whyte 1944 sicilian peasant society

8/2/2019 Whyte 1944 Sicilian Peasant Society

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Sicilian Peasant Society

Author(s): William Foote WhyteReviewed work(s):Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 46, No. 1, Part 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1944), pp.65-74Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/662927 .

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SICILIAN PEASANT SOCIETY By WILLIAM OOTEW11YTEBETWEEN the years of 1889 and 1913 Dr. Giuseppe Pitr6 publishedtwenty-five volumes and a number of articles upon the life of the peopleof Sicily. His Biblioteca delle Tradizioni Popolare Siciliane constitutes anethnographic record, which, for scope and detail of treatment, is unsurpassedin the literature. His work upon folk songs, folklore, superstititions, magic,and sacred beliefs and practices is particularly valuable.Up to the present time, however, Pitre's work has remained relatively un-known to anthropologists. There seem to be two explanations for this situation.Until recently anthropologists have been concentrating their attention uponprimitive societies and have done little research into the peasant communitiesof civilized societies. Then, as linguists, anthropologists have given little atten-tion to the Italian language. They have learned the languages of the primitivesthat they have studied and otherwise have taken up only the languages, gen-erally German and French, that are ordinarily acquired by going through ourschool system. Anthropological literature written in Italian has reached only asmall public.A discussion of Sicilian society should be particularly timely now. WhileDr. Pitre's volumes appeared many years ago, comparison with a recent studyby Charlotte Gower' indicates that the Pitr6 volumes may still be consideredbasic background material. Changes in the peasant community have, at leastuntil very recent years, come along slowly and may best be understood againstthis background.It is not my purpose simply to summarize Pitr6. I shall direct particular at-tention to the social organization and discuss its relations with the sacredbeliefsand practices. From the standpoint of the social anthropologist, the Pitr6 writ-ings are subject to the same criticism that may be directed against the greatbody of ethnographic literature. The author has not related his observations toeach other so as to present a picture of a functioning social system. Neverthe-less, the data are so voluminous and detailed that it is possible to put some ofthe parts together and observe the social system in action. It is that which Ishall attempt to do.

My conclusions are drawn primarily from three volumes, Usi e CostumiCredenzee Pregiudizi del Popolo Siciliano, Feste Patronali in Sicilia, and LaFamiglia, La Casa, La Vita. In addition I am calling upon an interview of myown with a Sicilian peasant immigrant, whom I talked with in this country.One of the most striking features of Sicilian society is its system of socialstratification. Unfortunately Pitr6 was primarily occupied with studying thepeasantry so that his remarks upon groups above that level are incomplete1Milocca, unpublished manuscript in the office of the Department of Anthropology, Uni-

versity of Chicago.65


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66 AMERICAN NTHROPOLOGIST [N.s., 46,1944and unsatisfactory. From the Gower2study we learn that there were four mainclasses. Top positions were held by the nobility. Next highest were the land-lords and well-to-do businessmen. The artisans ranked below the landlords, andthe peasants held the bottom positions. There were two main divisions in thepeasant class: the burgisi who owned their own land and the viddani who werefarm laborers. While the farm laborers were below all other groups, some of themore prosperous burgisi ranked as high as the artisans. Representatives of thenobility were, of course, not present in every community, so that we find, ineffect, a three class system in many areas.According to Pitre, there were elaborate social distinctions even among thepeasants. A shepherd was superior to a peasant proprietor, both, of course,standing above the farm laborer. The laborer who worked in the vineyards wassuperior to the one who did not. The man who kept cows was superior to theone who tended oxen or swine, and he in turn was superior to the man whotook care of horses or calves. The herder of sheep was superior to the goatherd.Farmers were consideredsuperiorto fishermen.These distinctions were really operative in the lives of the people, and theymaintained themselves by the limitations they placed upon marriage. It waspossible for a peasant to marry a peasant woman who ranked somewhat abovehim, but this seems to have been rarely done. A man who sought to contractsuch a marriage had an intermediary, a prominent person in the town, to actfor him. Even when the girl could say nothing against the character of hersuitor and could not doubt his ability to support her, she usually turned downthe request, saying, "Non e dellamia condizione."As in other primitive and peasant societies, the family was the fundamentalsocial grouping. It was the family which worked the land. Since local endogamywas customary, families were related to each other through an intricate kinshipnetwork. Conflicts within the family were regulated within the family. It wasonly through familial institutions that conflicts could be regulated. When therewere no blood ties between families, petty conflicts sometimes grew into ven-dettas that continued until one of the families was entirely wiped out.There seems to have been only one effective way of bringing about peacebetween warringfamilies. An intermediary brought the heads of the two fami-lies together. If he was successful in his mission, they drank together andagreed that each would serve as Godfather for the next child born to the otherman.

It would not have been sufficient simply to have the men shake hands andagree to be friends. Each man then mightbegin to wonder about the sincerityof the other's profession of friendship. If no channels of interaction were setup, suspicion and conflict would be almost certain to arise again. Spiritualparentage established a sacred relationship. The Godparent-Godchild rela-

2 Ibid.


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WHYTE] SICILIAN PEASANT SOCIETY 67tionship was under the special protection of St. John the Baptist, who, nextto the Virgin, was the most powerful of all the saints. The relationship wasconsidered even more sacred than those of blood kinship. Having establishedsuch a relationship, each man could feel secure and could dare to let down hisguard.The children had a practice of relating themselves to each other by a playform of ceremonial sponsorship. At one stage in the life of the young girl, it wasthe custom for her to make a doll, using a lemon for the head and other tra-ditionally prescribed objects to make up the rest of the body She then askeda playmate to be Godmother to the doll. The families of the two girls got to-gether and had a party in which the doll was the center of attention. Theparty was half play, half serious. That is, the traditional rituals performedwith the doll were recognized as play, but the relationship established betweenthe girls was taken seriously.In some places it was the custom for lower class-children to make cere-monial presentations of fruit, grain, etc., to children of higher status and askto be taken under their protection. If the upper class children accepted thepresentation, they became quasi-Godparents. Adults frequently looked towarda person of higher status to serve as Godparent to their children. The behaviorof both children and adults in such cases had the same function: to build upties of social solidarity across lines of class distinction.The peasants were closely tied to the soil they cultivated and to the villagein which they lived. Each village had its own patron saint, which served as asymbol around which community spirit was built up. Some of the larger townshad more than one patron saint, each important section of the town having itsown symbol. The people were intensely partisan in these matters. The adherentof one patron saint would not permit his children to marry followers of anothersaint, if he could help it. Thus most marriages were made along lines of localendogamy. Social relations correspondedso closely with the saint symbols thatPitr6 reports cases of riots in the larger towns on the occasion of processions inhonor of one of the saints. Adherents of a competing saint sometimes at-tempted to break up the processions.The close relationship between the social structure and sacred beliefs andpractices is best revealed when we observe the annual festa for the village pa-tron saint. The climax of thefesta was a great procession through the streets ofthe village. The bands played, the men carried the statue of the saint withstreamers attached for the affixing of contributions, and the townspeoplemarched with the saint. Some of them, particularly the women, marched bare-foot to keep a pledge made to the saint in return for some favor.Sicilian immigrants brought their saint's day processions to this countrywiththem, and until quite recently one could observe ceremonies closely fol-lowing the pattern describedby Pitr6 in some of our large cities. The chairman


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68 AMERICAN NTHROPOLOGIST [N.s., 46, 1944of afesta taking place in EasterniCity8 gave me this interpretation of the cere-monies:

The reasonfor the feasts is this. We want to renewand reinforce he faith of thepeoplein God. We want to make ourselvesdisciplesof Christamongthe people....Protestantspraydirectlyto God.They say, "Godknowsus, he knowseverythingwedo.Whyshouldwenotprayto him?"Yes, Godknowseverything,butwe areweak sin-ners.WhyshouldHe grantus the favorsthat we ask?Instead weprayto somesaint-to a persononcea humanbeing ike ourselves,whoseholinessand sanctityhave beenproven n order o makehim a saint. Weprayto thissaint who s withoutsins;who hasled such a purelife that he can take someof oursins off of our shoulders.We ask thesaint to intercede or us andbe ouradvocatebeforeGod.. . . We arepoor, ittlepeople.If we celebrated hefeastof the sainteverytwentyorthirtyyears,thesaint wouldask,"Whoarethesepeoplethat arecallinguponme?"No, we set asidea day eachyearforoursaint,andeveryyearwe celebrate hefeast on that day so that the saintwillcometo knowus as hispeopleand willtry to helpus whenweprayforhisaid.Someignorantpeoplethink that the saint can performmiracles.That is not true.ThesaintcanonlyaskGodtoperformhe miracles.God s a Godofmercy.If thesinnerprays to the saint, the saint stands in right with God,and Godtakes pity uponthesinnerandforgiveshim his sins. . . . That is the spiritualworld.It is the sameway inthe materialworldexceptthat here we aredealingwithmaterial hings.

While my informant was explaining thefesta in Eastern City, he was a mid-dle aged man who spoke no English, and he was giving me the conception ofsociety and the sacred that he had brought over from Sicily. According to thisview, society was hierarchically organized and so was the realm of the sacred.To gain ends that were beyond his individual powers, the little man neededto establish connections with someone in an intermediate position who wouldintercede for him at the top of the sacred or secular hierarchies. Connectionswere established through the performance of personal favors. A continual ex-change of services and good will linked the various levels of the hierarchies to-gether.The realm of the sacred stood above the secular world. In order to estab-lish the most effective relations with the supernatural; the individual had toparticipate in the rituals of his social group. In' the course of the individual'slife, his position in his social group changed at the same time that his relationswith the sacred underwent changes. The connections between the two realmscan best be illustrated by following the career of an individual through someof the critical periods of his social life. Pitr6 provides admirably detailed infor-

3 Actual name of the city withheld to permit publication of a community study of its Italiandistrict. See author's Street CornerSociety, to be published in 1943 by The University of ChicagoPress.


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WHYTE] SICILIAN PEASANT SOCIETY 69

mation, which will enable us to describe some aspects of the life of the womanfrom engagement through marriage and childbirth to death.4The first step toward marriage was taken by the prospective groom'smother or by a woman who substituted for her. She went to pay a visit to themother of the girl, declared the man's intensions and asked about the size of thegirl's dowry.In the ordinary course of events, the engagement was announced with aformal visit of the man and his parents to the home of the girl's family. Thetwo families ate and drank together, and certain rituals were used to cementtheir relationship.In the period of engagement, social contacts between the couple werestrictly circumscribed. They could see each other from once a week to threetimes a year, depending upon the mores of the part of Sicily in which they lived.These meetings always took place in the girl's house. Boy and girl sat at oppo-site ends of the room, chaperoned by members of the family. If the boy wishedto communicate with the girl at other times, he could only do so indirectly bytalking with his future brother-in-law or sister-in-law.It was customary for the boy to give his future bride rings, earrings, andother trinkets that he had made himself. On every holy day until they weremar-ried, he presented her with cookies, sweets, or other choice edibles. Friendssingled out the couple as a butt for practical jokes. In this period, the boy andthe girl were beginning to establish social relations with each other in a man-ner strictly prescribed by the customary usages, and the society was beginningto give them recognition as a future family unit. (Of course, since most mar-riages were contracted between people of the same town, the boy and girlmight have played together as small children, but after puberty the girl be-came more and more withdrawn from the outside world and confined to thesphere of her parents' household. Therefore boy and girl might be almoststrangers to each other.)

