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The Art of Making Do in Naples
Abstract
“In Naples, there are more singers than there are unemployed people.” These words echo through the neomelodica music scene, a vast undocumented economy animated by wedding singers, pirate TV, and tens of thousands of fans throughout southern Italy and beyond. In a city with chronic unemployment, this setting has attracted hundreds of aspiring singers trying to make a living—or even a fortune. In the process, they brush up against affiliates of the region’s violent organized crime networks, the camorra. This book explores the murky neomelodica music scene and finds itself on uncertain ground. The “art of making do” refers to the informal and sometimes illicit entrepreneurial tactics of some Neapolitans who are pursuing a better life for themselves and their families. In the neomelodica music scene, the art of making do involves operating do-it-yourself recording studios and performing at the private parties of crime bosses. It can also require associating with crime boss-impresarios who guarantee their success by underwriting it with extortion, drug trafficking, and territorial influence. This book offers a riveting ethnography of the lives of men who seek personal sovereignty in a shadow economy dominated, in incalculable ways, by the camorra. The text navigates situations suffused with secrecy, moral ambiguity, and fears of ruin that undermine the anthropologist’s sense of autonomy.
... Nate alla ine degli anni Ottanta nel campo della musica folk ad opera di pop-star "di territorio" quali Nino D'Angelo, Gigi D'Alessio, Maria Nazionale, e l'ex capoclan camorrista Luigi Giuliano (Ravveduto, 2007), le estetiche neomelodiche sono percolate rapidamente lungo l'intero "mediascape" partenopeo (Appadurai, 2010), ispirando nel corso di più di trenta anni una quantità impressionante di lavori discograici, trasmissioni televisive, musical e opere cinematograiche a difusione sia locale che nazionale. Da un punto di vista strettamente musicale, le performance neomelodiche giustapponevano le caratteristiche tecniche del canto melodico napoletano "tradizionale" e della sceneggiata ad un eclettico set di sonorità di largo respiro internazionale, le quali erano, di volta in volta, prese in prestito dai campi del pop anglosassone, del rock&roll, dell'hip hop afroamericano, dei ritmi latini, dell'elettronica, e della dance anni Novanta di matrice Nord Europea (Pine, 2012;Ravveduto, 2007;Saviano, 2012). Al contempo, le narrative espresse dalle canzoni neomelodiche si proponevano di illustrare e romanticizzare da un punto di vista interno e, per così dire, "indigeno" le vite, gli afetti, e l'intima fenomenologia di soggetti socialmente marginali come disoccupati, lavoratori precari, casalinghe, studenti squattrinati; con una notevole preferenza per quei soggetti coinvolti in attività criminali, quali gangster di Camorra, sex-workers di ogni orientamento di genere, latitanti, carcerati, ed i loro familiari. ...
... Tale sovrapposizione strutturale era messa in atto, fra gli altri, dalla Camorra stessa, che l'attuale inanziarizzazione del contesto socio-politico internazionale (Harvey, 2006) aveva trasformato in un play-maker culturale e inanziario di primissimo piano su scala locale, nazionale, e inanche globale. A partire dai tardi anni Ottanta (non a caso il periodo nel quale il fenomeno neomelodico ha preso storicamente piede), il cartello camorrista non era più infatti ciò che il sociologo Diego Gambetta aveva deinito in termini quasifordisti come "un'industria criminale della protezione privata" (Gambetta, 1992), grazie al coinvolgimento progressivo dei suoi ailiati nel traico globale di droga, riiuti tossici, lavoro nero, beni agricoli, tessili, immobili e inanziari (Allum, 2006;Pine, 2012;Saviano, 2006). Essendo diventato di fatto una variante illecita di holding inanziaria multinazionale, la Camorra era riuscita a collezionare nel corso delle ultime tre decadi capitale simbolico e inanziario a suicienza per ottenere forme di egemonia economica e sociale su molti dei mezzi di (ri)produzione culturale (Benjamin, 2000) operanti tanto nel mediascape quanto nello spazio sociale napoletano; in primissimo luogo l'industria mass-mediatica. ...
