Holding to the erroneous historicist belief that in all civilizations analogous cultural cycles occur, the scientists thought, in examining the behavior of an Anglo-Saxon community, for example, that they were dealing simply with an earlier phase and that in the community’s later development an inhabitant of, say, Glasgow would behave much like a Melanesian. We are therefore deeply indebted to the enlightened studies of Professor Poa Kilipak, who essayed the concept of «cultural model» and drew her brilliant conclusions.
An in habitant of Paris lives by a code of norm and habits that are part of an organic whole and constitute a given culture as valid as our own though very different. This new perception opened the way for an objective anthropological study of colorless man and an understanding of Western civilization. For-and I may be accused of cynical relativism-we are indeed dealing with a civilization, even if it does not conform to the ways of our own civilization. (Gathering coconuts by climbing a palm tree with bare feet is not necessarily a form of behavior superior to that of the primtive who travels by jet aircraft and eats fried potatoes from a plastic bag.)
The methods of the new anthropology, however, can also give rise to serious misinterpretations, especially when the researcher, precisely because he recognizes as an authentic culture the «model» he has investigated, bases his work on historical documents produced directly by its natives, attempting to derive from these the characteristics of that society.
- The Hypothesis of Dr. Do bu of Dobu (Dobu)
A typical example of this «historiographic illusion» is furnished us, -in fact, by the village of Milan, in a book published in 1910 by Dr. Dobu of Dobu (Dobu) entitled Italian Villages and the «Risorgimento» Cult. In this volume the well-known scholar attempts to reconstruct the history of the peninsula
from documents written by the natives.
In the view of Dr. Dobu, the peninsula in the course of the last century was the scene of fierce fighting aimed at bringing all the various villages under a single ruler. Some communities fought for this goal, while others opposed unification with equal ferocity. Dr. Dobu calls the former communities revolutionary or «risogimental» (a local dialect term referring perhaps to a rebirth cult, widespread in this period, surely shamanic), and the latter reactionary.
This is how Dr. Dobu, in his highly individual style, distinguished more by its ornate literary quality than by any scientific precision, describes the situation:
A risorgimental flame burned throughout the peninsula, but the reactionaries lay in wait, determined to keep patriots and the entire citizenry crushed beneath the heel of the Austrian. To be sure, not all the Italian states yearned for unification; but, fi_rst among them all, the kingdom of Naples was the one that held aloft the torch of freedom.
According to the documents it was, in fact, the King of the Two Sicilies who founded the military academy of the Nunziatella, in whose halls were educated the fervent patriots Morelli, Silvati, Pisacane, and De Sanctis. This enlightened monarch was thus the prime mover of Italian rebirth; but in the shadows an obscure conspirator was weaving his sinister web: Mazzini, who is infrequently mentioned in the histories of the time, and then only in descriptions of the false plots he organjzed, always, curiously, discovered and foiled in time, so that the best and bravest patriots, cynically instigated by Mazzini, fell into the hands of the Austrian oppressor and were either imprisoned or executed. Another great enemy of risorgimento was Silvio Pellico.
Even the most casual reader of Pellico’s diary, written during his confinement in an Austrian prison, has the distinct impression that this book cost Italian unification more than one battle. The sly narrator paints an idyllic picture of a Moravian prison, a place of chaste repose where great human questions are debated with amiable jailers, where prisoners flirt, however platonically, with young ladies, and insects become pets. The prisoner welcomes an amputation, so impressed is he by the supreme skill of the Austrian surgeons, a skill which the amputees reward with floral offerings. And in his little work Pellico gives a subtle, «cunning, and most dispiriting image of the Italian patriot, making him seem so alien to violence and combat, and, in the end, so impervious to any passion, so timid and sanctimonious, that the reading of these pages must surely have dissuaded legions of vigorous youths from :fighting for national rebirth (just as in the lands of North America a little book entitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin cast such discredit on the black slaves, making them seem foolish, ingenuous, and without initiative, that even today its influence is perceptible among the colorless in the southern states, who are irrevocably
opposed to so inferior a race).
