The family, honour and gender in Sicily: models and new research

Modern     Italy   (November 2004), 9(2), 263-280                                | ^   Carfax       Publishing
                                                                                       Taylor & Francis Croup

The family, honour and gender in
Sicily: models and new research*
IDA FAZIO

This article shows how the latest research into Sicily's social and economic
history calls into question certain well-established interpretations of the history
of the family and its structures, the paradigm of Mediterranean honour, and the
theory of familism. This new appraisal also highlights the major significance of
the history of women and gender identity.

The history of the family and of codes of honour are often connected through
the history of women and gender identity. In the context of Sicilian historiogra-
phy, the themes of family and honour have generated a rich crop of recent
writings in which models and paradigms have spread rapidly and been equally
rapidly reappraised. The earlier and more circumscribed group of studies, with
their basis in the history of law, dealt for the most part with matrimonial
customs, norms of inheritance and folklore, and were focused almost exclusively
on the behaviour of peasants and workers. But in the 1970s this field felt the
powerful impact of Cambridge historical demography and anthropological stud-
ies of Mediterranean society—an impact that had three aspects: the need to
classify into larger structural systems material which, so it seemed, had hitherto
been fragmented between specific disciplines or research subjects; the wish to
come to terms with more modem and innovative systems of theoretical study
and methodology; and the possibility of opening up a field, barely explored
previously, which promised to be very rich and productive. We now know that,
precisely because of the novelty of these aspects, there was to be a close
connection between acceptance and criticism of the new paradigms, and that the
use and the revision of models were to be similarly related—at times coinciding
with different phases in the work of individual researchers.
   An interesting aspect of this process has of course been the way recent
historical research into family and honour has had the opportunity to engage in
a meaningful discussion about the development of theoretical and paradigms and
keys to their interpretation, rather than remaining on the fringes of scientific
discussion or playing a merely reactive role. Now that researchers can conduct
an ever-more immediate and rapid dialogue with each other across intemationai
frontiers, they can make wide-ranging and valuable comparisons using such
techniques as quantitative analysis or the reconstmction of families before or
Ida Fazio, Faculty of Training Sciences, University of Palermo. E-mail: ida@intemetpiv.com

ISSN 1353-2944 print/ISSN 1469-9877 online/04/020263-18 © 2004 Association for the Study of Modem Italy
DOI: 10.1080/1353294042000304992

264    I. FAZIO

after adopting the methods and theories of historical microanalysis or gender
history, or the infiuence of social history, historical anthropology, economic
anthropology and network analysis.
   In order to illustrate this perspective, I shall concentrate on three issues that
have generated an extensive range of systems of analysis, historical accounts and
social anthropology; these are areas, furthermore, in which studies on Sicily have
had a considerable impact. The first issue relates to the existence of pattems
typical of the 'Mediterranean' family and to the predominantly stmctural
characteristics of such patterns in marriage and family life. The second issue
concems honour as a social constmct bound up with the sexual behaviour of
women. The last issue is familism: in the social sciences, this interpretation of
the central role played by the southem Italian family in generating social mores
which, so it is claimed, are typical of a backward society, is both deeply rooted
and enduring. As will be seen in what follows, these three issues are inter-con-
nected; but as I am about to demonstrate, a critique of them hinges above all on
reconsidering female roles so as to take account of gender as 'a constituent
element of social relationships, based on a deliberate differentiation between the
sexes [which] is a primary factor in power relationships'.'

The Mediterranean family: structure and models
For a long time it has been a received tmth—historiographical or otherwise—
that in peasant societies the extended patriarchal family was the preponderant
form of co-residence and that, in the transition to modem times, the family has
become more nuclear, links between family members have been loosened and
individuals have gone their separate ways.^ T'his received wisdom is finnly based
on authoritative sources: we find its roots in the 1860s, when Burckhardt (and
later various historians and experts in the history of law with an interest in the
Italian family in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance) placed this transition
in the Renaissance era; also in the 1860s, Le Play traced the roots of the
transition back to a much later period, the years of industrialization and
urbanization.^ Most sociological studies of the family for the next century were
predicated on this second estimate, which was later shared by Parsons as well as
by Durkheim.'*
   We turn now to two sets of studies: those carried out by the Cambridge group
on the structure of English and, later, of European families, and those by John
Hajnal on different pattems of nuptiality. These were almost contemporaneous
and gave further impetus in the 1960s and 1970s to the correlation between the
complex patriarchal family, early marrying-off of women, absence of paid labour
and economic backwardness.^ (This infiuence, it should be said, was somewhat
insidious, since the research was based on sophisticated methods of historical
demographic analysis such as back-projection.) The areas where this type of
family and nuptiality were found were indeed backward ones, namely Eastem
Europe and the 'Mediterranean' area. In the 1960s and 1970s, moreover, this
'Mediterranean area' was also portrayed from an anthropological perspective:
Mediterranean Family Structures, the book put together by Peristiany, was
published in 1976.^
   However, the crop of studies that emerged as these new techniques of
retracing the characteristics of families appeared (although the studies then

