Social Class in a Mid-Eighteenth-Century Apulian Town: Indications from the Catasto Onciario

Abstract

Cluster analysis is applied to the mid-eighteenth-century tax register and household census of the southern Italian town of Locorotondo in the Province of Bari in order to reconstruct aspects of social class. Other documentary sources such as notarial transactions are also brought to bear on the study. It is argued that in this zone there existed a degree of social mobility even within the strictures of late feudalism, that both an entrepreneurial elite and yeoman peasantry existed, and that analysts of synchronic documents of this kind must be careful about taking occupational categories as coterminous with social class categorizations. In this article I will discuss social class in the town of Locorotondo, Province of Bari, southern Italy, at the middle of the eighteenth century. I intend it both as a substantive contribution to our knowledge of southern Italian peasant culture in its historical dimension and as a demonstration of methodologies which can be applied to a set of documents which have been little utilized by anthropologists. Recently anthropologists working in Italy have turned their attention to historical problems and historical methodologies (Blok 1974; Douglass 1980 and 1984; Kertzer 1984; Schneider and Schneider 1976). Similarly historians have used anthropological understandings in reconstructing aspects of Italian society in the past (Bell I979; Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber I985). This article is informed by such interdisciplinary approaches and is part of a continuing project meant to produce an anthropological history of Locorotondo which traces the formation of the unique peasant cultural patterns of the zone, the Murgia dei Trulli, in which it is located. The murgia, or plateau, is characterized by two things which set it apart from other areas in rural south Italy. First are the trulli themselves. These coneroofed peasant dwellings are found only in this area of Italy and are widely known from travel posters and picture books. Second, in contrast to the more Ethnohistory 33:4 (Fall 1986). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8oI/86/$I.5o. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:06:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms