Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
104
a study that formed the basis for further research projects, in particular Pardo’s work on élite
groups. Though centered on his project on the Naples élite, Pardo’s contribution in the
volume
Anthropology in the City
gives a good overview of his long experience of field
research in the metropolitan area of Naples.
It seems natural to confront Pardo’s research with a recently published ethnography
by the American anthropologist Jason Pine. In
The Art of Making Do in Naples
, Pine
introduces us to the Neapolitan underworld of the neo-melodica music scene, the murky
ambience of wedding singers, boss-impresarios and pirate TV channels, one of the most
particular social backgrounds of Naples where the so called formal, informal and illicit
economic activities overlap.
Pardo and Pine both tried to understand how people in Naples manage their existence.
They have investigated the grey zone between legal, semi-legal and illegal economic
activities in comparable but different ways, paying attention to different aspects of the life
among a heterogeneous population. Both of them have avoided separating artificially the
social, cultural and economic dimensions of the city, and have tried to illustrate a complex
reality with all its vagaries and contradictions. Both have contributed to overcome a
simplistic characterization of the Neapolitan population as a backward society, demonstrating
that the reality is much more complex; they use, however, different methods and a different
terminology, not least because they belong to different anthropological traditions. Pardo is
known as a British-trained scholar. Pine belongs to the young generation of American
anthropologists who shun attribution to a particular scientific tradition.
Pardo and Pine describe in detail the beginning of their fieldwork and the long,
systematic process of penetrating the territory. They tell us about their initial difficulties and
their first successes in becoming acquainted with the residents. For both the contact with key
informants was decisive. In their publications the identity of those persons is encrypted by
code-names.
Pardo started his research with the conviction that in order to understand life in
Naples it was imperative to study holistically the city’s ordinary residents. He strongly
challenged the stereotype of Naples’
popolino
as a backward lumpenproletariat, an image that
had been shaped by generations of sociologists, historians, philosophers and novelists. After a
first phase of preliminary study which had revealed a clear contrast between the social reality
of the
popolino
and its representation in the literature, he started constructing the case-studies
of significant individuals and situations and examining local people’s networks in order to
