¹ Page references are to the paperback edition of 1967, New York: Free Press. The degree to which Banfleld sees Montegrano as typical of Southern Italy is unclear. In fact he makes two contrasting claims. In the introduction he remarks that since his sample was not rigorously contrived, he has no statistical measure of the typicality of his interviewees, and he continues: ‘Our impression is, however, that they were highly representative of that part of the population which lives in the town and reasonably representative of the nearby countrydwellers. We are not competent to say how representative Montegrano is of Southern Italy as a whole; there is some evidence, however that in the respect relevant to this study, Montegrano is fairly the “typical” south, viz., the rest of Lucania, the regions of Abruzzi and Calabria, the interior of Campania, and the coasts of Catania, Messina, Palermo and Trapani’ (p. 10). And in a footnote he quotes the estimable J. S. McDonald, to the effect that these are the areas where associations tend to be lacking, and where the nuclear family is the sole or chief integrator of economic aspirations. On these grounds we may take it that Banfleld is claiming that his study is representative of the typical south and that the prime feature of this is amoral nuclear familism. However, later in his book, he introduces evidence in passing that in some areas—Reggio Calabria is mentioned—the nuclear family is in fact integrated into a wider association of nuclear families which has the specific purpose of aiding emigration overseas. Montegrano is not such a town, says Banfleld; and the towns where the wider association exists have a ‘different’ ethos (p. 88, n. 3).

² The interviews do not seem to have been formal interviews following a consistent pattern: on page 40 he reports that various questions were asked of variously fourteen, eighteen and twenty people; on pages 129–31 the ‘number of respondents’ to sets of attitude testing questions varies between twenty-five and twenty-eight. In Chapter 5 the seventeen propositions are illustrated with quotations from five teachers, two merchants, four landowners (one of them resident in another town), Carlo Prato, two peasant women, a young man, the Director of the Schools, the pharmacist, the doctor, a retired official, an engineer from Northern Italy, and twenty-one peasants. In Chapter 8 the autobiographies of six people are cited; Carlo and Maria Prato, Paolo and Maria Vitello and Pasquale and Pasqualina. In Appendix A, tables 6 and 7 give the expenses and income of Carlo Prato: table 10 gives the expenses only of ‘an artisan family’.

³ P. 10.

⁴ P. 11.

⁵ P. 155.

⁶ P. 177.

⁷ P. 8.

⁸ P. 8.

⁹ P. 83.

¹⁰ P. 103.

¹¹ P. 103. Italics mine.

¹² A rapid and to some extent arbitrary count of the isolable bits of evidence used in Chapter 5 to demonstrate the predictive value of the general rule reveals eleven descriptions of ‘actions’ (which range from defaulting on payment of wages to talking with haughty officiousness) and eight negative evidences (of the sort: there are no civic improvement associations, etc.). There are also thirty-nine accounts of what people said when they were asked to explain what they had done in the past or what they would do in specified circumstances, or what they thought about something. In Banfield's usage this is all behaviour. In Chapter 6, devoted to demonstrating the truth of the rule of amoral familism, Banfield adduces: the Thematic Apperception Test results; some generally excellent summary descriptions of typical worldviews; and extracts from the autobiographies which some Montegranesi wrote for the Ban- fields. We might summarize the components of ‘behaviour’ and of ‘ethos’ as follows. Behaviour (Chapter 5) is actions (11), or inactions (8), or explanations of past or future actions (39); Ethos (Chapter 6) is TAT responses, or Weltanschauungen, or explanations of past actions.

¹³ I shall not make any specific critique of the facts which Banfield presents. My friend and colleague Nevill Colclough points out that one reason so many Montegranesi responded to the TAT picture of a boy and violin with stories of orphans and premature death (Appendix B, pp. 175–86) may be that in Southern Italy a musical training is most commonly given in orphanages. More serious, from an academic point of view, is the casualness with which many facts are presented: e.g., Logical Implication 9 (p. 90), about the reluctance of Montegranesi to enter into legal agreements, requires considerable elaboration; for in general it appears to be the case that the amount of litigation varies inversely to the prosperity of the community. See: Ascarelli, T., ‘Litigiosità e Ricchezzá’, Studi Economici, Anno X, p. 181.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Pp. 31, 36, 39.

¹⁵ p. 69. Italics mine.

¹⁶ P. 17.

¹⁷ Sumner's definition—surely descriptive rather than explanatory?—cited by Banfield, , p. 10, n. 3.Google Scholar

¹⁸ P. 139.

¹⁹ See above, n. 3.

²⁰ P. 145.

²¹ pp. 151–2.

²² P. 136.

²³ See Davis, J., ‘Town and Country’, Anthropological Quarterly, 42 (1969); 171–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ Banfield however is self-contradictory on this point. In his account of child-training (pp. 145–52) he refers to ‘a characteristic failure to establish a relat onship between the punishment and an antecedent wrong-doing’ (p. 149). Again (pp. 151–2) ‘punishment … is unrelated to any principle of “oughtness’ … (and in these circumstances no general principles can be internalized as conscience)’. So who enforces the rules?

²⁵ Davis, J., ‘Passatella, An Economic Game’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 15, no. 3, 1964, 191–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Dovring, F., Land and Labour in the 20th Century, 3rd revised edition, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1965, pp. 202–4.Google Scholar

²⁷ Smith, Louis P. F., The Evolution of Agricultural Co-operation, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961, passim, but especially pp. 3ff.Google Scholar

²⁸ P. 166.

²⁹ Montegrano is in the province of Potenza, and in the 8th agricultural-statistical zone, which is called Montagna Interna: Versante Settentrionale del Pollino. The data which follow are from: Prodotto Netto dell'Agricoltura in Provincia di Potenza, Camera di Commercio, Industria e Agricoltura, Potenza, 1964.Google Scholar

³⁰ Prodotto Netto, etc., Table 12 (after p. 65) and p. 81.

³¹ M. Rossi Doria argues that in some regions of Lucania the only rational agricultural policy is to attempt a renaissance of cattle farming.