... She sees the mafia as the political equivalent of witchcraft, a local alternative to global universalist understandings of accountability and justice. Meanwhile, across the Tyrrhenian Sea, Jason Pine's exploration of neomelodica musicians and their ambiguous relationships with the Camorra finds the latter to be a similarly spectral, indeterminate and amorphous phenomenon, casting an affective and atmospheric pall over the city regardless of where and when it is actually present (Pine 2012; and see also Pipyrou 2016 on the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, and Sorge 2015a on legacies of Sardinian banditry). ...
The Introduction sets out the case for the study of contemporary Naples and its relationship with the Italian nation state. It provides a brief overview of the changing fortunes of Naples in the Second Republic and of the centrality of the city to the image of Italy. It makes the case for the ongoing relevance of the nation in the context of the transnational turn in Italian Studies and highlights the role played by cultural production as a privileged medium for the production, articulation, exchange and circulation of new knowledges and identities. Finally, the introduction provides a brief outline of the theoretical underpinnings of the book and an account of the content and arguments addressed in each chapter.
This chapter provides a historical overview of Naples’ troubled relationship with the Italian nation state and introduces theoretical considerations pertaining to the study of city and nation in general and of contemporary Naples in particular. I outline and interrogate recent postcolonial perspectives on Naples, identify the limitations of those perspectives for the study of cultural production addressing the relationship between city and nation, and propose a supplementary framework deriving from critical perspectives relating to cultural accentedness. I argue for a consideration of cultural production addressing Naples and its cultural practices as manifesting a Neapolitan-accented expression of Italian identity and addressing phenomena and concerns that are frequently shared at the national level. While this approach is developed with the specificities of Naples in mind, it is intended to serve as a model for critical interrogation of city-nation relations in other contexts, both within Italy and beyond.
This article considers the conceptual ambiguity of skateboarding, a phenomenon that has undergone a process of globalization over the past twenty years, redefining itself in peripheral regions worldwide. I address this trend by focussing on material culture in my anthropolog-ical research on skateboarding at the México-U.S. border. The liberalization of this border over the past three decades has led to the relocation of the global skateboard production to Mexico's industria maquiladora. Through an ethnographic case, I show how this external-ization in the so-called Global South of Tijuana has triggered an informal local culture representative of a transborder scene. By approaching the border as a 'contact zone' , and skateboards' biographies as one of its material manifestations, I reflect on both the asymmetries underlaying the contemporary neoliberal sports and the grassroots creative domes-tications of their scripts, artifacts, and imaginaries by local actors; eventually rethinking where the West of global skateboarding is located.
Le présent article traite de la fabrique chaotique du capitalisme prédateur à partir d’une étude ethnographique des logiques déployées par une chaîne d’acteurs impliqués dans l’éradication successive de deux essences forestières dans le sud de l’Inde, des années 1980 à aujourd’hui. Il retrace une histoire de la contrebande de ces bois précieux dans deux États indiens frontaliers et de la criminalisation d’une population dite « tribale » engagée au plus bas de l’échelle des chaînes de prédation. Grâce à l’incertitude générée par les entrelacements mafieux entre le politique, l’État, l’économie ainsi qu’entre le légal et l’illégal, de multiples opportunités économiques, dangereuses mais rémunératrices, s’ouvrent néanmoins à ces acteurs du trafic, mais aussi aux policiers, avocats, juges, et politiciens-contrebandiers. Les saisir requiert des « prises de confiance » risquées, parfois mortelles, mais indispensables pour espérer s’élever dans cette économie. La prédation capitaliste des ressources environnementales assure ici sa reproduction par la puissance séductrice d’une activité illicite, attirante et menaçante, qui oblige ceux qui y prennent part à se trouver simultanément dans des positions de proie et de prédateur. Cette réversibilité des positions stimule une participation complice à la contrebande : en étant à la fois proie et prédateur, créditeur et endetté, extorqueur et extorqué, chacun devient potentiellement éligible à l’obtention d’un micro-privilège ou d’un micro-bénéfice. Ces logiques prédatrices se déclinent dans des gammes relationnelles asymétriques marquées par une distinction troublée entre amitiés et trahisons, fiction et réalité, extorsion et protection, ainsi que dette, don et coercition. De tels environnements sont propices à des sous-marchés de la prédation, encouragés par des acteurs juridiques et policiers qui utilisent la loi comme une arme pour extorquer les travailleurs du bois qu’ils arrêtent. Loin de se situer hors du capitalisme, nous montrons que cette économie illicite, par ses usages de la loi et de la violence, en est une forme pleinement contemporaine.
