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ChapterS Contested Structures The Lintel World is crazier and more ofit than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness ofthings being various. -Louis MacNeice, "Snow" In the late sixties in Losa, a community ofabout eight hundred inhabitants in the Maritime Alps of northern Italy, I heard a brief and apparently simple tale-an anecdote-about a lintel. I will repeat it and use it to model Losa both as a moral community and as an arena in which incompatible structures coexist, are contested, and change. The techniques of contestation, as you will see, are anything but simple and straightforward. The storyteller was Roberto, a wealthy corporate executive who drove down from his office in Milan to spend weekends in his substantial house in the center of Losa. He came in his chauffeured car. Roberto was an eager collector of local memorabilia. Hiking in the mountains, when he was passing a baita (a shack built in the upland pastures, occupied only when cattle were taken up the mountain to graze-virtually every baita, including this one, was by then derelict) he noticed that the stone lintel over the doorway had a date carved on it, the numbers spaced across its length. He worked out that it came from Losa's old municipio (town hall), which had been destroyed in the Napoleonic wars, and he decided that he must have it for his collection . He knew which family owned the baita (everyone knew at least the basics about everyone else in Losa and its environs) and the following weekend he sought out its head, offering both to buy the lintel Contested Structures 153 and to have it replaced with a concrete beam. The owner, identified in the municipal register as contadino, a peasant, refused. He did so respectfully , explaining with great politeness and some eloquence that for his part he would be happy to give the stone to the gentleman (signore ), but unfortunately this could not be done because the baita was jointly owned with his three brothers. It would be wrong to give it away or sell it without first asking their permission. He would have been more than glad to do that, but it was impossible because one brother was in the Argentine, one was in the United States, and the third was in Nice, and he had been out of touch with all of them for many years. In the circumstances, the best he could do would be to cut off his portion of the stone, one fourth, and give it to the gentleman. Roberto, telling the story, said the man was a fool for passing up the chance to make a bit of money without having to do anything to earn it. Some people were like that-perverse and a bit stupid. Then he added that he himself, Roberto, had not been very smart. "If I'd sent Vincenzo to ask for it as a favor-to prop up a gutter or somethinghe 'd have got it without any fuss." (Roberto was a modern-day seigneur in Losa. Vincenzo, a construction crew foreman, was one of his henchmen.) There are two obvious questions: (1) Why did the peasant refuse to sell? (2) Why did Roberto think that Vincenzo could have had the lintel for nothing? You can easily, and correctly, deduce the lintel owner's motives: he intended to cock a snook at Roberto. Nor-the second question-is it difficult to work out that, at least in Roberto's mind, the lintel owner had some kind of affinity with Vincenzo. You can also guess that both the refusal and the presumed link with Vincenzo had something to do with class. Roberto was a wealthy man and a signore (a gentleman) and the lintel owner was a peasant who worked with his hands, as did Vincenzo. The motives are clear enough, and so alsoin broad outline-is the context ofclass antagonism. What is less clear is why the peasant chose to deliver his refusal in that elaborately rhetorical fashion. What could have been a plain "no" expanded into a parable about the various alternative and contradictory structures available to define morality in Losa. Roberto, at the outset, clearly intended to define their situation on the principle of expected utility-of a market economy. He was a buyer, the peasant was a seller; they would negotiate and agree on a price. The lintel would be replaced with a...

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