Jane and Peter Schneider's career-long study of Sicily has created a lasting contribu... more Jane and Peter Schneider's career-long study of Sicily has created a lasting contribution to the understanding of both Sicilian and Italian social life. Their research into Sicily's historic economic under-development and its highly particular and interesting demographic transition, along with their chronicles of the rise of the Mafia and an opposing antimafia movement, provide a model for intelligent social science
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Sep 29, 2021
Inequality in all its forms is common to human societies, and thus its understanding is part of t... more Inequality in all its forms is common to human societies, and thus its understanding is part of the central mission of anthropology. Social structural elements such as race, class, gender, status, and caste have a decisive influence on human well-being and have been a persistent focus of inquiry over the course of more than a century of anthropological investigations. It is also fair to say that anthropologists over time have adopted as core values equal protection and equal opportunity for all peoples. These principles have been applied by extension most recently to sexual minorities, stateless refugees, and migrants.
Michael Blim, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkAndrea Muehlebach, The Moral Neolib... more Michael Blim, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkAndrea Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 228 pp.Without Gramsci, neither contemporary Italy nor Andrea Muehlebach's book about it could be imagined. For this writer, and for Muehlebach, this is precisely the problem, for Italians of many political stripes seeking social change invoke as their interlocutors Machiavelli and the Catholic Church in their (r)evolutionary visions of a new Italian society. Between their imagination of hegemonic conquest and the act, however, lies the sclerotic Italian society of the past quarter century, transforming each bold idea into pusillanimous power projections onto a political and social landscape still unaccepting of its Cold War and un-rejecting of its Fascist pasts.Muehlebach argues that Italians today, or more specifically Milanese Italians under the fetishizing guise of volunteer work, are becoming increasingly responsible for helping disadvantaged individuals and groups neglected or delegated to their care by the state. In doing so, they are transforming themselves into persons for whom citizenship no longer consists of positive rights for themselves or the people they help, but becomes a new kind of subjection in which supplanting state effort itself is a form of validation and virtue. Both persons from Catholic and leftists sectors (specifically the leftist union confederation) participate wholeheartedly in this exercise, the possible unintended by-product of which is an affect-laden belief in the need for a society with broadly distributed social compassion.This new disposition derives from the workings of neoliberalism in the Italian context, the author argues, hence the title "the moral neoliberal." The theoretical relationship posited between neoliberalism and a new social personality seems to me a bit forced and at odds with the actual history of neoliberal programs and the rise of the Italian welfare state. The latter, such as it is, developed as a highly path-dependent zigzag of programs and policies traveling through a post-World War II Italian society buffeted by the imperatives of feeding itself and making a collective living in the face of its much stronger European neighbors; by massive worker resistance in Italy's industrial core and worker complacency everywhere else; and by the maneuvers of the American hegemon to govern a polity split between Church and lay parties, all of whom wanted to create a distributive state in their quest for political legitimacy. Classically "late-developing," historically forced to protect itself from economic and political marginalization within the northern-dominated European community, possessed of North- South economic differences inside its borders without parallel in Western Europe, Italy can even claim the dubious distinction of being among the first, and certainly the first of any major Western economy, to suffer in 1974 an IMF structural adjustment program. Even so, while the country was caught in the clutches of international as well as its own bankers, the Italian Parliament in 1978 created a universal, national health service, an achievement which, like its British counterpart or the United States' Social Security Act, remains the crown jewel of an otherwise jerry-rigged welfare state. I would argue that Italy offers very particular "particulars" to its interpreters that destabilize the kind of sure-fired, direct relationship posited by Muehlebach between a neoliberalist epoch and the new form of comportment she argues is emerging in Italy today.The book is oddly pitched. If it is to serve as an essay on neoliberal temperament as conditioned by the formation of a new socially helping, though responsibalized self, then its scope should have included putting the Italian findings among others now reported around the neoliberalized world. Instead, after cursory mention of the new role of affect in what are taken to be neoliberalized societies, the book might best work under the title "The Northern Italian Way of Welfare," in which the evidence the author adduces from interaction with volunteers, volunteer trainers, and volunteer agencies would establish her case indeed. …
... Though emerging from World War II most committed among the regions to agriculture, usually in... more ... Though emerging from World War II most committed among the regions to agriculture, usually in ... and unskilled labor, as a possible solution to chronic inner-city unemployment and ... Importantly, however, the peripheral capital-ist basis of the Third Italy's industrialization and its ...