The oscillation between the reality-effect and the fiction-effect in film becomes a source of affect when we see "how" performers express their feelings in the service of their performance and as a reflection of their lives. Lana Turner in "Ziegfeld Girl" and in Douglas Sirk's "Imitation Of Life" is a model for these ambiguities of performance.
Public Culture 16.2 (2004) 289-314
In Kano, the economic center of northern Nigeria, media piracy is part of the "organizational architecture" of globalization (Sassen 2002), providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate. Infrastructures organize the construction of buildings, the training of personnel, the building of railway lines, and the elaboration of juridicolegal frameworks without which the movement of goods and people cannot occur. But once in place, infrastructures generate possibilities for their own corruption and parasitism. Media piracy is one example of this in operation. It represents the potential of technologies of reproduction—the supple ability to store, reproduce, and retrieve data—when shorn from the legal frameworks that limit their application. It depends heavily on the flow of media from official, highly regulated forms of trade but then develops its own structures of reproduction and distribution external and internal to the state economy.
It is through this generative quality that pirate infrastructure is expressive of a paradigmatic shift in Nigerian economy and capital and represents the extension of a logic of privatization into everyday life. Piracy's negative characteristics are often commented on: its criminality, the erosion of property rights it entails, and its function as a pathology of information processing, parasitically derivative of legal media flows (Chesterman and Lipman 1988; Coombe 1998). As important as these questions are, the structural focus on legal issues tends to obscure the mediating nature of infrastructure itself. In the Nigerian case, this is seen most strikingly in the rise of a new video industry that makes feature-length films directly for domestic video consumption (see Larkin 2000; Haynes 2000; Ukadike 2000; Ukah 2003). This new industry has pioneered new film genres and generated an entirely novel mode of reproduction and distribution that uses the capital, equipment, personnel, and distribution networks of pirate media. These Nigerian videos are a legitimate media form that could not exist without the infrastructure created by its illegitimate double, pirate media.
In recent years, then, there has been a wholesale shift in which many entrepreneurs previously involved in the distribution of pirate material have switched to the reproduction and dissemination of legal media. The mass importation of foreign music and films brought about the capital and professional expertise that facilitated the rise of a local film industry. This wandering over the lines that separate the legal from the nonlegal has been a common experience for urban Africans, who have been progressively disembedded from the infrastructures linking them to the official world economy and instead have poured energy into developing informal networks—equally global—that facilitate traffic in economic and cultural goods outside the established institutions of world trade (Simone 2000, 2001; Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999; Mbembe 2001).