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY        265

related to a family that would subsequently be defined as 'static', because
researchers had not yet fully understood the changing nature of families and their
life-pattems^) revealed two things: that not only (i) families in the so-called
'Mediterranean' area were not linked by any strict homogeneity of stmcture, but
also (ii) that these families were for the most part nuclear—a finding that
contradicted what the models purported to show. In short, the supposedly
complex and patriarchal Mediterranean family was not a valid model for
southem Italian families, in particular Sicilian families.^ In fact studies of
Sicily—of which there have been a great many, almost all of them produced in
the 1980s—have all demonstrated that a nuclear and neolocal family is prepon-
derant.' Thus, as new theoretical models and methodological practices were
brought into use in order to constmct Laslett's paradigm, that paradigm itself has
been radically questioned. The presence of the nuclear family in Sicily appears
to date a long way back: at least to some point between the fifteenth and
nineteenth centuries; and this fact is deduced from various sources, including
censuses, records of individuals and property, records of wheat harvests and
very occasional status animarum. In Sicily as in the rest of southem Italy, if we
disprove the correlation between the complex family, the mral world, the
Mediterranean area and economic backwardness, then the general reliability of
Laslett's model becomes problematic—as does Wdgley's reading of it, which
identifies demographic transition and the infrequency of large households as the
decisive elements which permit economic development and industrialization.'" If
the nuclear family were the prerequisite, and not merely the consequence, of
economic development, there would be no explanation for the persistence of
economic backwardness in areas, such as Southem Italy and Sicily, where the
nuclear family represents the dominant example of domestic stmcture.
   Benigno has explained the ideological slant of the Cambridge quadripartite
model, particularly in relation to the possibility recalled above that eco-
nomic development was triggered off in the demographic conditions found in
England from the sixteenth century, well before industrialization." Such an
interpretation of demographic data would in fact have reasserted the logical
and historical pre-eminence of the British path to development, not only in
respect of relationships and production methods but, as Wrigley seemed to
recall and as McFarlane certainly indicated, in individualism and preventive
checks.'^
   The neo-Malthusian model drawn up by Wrigley also stressed how the age of
females at marriage was a cmcial variable that could be used to identify customs
relating to marriage, and hence also to families. Thus, as Richard Smith and later
Robert Rowland argued, nuptiality could be seen as the regulatory element in
demographic changes.'^ The culturalist emphasis of this reading implied that
only by abstinence from marriage or by marrying late could demographic
pressures on resources be kept at a low level; therefore behaviour that diverged
from this norm could implicitly be taken as 'primitive', based on a lack of sexual
self-control and, accordingly, by process of induction, commensurate with
societies that were economically underdeveloped. Clearly such a line of reason-
ing is put in serious doubt if, in Sicily and Southem Italy, there are nuclear
families and women marry at an age that is not always young and even
sometimes quite advanced.''*
   In a later essay on 'gender mortality', Benigno used nineteenth-century Sicily

266    I. FAZIO

to point to a need to establish correlations between a range of factors: male and
female mortality, division of labour by gender and the way production and
population distribution are organized.'^ According to Benigno, demographic
variables—rates of marriage, birth and death—needed to be related to gender in
order to explain the plurality of demographic and familial models. He thus
placed the data relating to the female marriage rate outside the mainly cultural
context into which it could have slipped and instead put it into a primarily
demographic context. In a context of this sort, the rates of the different variables
were made to interact, and gender-based mortality had concrete effects on
remarriage: the presence or absence of this practice was not determined solely
by social norms and/or cultural prohibitions. Instead, Benigno argued, it was
determined by the 'effects of the different proportion of males in various age
groups in a segmented marriage market such as that of the ancien regime. If
there are precise limits to opportunities for marriage—that is to say, if matri-
monial choice can come about only between a restricted number of possible
partners—then the death of each one of them becomes a cmcial element in the
demographic system, producing important consequences for age at marriage,
rates of celibacy and, indirectly, fertility'.'^
   When mortality differentiated by gender is examined in this way, with its
repercussions on nuptiality, it leads us to consider ecological and production
contexts and the relationship between these and the organization of male and
female labour. Benigno's work on Sicily suggests that one should go beyond the
confines of historical demography as it is strictly understood. Starting in the
mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s the most interesting research from various
perspectives converged on this point of view. Among this research was the work
of Gerard Delille on the Kingdom of Naples which identified, alongside two
Southem Italian demographic models, very close correlations between systems
of residence, family stmcture, modes of marriage, transmission of houses and
land to men and women, work customarily carried out by males and females, and
territorial mobility.'^ Worthy of note was also the work by Giovanni Levi and
(again) Delille which accorded heuristic importance to the life cycle of the rural
family and to its fiexibility in connection with the relationship between con-
sumers and workers.'^ (These insights drew in tum on research by Chajanov—
after it had been translated into English.'') Then there was the infiuence of Jack
Goody's social and economic anthropology: in Production and Reproduction
and in The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe, Goody com-
pellingly affirmed the very close links between nuptiality, methods of agricul-
ture, the demographic system and assignment of property (which he identified
through the comparative aggregation of data from the Ethnographic Atlas).^°
Last, but not least, this research agenda was carried forward in the papers from
the Past and Present Conference published in 1976 under the title Family and
Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1900. Significantly, this
volume was edited by an agricultural historian, Joan Thirsk, a social anthropol-
ogist. Jack Goody and by E. P. Thompson, at that time the social historian who
was the most receptive to historical anthropology.^' Indeed, Thompson noted
that the assignment of property was a 'grid' through which to observe mral
society.^^ The strategies underpinning the assignment of property betrayed the
infiuence of gender distinction first and foremost: dowries, wills and ways of
managing the transmission of property between generations through males and

