Power and Hegemony: a South Italian Elite, 1800-1980 (Calabria, State, Class).

This study adopts a configurational framework combining anthropological and historical methods and materials to explicate different patterns of elite control in the Locride, a little known part of southern Italy, between 1800 and 1980. The first part examines economic, political and cultural dimensions of the domination of the area between 1800 and 1950 by a local ruling class whose power was founded on a combination of l and ownership and monopolization of crucial political connections to the central state apparatus. Tracing specific genealogies, it shows how the rise to and consolidation of power by this group of families followed from the manner of enactment of the liberal property reforms of the nineteenth century, as well as the way in which the Italian nation-state took shape early on as a system of elite alliances. Indeed, it shows how elites such as these also contributed to the definition of the State. The second part of the thesis considers the post-World War II period. Evaluating the many changes that have occurred in settlement patterns, occupational structure and cultural ideologies, it focuses most especially upon the replacement of the old l and owning elite by a new elite of "broker-politicians" with a power base in access to state resources acquired through occupying positions in political party organizations. As above, it shows how changes in the local configuration of power correspond to changes in the relationship between the Locride and the nation-state, demonstrating how the recent rise of the 'ndrangheta or Calabrian mafia is similarly intertwined with the emergence of new forms of intensified state activity and investment in the area.PhDCultural anthropologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160268/1/8502767.pd