In addition to generating new economic networks, piracy, like all infrastructural modes, has distinct material qualities that influence the media that travel under its regime of reproduction. Piracy imposes particular conditions on the recording, transmission, and retrieval of data. Constant copying erodes data storage, degrading image and sound, overwhelming the signal of media content with the noise produced by the means of reproduction. Pirate videos are marked by blurred images and distorted sound, creating a material screen that filters audiences' engagement with media technologies and their senses of time, speed, space, and contemporaneity. In this way, piracy creates an aesthetic, a set of formal qualities that generates a particular sensorial experience of media marked by poor transmission, interference, and noise. Contemporary scholars of technology returning to the Frankfurt school have stressed that technology's operation on the body is a key factor in producing a sense of shock—the complex training of the human sensorium associated with modern urbanism (Benjamin 1999; Crary 2000; Doane 2002; Hansen 1995, 2000; Kracauer 1995; Schivelbusch 1986). This work is crucial in understanding the phenomenological and cognitive effects of technology when it is working at its optimum. What is less discussed (but see Schivelbusch 1986; Virilio 2003) is how technology influences through its failure as much as through its successes. Yet the inability of technologies to perform the operations they were assigned must be subject to the same critical scrutiny as their...
Proverbs provide insight into the nature of socio‐logic as a body of principles to guide practical reasoning. English language proverbs reflect many of the rational principles found in argumentation textbooks, including: (1) a typology of arguments, (2) rules for correct inference, and (3) cautions about potential fallacies.
The relationship between the Anglo-American and German aesthetic traditions is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, acquaintance with one or more figures from the “great tradition” in German aesthetic thought over the last 250 years is a given for most philosophically oriented writers on aesthetics in Britain and America. Thinkers such as Kant or Adorno form a real and abiding part of our background. In some cases the connection with German intellectual lineages goes a good deal further. As an extreme case, take Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic,1 whose engagement with German thought is so deep that I have come across it as a set text for aesthetics courses in German universities (despite the fact that none of the dozen authors Eagleton analyzes are cited in their original language). On the other hand, interest in contemporary German aesthetics in English and American circles appears to be relatively slight. One would have little idea, from reading any of the philosophical journals in English, of just how much activity there is in this area, only a small proportion of which has been translated, cited, or reviewed. And yet the past two decades have seen the publication of dozens of relevant books by German authors, many proposing independent theoretical approaches. Among these—aside from the books reviewed here—are the substantial work done on performance and performativity by Erika Fischer-Lichte (Ästhetik des Performativen, 2004) and Dieter Mersch (Ereignis und Aura, 2002); the theoretical oeuvre of the prize-winning literary critic Karl Heinz Bohrer, of which Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, originally published in 1981, has made it into English; Ruth Sonderegger’s Romantic-leaning plea Für eine Ästhetik des Spiels (2000); Dieter Heinrich’s work on the philosophy of art and subjectivity, Fixpunkte: Aufsätze und Essays zur Theorie der Kunst (2003); Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing (2004); the traditional neo-Kantian perspective of the late Rüdiger Bubner as set out in his Ästhetische Erfahrung (1989); Gábor Paál’s Was ist schön?—Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (2003); Konrad Paul Liessmann’s Reiz und Rührung: Über ästhetische Empfindungen (2003) . . . the list could be continued. And this is not to mention empirical-psychological approaches, works on the history of aesthetics, the reception accorded to analytical aesthetics and American philosophers such as Goodman and Danto, or the continuation of European poststructuralist and Frankfurt School traditions (for example, in the work of Albrecht Wellmer and Christoph Menke).
Given this large “backlog” of writing not yet assimilated into Anglo-American discussion, it makes sense to be selective and range a little further than the most recently published texts. Owing to sheer diversity, I cannot honestly claim that the three books I am going to discuss here are “representative” of the interests driving contemporary German aesthetics. But I have chosen them for certain common traits, traditions, and emphases that seem to me to present a stimulating contrast with the approach of Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics, while retaining many points of contact with non-German thought. That the contrast does not come down to the crass standoff of “analytical” vs. “Continental,” and all the clichés about academic style that go with it, should become obvious. It is more interesting than that, and although I want to leave the details to the discussion of the three books, I can mention at the outset a few aspects I regard as important. One is that none of these authors addresses themselves exclusively to either the philosophy of art or to the aesthetics of nature and the environment. Instead they tend to make points relating to both, or to regard both as aspects of a single situation. “Environmental aesthetics” in Anglo-American philosophy—for instance, the work of Allen Carlson—is not only of recent date but is still a subdiscipline separated from aesthetics qua philosophy of art. In Germany, for various reasons, such a barrier has not been formed. Secondly, and connectedly, there is a desire to take the process and situation of perception—the original source of aesthetics as aisthesis—seriously, whatever its objects. Perception is taken much more as a physical (leiblich) and situated act...
