Voci dizionariali

	The European Ethnology of Alberto Mario Cirese "Minor Areas" and "Peripheries" EUROPAEA 1996, II-1 pp. Perhaps everyone constructs his own Maestro or guru and then ends up by representing him in function of what he has himself become thanks to his teachings, choosing from what is on offer of the intellectual heritage that part or slice of the paternal offering which most justifies his own personality and filial choices. To have been a pupil of Alberto Cirese for my generation is all one with a consideration both for the abundance of the intellectual offering and the generosity with which it was displayed. Alberto Cirese always had a predisposition for individual work; for conducting alone, despite everything, carrying on his intellectual challenges alone, making uphill work. But he also always had the ability to decentre both responsibilites and competence, to allow his intellectual knowledge to be looked over and carried off, and the ability to give suggestions when they seemed to him to fit with the person he was communicating with, that is if they seemed coherent with the other's discourse. This is something which has not often been acknowledged and it is a quality that I would like to strongly emphasise, because I also see myself in the past and remember somewhat self-critically the experience undergone with Cirese in Siena and Cagliari, and that I now continually relive with the present generations of scholars; the experience of that narcissism of youth which is so much stronger than that of their masters. When the young come across a teacher who functions as a point of reference who is not wholly directive, but democratic and capable of listening (and Cirese was all of that while I was working with him) rather than following their teachers they really want to be 'recognised' by them. So when I was working on my thesis and after when I showed him my written work I would get annoyed with the little comments he would make in the margin; "new paragraph here", "add subtitle", "add a bibliographical footnote", "tone down that expression", "check coherence between one part and another", and so on. It was as if by pointing out little improvements in the text he was refusing to engage himself with the arguments and their value. I find myself doing the same thing nowadays, in particular with the young scholars whose work I get to read. And I now realise how generous a teacher he was, giving advice as to how to better my texts in a spirit of service while I in my turn was so intent on following the logic of my own bit of research (in a dialogue with his own, not modelled on it) instead of following in his footsteps, and so I ended up joining in consigning him to a proud solitude which was his prerogative but was not necessarily inevitabile. And perhaps sometimes my youthful narcissism would expect the Maestro to recognise some feature of genius in my writing when I would have done better to let my incomplete and presumptuous knowledge to allow itself to be moulded a bit so as to inherit more and not just that part which I was unconsciously selecting, as seemed to always happen with Cirese and his pupils. By behaving as he did Cirese taught me modesty, prudence, care and attention, the importance of writing, a passion for clarity. All these I dealt with in my own way and in a different way from his almost as a kind of proof of a generational compulsion: as if that generation which rebelled against its parents had to fight not just against its real parents but also against its chosen intellectual 'fathers'. He might once have said: «Don't be presumptuous, Clemente: the world isn't waiting open-armed for your work. We write and write and write. Our work is all about truth. Don't illude yourself. We are the craftsmen of truth. Think about getting your tools into shape». Instead I sweated trying to work it out for myself. In his teaching and in friendly, convivial dialectic he never hid his direction of thought in fact he tended to make it explicit in discussions and on request to clarify the logic of his research. Even that reticence and the very Sardinian reluctance of his Sardininan students to agree or disagree with him (a kind of sort of conspiracy of silence or a continual interior discussion with the teacher, never expressed in open dialogue) was a factor of solitude in his work; in his work in the sense of public discourse which so forcefully crossed into private space and almost imposes on it. Many of us learned; we learned from that abundance provided by his setting himself up in public like an object open to the public eye capable of being 'stolen' as in any craft, from his willingness to delegate commitments so as to give one a sense of responsiblility, from his not departing from his role, his teaching us (at our request) how to work on some one else's project. But those who could, and who wanted to, also learned from his declared set of values, from the judgements he