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La basicilicate: Changement social et changement spatial dans une Région du Mezzogiorno
Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 13, No. I, pp. 131 - 133, 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain 0743-0167/97 $17.00+ 0.00
Book Reviews La Basicilicate: Changement Social et Changement Spatial dans une R~gion du Mezzogiorno, Robert Bergeron, 713 pp., 1994, Ecole Fran~aise de Rome, Rome
Basilicata is one of the lesser-known of Italy's twenty regions: situated in the 'deep south' of the country, with an area of less than 10000 km 2 and a population of 620 000, its main physical distinguishing feature is its drainage to the Ionian Sea via five rivers (Bradano, Basento, Cavone, Agri, Sinni), strikingly parallel and evenly-spaced in their lower courses. Few Italians from the northern half of Italy have ever been there, or have even thought of visiting the region. This perception of Basilicata as a 'forgotten' region, even stronger in the past, is itself part of the complex explanation for the backwardness and isolation of the region. In a sense, Basilicata can be regarded as the classic region of the Italian Mezzogiorno, and therefore a test-case for the Italian government's attempts to stimulate development in the nation's peripheral regions. Robert Bergeron's massive tome on Basilicata is in the best traditions of French regional geography: an encyclopaedic and complex synthesis of virtually all aspects of the region's social, economic and geographical character. The main time-frame is the 40 years between the 1940s and the 1980s, but earlier historical periods are also brought into the analysis where they are clearly relevant - - as they are, for example, when describing the origins of the settlement pattern or the landholding system. The book is basically the published version of Bergeron's th~se du doctorat which he finished in 1988. Unfortunately, during the six years which have elapsed between the thesis and its publication by the French School in Rome, no attempt has been made to update the study: the most recent references and statistical data remain those of the mid-1980s. Leaving this rather fundamental shortcoming aside, this volume is undoubtedly a tour de force, a work which spans, literally, half an academic lifetime. Bergeron's first work on the Mezzogiorno was carried out in Sardinia in the late 1960s. In 1972 he went as an assistant on a field trip to Basilicata led by Bernard Kayser, whose 1962 monograph on soil erosion in the region remains a fundamental contribution. But his real heroes are three of the literary giants of the south: Rocco Scotellaro, the 'peasant-poet' and radical mayor of Tricarico who tragically died so young; Manlio Rossi-Doria, the famous agricultural economist whose books on Basilicata and the problems of the south published in the 1940s and 1950s combine erudition and passion; and Carlo Levi, exiled by Fascism to a small hill-village in the region in the late 1930s, whose testimonial Christ Stopped at Eboli (1948) is perhaps the most evocative study of Basilicatan life before the postwar transformations which are the main theme of Bergeron's study.
Bergeron's opus has a complicated, multi-level structure. It is in fact divided into two books, 'Livre Premier' and 'Livre Deuxi~me', each of which is subdivided into three parts, in turn further divided into three or four chapters. Book One is entitled 'Lucania in the 1940s' (Lucania is the old name for the region). Part One is on traditional spatial structures: land use, settlement patterns, population pressure, housing conditions, isolation, and scarcity of water. Part Two discusses the underdevelopment and crisis of peasant society, with chapters on the agrarian structure (latifondo and minifundia) and its key relationship to cropping patterns, on rural social structure (from signori to braccianti), and on the world of las miseria - hopeless, abject poverty. Book Two is titled 'Changing Basilicata: from the Agrarian Question to the Urban Question'. Its first part is about rural social movements and the preconditions for postwar development - - the land reform laws of 1950, the early work of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, and the causes and effects of continued emigration. Part Two is about rural development: the operation of the land reform 'model', eradication of malaria, the dramatic strides made in land reclamation and irrigation, and the development of new land-use regimes which emphasized the disparity between the mainly mountainous province of Potenza and the more agriculturally favoured province of Matera. Part Three moves to an analysis of the region's evolving urban economy, with chapters on new road systems, new industries (now in crisis), the development