Sociologists
have struggled since the nineteenth century to express the shared, relational, joint features of social thought and behaviour,
and to resist the image of the
individual self as encapsulated, largely self-contained. Not only Marx,
then Durkheim, with his exploration of ‘social facts’, but writers in the
twentieth-century tradition of the sociology of knowledge have emphasised this
key facet of sociality. Their efforts include Mannheim’s attempts, however flawed,
to encompass the ways we think in terms that are afforded to us by our cultural
circumstances and marked by patterns of power. Also in the 1930s, the scholars
of the city studies in America were brought, among other places, to Ireland:
Lloyd Warner’s students, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, had been taught
that ‘the unit of analysis is the relation’, not the individual. This goes
along with recognising that individual
people are not generally self-contained and rational, but in many ways
incoherent and often inconsistent, as Schütz pointed out in ‘The Stranger’ in
1944. It ought also to be accompanied by an appropriately holistic grasp of thought that eschews the artificially cognitive, and
accepts emotions as part of thinking and reasoning rather than contrasting them
with ‘rationality’. This part of appreciating sociality remains in some
ways the hardest: the rhetorical force
of contrasting emotion with reason, misguided as the dichotomy is, continues to
present itself as irresistibly sensible through much of the sociological world.
This idea of the
decentred self needs perpetually to
be reinvented in sociological theory, as it was, not least, by Foucault, but it can be hard to reconcile with
telling stories. Foucault was not alone in pointing out that through most
of human history the notion of the individual was experienced in ways that were
less encapsulated than those that may seem natural to us now. Nonetheless, old stories still concentrate on heroes and
dragons rather than the social settings within which their actions could be
located. However adeptly we feel we are conceptualising and evoking this
shared realm, when it comes to describing concrete actions, like the ancients we find it hard to write and
read empirical work in its terms.
The articles in
this issue can all be read as contributions to understanding both this joint
realm and the tensions inherent in discussing it. (137)
…
The concluding
article of the issue takes a very different approach to self-representation: Italians’ interpretations of their own collective
identity. The attribution of
familism and particularism to Italians may be partly imaginary, but it has real
consequences nonetheless – as do the other forms of imagining dealt with in
this issue. Edward Banfield’s much-criticised, but highly persistent, account of
‘amoral familism’ has been argued (not least in these pages, by Antonella Coco
(2016)) to be a simplification. But Pierluca Birindelli takes a different
approach, examining literary sources for
the ‘familism-particularism’ pairing, going back to the fifteenth century
and the work of the Florentine humanist
Alberti – who attributed this
feature to central Italy, with no sign of the North–South cleavage that later
became notorious in the literature. Francesco
Guicciardini was then the first to use the term ‘particulare’, in the sixteenth century. Italians, Birindelli
argues, adopted this self-image very early, and it later became embedded in
outsiders’ perceptions during the eighteenth century, the age of the Grand
Tour, where Italians became the beloved
and despised ‘others’ of Northern Europeans. It is this long literary
acceptance that made ‘familism-particularism’ – whether or not in those exact
terms – such a persistent topos. It became to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy: Italians
themselves expect it to be true and act as if it were true.
Birindelli
reconstructs the image of ‘passionate, rebellious and decadent Italy’ in the
novels of Stendhal and de Staël, together with the import of the notion of ‘national
character’ from the same literary milieu. Soon after, Leopardi wrote on the
supposedly exteriorising impacts of climate (apparently, living so much outside
makes people more conscious of their appearances). Also, Birindelli notes, ‘Leopardi also anticipated the crucial key
to the sociological interpretation of Italian society: the absence of a ruling
class conscious of its own historical role.’ However, it was the notion of ‘a
structural lack of civic sense’, Biridelli argues, that Italians ‘pinned on
themselves.’ Of course, commentators such as Alessandro Pizzorno have pointed
out rightly that in conditions of long-term
poverty and marginality, it is perfectly reasonable to seek certain and
immediate advantages rather than an ideal of public good postulated for the
future; it was the overall political structure of the national setting that
shaped the cultures of small, impoverished communities. But the idea of amoral
familism became so rhetorically convincing that its power remained. Birindelli develops this hermeneutic
exploration of the impact of a stereotype in connection with older and newer
theories of how Italy is thought to work – and how hard Banfield’s ghost is
to banish. (141-142)
Edmondson, R. (2019) Culture, politics and the de-centred
self, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 6:2,
137-142. Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2019.1609769
Birindelli, P. (2018). Collective identity inside and out:
Particularism through the looking glass, European Journal of Cultural
and Political Sociology, 6:2, 237-270.