expressed, from those polemical paradoxes, the annotations he made and from his recommendations made about research ethics. Amongst his students, there would often be discussions how many Alberto Cirese's there are in Alberto Cirese, over time and space, a kind of ironic imitation of theological debates about the Trinity, and Borges-like inventions as to multiple and identical figures. This is also a problem of classification which would need the consultancy of Cirese in one of those incarnations we assigned to him, the one who used to deal with problems of taxonomy, but obvously we can not call upon him in this particular case. In my opinion, and that of Eugenio Testa who is the compiler of the Cirese bibliography, there are at least seven Alberto Cirese's: 1. the philologist, text critic, methodologist, classifier of documents; 2. the historian of local culture, politico-cultural interpreter of the culture of the base, careful of the dialogue between ethnology and literature (thanks to the mediation of his father, a dialectal poet and founder of the journal La Lapa ); 3. the founder of 'demology' based on high and low levels of culture and the gap between them, and on the relationship between the hegemonous culture and the subordinate culture; 4. the structural linguistic analyst and the semiotician of popular poetry, of proverbs, ceremonies, types of bread, literary sources etc.; 5. the parentologist and applier of logic and computers to anthropology; 6. the constructor of logico-informational models with widespread potential applications; 7. the theorist of the materialistic foundations of life and human culture. As can be seen, the above list is an attempt to make distinctions in what is a broad based corpus of work, seen as a whole because it is the work of one individual, but these distinctions can be made and organised along many different lines especially if we take into account the fact that some of the seven themes developed from each other and overtake others over time whereas some coexist as different approaches taken by the same author contemporaneously; however they could serve as headings, points of reference for interpreting the message of a Maestro, in order to be able to account for the plurality of heritage that one intellectual experience can leave behind. I would like to testify to the plurality of ways of being a pupil, and having followed Cires's teaching and work (particularly between 1968 and 1979, from Cagliari to Siena) and the experience of those meetings on marxism and anthropology, which were known by the initials of the Universities taking part as tofisiroca (Turin, Florence, Siena, Rome, Cagliari), and which wound up in 1979, and having been charged in Siena with carrying on the work in the field of History of Popular Traditions, I ended up by seeing my personal contribution as the first lesson, that concerning the first three items on the list: philology of sources, cultural history, folklore studies and history, cultural differences. In a certain sense I have taken the path that Cirese took in his development, but in reverse, from the third back up to the second and then back up to the first, though without ever totally ignoring the other four though I have ended up by differentiating myself from them. Such is destiny. So I consider some works from the Cirese bibliography as being the foundation stones of my intellectual history; legends from the 'foundation' of myself as a scholar and university teacher. I am not really able to talk about Cirese iuxta propria principia , that would need both time and a capacity for detachment to be able to do so, but I can talk about a co-relation, a state of transmission, as I have already done in my preface to the re-edition of La Lapa , the journal of the "Cirese family". And it is in that journal, and in some discussion texts and articles about cultural outlines that appeared in it, that we can discern the position of Cirese which corresponds to the first two headings. In particular I would pick out two articles from La Lapa , 3/4 1955: "Culture on the move" (a leader signed A. M. C.) and "Notes on 'the peasants of the South'", which characterise a style of reflecting on cultural policies and on the autonomy of cultural analyses and cultural subjects. But even some years earlier Cirese had already written articles for Avanti! (the socialist daily newspaper): "Storicismo ristretto" ( Narrow historicism ), 1950, "Il volgo protagonista" ( The People as Protagonists ), "Come mi suoni, commare, ti ballo" ( As you play, goodwife, so I shall dance for you ), 1951; these are texts on which I worked, alongside M. L. Meoni and M. Squillacciotti at the beginning of my university career, in 1975, when putting together an anthology on the debate and link with the worker's and peasant movement in Italian folklore studies in the later post-war period (it came out in 1976 under the title "Il dibattito sul folklore in Italia" [ The folklore debate in Italy ]). These are texts which I think are important because they follow a line of method which still has the ability to give direction to research (and to the use of its cognitive valency in the given politico-cultural context) into 'the other Italies', into 'minor areas', the 'peripheries' of actual everyday life in a society which is profoundly changed with respect to the one Cirese was analysing. This line of approach was based on a primary consideration of the autonomy of social subjects, on the of 'giving voice', not in any mythical way but critically, to such subjects and a consideration of the importance of processes of choice and renewal as carried out by social agents. This was a position which sharply differentiated itself from the attitude communist pedagogy held. I am convinced that the socio-cultural autonomism of that intellectual area in which Cirese developed has come round again today, and is even stronger than it was then, to be a principle both of society and of intellectuals. Cirese often connected his development with his relationship of participation with "the peasants of the Rieti plain", even quite recently he said: «Si je pense aux debuts de mon itinéraire culturel, je dis: mon père, le Musée de l'Homme de Paris ert les paysans socialistes de la plaine de Rieti» ["Des paysans de Rieti à l'ordinateur", interview by Françoise Luoux and Cristina Papa, Ethnologie Française , 1994, No. 3]; in that same interview Cirese indicates his own relationship with concept of peripheries in his research: «Bendetto Croce disait que l'historie s'écrit depuis le centre, et que les périphéries ne s'expriment que par la négation et la résistance au centre. Ma thése était que l'histoire se fait aussi dans les périphéries, c'est l'historie de la circulation culturelle vue a partir des périphéries...» [p. 486]. The peripheries are therefore angles, points of view, not opposed to the centre but complementary, points of view without which the centre has no cognitive autonomy. In this recognition of the inadequacy of a culture of the centre and from the centre, one can place the importance of studies in History of Popular Traditions (Cirese himself defined it using the term 'demology', corresponding to the English term Folklore). Periphericity is a form of 'understatement', 'irony', anti-phrase that folklore studies use as a kind of stake in its bet about its role in the comprehension of reality. It is an open bet, because giving some dignity to the denigrated area of folklore with the more accademic sounding name 'demology' is acknowledging a necessity in the study of human and social studies, it is not an easy task because its value will be lost if there is no rigourous cognitive force. The bet is placed backing the small, the marginal, the peripheral, with «a committment of rigour which Italian demological research often avoids and which should rather be attempted as a duty both in this case and in general...», «in order to be able to construct a serious sector...», «the studies which we call 'demologic' should in any case come to terms with contemporary socio-cultural reality...» «and with the rigour of the concepts which its study calls for...»; «otherwise the game will be resoundingly lost in the end» [this is from the last page of Cirese's Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne ( Hegemonic culture and subordinate cultures ), Palermo, Palumbo, 1973]. So it is possible to lose the bet and for us there is still a question of finding out whether in Italy (one of the few nations of western Europe to have assigned the dignity of a discipline to folklore studies), the bet has been won. Certainly Cirese has piled up some fairly significant aspects of scientific status, and as far as rigour is concerned one must say above all that he set up documentary statute and the systematising of documents: set up with the Sardinian Demological Atlas and with the journal BRADS (both of which carried on under the aegis of Enrica Delitalia), these aspects are linked to the dialogue with Gianni Bosio and the Istituto Ernesto De Martino in Milan, but were already present in his pre-university work in La Lapa and in the early studies in folk-songs from Rieti (1945), the Sabine area and Molise (1957) and later of Sardinia, where the research then connected up with the theme of structural analysis. This documentary tradition is also what was handed down to Cirese's students; that was what he put into practise in his research for the Discoteca di Stato (1975a), and again in the phase where he studied computer applications to kinship and data-bases. It is worth underlining that even the other perspectives were opened up by Cirese on his path, relatively early, and in the late fifties and in the sixties with the take-off of his university work in Cagliari they turn up almost like a 'bunch' of interests. The semiotic-linguistic Cirese is already discernible in some notes making terminological points on popular metric (1959), and the model-inventor version in his looking into Ozieri's game (1960); his first metricological study is from 1960, and that on kinship goes back to 1967 but takes up a collaboration from his days at Rome University with De Martino way back in 1954. His interest in literature flows all through La Lapa but there is a classic study on Verga's Malavoglia , completed and published in 1976, but begun in 1954 and 1955. The notion of structure apppears in the studies of the Sardinian folk-songs (1963, 1964), and he talks of 'structural analysis' in his book on proverbs published in 1968. His work with computers appears in a bibliography with the Repertorio Tommaseo (1973) but is obviously the result of an earlier work. The perspective that I have chosen to follow is most extensive in the 50's and 60's and may be said to be completed with the publication of that very much used volume, so profitable in university training, Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne : the first edition came out in 1971, but it was presaged by many articles starting with a handout in Cagliari in 1961. Historical attention to local cultures has its mainstay in the volume Saggi sulla cultura meridionale ( Essays on Southern culture ), 1955, dedicated to the Molise, significant and yet further enriched in 1973 and 1983. The bibliographical and archival functions of demological research are underlined in many studies where Cirese makes much reference to the use of questionnaires as a research tool. Then there are Cirese's various essays on 'cultural levels' and on the culture gap, and his reading of certain passages from Gramsci's Notebooks, in terms later taken up in his Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne , and were for many years at the centre of a debate in Italy and even at international level. I myself developed within that perspective and I have remarked upon its essentially methodological nature in 1979 [P. Clemente, "Dislivelli di cultura e studi demologici italiani" ( Dislevels of culture and Italian demologic studies ), in Problemi del Socialismo , 1979: 15]. Thus I believe that a reading of Cirese as a theoretician of the two opposing cultures is an erroneous one (as he seemed to those french anthropologists and sociologists who studied both Cirese and Gramsci for example), when the main criticism in Italy has been not to consider them far enough opposed. I feel that the insistence on relationship links among social groupings has allowed, on a methodological level, for open approaches to changing realities. What is more it seems to have made for a defence of the demological disciplinary field from over-strong concepts of the society-culture relationship, such as in the Durkheim tradition on the one hand (see for example the wiping out of potential cultural autonomies of non-dominant social groups in Bourdieu) or, on the other hand, from the school of critical sociology of Frankfurt which tends to neglect the autonomous empirical-documentary gesture (a type of behaviour also to be found in E. De Martino). Without a documentarist position based on a relational concept of the research field, a discipline like that of demology could never have found its own specificity, that autonomy and that rigour which Cirese posed in re-founding it on a different basis from that positivist and amateur tradition. (Pietro Clemente, University of Rome "La Sapienza")

The European Ethnology of Alberto Mario Cirese
"Minor Areas" and "Peripheries"
EUROPAEA 1996, II-1 pp.

Perhaps everyone constructs his own Maestro or guru and then ends up by representing him in function of what he has himself become thanks to his teachings, choosing from what is on offer of the intellectual heritage that part or slice of the paternal offering which most justifies his own personality and filial choices. To have been a pupil of Alberto Cirese for my generation is all one with a consideration both for the abundance of the intellectual offering and the generosity with which it was displayed. Alberto Cirese always had a predisposition for individual work; for conducting alone, despite everything, carrying on his intellectual challenges alone, making uphill work. But he also always had the ability to decentre both responsibilites and competence, to allow his intellectual knowledge to be looked over and carried off, and the ability to give suggestions when they seemed to him to fit with the person he was communicating with, that is if they seemed coherent with the other's discourse. This is something which has not often been acknowledged and it is a quality that I would like to strongly emphasise, because I also see myself in the past and remember somewhat self-critically the experience undergone with Cirese in Siena and Cagliari, and that I now continually relive with the present generations of scholars; the experience of that narcissism of youth which is so much stronger than that of their masters.

When the young come across a teacher who functions as a point of reference who is not wholly directive, but democratic and capable of listening (and Cirese was all of that while I was working with him) rather than following their teachers they really want to be 'recognised' by them. So when I was working on my thesis and after when I showed him my written work I would get annoyed with the little comments he would make in the margin; "new paragraph here", "add subtitle", "add a bibliographical footnote", "tone down that expression", "check coherence between one part and another", and so on. It was as if by pointing out little improvements in the text he was refusing to engage himself with the arguments and their value. I find myself doing the same thing nowadays, in particular with the young scholars whose work I get to read. And I now realise how generous a teacher he was, giving advice as to how to better my texts in a spirit of service while I in my turn was so intent on following the logic of my own bit of research (in a dialogue with his own, not modelled on it) instead of following in his footsteps, and so I ended up joining in consigning him to a proud solitude which was his prerogative but was not necessarily inevitabile. And perhaps sometimes my youthful narcissism would expect the Maestro to recognise some feature of genius in my writing when I would have done better to let my incomplete and presumptuous knowledge to allow itself to be moulded a bit so as to inherit more and not just that part which I was unconsciously selecting, as seemed to always happen with Cirese and his pupils. By behaving as he did Cirese taught me modesty, prudence, care and attention, the importance of writing, a passion for clarity. All these I dealt with in my own way and in a different way from his almost as a kind of proof of a generational compulsion: as if that generation which rebelled against its parents had to fight not just against its real parents but also against its chosen intellectual 'fathers'. He might once have said: «Don't be presumptuous, Clemente: the world isn't waiting open-armed for your work. We write and write and write. Our work is all about truth. Don't illude yourself. We are the craftsmen of truth. Think about getting your tools into shape». Instead I sweated trying to work it out for myself. In his teaching and in friendly, convivial dialectic he never hid his direction of thought in fact he tended to make it explicit in discussions and on request to clarify the logic of his research. Even that reticence and the very Sardinian reluctance of his Sardininan students to agree or disagree with him (a kind of sort of conspiracy of silence or a continual interior discussion with the teacher, never expressed in open dialogue) was a factor of solitude in his work; in his work in the sense of public discourse which so forcefully crossed into private space and almost imposes on it. Many of us learned; we learned from that abundance provided by his setting himself up in public like an object open to the public eye capable of being 'stolen' as in any craft, from his willingness to delegate commitments so as to give one a sense of responsiblility, from his not departing from his role, his teaching us (at our request) how to work on some one else's project. But those who could, and who wanted to, also learned from his declared set of values, from the judgements he expressed, from those polemical paradoxes, the annotations he made and from his recommendations made about research ethics. Amongst his students, there would often be discussions how many Alberto Cirese's there are in Alberto Cirese, over time and space, a kind of ironic imitation of theological debates about the Trinity, and Borges-like inventions as to multiple and identical figures. This is also a problem of classification which would need the consultancy of Cirese in one of those incarnations we assigned to him, the one who used to deal with problems of taxonomy, but obvously we can not call upon him in this particular case. In my opinion, and that of Eugenio Testa who is the compiler of the Cirese bibliography, there are at least seven Alberto Cirese's: 1. the philologist, text critic, methodologist, classifier of documents; 2. the historian of local culture, politico-cultural interpreter of the culture of the base, careful of the dialogue between ethnology and literature (thanks to the mediation of his father, a dialectal poet and founder of the journal La Lapa ); 3. the founder of 'demology' based on high and low levels of culture and the gap between them, and on the relationship between the hegemonous culture and the subordinate culture; 4. the structural linguistic analyst and the semiotician of popular poetry, of proverbs, ceremonies, types of bread, literary sources etc.; 5. the parentologist and applier of logic and computers to anthropology; 6. the constructor of logico-informational models with widespread potential applications; 7. the theorist of the materialistic foundations of life and human culture. As can be seen, the above list is an attempt to make distinctions in what is a broad based corpus of work, seen as a whole because it is the work of one individual, but these distinctions can be made and organised along many different lines especially if we take into account the fact that some of the seven themes developed from each other and overtake others over time whereas some coexist as different approaches taken by the same author contemporaneously; however they could serve as headings, points of reference for interpreting the message