of various branches of the service sector, and the problems of urban planning in the two provincial capitals - - Potenza (which is also the regional capital) and Matera. This bare-bones outline can hardly do justice to the wealth of detail nor to the richness of descriptive analysis presented by Bergeron. Perhaps more useful in this review is to relate some of his conclusions. Bergeron writes of a region still searching for an identity beyond its partial physical definition on the basis of drainage orientation. Western Basilicata is under the influence of Naples and Salerno; eastern and northern Basilicata lie under the sphere of Bari and the towns of Puglia; the coastal plain links to Taranto. In summing up the various dimensions of postwar change (political, economic, demographic, social etc.), Bergeron identifies five 'faces' of Basilicata in the 1980s. First is urban Basilicata: mainly Potenza and Matera, but also Melfi where Fiat have just opened a huge factory. Second, there are the coastal strips undergoing touristic development (Maratea on the west coast, Policoro on the south-east coast) and backed by intensive irrigated agriculture (the Metapontino or Ionian coastal plain). Third, there are the valley-bottoms where new roads, irrigation and (especially in the Basento) industrial estates have introduced new axes of dynamism. Fourth, there are those districts of the northern interior where post-1980 earthquake funding has helped to generate a limited economic revival. Finally there is the rest of the hill and mountain country, accounting for 50% of the area
132
Book Reviews
of the region and 20% of its population, which remains isolated, badly eroded and is still depopulating.
La Basilicate is a seminal work; given the 'typicality' of the region, it is an emblematic study on the progress of the Mezzogiorno as a whole. It deserves to stand alongside other classical French regional monographs on the Italian South such as Maurice La Lannou's P~tres Paysans de la Sardaigne (1941) and Ren6e Rochefort's Le Travail en Sicile (1961). Significantly, both Le Lannou and Rochefort were Bergeron's main teachers when he was a student at Lyon. Hence the dynasty of French classic regional geography lives on. This is both the strength and the weakness of La Basilicate. Reading this book before, during and after a recent field course in Basilicata with a group of Sussex geography students, I certainly appreciated its wonderful blend of encyclopaedic knowledge and sharp geographical insight. However, also on that trip were two Sussex colleagues, Helen Rendell and Mick Dunford, whose own published work on the region - respectively on slope instability and industrial development - - is not mentioned by Bergeron. This raises a general critique of the book, which eventually becomes two specific criticisms. First, while Bergeron has undoubtedly done his homework (on the Italian and French sources) and of course his fieldwork, he does not cite much of the important work done on Basilicata in other languages such as English or German. Amongst the latter the most significant omission is Klaus Rother's monograph on the Metapontino published in the Bonner Geographische Abhandlungen in 1971. Amonst the former several items can be mentioned: John Davis's important book on Land and Family in Pisticci (1973), for instance, or Anne Cornelisen's triology of books on Tricarico (Cornelisen, 1973, 1978, 1980), or the work of Anglo-American geographers such as R. E. Dickinson (1955). Secondly, Bergeron does not step out of the frame of reference(s) which he has consulted. His narrative is contained within the established tradition of French regional scholarship; and is constrained by his use of the abundant, but equally traditional, Italian source material, both literary and statistical. One searches in vain, therefore, for a truly imaginative, original analysis of the region's geography.
RUSSELL KING School of European Studies University of Sussex References
Cornelisen, A. (1973) Torregreca. Macmillan, London. Cornelisen, A. (1978) Women of the Shadows. Macmillan, London. Cornelisen, A. (1980) Flight from Torregreca. Macmillan, London. Davis, J. (1973) Land and Family in Pisticci. Athlone, London. Dickinson, R. E. (1955) The Population Problem in Southern Italy: an Essay in Social Geography. Syracuse University Press, New York. Kayser, B. (1961) Recherches sur l'~rosion des Sols en Italie M~ridionale: Lucanie. SEDES, Paris. Le Lannou, M. (1941) P3tres" et Paysans de la Sardaigne. Arrault, Tours.
Levi, C. (1948) Christ Stopped at Eboli. Cassell, London. Rochefort, R. (1961) Le Travail en Sicile: Etude de G~ographie Sociale. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Rother, K. (1971) Die Kulturlandschaft der Tarentenischen Golfkiiste. Bonner Geographische Abhandlungen 44.
