US Social scientists of the 1950s in the Mezzogiorno and Ernesto de Martino: Two divergent approaches to history and development

In the 1950s, several US scholars came to Italy to study the Mezzogiorno, that is the Southern region. Their aim was to suggest how to solve the 'backwardness' of a Cold War disputed region, split into two political and opposing camps. The relationship between those scholars and the Italian intelligentsia was difficult. Surprisingly, they never found common ground with the best-known Italian anthropologist of that time, Ernesto de Martino, whose prominence would be internationally acknowledged. US scholars and de Martino could not appreciate each other because their approaches were divergent, particularly their visions of history and the determinants of change and development. US researchers regarded change/development as a zero-sum game, in which new cultural and ethical attitudes should have replaced old ones. De Martino had an anti-empirical, non-zero-sum vision of change and thought that the future would have arisen only from a profound fusion of past and present. US researchers, also owing to American exceptionalism, were scarcely interested in history, and they preferred to focus on the present interaction between attitudes, environment, and the inner world. Despite his joining the Italian Communist Party, de Martino was deeply influenced by neo-idealistic philosophy, and his anthropology revolved around history and culture. He criticized both the presentism and ethnocentrism of classical social anthropology: and his emphasis on hegemony, oppression and resilience in subaltern people made him a pioneer of the open-engagement approach of contemporary social science.