Boy and girl were in a very subordinate position as marriage approached.Their families originated the action for them, and they could only submitpassively to what was being done. The girl was in a particularly low positionfor, while the boy could originate action for her by bringing her gifts and com-ing to visit her, she could do nothing but receive his attentions.On the night before the wedding the two families and friends gathered inthe bride's house to admire the trousseau. A seamstress was brought in to ex-

SThe conceptual chemeusedin the subsequentdiscussion s takenfromConradM. Arens-bergandEliotD. Chapple,MeasuringHumanRelations:An IntroductionotheStudyoftheInter-actionof Individuals GeneticPsychology Monographs,Provincetown,Mass.: JournalPress,1940).Seealso Chappleand CarletonS. Coon,Principlesof Anthropology,speciallypp. 26-69,(NewYork,HenryHolt andCompany, nc., 1942).


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amine every piece and estimate its value, and she had an assistant to put downthe figures ahd total the amount. Since she was hired by the bride's family, shetended to make her estimates very liberal. The groom's family was consciousof the exaggeration, but their social standing as well as that of the bride'sfamily depended upon the value of the trousseau, and therefore they were un-likely to enter any protests. Food and drink were also served at this gathering.The trousseau was transported to the future home in a great procession ofthe families and friends.The procession to the church was made in carriagesor on foot if the familiescould not afford to ride. In either case, males and females were completelyseparated on the way to the church. The bride went first with her mother onher left and other female relatives, including future in-laws, following in theorder of their relationship. The husband led the procession of males, whichwas organized in the same way.The couple was united according to the rites of the Catholic Church. Manand wife walked out of the church arm in arm, followed by the two mothers.Intimate friends threw confetti, grain, beans, and salt upon them. The saltstood for wisdom, the foods for fertility. Other fertility rites were performedon the threshold of the new home. Friends threw leaves from the orange treeupon the bride and wished her male children. Two eggs and a bottle of winewere broken upon the threshold. Inside the house, relatives offered a spoonfulof honey to the couple. The groom took half of the spoonful and left the otherhalf to his bride. There followed a reception in which friends of the couple wereoffered wine and ceremonial foods.

In the evening of the wedding day, banquets were held in the houses of thetwo sets of parents. When the banquet began at the house of the bride's family,the groom left and returned to his parents. In the middle of the banquet in hisparent's home, he returned to the home of the bride's parents where he joinedin the eating and drinking. His movements were rigidly prescribed by custom,and if he left too early or arrived too late it would have given rise to seriouscomplaints on the part of one or the other family. Shortly after midnight, theparty at the house of the groom's parents broke up and reconvened at thehome of the bride's parents, where the eating and drinking continued. With thearrival of the groom's relatives and friends, the seating of the guests was re-arranged. Chairs lined one wall of the room. The bride sat in the middle chairwith the female relatives of her husband to her right and her own female rela-tives to her left. If any relative was unable to be present, her chair was leftvacant or else filled by a special friend. The men, including the husband, werefree to wander around and eat and drink. Until the dancing began, the bridehad to remain in her chair, and she did not eat or drink.The bride danced the first dance with her husband. After that she had todance with each man who asked her. While she was thought to be the queen of


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WHYTE] SICILIANPEASANTSOCIETY 71the ball, she had no authority to govern her own actions. Nuptial songs werealso sung. These had a number of verses, and a different person sang each one.Bride and groom each had a verse to sing, but they came in only after theirmothers and certain other relatives had expressed themselves.When the nuptial celebrations were finally concluded, all relatives andfriends accompanied the couple to the threshold of the new home. Here thebride tearfullytook leave of her mother. In the province of Palermo,the groom'smother went inside with the bride to undress her and prepare her for bed.Then finally, and for the first time, bride and groom were left alone.However, the wedding guests participated so actively in the ceremoniesthat they were reluctant to break off suddenly and go home. In some parts ofSicily, they remained outside of the house setting off fire crackers or rockets.They returned before dawn to create a disturbance about the house with loudlaughter and joking.In the morning the two mothers made the first visit to the couple. Thebride's mother brought a bowl of hot soup to present to her son-in-law. Shethen went in to make the bed, first examining the sheets for proof that herdaughter was a virgin. She exhibited this with pride to the groom's mother andher friends. In Modica the bride's night clothes were hung up outside of thehouse so that all might see that she was a virgin.