The Kingdom of Sardinia found itself in a singular position, apparently uninterested in the problems of national unification. It is known that the Piedmontese army intervened in Milan during a local insurrection, but succeeded in confusing the situation to such a degree that they caused the revolt to fail and abai;idoned the city and the rebels to the occupying Austrian forces. The prime minister, Cavour, was more concerned with serving the interests of other countries; first he helped the French against the Russians in a war to whose aims Piedmont was absolutely indifferent, then he went to great pains to provide foreign monarchs with the sexual favors of Piedmontese noblewomen. It is not evident that any other real effort was made to unify Italy beyond that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. According to some texts, it was their inflexible devotion to rebirth that drove Piedmont to unleash against them an adventurer from Uruguay.
All these machinations had finally a single purpose: to clip the wings of the Italian power that, even more than the Two Sicilies, had been working ceaselessly toward unity not so much on the military level as through persuasion and philosophy. I refer to the Papal States. Exploiting the work of men of faith and intellect, the Papal States acted tirelessly to bring Italy toget.her under a single government. It was a hard, impassioned struggle, in the course of which the Papacy had recourse even to subterfuge, luring, for example, crack Piedmontese troops to Rome to acquire a strong army for itself. This long and relentless struggle was concluded definitively only after a hundred years, on 1 8 April 1948, when finally the entire peninsula flocked to vote for the Papal party, whose Sign was the Cross.
Now, when the researcher approaches today’s Milan, what does he see of the barbarian but politically complex situation that Dr. Dobu’s ridiculous historiography would have us imagine? Alas, what the researcher sees leaves him a choice between only two hypotheses: one, that in the last fifty years some regressive phenomenon has taken place whereby every
vestige of the political structure described by Dobu has disappeared; or two, that the community of Milan has not participated in the great developments that involved the rest of the Italian peninsula, because of the inhabitants’ peculiarly colonial and congeni
tally passive nature, which is resistant to any acculturation and doomed to a frenetic social mobility quite common, for that matter, amng pr1mltlve communities.
- La Pensee Sauvage
(A Report on Field Research)
The typical day of the Milanese native obeys elementary solar rhythms. At an early hour he wakes and sets off to perform the tasks characteristic of this people: the gathering of steel in the plantations, the cultivation of metallic parts, the tanning of plastic materials, the barter of chemical fertilizers with the inhabitants of the interior, the sowing of transistors, the putting of motor scooters out to graze, the breed
ing of alfaromeos, and so on. The native, however, does not like his work and will do everything possible to postpone the moment when he has to start. Curiously, the village chiefs seem to assist him in this, eliminating, for example, the customary methods of transportation, digging up the tracks of the primitive tramways, confusing traffic with broad yellow stripes painted along mule tracks (with an obvious taboo power), and making deep holes in the least convenient places, where many natives are engulfed, probably sacrificed to local deities. It is hard to explain psychologically the attitude of the village chiefs, but this ritual destruction of transportation is no doubt linked with rebirth rites (obviously forcing hordes of inhabitants intQ the bowels of the earth, this human
sacrifice considered seed to produce stronger, more vigorous individuals). But the population’s reaction
to this is a clearly neurotic syndrome, the attitude of the chiefs affording a genuine example of collective frenzy: «the tube cult.» At regular periods the Rumor spreads through the community, and the natives are possess,ed by the quasi-mystic faith that one day
enormous vehicles will move beneath the earth carrying individuals at miraculous speed to any part of the village. Dr. Muapach, a serious and learned member of my team, asked himself if the Rumor had
originated with some real event, and then he descended into those caverns, but found nothing that could remotely justify this suppositiqn.
A morning ritual shows how important the chiefs believe it is to keep the populace in a state of uncertainty. Every morning the members of the tribe read a hieratic message that the village headmen have distributed among the populace shortly after dawn, though the sheet bears the bewildering name of Il
Corriere della sera, which in local dialect means
courier of the evening. The hieratic nature of the message is underlined by the fact that what is com
municated is totally abstract and has no relation to reality, though sometimes there is, as we have been able