Analyse des rapports entre economie, capitalisme et culture. L'A. discute des variations sur ... more Analyse des rapports entre economie, capitalisme et culture. L'A. discute des variations sur les theories des economies socioculturelles populaires montrant en quoi leur nature pluraliste donne une base insuffisante pour une combinaison fertile des cultures et des economies. Il discute aussi de la diversite empirique dans l'economie capitaliste mondiale moderne. Il revoit de maniere critique les declarations systematiques d'I. Wallerstein dans l'interet de ses hypotheses sur le systeme-monde. Il modifie et etend finalement la theorie de G. Arrighi sur le developpement et le declin hegemonique a l'economie mondiale pour montrer comment les cultures figurent de maniere proeminente dans la determination du changement dans le capitalisme contemporain
Introduction: The Emerging Global Factory and Anthropology by Michael L. Blim Global Production a... more Introduction: The Emerging Global Factory and Anthropology by Michael L. Blim Global Production and the Mobility of Capital and Labor What Happens to the Past? Return Industrial Migrants in Latin America by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein Capitalist Production in a Socialist Society: The Transfer of Manufacturing from Hong Kong to China by Alan Smart and Josephine Smart Nonresident-Indian Investment and India's Drive for Industrial Modernization by Johanna Lessinger The New Industrial Diversity Small-Scale Industrialization in a Rapidly Changing World Market by Michael L. Blim Spanish Galician Industrialization and the Europe of 1992: A Contextual Analysis by Hans C. Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler The Unexpected Entrepreneurs: Small High-Technology Firms, Technology Transfer, and Regional Development in Wales and Northeast England by Douglas Caulkins Rural Industrial Enterprise and "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" by Eugene Cooper and Xiong Pan Informal Sectorization of Egyptian Petty Commodity Production by Kristin Koptiuch Industrial Decentralization and Women's Employment in South Africa: A Case Study by Georgina Jaffee Worker Struggles and Survival in the New Industrial World Labor-Managed Systems and Industrial Redevelopment: Lessons from the Fagor Cooperative Group of Mondragon by Davydd J. Greenwood Tobacco, Textiles, and Toyota: Working for Multinational Corporations in Rural Kentucky by Ann E. Kingsolver Women as Political Actors in Rural Puerto Rico: Continuity and Change by Ida Susser Women Workers and the Labor Movement in South Korea by Seung-kyung Kim Conclusion: New Waves and Old--Industrialization, Labor, and the Struggle for a New World Order by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein Bibliography Index
▪ This article reviews neo-Weberian, neo-institutionalist economic, and neo-Marxian approaches ... more ▪ This article reviews neo-Weberian, neo-institutionalist economic, and neo-Marxian approaches to the analysis of capitalism in late modern societies. It argues that all make important contributions to the understanding of the increasing economic variability reported in capitalist societies. The approaches also may be profitably combined to assess the degree to which specific cases identified deviate in significant ways from current hegemonic patterns of capitalist development. Finally, consumption theory is assessed for its value in revising standard capitalist development theory.
The first edition of this unique Handbook was praised for its substantial and invaluable summary ... more The first edition of this unique Handbook was praised for its substantial and invaluable summary discussions of work by anthropologists on economic processes and issues, on the relationship between economic and non-economic areas of life and on the conceptual orientations that are important among economic anthropologists. This thoroughly revised edition brings those discussions up to date, and includes an important new section exploring ways that leading anthropologists have approached the current economic crisis. Its scope and accessibility make it useful both to those who are interested in a particular topic and to those who want to see the breadth and fruitfulness of an anthropological study of economy.
The Rationality of Rural Life: Economic and Agricultural Change in Tuscany. Jeff Pratt. Switzerla... more The Rationality of Rural Life: Economic and Agricultural Change in Tuscany. Jeff Pratt. Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. 219 pp.
The highly successful economic development over the past 30 years of central and northeastern Ita... more The highly successful economic development over the past 30 years of central and northeastern Italy, commonly referred to as the Third Italy, has created significant economic and social gains for the regions' women. The high historical prevalence of extended and multiple households among agricultural sharecroppers provided the social materials necessary for constructing a rapid and efficient engine of accumulation in the area's dynamic, small-firm-based economy. Though women have achieved some economic autonomy through employment and entrepreneurial activities, their achievement of greater economic equity is impeded by the continuing double burdens of employment inside and outside of the home. After examining the dimensions of women's status mobility with particular reference to the Marche region, one of the Third Italy's most economically dynamic, as well as socially conservative regions, it is argued that increasing state subsidies to families with children might increase women's options and help achieve greater equity between the sexes.