For the eight days following the wedding, the bride remained in her home.She and her husband refrainedfrom all work in this period, though he was notconfined to the house as she was. During this time, the bride received a roundof visits from all relatives and friends of the two families. Other people werestill originating action for her, but the meetings took place in her house, andshe was in the process of establishing herself as mistress of an independenthousehold. At the end of the eight days, the man and wife went out togetherfor the first time. This was a solemn ceremonial occasion. The woman wasdressed completely in white. All eyes were upon the couple as they walkedthrough the streets to church where they heard mass. For the woman the cere-monial exit from the house and the hearing of mass marked a transition in herinteractions with the people of her society. Upon returning home she began togo out and repay the visits made to her in the eight days following her mar-riage. When these visits were completed, she had gone through the customaryactivities that established her new position in the society.In Sicilian society, the wife was always subordinate to the husband, butthere were ways in which she could improve her position and even gain a largemeasure of authority. In one province the mother of the family had completecharge of making all marriage arrangements for her children. While this wasexceptional, it indicates the great importance of offspringfor the social positionof the wife. In all of Sicily, we can observe the wife improving her position inthe family in the process of bearing a child, especially the first child.


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72 AMERICAN NTHROPOLOGIST [N. ., 46,1944Very shortly after marriage relatives and friends of the couple began in-

quiring as to whether the wife had become pregnant. These matters were dis-cussed with great freedom, and tremendous social pressure was exerted uponthe wife. According to Sicilian folk beliefs, man was the generator of life andwoman was simply the soil from which life arose; the woman was alwaysblamed for her childlessness. Consequently, as the months passed and the wifedid not become pregnant, her social position in the community suffered a greatdecline. When she did become pregnant, the trend was sharply reversed. Asbirth approached her status rose and she entered into more intimate contactwith the supernatural world.The life of family and intimate friends was organized around the pregnantwoman. It was believed that she must be allowed to eat anything that struckher fancy. If she was deprived of what she wanted, her child would have a birthmark in the shape of the desired object. This would appear on the part of thechild's body corresponding to the part of her own body which the mother firsttouched following her deprivation. This belief placed the pregnant woman in aposition to originate action for others-to demand anything she wanted. Herassociates also tried to anticipate her wishes. Her society was organized to waitupon her. If she dropped something to the floor,she must not be allowed to pickit up. The person who picked up an object for her released a soul from purga-tory. The woman had attained such a high social position and entered intosuch intimate contact with the sacred that one who performed a service for herautomatically affected the supernatural world.During her pregnancy the woman placed herself under the protection ofSt. Francis. She prayed frequently to him and also to other saints. When thetime of birth approached, she prepared herself with special devotions. Herhouse was put in order by her relatives in preparation for a great celebration.When the labor pains began, the midwife was called. She was a very importantperson in the community, and frequently served as Godmother for the childthat she brought into the world.The woman's mother attended her in childbirth, and other female friendscould be present, but no woman of bad reputation was allowed in the house, forher uncleanness could interfere with the birth. The evil eye was feared, and themidwife led in prayers and invocations to keep away evil spirits and secure thesupport of supernatural powers. Under ordinary circumstances, the individualprayed to one particular saint. Saint Leocardapresided over childbirth and thefirst prayers were directed toward her, but, as the birth approached (and es-pecially if it was a difficult birth), other saints were called upon. Those in at-tendance prayed to the Madonna and even directly to God. At this time thewoman attained her most central position in her society. In the province ofEtna it was customary to ring a bell outside of the house when the woman had