The article examines town planning in the city of Naples since the war and, in particular, the ambiguous relations between politicians and policy. The focus of the analysis highlights the failure to give effect to the various master plans (PRG) discussed and sometimes adopted by the city authorities. This explains to a large extent the widespread building speculation that occurred in these years.
Andrea De Jorio's classic work of 1832 on Neapolitan gesture is described. Besides containing remarkably clear descriptions of gestures it includes interesting discussion of theoretical and methodological issues still pertinent today. De Jorio's insistence on studying gestures in their contexts of use and his use of pictorial tableaux as a way of illustrating how the gestures he describes function in interaction is of particular interest. The value of the book for studies of gesture diachrony and for studies in the historical ethnography of communication conduct is briefly discussed.
This article argues that Schmitt's concept of sovereignty and Gramsci's notion of hegemony represent two distinct variations on a single theme, namely the idea of the political as the original instituting moment of society. Both Schmitt and Gramsci focused on the sources, conditions, content, and scope of the originating power of a collective will. While the former located it in the constituent power of the sovereign people, the latter placed it in the popular-national will of the modern hegemon. Both thinkers explored the complex and perplexing relationship between radical founding acts and modern democratic politics in a secular age, that is of democratic legitimacy, where with the entrance of the masses into the political sphere, the references to ultimate foundations of authority and to an extra-social source of political power had begun to appear more dubious than ever. The last section of the article develops a notion of hegemonic sovereignty defined as an expansive and positing democratic constituent prince, aiming, through founding, total decisions, at the overall, radical, explicit, and lucid institution of society. The article briefly shows how the concept of hegemonic sovereignty can solve some problems pertaining to Schmitt's notion of sovereignty and to Gramsci's theory of hegemony. In so doing, the article seeks to establish the mutually reinforcing qualities of the two concepts.
TWO hundred years ago today, on 22 January 1799, French troops forced their way into the city of Naples. In doing so, they confirmed the authority of the Neapolitan Republic which had been proclaimed, one and indivisible, the day before by a group of patriots who had taken control of the Castel Sant'Elmo, the fortress on the hill immediately above the centre of the city. Thus began the last of the revolutions which can be regarded as the offspring of the great French Revolution of 1789. There is no denying that the Neapolitan Revolution, like its predecessors in northern Italy and elsewhere, depended on French military intervention. The patriots were not in control of the city before 22 January, and needed the French to quell the popular violence and disorder which had swept the city for the previous week. And when, after three months, the French withdrew their forces, the republicans' hold on the city was too precarious to last more than a few weeks.
The ambiguity of the concept of crime is evident in the two strands of anthropological research covered in this review. One strand, the anthropology of criminalization, explores how state authorities, media, and citizen discourse define particular groups and practices as criminal, with prejudicial consequences. Examples are drawn from research on peasant rebellion, colonialism, youth, and racially or ethnically marked urban poor. The other strand traces ethnographic work on more or less organized illegal and predatory activity: banditry, rustling, trafficking, street gangs, and mafias. Although a criminalizing perspective tends to conflate these diverse forms of "organized" crime, in particular erasing the boundary between street gangs and drug trafficking, the forms have discrete histories and motivations. Their particularities, as well as their historical interactions, illuminate everyday responses to crime and suggest ways to put in perspective the "crime talk" of today, which borders on apocalyptic.