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY        267

females seemed to have just as strong an infiuence in shaping marriage and
family models as did other elements. Of all the systems for transferring property
the dowry is the most manifestly gendered form. It is a juridical phenomenon,
formulated as part of the corpus of Roman law, abandoned and then revived and
manipulated in a thousand ways according to the interests of a variety of
historical agents. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, the women historians who put the
dowry in Italy at the centre of a significant debate emphasised above all that the
dowry exposed a series of tensions—some of them political—inherent in
society.^^ Such tensions could be perceived through the proprietary role of
women within social classes and groupings and through the strategies deployed
by the women themselves, together with or against their families, in a highly
eloquent gendered dialogue. A number of occasions for social tension which
were related in particular to the assignment of property and rights presented
researchers with opportunities to revisit earlier models that had ended up by
excluding the possibility of change from the picture. Two examples could be
when women acquired different types of property, buildings, land or money,
either in the form of a dowry, or by inheritance, or as property free of the kind
of restrictions that normally came with dowries. Another instance could be the
presence or absence of an exclusio propter dotem succession clause; yet another
could quite simply be a woman's greater or lesser freedom to dispose of property
in practice, and not only within the letter of the law.
   In Sicily, too, it was the position of women in the mechanisms of property
transmission that highlighted the characteristics of at least three forms of family
grouping, linked to three different types of economy and settlement. These forms
showed wide variations in residence, gender-based division of labour and roles
within the family, opportunities for marriage and family size.^"* And these three
models can also be applied to different layers of society if we replace the
concept of 'goods' with that of 'resources' as a way of including non-material
wealth made up by family networks, relationships with relatives and forms of
organizing the family economy (based on the authority of the head of the family
in relation to both male and female family members, or else on casual labour by
individual men and on the segregation of male and female economic roles). In
essence, inheritance and dowry systems that favoured males were linked to a
number of things: first, the way men managed more complex resources; second,
the involvement of women (through their own work or because of their value as
wives) in constructing the family economy; third, to a lower level of demo-
graphic pressure; and, fourth, to a higher age at marriage and a proportion of
unmarried people. These are factors that can be seen at work both in the higher
echelons of society and in the less impoverished areas of Sicily where settlement
pattems were more diffuse and agriculture was based on fmit and vines.^^ On the
other hand, a different pattern could be found among the lower classes of
wage-earning agricultural labourers and tenants subletting very small plots—as
it could in geographical areas where these figures were preponderant in the
economy. In other words, in the Sicily of the cereal-growing latifondi there was
a substantial equality of inheritance between male and female offspring, houses
were handed down to wives through the dowry system, families were more often
nuclear and in any case smaller, marriage tended to happen at a younger age,
there was a smaller number of unmarried people and the distinction between
economic roles was gender-based (that is, either the exclusion or the greater

268     I. FAZIO

autonomy of women). When Sicily was compared to central and northem Italy,
one could identify
  at least two pattems, within the overall variety of forms, into which family behaviour
  tended to cohere. These pattems are distinct from a strictly geographical typology; we
  should work instead according to categories of classification. What is needed is to
  identify broadly similar responses to qualitatively similar problems, we can define as
  ones based in particular types of environment (whether demographic or related to
  production, juridical stmctures or social relationships). The content of these problems is
  not necessarily identical in each case, but the similarities relate to wider conditions: the
  complexity or the simplicity of the agrarian economy; the restrictions on or inclusion of
  women in the family economy; the role played by gender in the transmission of property.

   We now tum to the question of the supposed coexistence of the nuclear
family, in southem Italy and Sicily, with economic backwardness. The analytical
approach outlined above centres on seeing elements such as demographic
pressures, family stmcture, age at marriage and even the juridical norms
conceming assignment of property as being dependent on the broad pattems of
ways in which social agents engaged with their economic context by drawing on
a range of economic and relational strategies. Taking an approach like this does
not imply attributing economic backwardness to demographic perameters rather
than to relations of production. Indeed Maurice Aymard in the 1970s explained
both how the 'feudal' Sicilian system was functional to the intemationai market
in raw materials, especially cereals, and how the very early arrival of a market
in land and labour on the island was related to this economic dependency.^^
Within this system, the large landowning aristocracy appropriated a surplus by
sub-letting small plots which the day-labourers hired to work on the latifundia
depended on to supplement their income. And it was just such a system that
shaped conditions of life for day-labourers and smallholders, in other words the
two overlapping social groups that tended to be found in the same places as the
nuclear family. It was a system that was subordinate to the intemationai trade
supplying the economic core areas of north-western Europe. As such, it rein-
forced, rather than undermined, the status quo as far as economic relations of
production were concemed, and thus it also ensured that the nuclear family
would persist as the most adaptable, simple and fiexible unit. Quite simply, the
nuclear family was best suited to coping with a situation characterized by
precarious short-term labour contracts and by plots of land that were scattered
far from each other across the large estates and that had to be worked by people
who were both day-labourers and smallholders.
   But there are still unanswered questions conceming the social isolation that
could be associated with the nuclear stmcture of the domestic unit—an isolation
that made even the simplest economic or social strategy impossible or at least
very difficult. This is an issue with important implications, which we shall
examine more closely in the third part of this study insofar as it concems
networks of relationships between individuals (relatives, friends, neighbours,
professional associations). At this point, we shall instead recall the importance
of the networks that are woven around institutions and used strategically to
support the daily lives of individuals and families. Studies in this field in Sicily
and indeed elsewhere in Italy have tended to concentrate more on women as the

