ABSTRACT
Until recent decades, the peasant of southern Italy, like peasants elsewhere, had led a traditionally precarious existence within an essentially static economy. Poverty, along with an accompanying isolation from the centres of civilization, resulted in a set of circumstances whereby the peasant had occupied the lowest status in the prestige and power structures of his society, and had received little or none of the social recognition that his toils, tenacity and contributions would merit. The combination of economic poverty and social castigation, in turn, had produced in the peasant a deep sense of deprivation and despair and, in his own group, a system of interpersonal relations based on tension, conflict and rampant insecurity. Thus it has often been said of the southern Italian peasant, as of many peasants elsewhere, that he is an inveterate individualist and pessimist, hopelessly alienated from his society. Above all, he is said to be endowed with a low level of achievement motivation, at the basis of which the interest of his small family nucleus is the major driving force.
