Alison Sánchez Hall, <em>All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt</em>, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3796
Recensione di Alison Sánchez Hall, All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300.
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Theodoros Rakopoulos
Anuac
Alison Sánchez Hall, <em>All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt</em>, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300
Text.Serial.Journal
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Book reviews
2019-07-31
2019-06-22
2019-07-31
2019-07-30
251-253
1
Theodoros Rakopoulos
2019/07/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3796
251
University of Oslo, Norway
2239-625X
1
en
253
Alison Sánchez Hall, <em>All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt</em>, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300
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                                       2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 251-253




                                                                      RECENSIONI
Alison SÁNCHEZ HALL | All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red
belt, New York, Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300.


   This is a political book in a twofold sense, in that it provides a thorough
investigation of a socioeconomic phenomenon that sprung out of a strong
political culture and that its main aim is to suggest alternative paths to our
current predicament. These paths are alternative but not utopian; in fact,
much of the book’s argument is a practical thesis rooted in the historical and
ethnographic empirics of an achieved alternative to the dominant
conceptual dependence on free-market fundamentalism. The empirical
reality of the rural areas of Romagna -the agricultural hinterland of Faenza
and Ravenna- provides, shows the author, a powerful argument for the
possibility of constructing a cooperative life that mobilizes an agrarian
population in ways that are both sustainable economically and cohesive
socially. The force of that argument is in its detailed description of how the
cooperative movement in Emilia-Romagna, traditionally a “red” area of the
country, managed to ensure a dignified life for its rural inhabitants, who had
been through long periods of repression and exploitation.
   The argumentation is done in implicitly comparative ways – sometimes
less subtle than others. The author endorsed the social experiment of her
Romagnol interlocutors in two waves of engagement with them: the first
time was in her 20s, during fieldwork in 1972. Having hit “red” Italy after
being raised in California, she notes in hindsight: “I came to feel like the
first anthropologist in the history of the discipline whose informants
thought she came from a backward culture to study their most advanced
ways” (p. 2). The second time she did fieldwork in Romagna was in the
course of several trips between 2010 and 2014, to attest to the “persistence
of the cooperative spirit” (p. xvi), and revisit many interlocutors from her
original fieldwork. This book is therefore original in that it draws from both


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Theodoros Rakopoulos
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 251-253.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3796
252                                                 ALISON SÁNCHEZ HALL | ALL OR NONE


the first and the second fieldwork (40 years in between), as well as from
extensive secondary historical material. In that way, here we appreciate a
holistic phenomenon in at least three tiers – an immediate ethnographic
one, one attempting a comparison between two different ethnographic
moments and one taking on the long history of the region’s fertile geography
that led to interesting developments in agrarian sociology, of which the
cooperative system was the culmination.
   We come to appreciate this long historical narrative in chapters 4, 5 and 6,
which constitute the bulk of the book’s empirical discussion, leaving the
ethnography proper to chapters 1, 7 and 8, while chapters 2 and 3 provide
the geographical, sociological and political economic exegesis of the region
and its cooperative movement. The first chapter narrates the author’s long
engagement with the area and mobilizes the main argumentation pattern of
economic cooperation as a myth-busting phenomenon for mainstream
economics’ obsession with rational choice and selfish maximization. The
extended case is presented in detail in the second chapter where Ravenna
and its area are discussed across the 40 years of the two fieldwork
engagements. Chapter 3 then delves into the political aspect of the “political
economy” of the area: the “red” element in the cooperative development in
the Emilia-Romagna miracle. Chapter 4 offers the long historical outlook,
from the early Middle-Ages to just after the Risorgimento; chapter 5, under
the telling title “Land to those who work her” treats the period from 1861
and thereabouts to 1922 – providing an excellent review of the tensions
between property, labour organization and the development of the collective
tenure management from mutual aid societies to modernized farms. In
chapter 6, we encounter another tension: that between bottom-up and
grassroots solutions to collective farming, in the years of the ventennio, the
Liberation and the Marshall plan. The author then ethnographically presents
how the “bottom up” agenda came about with such success in the last two
chapters, where she discusses how cooperatives managed to “make work” for
the Romagnols.
   It is of timely importance, as the Left has been collapsing in Italy, to
consider such books that stand as social scientific reminders of the recent
achievements of red cooperation in the country. The monograph does not
only criticise the massive problems of the homo economicus concepts, the
way almost all economic anthropology books do, but actually presents an
ethnohistorical realm of the possible – a positive example that Italy can
suggest to the world. The choices of the author in showcasing her case-
study, are admittedly done with most probably a US audience in mind. In



2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 251-253
ALISON SÁNCHEZ HALL | ALL OR NONE                                                253


many moments in the book there is a tone of incitement and suggestion; one
thinks that the major aim of the book is to motivate and inspire, with the
critical analysis coming as a secondary goal. This is not to say that there is
not a very careful discussion of the literature and the wider sources –
especially in the three historical chapters.
   The main postulation of the conceptual apparatus for the book, however,
could have possibly benefited from a tad deeper discussion of the main
problem it addresses, that is how we can deconstruct the presentation of
profit-seeking as a natural pursuit and the downscaling of cooperation’s
potential of. This discussion (done especially in the preface, in chapter 1 and
in the conclusion) draws extensively from specific sources (for example,
Charles Erasmus), as does the discussion of cooperation (from Michels,
Vöchting), while the emancipatory prospect of the commons and collective
economies draws from theory mainly outside anthropology (Chomsky,
Ostrom) and less so from within it (e.g. Graeber). As economic and political
anthropology is an exercise in realistic alternative life scenarios, the array of
anthropological inspiration could have been wider. That said, the book does
contribute substantially both to these domains and to the burgeoning
current Anthropology of Italy.




                                                       Theodoros RAKOPOULOS
                                                               University of Oslo
                                                         trakopoulos@gmail.com




                                     2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 251-253