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY         269

main protagonists than on families. Focused as they are on the ideal subjects to
be disciplined and punished, on objects singled out for both major and minor
forms of imprisonment, studies on women in Sicily have offered numerous
pointers—in addition to a well-established dialogue with the corpus of historiog-
raphy on gender history and the history of women—towards understanding
women's interaction with institutions. These organizations include, under the
ancien regime and in particular during the Bourbon period, the charitable and
penal institutions which came into being to re-create a symbolic but also
marketable resource: the honour of women and families. The purpose of these
policing and ecclesiastical institutions was to check and regulate sexual trans-
gressions and prostitution: that is, to make laws and pass judgement.
   When women (and, through them, their families) came into contact with these
institutions, they derived benefits from them: the restitution of their honour, a
dowry, or simply the maintenance of orphans or other types of assistance;^^ in
the case of institutions responsible for abandoned infants, or municipal supervi-
sion of wet-nursing, women obtained moratoria and subsidies in times of major
family difficulties.^' But they also received penalties, patenti d'infamia (licences
to practice prostitution in public), imprisonment and corporal punishment.^"
Furthermore, their relations with the institutions were not set in stone; they
changed over time. Women's bodies became indicators and served to demon-
strate the modemization or otherwise of social control and criminal law, and
even political confiict between local and national institutions.^' At the point
where women became the objects of governmental intervention, access to
institutions seems to have been focused on marriage and female sexual behav-
iour. There was therefore good reason for contemporary researchers to focus
their attention on issues that dominated the interests and actions of people within
the institutions at the historical moment in question. But the emphasis on the
social norms that affected women and their sexual and matrimonial role, which
seemed a bit strained in the context of demographic studies, needs to be
examined in an appropriate analytical context.

Honour and the 'vigilance of virgins'
This kind of analysis puts the influence of legal norms into a new perspective
by demonstrating that they provide a framework for social behaviour that is less
rigid than a simple examination of the prescriptive mles might lead one to
suppose. Female sexuality thus appears as a key aspect in our present capacity
to understand the social flexibility of families, their capacity to interact dynam-
ically with their environment and to constmct and negotiate diverse forms and
solutions with local societies and authorities. In an essay in Social Anthropology
written in 1996, Giovanna Fiume drew attention to the increase in 'quasi-famil-
ies', that is to say informal family groupings and cohabiting unmarried couples,
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sicily.^^ These situations were for the most
part accepted by urban and mral communities within which the stable family
authorized by church and state was not, therefore, the only possible arrangement
to satisfy the affective, sexual and economic needs of the individual. (Indeed
there were other, similar situations elsewhere under the ancien regime.f^ As late
as the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Gower Chapman discovered in Milocca that
family situations were accepted where the illegitimacy of the children was seen

270     I. FAZIO

as a merely technical matter: they were children bom to the new partner of a
man who had been abandoned by his wife and who was not free to marry. Gower
Chapman even found that the community approved of the faimess of Dr Caliari,
a well-off bachelor who made his four servant-concubines his joint sole heirs: he
had not married any of them because there was too great a difference of class,
but he did not wish to leave them without support in their 'widowhood' and
wanted to provide them with a dowry for a possible future marriage.^'* In the
1960s, the Schneiders shrewdly underlined the fact that, while there were strict
prescriptions for sexual behaviour, this degree of rigour coexisted with a fair
amount of tolerance, as evinced by the acceptance of different forms of
cohabitation and sexual relations between men and women. In Villamaura, 'not
all cuckolds became murderers'.^^
   One should accordingly refiect on the function of such an appreciable gap
between rigid precepts and permissive practices, or between the forms of
redressing a wrong and of mediation within a community. Indeed the honour of
women, their menfolk and their families could be seen as a 'field of possibilities'
within which centre and periphery, particularism and universalism, rules and
exceptions, are held in tension.
   The anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has stated 'that honour is a false concept,
a construct of the academic imperatives of anthropologists, which has little or
nothing to do with the concepts, ideas and actions of Mediterranean people'.^*
That assertion has been challenged by John Davis, who nevertheless regards it
as a 'healthy reaction to the work of his predecessors'. Davis also gives a sense
of just how pervasive and infiuential the concept of Mediterranean honour has
become: it is now so widely used and yet so shapeless that it can be applied to
heterogeneous forms of behaviour that are categorized very differently from
different viewpoints by those involved—to the extent that many deny that
'honour' is at stake at all. It is, however, possible, through the most convincing
studies making up the comerstones of the massive bibliography that has grown
around this topic, to single out two main interpretations which have become
established and which, from our perspective, have also proved to be useful to
historians.^' The academic debate has centred on whether honour should be
defined, on the one hand, as a prized possession, a mark of distinction and a
confirmation of social standing or, on the other, as a concept linked to female
sexual behaviour (this applies to masculine honour). And as a result of that
debate, the notion of honour has come to be seen as a very versatile form of
social language.

  Honour is a concept based in public value judgement, an assignment of value by the
  group a person belongs to; its character is essentially relational and refers back to social
  subjects within the well-identified communities that pass those judgments. In this sense
  the internal qualities that go to make up honour need also to be accepted in the eyes of
  others; they need to be publicly acknowledged, widely known ... Thus it is true that a
  family's loss of honour can indicate the vulnerability of its women and therefore the
  failure of its menfolk to stand up to public attack on these grounds. But the fact that there
  can be forms of reparation for damaged honour, and that loss of honour need not be
  irrevocable and that it can be restored, testifies to the fact that the honour of an individual
  is negotiated and renegotiated continuously in social praxis.^*

