Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
109
complex illegal practices’ (2012: 73). Naples’ leftist rulers have used the negative image of
southerners to whitewash the shortcomings of their politics, and Pardo has demonstrated the
disastrous consequences of resorting to this stereotype. On the other hand, a representation
that claims to reflect the city in its complexity must also take into account that not all
structural problems and social distortions can be ascribed to bad politics.
Pardo and Pine started from different viewpoints and focused on different aspects of
Naples’ many-faceted social reality. It would not be exact to say that they have obtained the
same results, but there are interesting convergences. Through their fieldworks Pardo and Pine
verified that the traditional categories with which work activities are generally analyzed were
insufficient to understand the art of making a living in Naples and that a broader analytical
framework was needed. The practices and sensibilities that Pine has observed transcend
common categories such as ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ (p. 309). Boundaries are blurred between
‘the formal and the informal, the legal and the illegal and the material and the non-material’
(Pardo 2012: 58). Furthermore it has become problematic to associate unambiguously the
‘formal’ with modernity and the ‘informal’ with pre-modern attitudes. ‘Rather than
conceptualize the informal only in terms of what it lacks, implying that it is an archaism that
vanishes with modernization, I follow continuities and interpenetrations across any figuration
of the economy’ (Pine 2012: 309). The distinction between the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’ is
dubious when it is applied in an abstract way, when it reduces a society’s complexity. Pardo
has illustrated the arbitrariness of such abstract categorization, inviting us ‘to look beyond the
formal categories of industrialism and the observable, material aspects of the Western
concept of quality of life’ (1996: 20).
However the research findings of Pardo and Pine might be evaluated, their fieldwork
in the metropolitan area of Naples has once again demonstrated that ethnographic research in
western urban settings with the holistic orientation of classical social and cultural
anthropology is not only possible, but extremely productive, and that its results open
interesting new perspectives in urban studies.
