Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
133
REVIEW ARTICLE
Legitimacy, Authority and Power:
Some Key Concepts in the Understanding of Contemporary Societies
Brigida Marovelli
Italo Pardo (ed.) (2000).
Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System
. New York,
Berghahn Books.
and
Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato (2011).
Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance:
Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region
. Farnham; Burlington, Ashgate.
Not without rhetoric, the Mediterranean Sea has been depicted as a hub of tolerance and mutual
understanding throughout the centuries. Over the last few years, it has been a death trap for
thousands of people escaping from countries such as Eritrea, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Somalia.
On 3 October, 2013, 366 corpses were recovered one mile away from Lampedusa’s shore (Day,
2013). Hundreds of people drowned in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea, while trying to
reach Europe. They were travelling in an overcrowded boat from the Horn of Africa. Over three
days, 200 people lost their lives in a similar event in the Mediterranean waters.
It is interesting to look at what kind of debate this mournful event provoked in Italy.
According to the Italian immigration law ‘Bossi-Fini’, the survivors of this tragedy had to be
investigated for having entered the country illegally and were denied the right to attend the
funerals of their relatives and friends who died in the shipwreck (Latza Nadea 2013).
Furthermore, according to the same law, fishing crews are not allowed to rescue illegal
immigrants trying to cross the Sicilian Channel. However, the fishermen who did not stop on
these occasions were blamed and those who saved people in high waters were celebrated as
heroes. The latter did not abide by the Italian state Law; many of them said to their interviewers
that the ‘law of the sea’ follows its own, different principles.
I believe that these events could be held as exemplary of the complex relations among
legitimacy, authority and citizenship in real life situations. They also point to the need to
contextualize the ideas related to legality and power. It is exactly in this perspective that the two
books that I will discuss in this review article are noteworthy.
Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System,
edited by Italo Pardo (2000b) in
2000, is a collection of essays addressing definitions of legitimacy in different settings, including
Italy, India, Britain, Cyprus, Papua New Guinea, and Japan. This book has contributed to the
political debate within anthropology, because it tackles the issues related to the cultural
construction of legitimacy and, consequently, of trust, authority and morality. More than ten