of a Maestro, in order to be able to account for the plurality of heritage that one intellectual experience can leave behind. I would like to testify to the plurality of ways of being a pupil, and having followed Cires's teaching and work (particularly between 1968 and 1979, from Cagliari to Siena) and the experience of those meetings on marxism and anthropology, which were known by the initials of the Universities taking part as tofisiroca (Turin, Florence, Siena, Rome, Cagliari), and which wound up in 1979, and having been charged in Siena with carrying on the work in the field of History of Popular Traditions, I ended up by seeing my personal contribution as the first lesson, that concerning the first three items on the list: philology of sources, cultural history, folklore studies and history, cultural differences. In a certain sense I have taken the path that Cirese took in his development, but in reverse, from the third back up to the second and then back up to the first, though without ever totally ignoring the other four though I have ended up by differentiating myself from them. Such is destiny. So I consider some works from the Cirese bibliography as being the foundation stones of my intellectual history; legends from the 'foundation' of myself as a scholar and university teacher. I am not really able to talk about Cirese iuxta propria principia , that would need both time and a capacity for detachment to be able to do so, but I can talk about a co-relation, a state of transmission, as I have already done in my preface to the re-edition of La Lapa , the journal of the "Cirese family". And it is in that journal, and in some discussion texts and articles about cultural outlines that appeared in it, that we can discern the position of Cirese which corresponds to the first two headings. In particular I would pick out two articles from La Lapa , 3/4 1955: "Culture on the move" (a leader signed A. M. C.) and "Notes on 'the peasants of the South'", which characterise a style of reflecting on cultural policies and on the autonomy of cultural analyses and cultural subjects. But even some years earlier Cirese had already written articles for Avanti! (the socialist daily newspaper): "Storicismo ristretto" ( Narrow historicism ), 1950, "Il volgo protagonista" ( The People as Protagonists ), "Come mi suoni, commare, ti ballo" ( As you play, goodwife, so I shall dance for you ), 1951; these are texts on which I worked, alongside M. L. Meoni and M. Squillacciotti at the beginning of my university career, in 1975, when putting together an anthology on the debate and link with the worker's and peasant movement in Italian folklore studies in the later post-war period (it came out in 1976 under the title "Il dibattito sul folklore in Italia" [ The folklore debate in Italy ]). These are texts which I think are important because they follow a line of method which still has the ability to give direction to research (and to the use of its cognitive valency in the given politico-cultural context) into 'the other Italies', into 'minor areas', the 'peripheries' of actual everyday life in a society which is profoundly changed with respect to the one Cirese was analysing. This line of approach was based on a primary consideration of the autonomy of social subjects, on the of 'giving voice', not in any mythical way but critically, to such subjects and a consideration of the importance of processes of choice and renewal as carried out by social agents. This was a position which sharply differentiated itself from the attitude communist pedagogy held. I am convinced that the socio-cultural autonomism of that intellectual area in which Cirese developed has come round again today, and is even stronger than it was then, to be a principle both of society and of intellectuals. Cirese often connected his development with his relationship of participation with "the peasants of the Rieti plain", even quite recently he said: «Si je pense aux debuts de mon itinéraire culturel, je dis: mon père, le Musée de l'Homme de Paris ert les paysans socialistes de la plaine de Rieti» ["Des paysans de Rieti à l'ordinateur", interview by Françoise Luoux and Cristina Papa, Ethnologie Française , 1994, No. 3]; in that same interview Cirese indicates his own relationship with concept of peripheries in his research: «Bendetto Croce disait que l'historie s'écrit depuis le centre, et que les périphéries ne s'expriment que par la négation et la résistance au centre. Ma thése était que l'histoire se fait aussi dans les périphéries, c'est l'historie de la circulation culturelle vue a partir des périphéries...» [p. 486]. The peripheries are therefore angles, points of view, not opposed to the centre but complementary, points of view without which the centre has no cognitive autonomy. In this recognition of the inadequacy of a culture of the centre and from the centre, one can place the importance of studies in History of Popular Traditions (Cirese himself defined it using the term 'demology', corresponding to the English term Folklore). Periphericity is a form of 'understatement', 'irony', anti-phrase that folklore studies use as a kind of stake in its bet about its role in the comprehension of reality. It is an open bet, because giving some dignity to the denigrated area of folklore with the more accademic sounding name 'demology' is acknowledging a necessity in the study of human and social studies, it is not an easy task because its value will be lost if there is no rigourous cognitive force. The bet is placed backing the small, the marginal, the peripheral, with «a