Environmental Economics: Individual Incentives and Public Choices, Ian Hodge, 205 pp. 1995, Macmillan, London, £10.99 pbk, ISBN 0 33 57771X
Not only is the environment the quintessential common property resource, it is also an intellectual common pasture where all may graze, given appropriate dentition, and no single discipline may claim exclusive rights. So we have environmental sciences of all kinds, including the social sciences, of which environmental economics can trace its ancestry at least back to the founding fathers Malthus and Ricardo, virtually two centuries ago. In the last decade, as the n th wave of pioneers has rediscovered the environment, the flow of books on environmental economics has swollen. The majority of economic treatments have aimed for the intellectual high ground offering advanced and ever more elegant theoretical treatments of difficult issues and empirical offerings whose weakness can only partly be justified by shortage of funds. Like all fashions, the environment as intellectual construct has attracted zealots, many of the swivel eyed-variety, earnestly pressing panaceas of varying credibility on the assumed naive reader. As the present wave of writing has matured, academics and publishers have begun to seek a more questioning and less didactic style. The present volume is an excellent example of the new style. The author is obviously interested in the environment but has managed to avoid rhetoric in favour of reason, offering honest scepticism instead of the more familiar polemic. The book covers a broad sweep of material in its 200 pages. It sets the scene with a series of chapters dealing with principles, economic growth and a review of environmental problems. Following a short chapter on optimization and sustainability it then reviews the problems of, and methods used in, valuing the environment. This leads to discussion of the options for environmental management and a chapter on environmental policy. The second part presents a more focused set of case studies in chapters on air pollution and acid rain, the economics of the countryside, the rain forest frontier and the problem of climate change. The third part consists of one short chapter which assesses the strengths and limitations of environmental economics. It considers the two basic questions which the environment poses for economists. First, 'what can we do?' to which the answer is that modest changes in behaviour can aggregate up to substantive offsets to environmental problems but that we should recognize the remarkable complexity of the environment and not see simple solutions as panaceas. Second, 'what is the role of economics in policy formation?' The answer assigns economists the appropriately modest roles of understanding incentives and markets, valuing environmental change and assessing policy options. These issues are by
Book Reviews La Basicilicate: Changement Social et Changement Spatial dans une R~gion du Mezzogiorno, Robert Bergeron, 713 pp., 1994, Ecole Fran~aise de Rome, Rome
Basilicata is one of the lesser-known of Italy's twenty regions: situated in the 'deep south' of the country, with an area of less than 10000 km 2 and a population of 620 000, its main physical distinguishing feature is its drainage to the Ionian Sea via five rivers (Bradano, Basento, Cavone, Agri, Sinni), strikingly parallel and evenly-spaced in their lower courses. Few Italians from the northern half of Italy have ever been there, or have even thought of visiting the region. This perception of Basilicata as a 'forgotten' region, even stronger in the past, is itself part of the complex explanation for the backwardness and isolation of the region. In a sense, Basilicata can be regarded as the classic region of the Italian Mezzogiorno, and therefore a test-case for the Italian government's attempts to stimulate development in the nation's peripheral regions. Robert Bergeron's massive tome on Basilicata is in the best traditions of French regional geography: an encyclopaedic and complex synthesis of virtually all aspects of the region's social, economic and geographical character. The main time-frame is the 40 years between the 1940s and the 1980s, but earlier historical periods are also brought into the analysis where they are clearly relevant - - as they are, for example, when describing the origins of the settlement pattern or the landholding system. The book is basically the published version of Bergeron's th~se du doctorat which he finished in 1988. Unfortunately, during the six years which have elapsed between the thesis and its publication by the French School in Rome, no attempt has been made to update the study: the most recent references and statistical data remain those of the mid-1980s. Leaving this rather fundamental shortcoming aside, this volume is undoubtedly a tour de force, a work which spans, literally, half an academic lifetime. Bergeron's first work on the Mezzogiorno was carried out in Sardinia in the late 1960s. In 1972 he went as an assistant on a field trip to Basilicata led by Bernard Kayser, whose 1962 monograph on soil erosion in the region remains a fundamental contribution. But his real heroes are three of the literary giants of the south: Rocco Scotellaro, the 'peasant-poet' and radical mayor of Tricarico who tragically died so young; Manlio Rossi-Doria, the famous agricultural economist whose books on Basilicata and the problems of the south published in the 1940s and 1950s combine erudition and passion; and Carlo Levi, exiled by Fascism to a small hill-village in the region in the late 1930s, whose testimonial Christ Stopped at Eboli (1948) is perhaps the most evocative study of Basilicatan life before the postwar transformations which are the main theme of Bergeron's study.
