Social Stratification on Pantelleria, Italy

Abstract

In this article I attempt tO account for patterns of social stratification on Pantelleria, an Italian island located between Sicily and the coast of Tunisia. I make the case that at mid-twentieth century social stratification on the island is best described using idioms of honor and bureaucracy rather than class, and that this is due to historical changes in the distribution of productive resources and power. Social stratification is often treated by social anthropologists and sociologists as a consistent framework that can be precisely elicited and sometimes quantified. Undeniably, some techniques are capable of producing more or less precise emic and, in some cases, etic models of stratification systems at particular points in time7 especially in settings where people readily agree about mutual rankings. Any such structure, however, is really a structuring a particular construction of social reality as seen by participants or observers at a given moment in time and from a given viewpoint. As several writers have been careful to point OUt about Italian towns, structurings of rank vary in complexity, depending upon viewpoints within ranking systems (Silverman I 966.905; Lopreato I 967: Fig 3). But a model of stratification is an abstraction of historical process as well as of structure and perspectives on stratificational systems must be tied to changing conditions, internal and external to the societies in which they exist. Works by Blok (I974) and J. and P. Schneider (X976), both dealing with a small area in Western Sicily, are valuable examples of long-term political economic processes related to strati.