  Honour, as John Davis explained in his People of the Mediterranean, is the

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY          271

capacity to carry through the role conferred on you by the community's accepted
social hierarchy: whether you are a man, a woman, rich, poor, a local person or
a stranger. When therefore we assume, from an historical point of view, that
change and evolution are fundamental and constituent parts of the social life of
a community (rejecting the static form visualized by functionalists), we can
likewise state that notions of honour change over time, through social evolution
and contact with different social groups and different value systems. So not only
can these different ideas of honour evolve within the same cultural system,
which is dynamic and not always stable; they can also evolve—and, indeed,
change substantially—through contact and friction between one social environ-
ment and another: their ways of changing are themselves subject to change.
   There are analyses of Sicily that have clearly demonstrated as much. It is well
known that Sicily has been regarded since the days of the Grand Tour as a
fragment of an 'other' society close to the heart of Europe; hence it has been the
object of particular analytical attention, especially from anthropologists in the
1950s and 1960s. Sicily was viewed as being a backward society on a frontier
between two worlds, and regarded as different and 'primitive' by observers. This
status meant that it was the place where many questions were asked which later,
after decolonization, would be asked by the anthropology of African countries,
by sociology and network analysis—questions, that is, about social and political
change in societies that came to participate, albeit with limited rights, in political
communities and value systems that had hitherto excluded them. But even prior
to the Second World War, 'othemess' had fully permeated what was perceived
as an encounter, indeed a clash, between the Italian south and the politico-ad-
ministrative culture of an Italy profoundly influenced by Piedmont at the
conclusion of the Risorgimento and, later, in the 'nationalization of the masses'
within the framework of the unified state.^' 'Altro che Italia!' (Some Italy!)' mns
the famous quotation from a letter by Luigi Carlo Farini, a minister in the
Cavour govemment and later a lieutenant in Naples after Garibaldi's famous
meeting with Vittorio Emanuele II at Teano. 'This is Africa: the Bedouins are
paragons of civilized behaviour compared with these caffoni [peasants, oafs]."*"
Although Farini was referring to the peasants of Molise and Terra di Lavoro, his
outburst is a good example of an attitude shared—even if not always expressed
in these terms^by a large proportion of the goveming class who after
unification came into contact with a reality they often saw as incomprehensible.
Italy's mlers experienced the post-unification period in terms of a profound
ethnic clash in which Sicily, whose institutional history was in many respects
very different, played a prominent part. Contact between the two worlds would
come to be characterized by episodes of extreme violence, long periods of
negotiation and idiosyncratic social and political discussions. Anton Blok was
later to encounter these aspects when he formulated a definition of mafiosi as
social and political mediators and situated them within a process of state-build-
ing that had not yet achieved a monopoly of violence."'
   The problem of mediation comes back in a completely different context in
connection with the first people to confront the gap between the culture of
post-unification Italy's institutions and the systems and cultural expectations that
shaped local societies. I have in mind here the middle-ranking officials,
especially in the administration, police and judiciary who, in the course of their
careers, encountered the social systems and values of a world that they found

272    I. FAZIO

disconcerting and worrying, and so portrayed those systems for this very reason
as 'other' and inferior. A cmcial component of the picture thus painted was the
sexual conduct of the lower classes. The magistrates who sent responses to
Abele Damiani at the time of the 1885 Inquiry portrayed mral Sicily as a nest
of ignoble fomication and incest, a place where men pimped their own wives,
and women were unfaithful, dirty and mendacious as well as lascivious and
promiscuous. Villages in the interior, abandoned during the week by day-labour-
ers who went to work on the large estates, became—so it seemed—centres of
illicit pleasures once the menfolk had gone away.''^ In contrast to this portrayal,
which makes sense as part of the 'barbarity' censured by the new mling classes,
was the picture described from inside the communities in question. Yet still, as
late as the 1960s, anthropologists persisted in seeing a picture in which women
were segregated, rigorous codes of honour and shame were strictly observed, and
women's sexual mores were obsessively supervised. Today we can decode both
of these perspectives as corresponding in part to factual reality, while at the same
time being constructed in the misleading language of power—whether govem-
mental, or more generally patriarchal. To some extent, as has been said, the
officials who censured sexual anomie in Sicily merely refiected their own
inexperience when faced with real-life situations that seemed chaotic. Neverthe-
less, these extemal observers cannot simply have invented all the sexual
transgressions they mentioned in their reports. So the behaviour they noticed is
evidence that the sexual reputations of women, men and families was not
maintained or lost once and for all by certain acts. Rather, honour was
manipulated through languages of reparation and restoration that rendered
theoretically forbidden conduct acceptable within the community. Altematively,
honour could be defended ('honour crimes') in a calculating and pragmatic
fashion, 'as a means of allocating and distributing resources and exchanging
goods in the market, starting with the marriage market'."^ We know furthermore
that the surveillance and punishment of such behaviour by the judicial authority
was based on a distinction between the public and the private domain, the latter
being less dangerous in regard to the maintenance of social order and therefore
as a place where transgressions could more easily be tolerated.'*" Private vice and
public virtue: in the grey area of what was tolerated by the state and its
institutions and allowed by the mles of the community, the language of honour
grew up and was manipulated each time by those involved on one side or the
other.
   But such manipulations of the language of honour were not always resolved
in a traditional or one-sided fashion, through the restating of past precepts. In the
same period, which saw phases when cultures were refashioned and contami-
nated and completely new social models were constmcted as a result, honour did
not merely stand for a flexible and versatile concept to be used in negotiation and
mediation: it was also postulated as the cornerstone of fresh perceptions closely
correlated with new social identities. The most famous case is that identified in
Sicily by Jane Schneider conceming the segregation of women and their
exclusion from work outside the home."^ Schneider indicates in an unusually
acute fashion the features underlying a process—an historical process—through
which a condition specific to one social class (the upper middle class, or civili,
who in some senses were imitating the aristocracy) is elevated to something that
is universally desirable and seen as almost timeless. Schneider unmasks the

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY         273

segregation of women and the 'vigilance of virgins', shut up within the walls of
their homes to embroider a trousseau that is to become 'a treasure', by
demonstrating why this condition had its particular attractions. Its significance
was the protection of women from the threats to their physical and sexual
integrity that could have menaced them if they had worked outside the home;''*
and at the same time it was a source of honour for their menfolk, demonstrating
that they were affiuent enough for their women to be freed from the need to
work and therefore from the dangers threatening their chastity. Schneider's study
of the 'invention of segregation' emphasises the close correlation between
cultural paradigms, social and economic status (or, more accurately, the pro-
cesses of social mobility and redefinition of one's position within the social
hierarchy) and the consequent emergence of suitable forms of self-representa-
tion.

Beyond familism: networks and strategies
Nuclear families were preponderant in Sicily from the start of the modem age.
As we have seen, this simple fact has had research implications from the
perspective of demography and strategies linked to the relationships of individ-
uals with institutions. One other feasible implication could be the implicit
reconfirmation of the 'amoral familism' paradigm. This expression was coined
by the American social scientist Edward Banfield in 1958 during his research in
Montegrano, the fictitious name of a small community in Lucania. The phrase
is intended to describe the system of social relations practised by Montegrano's
inhabitants."^ According to Banfield, they were unable to establish widespread
co-operation among themselves; this failure was a function of behaviour aimed
at maximizing benefit for one's own restricted family circle, in the nuclear
model: in short, there was positive reciprocity within the family, negative outside
it. This familism was branded as 'amoral' because it lacked any public morality
and because there was an absence of any community ethos or 'moral' social
relationships with individuals outside the family and in the public arena.
    Against Banfield, numerous commentators and critics have tried to demon-
strate that backwardness does not stem from the behaviour of families but from
historical marginalization, class-based dependency and a backward agricultural
system. Indeed all of these criticisms were used to dismantle Banfield's thesis as
a scientific tool of appraisal. Nonetheless, the phrase 'amoral familism' has
lingered tenaciously in attempts to explain and depict southem Italian societies,
to the extent that one can trace the signs of its ahistorical influence in Putnam's
model from the 1990s.''^ Paul Ginsborg himself, though he criticizes the stricter
and more schematic significance of familism, draws a connection between the
strength and cohesion of the Italian family and the possibility of using it as a
substitute for inadequate institutions; this, he claims, explains the failure to
develop a civic consciousness when the family provides such an accessible,
strong and widespread substitute. Thus 'amoral familism' has given rise both to
cmde explanations and more appropriate deliberations among experts. Yet it
remains a strong explanatory category, a 'powerful stereotype', as Gabriella
Gribaudi has defined it.'*' Now, if a direct correlation is postulated between
structural typology (the nuclear family widely discovered in Sicily) and be-
havioural typology, the 'powerful stereotype' makes a comeback, or rather never

274    I. FAZIO

fades away. Banfield—I am still following Gabriella Gribaudi's line of argu-
ment—tumed on its head the most widespread interpretation of Weber's
paradigm according to which 'in contrast to the asceticism, the solitude, the
individualism of the Protestant entrepreneur we have the image of the Mediter-
ranean man ensnared in a tangle of family ties that inhibit his attempts to achieve
self-sufficiency'—and, a fortiori, economic development. (This, incidentally, is
precisely the line of reasoning, according to Benigno's work on which I have
already commented, that can be seen in the background of the 'Anglo-Saxon
models'.) But for Banfield, Gribaudi continues, 'individualism becomes a nega-
tive value and the main problem of southem society is on the contrary singled
out as its inability to build up stable social solidarity of the type associated with
the extended family'.^° One could venture to comment that in Laslett's back-
ground is the homeland of rights-based individualism; with the American
Banfield, by contrast, there is the infiuence of a kind of community co-operation
that has to interact with a different type of individualism, the American model
of the frontier spirit.
   The implications of the amoral familism paradigm clearly need further
analysis in the light both of recent research and of the way methods of studying
the family in history have changed. Benedetto Meloni, in his introduction to a
collection of historical, anthropological and sociological essays arising out of the
conference on 'The southem family without familism: economic strategies,
networks of relationship and kinship', notes that thirty years of research in this
field show that the southern Italian nuclear, neolocal family can exist, has existed
and does exist only insofar as it is not isolated.^' This kind of family is fiexible
in the way it organizes its economic and relational resources and constmcts
networks for this purpose—networks of collaboration in the workplace,
among customers, of strategic alliances when dealing with institutions, but
above all with relatives, friends and neighbours; to sum up, this kind of southem
family enjoys multiple and fiexible forms of reciprocity. Familism was thus,
firstly, not a real way of organizing social relationships focused on the family;
secondly, it was not even an effective tactic for organizing in order to access
resources. Important social networks go beyond and supplement the limits
imposed by the nuclear stmcture of co-residence and by the community's
isolation.
   The research agenda related to kinship stmctures in Sicily is not yet exhaus-
ted. But there are chronologically scattered data that offer particularly interesting
pointers conceming the bilateral nature and the 'cognatic nuances' of Sicilian
kinship, whether in the context of modes of living together, organization of
labour or transmission of property. These 'cognatic nuances' were identified
over a long period by Henri Bresc in his wide-ranging study of fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century Sicily, with particular reference to the population of Palermo;^^
they were found more recently by Igor Mineo to have already been prevalent in
the Sicilian elite of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.^^ Partly for legal and
historical reasons, families—including those who were later to become feudal
families—had little agnatic genealogical depth precisely because of the bilateral
way inheritance was organized and the bilateral way in which kinship and
ancestry were conceptualized. So this was a trait that lasted for a very long time
 and spread and modified in line with social stratification. The agnatic principle
was adopted more and more frequently by elite families, whereas the bilateral