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wHYTE] SICILIANPEASANTSOCIETY 73difficulty delivering her child. All who heard the bell stopped what they weredoing to say an Avemaria dellegraziefor her.When the birth was announced, the husband and relatives and friends ofthe couple were brought in to see the baby. No one could kiss the baby untilit was baptized. It required this protection before being brought into contactwith anyone who might not be a good Christian. Even after baptism a men-struating woman was not allowed to kiss the baby.It was commonly believed that sorceresses liked to attack unbaptizedbabies, and these evil spirits were warded off by a combination of magicalformulae and sacred rites. For example, in Mazzara relatives kept the lightsburning in the house of the mother of the unbaptized baby, and they hung animage of the patron saint on the house door, placed a rosary on the wall inside,hung an old table cloth with frayed edges next to the door to the baby's room,stood a broom in front of the door, and scattered salt over the floor. Thesorceress might come in at midnight. If she got past the saint and the rosary,she felt compelled to count the threads in the table cloth, the straws in thebroom, and the grains of salt on the floor before going into the room to attackthe baby. This took so long that it was dawn before she had finished, and shelost her power when daylight came. From the social point of view, the essentialaspect of such rituals is that they allowed the family relatives to participate inthe birth of the child and to lend their support to the mother and father in thiscritical period.If the baby was baptized on the same day of its birth, a soul was liberatedfrom purgatory. Birth and baptism were each sacred events, and each broughttogether the relatives on both sides. By combining them, the participants es-tablished such relations with the sacred that they could act directly upon thesupernatural powers.In the procession to the church for the baptismal service, the grandparentsor the midwife held the child. The Godparents walked behind them, and thefather followed the Godparents. The best man at the wedding was alwaysGodfather for the first child. In the baptismal ceremony, the Godmother heldthe baby and the Godfather stood on her right. The father stood behind themand several steps below then. This was a symbolic representation of the sig-nificance of the Godparent-Godchild relationship.The names given to children were prescribed by family ties. The first malechild was named after his father's father, the second after his mother's father,the third after his father's eldest brother, and fourth after his mother's eldestbrother, and so on, except that the seventh son could be named Settimo becausethere was supernatural power in the number seven. The same system of alter-nation between male and female lines determined the naming of daughters.The midwife carried the baby out of the church, holding its head on her


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right arm if it was a boy and on her left arm if it was a girl. Friends of the fam-ily lined the street about the church and sprinkled bread crumbs and kernels ofwheat upon the child as auguries of abundant life. The procession took thechild back to the home of its parents, and then there was a great feast in cele-bration of the baptism. The baby could now be kissed. The Godparents pre-sented it with earrings.If the mother of a girl did not have enough milk, her child was nursed bythe mother of a boy. Boys were thought to bring more milk with them. Other-wise, if the mother did not have enough milk, she went to thirteen houses beg-ging a piece of bread of each one and to six more begging other things to eat.The Madonna rewarded her for such humility by giving her an abundant sup-ply of milk. By originating action for people in this manner, the woman gainedthe necessary strength from her society.I shall not describe the funeral rites in detail, since they were similar tothose in other Catholic peasant societies. The main point was that all relativesof the deceased gathered in his house and feasted together for three days.After the funeral the relatives made regular visits to the house for nine days,and in the first three days the men did no work. These rituals built up a veryhigh frequency of interactions among members of the family, and allowed themto reorganizetheir social relations so as to fill the gap left by the deceased.

Though reviewing this material in terms of frequency of interaction andorigination of action, it is possible to demonstrate the exceedingly close integra-tion of Sicilian social organization with the peasant system of sacred beliefsand practices.The individual faced each life crisis with the support and participation ofall those related to him by blood, ceremonial,or other intimate ties. The extent,frequency, and hierarchical organization of the interactions varied with thegravity and importance of the crisis. As the social participation became moreintense, the individual, in the case of childbirth, assumed a more and more cen-tral position in her society, and, as her social position was raised, she enteredinto more intimate contact with the supernatural powers. It was only underthese conditions that those in contact with her were enabled to communicatedirectly with God, the pinnacle of the sacred hierarchy. Each ceremonial shiftin the individual's social relations was accompanied by a corresponding shiftin her relations with the supernaturalpowers.

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMANORMAN, OKLAHOMA

whyte 1944 sicilian peasant society

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