Jane and Peter Schneider's career-long study of Sicily has created a lasting contribu... more Jane and Peter Schneider's career-long study of Sicily has created a lasting contribution to the understanding of both Sicilian and Italian social life. Their research into Sicily's historic economic under-development and its highly particular and interesting demographic transition, along with their chronicles of the rise of the Mafia and an opposing antimafia movement, provide a model for intelligent social science
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Sep 29, 2021
Inequality in all its forms is common to human societies, and thus its understanding is part of t... more Inequality in all its forms is common to human societies, and thus its understanding is part of the central mission of anthropology. Social structural elements such as race, class, gender, status, and caste have a decisive influence on human well-being and have been a persistent focus of inquiry over the course of more than a century of anthropological investigations. It is also fair to say that anthropologists over time have adopted as core values equal protection and equal opportunity for all peoples. These principles have been applied by extension most recently to sexual minorities, stateless refugees, and migrants.
Michael Blim, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkAndrea Muehlebach, The Moral Neolib... more Michael Blim, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkAndrea Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 228 pp.Without Gramsci, neither contemporary Italy nor Andrea Muehlebach's book about it could be imagined. For this writer, and for Muehlebach, this is precisely the problem, for Italians of many political stripes seeking social change invoke as their interlocutors Machiavelli and the Catholic Church in their (r)evolutionary visions of a new Italian society. Between their imagination of hegemonic conquest and the act, however, lies the sclerotic Italian society of the past quarter century, transforming each bold idea into pusillanimous power projections onto a political and social landscape still unaccepting of its Cold War and un-rejecting of its Fascist pasts.Muehlebach argues that Italians today, or more specifically Milanese Italians under the fetishizing guise of volunteer work, are becoming increasingly responsible for helping disadvantaged individuals and groups neglected or delegated to their care by the state. In doing so, they are transforming themselves into persons for whom citizenship no longer consists of positive rights for themselves or the people they help, but becomes a new kind of subjection in which supplanting state effort itself is a form of validation and virtue. Both persons from Catholic and leftists sectors (specifically the leftist union confederation) participate wholeheartedly in this exercise, the possible unintended by-product of which is an affect-laden belief in the need for a society with broadly distributed social compassion.This new disposition derives from the workings of neoliberalism in the Italian context, the author argues, hence the title "the moral neoliberal." The theoretical relationship posited between neoliberalism and a new social personality seems to me a bit forced and at odds with the actual history of neoliberal programs and the rise of the Italian welfare state. The latter, such as it is, developed as a highly path-dependent zigzag of programs and policies traveling through a post-World War II Italian society buffeted by the imperatives of feeding itself and making a collective living in the face of its much stronger European neighbors; by massive worker resistance in Italy's industrial core and worker complacency everywhere else; and by the maneuvers of the American hegemon to govern a polity split between Church and lay parties, all of whom wanted to create a distributive state in their quest for political legitimacy. Classically "late-developing," historically forced to protect itself from economic and political marginalization within the northern-dominated European community, possessed of North- South economic differences inside its borders without parallel in Western Europe, Italy can even claim the dubious distinction of being among the first, and certainly the first of any major Western economy, to suffer in 1974 an IMF structural adjustment program. Even so, while the country was caught in the clutches of international as well as its own bankers, the Italian Parliament in 1978 created a universal, national health service, an achievement which, like its British counterpart or the United States' Social Security Act, remains the crown jewel of an otherwise jerry-rigged welfare state. I would argue that Italy offers very particular "particulars" to its interpreters that destabilize the kind of sure-fired, direct relationship posited by Muehlebach between a neoliberalist epoch and the new form of comportment she argues is emerging in Italy today.The book is oddly pitched. If it is to serve as an essay on neoliberal temperament as conditioned by the formation of a new socially helping, though responsibalized self, then its scope should have included putting the Italian findings among others now reported around the neoliberalized world. Instead, after cursory mention of the new role of affect in what are taken to be neoliberalized societies, the book might best work under the title "The Northern Italian Way of Welfare," in which the evidence the author adduces from interaction with volunteers, volunteer trainers, and volunteer agencies would establish her case indeed. …
... Though emerging from World War II most committed among the regions to agriculture, usually in... more ... Though emerging from World War II most committed among the regions to agriculture, usually in ... and unskilled labor, as a possible solution to chronic inner-city unemployment and ... Importantly, however, the peripheral capital-ist basis of the Third Italy's industrialization and its ...
