Managing Existence in Naples: Morality, Action and Structure

by Italo Pardo

• ISBN13: 9780521562270
• ISBN10: 0521562279
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-09-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Italo Pardo has produced a thoughtful and original account of the moral life of Naples, a city in which the ethics of work, family and neighbourhood exist in complex relationship with the teachings of the church and, crucial to key processes of democracy, with the power and limitations of law, bureaucracy and government. Dr Pardo identifies the importance of strong continuous interaction between material and non-material aspects in the entrepreneurial strategies of the ordinary Neapolitan and shows the ways in which different ethical systems are negotiated in everyday life. Success is measured not only by material gain, but also by satisfying spiritual obligations and meeting the claims of intimate loyalties. This is one of the very few ethnographic studies of a European city; it questions old assumptions and raises fresh issues in the field of urban studies, demonstrating the significance of empirical analysis to mainstream debates in social theory.

Table of Contents

Issues of anthropological research in urban Europe

Beyond unemployment: work, morality and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial morality and ethics among the young: changing social and cultural relations

Acceptance vs. discernment: the morals of family, kinship and neighbourhood as resource options

Transgression, control and exchange: the rationality of the ambiguous and the liminal in life and death

The mass diffusion of contacts: redefined power relations, values of representation

The relation of agency to organisation and structure: deconstructed polarizations at the grass roots of democracy

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