ABSTRACT

The focus of attention in this section is not only a specific geographical area, but also a particular socio-political problem. Many social scientists have been attracted to southern Italy, not (or not only) by the climate and the beauty of the area, but because they have been, in Galtung's words, 'struck, amazed, almost awed by the resistance to change in that pocket of European underdevelopment '.1 The Mezzogiorno has, therefore, been used as a laboratory for the study of a problem whose implications extend far beyond the boundaries of this particular geographical area. In Italy, however, the problem contains an added piquancy due to the juxtaposition within a single state of a thriving industrial economy in the north and an undeveloped, poverty-stricken agricultural economy in the south. Because these studies have centred around a problem rather than an area, there is much less emphasis than in the previous section on British rural community studies on the descriptive ethnography of the locality. Indeed the key social facts are not in dispute-rather, disagreement lies over the interpretation of these facts, differing interpretations having sprung from differing theoretical perspectives.