Towards an Anthropology of Wealth by Theodoros Rakopoulos Knut Rio

Author:Theodoros Rakopoulos, Knut Rio [Theodoros Rakopoulos, Knut Rio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367180072
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 42919642
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy

Andrea Muehlebach

ABSTRACT

This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democratic assembly; of being and having laboured together as a social body in all of its corporeal materiality and resistant subjectivity. Having made democracy their own through years of assembly and collective law-making that sought to imagine a world outside of the ‘Republic of Property’, the Italians I met reminisced not only about water but also about this practical process as a kind of inalienable commonwealth. Today, they face the state’s refusal to recognize their claims to democracy and its willingness to overrun popular will, even as their democratic process has left its traces.

About 40 metres under the surface of the Southern Italian city of Naples lies a vast, 400-kilometre-long system of excavated tunnels and shafts that connect hundreds of subterranean cisterns and wells with each other. Some of these tunnels are so narrow that one brushes up against their coarse, cold stone with both shoulders when pressing through them. This labyrinth began to be built around 2400 years ago by the Greeks, who had dug down into the bowels of the earth for the yellow volcanic stone out of which ‘Neapolis’, the New City, was slowly built, creating the cisterns that were to be used to collect ground and rainwater. Some of these wells led directly into the homes and courtyards of the rich, others were for public use. The Romans later built the aqueducts that served a rapidly growing city; a system that was in use until 1885 when it was closed after a cholera outbreak that killed 14,000 mostly poor inhabitants of Naples. But until then, this liquid labyrinth needed to be tended to.

The men responsible for this task were called pozzari (after pozzo (‘well’ in Italian)). The pozzaro was small, wiry, and dexterous. He was capable of spending days in the damp underground, climbing vertically along the walls of wells and hiking through tunnels to clear the water surfaces of leaves and other debris. To protect his skin, the pozzaro wore a rough hooded cloak which made him appear like a little monk. But according to Neapolitan legend, the pozzaro was anything but. Instead, with free access to the homes of both the rich and the poor, these twilight figures were rumoured to be more engrossed with the wives of the nobleman’s houses than with the cleaning of water. Indeed, the legends ranking around the figure of the pozzaro gave rise to another mythical trickster figure that populates the Neapolitan imaginary until today; the monaciello who, like the pozzaro, was able to freely enter homes and steal objects, only to gift them to his lovers across the city.

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