Recovering the sense of sight: Berardino Palumbo’s vision for Italian anthropology’s possible redemption
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3776
Commento a Berardino Palumbo, Lo strabismo della DEA: Antropologia, accademia e società in Italia, Palermo, Edizioni Museo Pasqualino, 2018, pp. 289.
application/pdf
2239-625X
3776
1
en
Michael Blim
Anuac
Recovering the sense of sight: Berardino Palumbo’s vision for Italian anthropology’s possible redemption
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
8
Book forum: Berardino Palumbo - Lo strabismo della DEA
2019-07-31
2019-06-19
2019-07-31
2019-07-30
125-129
1
Michael Blim
2019/07/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3776
125
City University of New York, United States
2239-625X
1
en
129
Recovering the sense of sight: Berardino Palumbo’s vision for Italian anthropology’s possible redemption
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/3776/3357
8
                                                 2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 125-129




                                                                                    BOOK FORUM

Recovering the sense of sight
Berardino Palumbo’s vision for Italian anthropology’s possible redemption

Michael BLIM
City University of New York


Comment on BERARDINO PALUMBO, Lo strabismo della DEA. Antropologia, accademia e
società in Italia, Palermo, Edizioni Museo Pasqualino, 2018, pp. 289.



   It is a rare thing when scholars take on their chosen fields and commit
them to unsparing analysis as total social facts. I traffic in an old-fashioned
term, “total social fact”, not in homage to Durkheim or his successors, but
rather in search of a way of describing the scope of Palumbo’s ambition and
achievement. I struggle to nominate other exemplars from analyses of other
social sciences that can compare with Palumbo’s remarkable combination of
Italian anthropology’s institutional history and its entanglements with the
Italian state and civil society, as well as the articulation of its mission and
theory in light of the development of the powerful hegemonic
anthropologies emanating from the United States, Great Britain, and France.
The result is indeed a bracing, comprehensive, and convincing critique of his
field, albeit tempered by indications that the Italian path contains some
seeds for its own redemption.
   Sociocultural anthropology in Italy has entered a period of precipitous
slide, its intellectual core in universities and its impact on public life
shrinking, a process that Palumbo describes in complete and unblinking
detail. In the space provided, this short essay explores important dimensions
of his argument. First, Palumbo lays out the historical demography of socio-
cultural anthropology in Italy, judiciously noting the shifting geography of


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Michael Blim
Recovering the sense of sight: Berardino Palumbo’s vision for Italian anthropology’s possible redemption
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 125-129.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3776
126                                                                 MICHAEL BLIM


its centers from South to North. Second, he discusses how Italian
anthropology’s (and Italy’s for that matter) unfavorable embedding in the
hierarchy of nations and more politically powerful scholarly knowledges has
aggravated the internal intellectual tensions of a field already struggling
with its vocation in a class-divided, markedly inequitable society. Third,
Palumbo points out a possible route to recovery through the rediscovery of
Ernesto De Martino’s thought and works, noting especially how constituting
a dialectical relationship between state and/or civil society and subaltern
status can transcend theories that fail to account for a modern Italy
characterized simultaneously by bureaucracy and magic, religion and
politics, administrative rationality and clientelism, and the extremes of
centralization and “campanilismo” (Palumbo 2018: 242).

The demography of decline
    Beginning in 2008, as Palumbo points out, sociocultural anthropology in
terms of university posts began its demographic decline, dropping by 27%,
even as the total Italian professorate fell by only 4%. Sociocultural
anthropology doctoral programs disappeared or were merged with other
subject fields, leaving Milano-Bicocca the only stand-alone degree-granter.
It is especially grievous for Palumbo that the South, once the hot springs of
anthropology with several training centers, is no longer; what forward
momentum the discipline possesses now comes from the North.
    The shrunken sociocultural anthropological labor market provides only
23% of the nation’s 400 PhDs with academic employment. For the 3,000
additional former students with one or more anthropological degrees,
Palumbo is concerned that their fates are joined with the mass of over-
qualified and under-employed Italian young adults.
    As Palumbo notes, anthropology’s fall in the United States and Great
Britain began earlier. By way of comparison, a cursory glance at the statistics
available suggest that the United States is producing 50% more anthropology
PhDs than it did in 1985 (530 in 2014), even as the labor market for
anthropology doctorates is just as dismal as that of Italy’s – only 21% get
tenure-track jobs. Its “market share” of university majors, 11,000 per year,
has slumped to 42nd in a field of 48, outrunning only music, philosophy,
architecture, arts management and agriculture in the contest for the hearts
and minds of American college students. (Speakman et al. 2018) The number
of American anthropologists, 7,600 at last count by the U.S. Labor
Department, is expected to grow by only 300 or 4% by 2026. Job growth will
be “slower than average”, they say. Put a bit less bureaucratically, U.S.