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY        275

principle, which is more fiexible and adaptable in that it gives an opportunity to
more than one kinship tie, was gradually used by other social groups.
   If we move forward several centuries, we find more signs of open-endedness
in urban family groupings. The residents of the Palermo parish of St Ippolito at
the beginning of the eighteenth century were happy to accept male servants,
lodgers, nieces and nephews, and children from a previous marriage by one or
other or both spouses into the nuclear household.^'* They often organized
themselves into groups of unmarried men or women; single women of more than
one generation, not always related to each other, would often live together; while
single parents who had outlived their spouses or stayed in the town after a
spouse had abandoned them or emigrated would look after the children.
Relationships with neighbours, even if they were fragile and short-term in the
comings and goings of city life of the ancien regime, became very important for
the support of individuals. These connections are very difficult to trace, as
Delille has noted, remaining as they do outside the 'logic of the sumame' that
lets us distinguish kinship and neighbourhood by an onomastic criterion. The
Schneiders researched the economic meaning of marriage between first cousins
among day-labourers in nineteenth-century Villamaura and found that tracing
bilateral kinship was clearly becoming more and more difficult, less obvious,
more chancy or indeed possible only with the aid of recollections from
descendants or other qualitative sources.^^ (This meant that, whether they were
written or oral, the sources were themselves the product of choices made by the
subjects of the study.) Women do not pass on their name, so historians can
recognize kinship immediately and reliably only from one side: that of patrilineal
descent. This is a further demonstration of the 'power of agnation'. Men with the
same sumame and married brothers in Villamaura were recognized by the
Schneiders as being those massarioti or moderately rich peasant landowners who
(once again giving the lie to the supposed isolation of Sicilian peasant families)
joined forces to run complex and diversified estates and found it more efficient
to continue working together after the death of their father, with consequences
that can be imagined for relationships between relatives as well as for the
transmission of property.
   The network analysis approach in its connections to micro-history presents
itself as one method of overcoming the impasse of familism. Sicily has been the
research field where such analysis has been employed in one of its most famous
versions, with the work of Anton Blok on the mafia in a community in western
Sicily. In this instance, individuals were placed within multiple relationships and
diverse loyalties to social spheres and cultural norms; at the centre of analysis
were the forms of mediation in operation at the points where those various
relationships converged. These forms of mediation included chains of clients and
the violent, legal or para-legal control of territory; they were connected to the
unsuccessful process of state-building and were run entirely by violent interme-
diaries or mafiosi: the monopoly of violence, the elimination of competitors,
political alliance-building, protection rackets and a levy on resources. Blok
reconstmcted the origin and the entrenchment of mafia allegiances among
inter-family relationships, enemies, allies and friends of friends in the context
shaped by the flawed management of the transition to a unitary state within the
complicated stmcture of local society. The Schneiders and Blok both concern
themselves with wider issues, as micro-analysis typically does: while the

276    I. FAZIO

Schneiders address the themes of what was known at that time as 'modemiza-
tion' and the emergence of what became known as 'broker capitalism', Blok
observes a spatially circumscribed situation that nevertheless leads to a reinter-
pretation of more general phenomena, in this case the special aspect that the
process of nation-building has assumed in Italy. In both cases, it is mediators
who are the focus of attention and the study of the family remains subordinate
to this main objective.
   If we tum to more recent research on Sicily, we find great emphasis on the
organization of kinship networks, but couched in such a way that historical
techniques derived from network analysis as it is strictly understood leave room
for wider questioning and more flexible methods.^^ The network remains in the
background as a metaphor used to stress the importance of points of social
intersection and of individuals with many allegiances who are involved in
forming links with more than one party. A network-based perspective is
combined with micro-history to identify the strategies employed by individuals
when they form relations that sustain the family by going beyond it—or, on the
other hand when they use the family in a wider area of targeted relationships:
matrimonial alliances, inheritance and dowries, the reproduction of political and
symbolic capital. New meanings for otherwise static definitions emerge from all
this: for example, the study by Igor Mineo (see n. 33) demonstrates that, in order
to constmct an aristocratic identity and forms of behaviour for themselves,
families adopted a strategy based on agnatic selection in the matter of dowries
and inheritance—which was in tum based on the division of property and the
differentiation between heirs on the basis of gender and rank. In the process,
these families gradually abandoned practices characterized by bilaterality and
family co-ownership that put spouses and offspring on an equal footing. From
Mineo's study, membership of an aristocratic class emerges as a dynamic
process based on actions and representations. Family politics can also be traced
in the devotional 'spaces' (altars and ceremonies) of the 'devout community' of
a seventeenth-century confraternity in Palermo.^^ Through the names of persons
connected to each other as patrons or clients, benefactresses,^^ usurers^' and
saints^" we can also detect the existence of 'spiders' webs of relationships'
between peasants, doctors or up-and-coming men; these relationships, in tum,
shed light on a politics of prestige and power, 'team games' involving a number
of social actors and the management of large or small symbolic or economic
patrimonies.
   But the family conceived of as a crucial hinge between interests and emotions
does not entirely exhaust the contribution made by this new research. In La
Santa dei Tomasi, Sara Cabibbo and Marilena Modica point to the personal
memorabilia—diaries, letters, testimonies—of a future saint, of her fellow nuns,
of the clerics who knew her, as well as of her relatives: these reveal both
masculine and feminine peculiarities in relationships of this type.**' In doing so,
they demonstrate that family strategies cannot be viewed as pre-determined
successes or failures independent of individuals' desires, suffering and choice. In
La vecchia dell'aceto, on the other hand, Giovanna Fiume, by means of the
women's networks (but not only these) which grew up in eighteenth-century
Palermo around a female poisoner, her 'clients' and their victims (husbands),
traces 'anti-family' strategies that should be put in the framework of the more
unusual meanings that family relationships acquire when we examine cases
where normal standards break down and transgressors are punished.*^ The lives

THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY                           277

of spouse-killers and their associated networks of complicity and pervasiveness
in city life tell us that the everyday criminality of women as found in the kitchen,
the street and the more disreputable working-class areas of an ancien regime city
may have been exceptional, yet they show up the normality of family relation-
ships.*^ They show us that families are not always created harmoniously from a
balance of demands and desires, in which mediation and the sharing out of work
and roles is operative. Families also comprise discordant expectations and plans,
initiatives undertaken and courses of action embarked upon both through
courage and through cowardice. These are aspects of family life that we can no
longer judge as incidental or marginal or even exceptional: it would be
worthwhile to test them again through new research.