Analyse des rapports entre economie, capitalisme et culture. L'A. discute des variations sur ... more Analyse des rapports entre economie, capitalisme et culture. L'A. discute des variations sur les theories des economies socioculturelles populaires montrant en quoi leur nature pluraliste donne une base insuffisante pour une combinaison fertile des cultures et des economies. Il discute aussi de la diversite empirique dans l'economie capitaliste mondiale moderne. Il revoit de maniere critique les declarations systematiques d'I. Wallerstein dans l'interet de ses hypotheses sur le systeme-monde. Il modifie et etend finalement la theorie de G. Arrighi sur le developpement et le declin hegemonique a l'economie mondiale pour montrer comment les cultures figurent de maniere proeminente dans la determination du changement dans le capitalisme contemporain
Introduction: The Emerging Global Factory and Anthropology by Michael L. Blim Global Production a... more Introduction: The Emerging Global Factory and Anthropology by Michael L. Blim Global Production and the Mobility of Capital and Labor What Happens to the Past? Return Industrial Migrants in Latin America by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein Capitalist Production in a Socialist Society: The Transfer of Manufacturing from Hong Kong to China by Alan Smart and Josephine Smart Nonresident-Indian Investment and India's Drive for Industrial Modernization by Johanna Lessinger The New Industrial Diversity Small-Scale Industrialization in a Rapidly Changing World Market by Michael L. Blim Spanish Galician Industrialization and the Europe of 1992: A Contextual Analysis by Hans C. Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler The Unexpected Entrepreneurs: Small High-Technology Firms, Technology Transfer, and Regional Development in Wales and Northeast England by Douglas Caulkins Rural Industrial Enterprise and "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" by Eugene Cooper and Xiong Pan Informal Sectorization of Egyptian Petty Commodity Production by Kristin Koptiuch Industrial Decentralization and Women's Employment in South Africa: A Case Study by Georgina Jaffee Worker Struggles and Survival in the New Industrial World Labor-Managed Systems and Industrial Redevelopment: Lessons from the Fagor Cooperative Group of Mondragon by Davydd J. Greenwood Tobacco, Textiles, and Toyota: Working for Multinational Corporations in Rural Kentucky by Ann E. Kingsolver Women as Political Actors in Rural Puerto Rico: Continuity and Change by Ida Susser Women Workers and the Labor Movement in South Korea by Seung-kyung Kim Conclusion: New Waves and Old--Industrialization, Labor, and the Struggle for a New World Order by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein Bibliography Index
▪ This article reviews neo-Weberian, neo-institutionalist economic, and neo-Marxian approaches ... more ▪ This article reviews neo-Weberian, neo-institutionalist economic, and neo-Marxian approaches to the analysis of capitalism in late modern societies. It argues that all make important contributions to the understanding of the increasing economic variability reported in capitalist societies. The approaches also may be profitably combined to assess the degree to which specific cases identified deviate in significant ways from current hegemonic patterns of capitalist development. Finally, consumption theory is assessed for its value in revising standard capitalist development theory.
The first edition of this unique Handbook was praised for its substantial and invaluable summary ... more The first edition of this unique Handbook was praised for its substantial and invaluable summary discussions of work by anthropologists on economic processes and issues, on the relationship between economic and non-economic areas of life and on the conceptual orientations that are important among economic anthropologists. This thoroughly revised edition brings those discussions up to date, and includes an important new section exploring ways that leading anthropologists have approached the current economic crisis. Its scope and accessibility make it useful both to those who are interested in a particular topic and to those who want to see the breadth and fruitfulness of an anthropological study of economy.
The Rationality of Rural Life: Economic and Agricultural Change in Tuscany. Jeff Pratt. Switzerla... more The Rationality of Rural Life: Economic and Agricultural Change in Tuscany. Jeff Pratt. Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. 219 pp.
The highly successful economic development over the past 30 years of central and northeastern Ita... more The highly successful economic development over the past 30 years of central and northeastern Italy, commonly referred to as the Third Italy, has created significant economic and social gains for the regions' women. The high historical prevalence of extended and multiple households among agricultural sharecroppers provided the social materials necessary for constructing a rapid and efficient engine of accumulation in the area's dynamic, small-firm-based economy. Though women have achieved some economic autonomy through employment and entrepreneurial activities, their achievement of greater economic equity is impeded by the continuing double burdens of employment inside and outside of the home. After examining the dimensions of women's status mobility with particular reference to the Marche region, one of the Third Italy's most economically dynamic, as well as socially conservative regions, it is argued that increasing state subsidies to families with children might increase women's options and help achieve greater equity between the sexes.
Argues that Catholic concept of the Common Good not adequate substitute for more radical program ... more Argues that Catholic concept of the Common Good not adequate substitute for more radical program of economic and social equality
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