2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 125-129
RECOVERING THE SENSE OF SIGHT                                                      127


anthropology in terms of its practitioners has entered a period of long-term
stagnation, while the overall market for postsecondary teachers, including
the professoriate, is expected to grow by 15% over the same period (U.S.
Department of Labor 2019).
   While the politics of austerity may ultimately be the cause of the triage of
winner and loser disciplines, in this case in Italy and the United States, they
do not explain why sociocultural anthropology is slipping or stagnating in
these climes. In Italy, as Palumbo notes, sociocultural anthropology
university staffing is falling along with the classic liberal arts fields of
history, geography, and philosophy, while pedagogy and psychology have
logged increases in university faculty. In the United States, by way of
contrast, the disciplinary shifts noted in Italian universities would be
attributed to the panicky vocationalism spreading among undergraduate
students that are currently abandoning the liberal arts at record rates for
degrees in computer science and business. In Italy, the reasons appear more
subtle, and one of them, Palumbo reasons, is that sociocultural anthropology
had not only lost its historically unique vision of the human condition
attributable to the influence of Croce, Gramsci, and De Martino, but it had
lost its voice in civic life as it splintered into self-regarding, professionalizing
cliques during soul-losing Craxi years.

The wars within
   As Italian state patronage of anthropology and of Italian universities grew
from the eighties through the 1992 economic crisis, patrimonialism reigned.
In anthropology, key anthropologists like tribal chiefs, Palumbo argues with
an abundance of supporting data, sought to capture the new positions and
academic funds for themselves and their bravi, and thus effectively form
tribes. Local chiefs even confederated, forming alliances across universities
in the South and the North. The politics of positions also affected the growth
of the field: analogous to the deleterious gene that is propagated and shapes
the genetics of a small group, the chiefs (with a few notable exceptions) were
more interested in an anthropology of Italy than one considering the rest of
the world, and they bequeathed their preferences to their students. By 2016,
half of Italy’s anthropologists specialized in Italy, and more than half of the
publications of senior professors concerned Italy. Moreover, the chiefs were
not especially dedicated to doing empirical or ethnographic research and
were satisfied writing in Italian for other Italians.
   Generational differences have emerged. Scholars entering the
professorate during the nineties worked abroad in greater numbers, were
more empirical and more ethnographic in their method. However, the chiefs

                                       2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 125-129
128                                                               MICHAEL BLIM


had left a legacy in their wake of an inwardly focused anthropology scattered
among sub-field interests (kinship and family, medicine, religion, for
instance) and practitioners of “Fieldwork Italian Style” that Palumbo
considers a pale and in some sense inauthentic copy of what had become the
ethnographic standard in the Anglo-American and French traditions.
   Anglo-American anthropologists of Italy have not helped matters. Indeed,
they have contributed to the absence of Italian anthropological voices in the
world anthropological community by systematically ignoring Italian
research as well as important Italian theoretical and historical problematics
that fruitfully occupied the critical work flowing from the Italian Marxian
traditions, including that of De Martino and many others. Instead of tapping
the wisdom several generations of Italian scholars possessed of important
insights into the work of Gramsci and the copious work done in situ by
Italian social scientists, the Anglo-Americans produced crude and
uninspired versions of his theories and often banal applications of his ideas
to their research. For many of them, Italy might well have been just another
colony or postcolonial opportunity.

Recovery prospects and a personal journey
   Palumbo believes that the path of recovery for Italian sociocultural
anthropology passes through a renewed appreciation of the work and
thought of Ernesto De Martino. The fundamental reason, it seems to me, is
that De Martino accepted that our worlds are composed of the different,
often contradictory memories and beliefs that we carry from our pasts and in
our presents, and that the resolution in action of our differences in our
memories and beliefs is a normal, if freighted human exercise. By accepting
the past in our presents as part of the human condition, De Martino rejected
the impulse to exoticize or colonize persons whose subaltern status posed
risks to their lives and wellbeing. Instead his anthropology sought to
understand the predicaments of persons whose status, ideas, and beliefs
should not be used to stand in the way of their possession of the full
opportunities of citizenship in a modern world. De Martino was a modernist,
albeit a critical one, for whom the capitalist state was an historical
component of class rule and ruling class ideology a lash upon the backs of
society’s subalterns.
   To these propositions, Palumbo adds himself, or rather his family and
professional histories – and this is the crowning touch of this important
book. As much as he has assimilated as his father before him into a state-
bureaucratic society, he as a professor of anthropology and his father as a


2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 125-129
RECOVERING THE SENSE OF SIGHT                                                    129


carabinieri, “rational choices” in post-World War II Italy, Palumbo and his
family, no less than millions of Italians not born to and part of the ruling
class know of other worlds and other beliefs specific to their history that
speaks along with their experience in civil society and the state through
their actions and conditions what they see. If one does anthropology in Italy,
or world-wide for that matter, Palumbo, I believe, is saying that an
anthropology that recovers the real lives of people without prejudice and
underscored by a belief in human equality and dignity can find its place in
this odd new world in which we live.
   And in this I salute him.

REFERENCES
Speakman, Robert J. et al., 2018, Market share and recent hiring trends in
     anthropology faculty positions, PLoS ONE, 13, 9: e0202528. https://doi.org/-
     10.1371/journal.pone.0202528, accessed on 20/04/2019.
United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019, Occupational
     Outlook Handbook: Anthropologists and Archaeologists, www.bls.gov/ooh/life-
     physical-and-social-science/anthropologists-and-archeologists.htm, accessed
     on 20/04/2019.




                                     2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 125-129
