A Venetian Island: Environment, History, and Change in Burano (review)

Burano is a small island in the northern reaches of the Venetian lagoon, a forty-five-minute ride from Venice by vaporetto (water-bus). Its population in 1982, the year Oxford anthropologist (and native Venetian) Lidia Sciama began her fieldwork, was about 5,000, although it is considerably smaller today because of out-migration and a declining birthrate. Buranelli (the natives of Burano) have always been fishermen, but the lagoon and the Adriatic are now polluted and decreasingly productive. For those who had to leave, "what they longed for the most was having a boat near the front door, and their lagoon where they could go fishing and rowing" (p. 17). Thus, the situation in which Burano finds itself today is one familiar to anthropologists and folklorists: a small traditional society threatened by environmental destruction, confronted with the mixed blessings of modernization, tourism, and a changing economy. Buranelli want to improve their living conditions, yet they love their island and want to retain their culture. Indeed, as with all of Venice, it has become a challenge just to remain on the island.

Sciama's ethnography is rich in fascinating details, paying a great deal of attention to Burano's folklore. She describes funeral customs and death beliefs, nicknames and naming traditions, proverbs, vernacular housing, fishing techniques, weather and fishing lore, narratives, and more—not for their own sake but always as part of her portrayal and analysis of life in Burano.

Sciama's study is also rich in ideas—far too many to summarize in a short review. But for this reader, the theme bringing ideas, folklore, and data together is Burano as "the island of lace." The word "lace" (Italian merletto or pizzo) does not appear in the title, but the photograph on the book's cover shows a middle-aged woman sitting outdoors on a chair by a doorway, bent over, intent on her needlework, creating punto in aria ("stitch in the air"—the Italian term for lacework, which almost existentially describes the creation of complex beauty from nothing but cotton thread and cloth). Such a sight—a woman, or a group of women, sitting outdoors, stitching lace—is still familiar in Burano today. In one of the photograph sections (pp. 186-90), we also can see Burano fishermen repairing nets, bent over in the same posture and with the same intensity as their lacemaking wives, sisters, and daughters. One of the most delicate stitches is called rete, or (fishing) net (p. 179).

Sciama is particularly concerned with the lacemaking because it is women's work, because it is an important social and economic barometer, and because it has a history—an excellent way to discover a great deal about women's lives and about Burano. We learn, for instance, that the women of Burano feel a profound ambivalence about lacemaking. It releases their creative artistry and so is fulfilling, but it also has been a major means of controlling them. Lacemaking gave women an economic tool, but it also allowed them to be exploited; contemporary older women, especially, have bitter memories of such exploitation, and Sciama has recorded their testimony. Lacemaking brings in money, albeit not very much, and the cost (in eyesight, for instance) can be great. Lacemakers have traditionally been trained to specialize in one or two stitches, so their creativity is constrained, but, because finished pieces of lacework are the composite creations of informal chains of women who pass merletti from one to another, each adding her specialty stitches in the appropriate places, making lace actually creates a social network and a kind of solidarity among women artists. It seems as if for each curse connected with lacemaking, there is a blessing, just as living in a "face-to-face society" (Sciama's preferred phrase) on a small island in the shadow of a cultural giant (Venice), is simultaneously rewarding and difficult.

I may have focused on lace in this review even more...