- Ethnography within a Pluralist Europe
The two works under review by Donald Martin Carter and Jeffrey Cole are significant efforts to deal with the possibilities and limitations of ethnographic inquiry within a pluralist Europe and, as such, they deserve serious attention and scrutiny. Though both studies are set in Italy at virtually the same time, it is hard to imagine two more different delineations of the aims and modalities of ethnography: one aligned by the conventions of political economy, the other, preoccupied with the poetics and politics of cultural discourse.
Jeffrey Cole begins his account with the passage of the Martelli law of 1990, Italy's first comprehensive law regulating resident foreigners. The law set the terms for a wide-ranging debate in Italy on race and immigration, against the backdrop of Italian political history. The bill was specifically designed to align Italian law with European legislation in anticipation of the open borders agenda of 1992. It thereby, as has been widely noted, linked advanced European integration to new configurations of racism. The result was a complex discourse on race and identity crosscut, as Cole notes, with idealism, naivete, and ambivalence.
Fieldwork for the study was conducted in urban districts of Palermo drawing on extended interviews among working class families as well as on supplementary questionnaires administered to university students, students at an elite high school, and adult students seeking equivalency diplomas. Cole states the initial aim of his study
to provide an ethnographic perspective on the notion that working people are structurally inclined by their insecurity to express "working class racism" or class specific hostility towards immigrants (p. 19).
By setting the study in Palermo, Cole can investigate systematically how new forms of racism operate in counterpoint to the Sicilian experience of emigration and anti-Southern bigotry.
Cole's analysis is framed by classic assumptions of political economy that locate working class fears and aspirations between traditional manifestations of solidarity-rooted in class consciousness-and chronic forms of insecurity and marginality incited by shifting regimes of capitalist production. This theoretical stance allows Cole to engage his informant's sensibilities, even when tinged by racism, with insight and candour. Yet it also creates a peculiar dilemma that Cole continually struggles with in the first part of the text. By construing the forces that give rise to racism as largely outside the control of working people the space for ethnographic inquiry is attenuated. Indeed, the way Cole seeks to deal with, if not resolve this problem is by adhering closely to his data, by insisting on the diverse responses to immigration on the part of Palermitans and emphasizing the inherent conflicts and anxieties incited by immigration. Thus, Cole negotiates with subtlety and intelligence the central issue of the study, the problem of working class hostility to immigrants.
Cole, drawing primarily on his survey data and supplemental interviews, also creates a picture of bourgeois attitudes towards immigrants. He delineates a series of paradigms of immigration to assess the degree to which major political and intellectual agendas in Italy promote racial tolerance or intolerance. As he acknowledges, this analysis of bourgeois values is limited insofar as it not supplemented with more a comprehensive ethnographic treatment. In other words, his "paradigms of immigration" are largely attitudinal constructs that are not measured against systematic observations of social action. Had this ethnographic analysis been pursued, it could have significantly enhanced Cole's inquiry.
In the penultimate chapter, "The Politics of Race and Immigration in the Italian North and South," Cole makes the most interesting and radical moves of his study. He shifts his analysis to the appalling anti-immigrant protests that surfaced during the Florentine Carnival in 1990 and spread across northern Italy marking, as he puts it, the "intense [End Page 39] politicization of immigration in the north" (p. 118). These violent attacks notably on North Africans and Senegalese traders revealed not just...