Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
103
REVIEW ARTICLE
The Art of Making a Living in Naples
Wolfgang Kaltenbacher
(Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici)
Italo Pardo (2012). Exercising Power without Authority: Powerful Elite Implode in Urban
Italy, in Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato (eds).
Anthropology in the City:
Methodology and Theory
. Farnham: Ashgate: 53-78.
and
Jason Pine (2012),
The Art of Making Do in Naples.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
The volume
Anthropology in the City
has opened up a broad discussion on the
methodological and theoretical status of what has become known as ‘urban anthropology’, a
debate that necessarily includes a historical reflection on the development of anthropological
research over the last decades. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban
settings, anthropology has inevitably become in great part ‘anthropology in the city’. As the
editors of this collection emphasize, ‘urban anthropology should be intended simply as (more
or less classical) anthropological research carried out
in
urban areas’ (p. 8). After years
marked by a too abstract and ideological debate in anthropology, we see again a clear
commitment to ethnographic research. The novelty of urban anthropology rests not so much
in conducting anthropological research in the city as in the relatively recent application of
classical methods of social and cultural anthropology in western towns and cities.
When Italo Pardo started systematic field research in Naples in the 1980s, he had to
deal with the mainstream opinion in anthropology, especially in British Social Anthropology,
that the anthropological paradigm could not be applied in western urban settings. The holistic
approach was simply considered inapplicable in the study of ‘complex societies’.
Furthermore the hermeneutical objections to the anthropological study of western cities
threatened to block any research project in this field.
Pardo had already worked on ‘belief and thought’ in Naples in the late 1970s and
early 1980s before starting his long-term fieldwork among the
popolino
, which he carried out
between 1984 and 1993. The results of this research have been published in numerous articles
and in the monograph
Managing Existence in Naples: Morality, Action and Structure
(1996),