Bergeron's opus has a complicated, multi-level structure. It is in fact divided into two books, 'Livre Premier' and 'Livre Deuxi~me', each of which is subdivided into three parts, in turn further divided into three or four chapters. Book One is entitled 'Lucania in the 1940s' (Lucania is the old name for the region). Part One is on traditional spatial structures: land use, settlement patterns, population pressure, housing conditions, isolation, and scarcity of water. Part Two discusses the underdevelopment and crisis of peasant society, with chapters on the agrarian structure (latifondo and minifundia) and its key relationship to cropping patterns, on rural social structure (from signori to braccianti), and on the world of las miseria - hopeless, abject poverty. Book Two is titled 'Changing Basilicata: from the Agrarian Question to the Urban Question'. Its first part is about rural social movements and the preconditions for postwar development - - the land reform laws of 1950, the early work of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, and the causes and effects of continued emigration. Part Two is about rural development: the operation of the land reform 'model', eradication of malaria, the dramatic strides made in land reclamation and irrigation, and the development of new land-use regimes which emphasized the disparity between the mainly mountainous province of Potenza and the more agriculturally favoured province of Matera. Part Three moves to an analysis of the region's evolving urban economy, with chapters on new road systems, new industries (now in crisis), the development of various branches of the service sector, and the problems of urban planning in the two provincial capitals - - Potenza (which is also the regional capital) and Matera. This bare-bones outline can hardly do justice to the wealth of detail nor to the richness of descriptive analysis presented by Bergeron. Perhaps more useful in this review is to relate some of his conclusions. Bergeron writes of a region still searching for an identity beyond its partial physical definition on the basis of drainage orientation. Western Basilicata is under the influence of Naples and Salerno; eastern and northern Basilicata lie under the sphere of Bari and the towns of Puglia; the coastal plain links to Taranto. In summing up the various dimensions of postwar change (political, economic, demographic, social etc.), Bergeron identifies five 'faces' of Basilicata in the 1980s. First is urban Basilicata: mainly Potenza and Matera, but also Melfi where Fiat have just opened a huge factory. Second, there are the coastal strips undergoing touristic development (Maratea on the west coast, Policoro on the south-east coast) and backed by intensive irrigated agriculture (the Metapontino or Ionian coastal plain). Third, there are the valley-bottoms where new roads, irrigation and (especially in the Basento) industrial estates have introduced new axes of dynamism. Fourth, there are those districts of the northern interior where post-1980 earthquake funding has helped to generate a limited economic revival. Finally there is the rest of the hill and mountain country, accounting for 50% of the area
132
Book Reviews
of the region and 20% of its population, which remains isolated, badly eroded and is still depopulating.