committment of rigour which Italian demological research often avoids and which should rather be attempted as a duty both in this case and in general...», «in order to be able to construct a serious sector...», «the studies which we call 'demologic' should in any case come to terms with contemporary socio-cultural reality...» «and with the rigour of the concepts which its study calls for...»; «otherwise the game will be resoundingly lost in the end» [this is from the last page of Cirese's Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne ( Hegemonic culture and subordinate cultures ), Palermo, Palumbo, 1973]. So it is possible to lose the bet and for us there is still a question of finding out whether in Italy (one of the few nations of western Europe to have assigned the dignity of a discipline to folklore studies), the bet has been won. Certainly Cirese has piled up some fairly significant aspects of scientific status, and as far as rigour is concerned one must say above all that he set up documentary statute and the systematising of documents: set up with the Sardinian Demological Atlas and with the journal BRADS (both of which carried on under the aegis of Enrica Delitalia), these aspects are linked to the dialogue with Gianni Bosio and the Istituto Ernesto De Martino in Milan, but were already present in his pre-university work in La Lapa and in the early studies in folk-songs from Rieti (1945), the Sabine area and Molise (1957) and later of Sardinia, where the research then connected up with the theme of structural analysis. This documentary tradition is also what was handed down to Cirese's students; that was what he put into practise in his research for the Discoteca di Stato (1975a), and again in the phase where he studied computer applications to kinship and data-bases. It is worth underlining that even the other perspectives were opened up by Cirese on his path, relatively early, and in the late fifties and in the sixties with the take-off of his university work in Cagliari they turn up almost like a 'bunch' of interests. The semiotic-linguistic Cirese is already discernible in some notes making terminological points on popular metric (1959), and the model-inventor version in his looking into Ozieri's game (1960); his first metricological study is from 1960, and that on kinship goes back to 1967 but takes up a collaboration from his days at Rome University with De Martino way back in 1954. His interest in literature flows all through La Lapa but there is a classic study on Verga's Malavoglia , completed and published in 1976, but begun in 1954 and 1955. The notion of structure apppears in the studies of the Sardinian folk-songs (1963, 1964), and he talks of 'structural analysis' in his book on proverbs published in 1968. His work with computers appears in a bibliography with the Repertorio Tommaseo (1973) but is obviously the result of an earlier work. The perspective that I have chosen to follow is most extensive in the 50's and 60's and may be said to be completed with the publication of that very much used volume, so profitable in university training, Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne : the first edition came out in 1971, but it was presaged by many articles starting with a handout in Cagliari in 1961. Historical attention to local cultures has its mainstay in the volume Saggi sulla cultura meridionale ( Essays on Southern culture ), 1955, dedicated to the Molise, significant and yet further enriched in 1973 and 1983. The bibliographical and archival functions of demological research are underlined in many studies where Cirese makes much reference to the use of questionnaires as a research tool.

Then there are Cirese's various essays on 'cultural levels' and on the culture gap, and his reading of certain passages from Gramsci's Notebooks, in terms later taken up in his Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne , and were for many years at the centre of a debate in Italy and even at international level. I myself developed within that perspective and I have remarked upon its essentially methodological nature in 1979 [P. Clemente, "Dislivelli di cultura e studi demologici italiani" ( Dislevels of culture and Italian demologic studies ), in Problemi del Socialismo , 1979: 15]. Thus I believe that a reading of Cirese as a theoretician of the two opposing cultures is an erroneous one (as he seemed to those french anthropologists and sociologists who studied both Cirese and Gramsci for example), when the main criticism in Italy has been not to consider them far enough opposed. I feel that the insistence on relationship links among social groupings has allowed, on a methodological level, for open approaches to changing realities. What is more it seems to have made for a defence of the demological disciplinary field from over-strong concepts of the society-culture relationship, such as in the Durkheim tradition on the one hand (see for example the wiping out of potential cultural autonomies of non-dominant social groups in Bourdieu) or, on the other hand, from the school of critical sociology of Frankfurt which tends to neglect the autonomous empirical-documentary gesture (a type of behaviour also to be found in E. De Martino). Without a documentarist position based on a relational concept of the research field, a discipline like that of demology could never have found its own specificity, that autonomy and that rigour which Cirese posed in re-founding it on a different basis from that positivist and amateur tradition.

(Pietro Clemente, University of Rome "La Sapienza")