Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
107
avoiding the formulation of definitive results: ‘Instead of telling sovereign truths, these
stories perform truths in the transient affective-aesthetic time and space between speculation
and unknowing. They invite contact with an atmosphere saturated with the intimacies,
vulnerabilities, and indeterminacies of fieldwork’ (p. 18).
Pine’s book is written in a fluent style that in some passages achieve literary qualities.
With his video camera he has filmed many events, but in some situations it was not
approriate to film or to write observations in his notebook. He could only count on his ability
to reconstruct the ‘film’ in his mind when he was alone. This might seem a banality, for most
anthropologists work in this way, but the results are really astonishing, considering the
precise depictions that he gives of certain situations which surely could not have been filmed.
He offers dense descriptions of his encounters with some of his ‘partners’ and informants in
the scene. He paid much attention to the details of the outward appearance of the persons that
he met, and to the interior decor of their houses. Pines’ analysis of the psychology of some
key situations convinces in as much as he succeeds in elucidating the inner logic of the
dynamics of his conversations. To present his investigations, Pine experimented with
alternative forms of documentation, sympathizing with Kathleen Stewart’s cultural poesis:
‘Instead of sorting things out and summing them up, I adopted a mode of attention that does
not distinguish between theory, ethnographic practice, writing ethnography, and even reading
ethnography’ (p. 221).
Doing fieldwork in the neo-melodica music scene, like in many other contexts in
Naples as testified by Pardo’s work, means to work hard to get behind the masks of self-
folklorization. With subtle irony people represent themselves as poor and oppressed
Neapolitans, satisfying thereby the expectations of northern Italian and Europeans who desire
a pre-modern ‘Italian South’ (Pine 2012: 216). The only way left to come to terms with
people’s tactics of mimesis was to participate in their performances and to practice the art of
making do. Pine shot and edited music videos and commercials for pirate television first as an
independent entrepreneur and then later under the direction of a boss-impresario, always in
search for new clients who could connect him with crime boss-impresari who manage some
of the major singers on the neo-melodica music scene. He did not hide his real identity, but
people preferred to think of him as a journalist who wanted to find a scoop, and they accepted
him because he represented for them ‘a link to the potentials of publicity’ (p. 167).
When Pardo returned to Naples to start his field research on élite groups he had to
face once again the objections of traditional social anthropology. With this project he was
