Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
135
Taking into account material drawn from historical and contemporary sources, Abrahams’s
ethnographic analysis demonstrates that vigilantism and the official institutional system promote
their idea of social order, and in the name of the common good they exercise power, which can
lead to ‘serious miscarriages of justice’ (p. 123).
The failure of the state to take legitimate control is addressed in Pardo’s (2011) essay
about the rubbish crisis in Naples, whereby the gap between citizenship and the law seems to
become insurmountable. In their chapter about the criminalization of black youth in poor urban
areas in Lisbon, Fernandes and Morte (2011) also examine this issue, arguing that the Portuguese
state contributes to creating prejudices and stereotypes against minorities, due to ‘contradictory
discourses and measures’ (p. 91).
These reflections can be placed into the wider discourse that Pardo originally initiated
about trust and distrust. He argues that trust becomes a ‘precious commodity in situations in
which power is seen to be exercised with insufficient or absent concern with the fundamental
responsibility of guaranteeing the rights of citizenship’ (2000a: 7). Motivated by Pardo’s
Neapolitan ethnography (1996, 2011, 2012), this concern can be extended to most of the
contributions to both volumes. I would argue that the systematic failure of the élite to be seen as
legitimate is particularly apparent in the Italian southern regions, due to the history of the Italian
Unification and to the firm repression of social movements throughout the centuries.
Nevertheless, this grassroots distrust in the people in power who man the state institutions —
and, in the long run, in the institutions themselves — has been observed in many different
contexts.
One of the implications of this theoretical reflection is that it helps changing the
perspective on marginality, because these ethnographies unmistakably invite a refusal to label
and dismiss particular cultural and moral frameworks as marginal when they are not in line with
dominant ideologies (Pardo 2000a: 22).
These dynamics of inclusion and exclusion link to Abrahams’ (2000) contribution on
vigilantism, when he discusses the concept of ‘frontier’, as elaborated by the work of Kopytoff
(1987, quoted in Abrahams 2000). From this point of view, the power of the state is not
distributed evenly over a territory and its authority is stronger in certain areas. ‘The long arm of
the law’, Abraham argues, ‘does not stretch everywhere with equal force, and areas where its
power is significantly diluted or resisted have a frontier quality. The simplest model of such
frontiers or edges of state power is a spatial one of centre and periphery’ (2000: 113).
We can easily grasp how such a view could be applied to the Mediterranean Region.
Pardo and Prato (2011b) highlight how Mediterranean cultures have been chosen as an
anthropological object of study and seen as the ‘exotic’ nearer us. The Mediterranean Region
does have these frontier qualities, as recent immigration trends demonstrate. It is located at the
margins of Europe, where at times ‘the long arm of the law’ does not seem to reach or, when it
does, its legitimacy is widely questioned.