La Basilicate is a seminal work; given the 'typicality' of the region, it is an emblematic study on the progress of the Mezzogiorno as a whole. It deserves to stand alongside other classical French regional monographs on the Italian South such as Maurice La Lannou's P~tres Paysans de la Sardaigne (1941) and Ren6e Rochefort's Le Travail en Sicile (1961). Significantly, both Le Lannou and Rochefort were Bergeron's main teachers when he was a student at Lyon. Hence the dynasty of French classic regional geography lives on. This is both the strength and the weakness of La Basilicate. Reading this book before, during and after a recent field course in Basilicata with a group of Sussex geography students, I certainly appreciated its wonderful blend of encyclopaedic knowledge and sharp geographical insight. However, also on that trip were two Sussex colleagues, Helen Rendell and Mick Dunford, whose own published work on the region - respectively on slope instability and industrial development - - is not mentioned by Bergeron. This raises a general critique of the book, which eventually becomes two specific criticisms. First, while Bergeron has undoubtedly done his homework (on the Italian and French sources) and of course his fieldwork, he does not cite much of the important work done on Basilicata in other languages such as English or German. Amongst the latter the most significant omission is Klaus Rother's monograph on the Metapontino published in the Bonner Geographische Abhandlungen in 1971. Amonst the former several items can be mentioned: John Davis's important book on Land and Family in Pisticci (1973), for instance, or Anne Cornelisen's triology of books on Tricarico (Cornelisen, 1973, 1978, 1980), or the work of Anglo-American geographers such as R. E. Dickinson (1955). Secondly, Bergeron does not step out of the frame of reference(s) which he has consulted. His narrative is contained within the established tradition of French regional scholarship; and is constrained by his use of the abundant, but equally traditional, Italian source material, both literary and statistical. One searches in vain, therefore, for a truly imaginative, original analysis of the region's geography.
RUSSELL KING School of European Studies University of Sussex References
Cornelisen, A. (1973) Torregreca. Macmillan, London. Cornelisen, A. (1978) Women of the Shadows. Macmillan, London. Cornelisen, A. (1980) Flight from Torregreca. Macmillan, London. Davis, J. (1973) Land and Family in Pisticci. Athlone, London. Dickinson, R. E. (1955) The Population Problem in Southern Italy: an Essay in Social Geography. Syracuse University Press, New York. Kayser, B. (1961) Recherches sur l'~rosion des Sols en Italie M~ridionale: Lucanie. SEDES, Paris. Le Lannou, M. (1941) P3tres" et Paysans de la Sardaigne. Arrault, Tours.
Levi, C. (1948) Christ Stopped at Eboli. Cassell, London. Rochefort, R. (1961) Le Travail en Sicile: Etude de G~ographie Sociale. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Rother, K. (1971) Die Kulturlandschaft der Tarentenischen Golfkiiste. Bonner Geographische Abhandlungen 44.
Environmental Economics: Individual Incentives and Public Choices, Ian Hodge, 205 pp. 1995, Macmillan, London, £10.99 pbk, ISBN 0 33 57771X
Not only is the environment the quintessential common property resource, it is also an intellectual common pasture where all may graze, given appropriate dentition, and no single discipline may claim exclusive rights. So we have environmental sciences of all kinds, including the social sciences, of which environmental economics can trace its ancestry at least back to the founding fathers Malthus and Ricardo, virtually two centuries ago. In the last decade, as the n th wave of pioneers has rediscovered the environment, the flow of books on environmental economics has swollen. The majority of economic treatments have aimed for the intellectual high ground offering advanced and ever more elegant theoretical treatments of difficult issues and empirical offerings whose weakness can only partly be justified by shortage of funds. Like all fashions, the environment as intellectual construct has attracted zealots, many of the swivel eyed-variety, earnestly pressing panaceas of varying credibility on the assumed naive reader. As the present wave of writing has matured, academics and publishers have begun to seek a more questioning and less didactic style. The present volume is an excellent example of the new style. The author is obviously interested in the environment but has managed to avoid rhetoric in favour of reason, offering honest scepticism instead of the more familiar polemic. The book covers a broad sweep of material in its 200 pages. It sets the scene with a series of chapters dealing with principles, economic growth and a review of environmental problems. Following a short chapter on optimization and sustainability it then reviews the problems of, and methods used in, valuing the environment. This leads to discussion of the options for environmental management and a chapter on environmental policy. The second part presents a more focused set of case studies in chapters on air pollution and acid rain, the economics of the countryside, the rain forest frontier and the problem of climate change. The third part consists of one short chapter which assesses the strengths and limitations of environmental economics. It considers the two basic questions which the environment poses for economists. First, 'what can we do?' to which the answer is that modest changes in behaviour can aggregate up to substantive offsets to environmental problems but that we should recognize the remarkable complexity of the environment and not see simple solutions as panaceas. Second, 'what is the role of economics in policy formation?' The answer assigns economists the appropriately modest roles of understanding incentives and markets, valuing environmental change and assessing policy options. These issues are by