Americanization and Authenticity: Italian Food Products and Practices in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

In 1954, the American political scientist Edward Banfield traveled from Chicago to Chiaromonte, a small village in southern Italy. Banfield’s goal was to discover why the villagers’ lives had been so poor—and so unchanged—for centuries. After nine months of research, Banfield concluded that the family was at the center of life in Chiaromonte—to the detriment of every other institution. It was the family that guaranteed assistance and emotional support, the family that functioned as the economic center of production and consumption. As the only environment in which trust and respect reigned, the family also operated as the starting point for all social relationships, vital to everything from meeting new people to finding a job. But there was a steep downside: this attitude of “Why trust a foreigner?” blocked all external forms of solidarity and cooperation. The singular emphasis on family inhibited the development of a modern society, which Max Weber characterized as anonymous, rationalized, bureaucratic, and capitalistic. In contemporary terms, the family blocked the creation of social capital; the villagers’ amoral familism, as Banfield called it, condemned the society to backwardness.1