Notes
 *    Translated from the Italian by Jennifer Radice.
 1.   J. Scott, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis', American Historical Review, 91, 5, 1986.
 2.   Cited by G. Gribaudi, Donne, uomini, famiglie. Napoli nel Novecento, L'Ancora, Naples, 1999, p. 89.
 3.   But the first Italian edition of Burekhardt's book The Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy was published
      in 1876. Le Play's La reforme sociale came out in 1867.
4.    For a discussion of the 'great transformation' of the Westem family, see M. Barbagli, Sotto lo stesso tetto:
      mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo, II Mulino, Bologna, 1984, pp. 3 1 ^ 4 .
 5.   The chronology is as follows: P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, Methuen, London, 1965; J. Hajnal,
      'European Marriage Pattems in Perspective', in D.V. Glass and D.E.C Eversley (eds). Population in
      History: Essays in Historical Demography, Amold, London, 1965; P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds). Household
      and Family in Past Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972; J. Hajnal, 'Two Kinds of
      Pre-industrial Household Formation System', Population and Development Review, 8, 1982; R. Wall, J.
      Robin and P. Laslett (eds). Family Forms in Historic Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
      1983.
 6.   J. C. Peristiany, Mediterranean Family Structures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1946.
 7.   L. Berkner, 'The Stem Family and the Development Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-
      century Austrian Example', American Historical Review, 1972. For Italy, G. Delille, 'La famiglia
      contadina in Italia', in A. Burguiere, C, Klapiseh Zuber, M. Segalen and F. Zonabend, (eds). Storia
      universale della famiglia, Mondadori, Milan, 1988, and the discussion between Delille and G. Levi, 'La
      famiglia nel mutamento', Passato e Presente, 7, 1985.
 8.   Cited from the works of G. Delille, Famiglia e proprieta nel Regno di Napoli, Einaudi, Turin, 1988; G.
      Da Molin, La famiglia nel passato: strutture familiari nel regno di Napoli in eta moderna, Laterza, Bari,
       1990 and (edited by the same author). La famiglia ieri e oggi: trasfonnazioni demogrqfiche e sociali dal
      XV al XX secolo, Laterza, Bari, 1992.
 9.   The earliest attestations of neolocality were considered by Henri Bresc in Un monde mediterrane en:
      economie et societe en Sicile, 1300-1450, Palermo, 1986. On the preponderance of the nuclear family, see
      A. Di Pasquale, Palermo nel 1480: la popolazione del quartiere della Kalsa, Palermo, 1975; F. Benigno,
      Una casa, una terra: ricerche su Paceco, paese nuovo della Sicilia del Sei e Settecento, CUECM, Catania,
       1985; F. Benigno, 'Un'analisi della coresidenza: Noto nel 1647', in Ultra Pharum: famiglie, commerci e
      territori nel Meridione modemo, Donzelli, Rome, 2001; here, the author also cites investigations carried
      out in Militello, Val di Catania and in Acireale; M. Grillo and S. Raffaele, 'Butera nel Setteeento: dinamica
      demografica e struttura della famiglia', Le Forme e la Storia, 1, 1980; M. Grillo, 'Demografia e societa
      ad Acicastello fra Settecento e Ottocento: evoluzione e permanenze', in La Sicilia del Settecento, Messina,
       1984; S. Raffaele, // censimento siciliano del 1831: Viagrande, CUECM, Catania, 1993; S. Raffaele,
      Dinamiche demografiche e struttura della famiglia nella Sicilia del Sei-Settecento, CULC, Catania, 1986
      and Famiglie e senza famiglia: strutture familiari e dinamiche sociali nella Sicilia moderna, Edizioni
      Scientifiche Italiane, Naples, 2000; P. Travagliante, // censimento siciliano del 1831: Zafferana Etnea,
      CUECM, Catania, 1990; M. Aymard, 'Un bourg de Sicile entre XVIe et XVIIe siecle: Gangi', in
      Conjoncture economique, structures sociales: hommage a Ernest Labrousse, La Haye, Paris, 1974; L.
      Giovinazzo, Lo stato delle anime della parrocchia di sant'Ippolito a Palermo nel 1714, degree thesis
      written at the Faeolta di Lettere e Filosofia at the University of Turin during 2000-01; on the numbers of
      people in a household, see also G. Raffaele, La Guardia allegra e giojosa, Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli,
       1993 (Giojosa Guardia); I. Fazio, 'Famiglia, lavoro, trasmissione della proprieta: ipotesi di lavoro a partire
      dal caso siciliano', in B. Meloni (ed.), Famiglia meridionale senza familismo: strategie economiche, reti
      di relazione e parentela, Donzelli, Rome, 1997 (Capizzi, Cesaro, Taormina, Santa Lucia).
10.   E. A. Wrigley, 'No Death without Birth: The Implication of English Mortality in the Early Modem