Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome

by Michael Herzfeld

Overview

Modern Rome is a city rife with contradictions. Once the seat of ancient glory, it is now often the object of national contempt. It plays a significant part on the world stage, but the concerns of its residents are often deeply parochial. And while they live in the seat of a world religion, Romans can be vehemently anticlerical. These tensions between the past and the present, the global and the local, make Rome fertile ground to study urban social life, the construction of the past, the role of religion in daily life, and how a capital city relates to the rest of the nation.

Michael Herzfeld focuses on Rome’s historic Monti district and the wrenching dislocation caused by rapid economical, political, and social change. Evicted from Eternity tells the story of the gentrification of Monti—once the architecturally stunning home of a community of artisans and shopkeepers now displaced by an invasion of rapacious real estate speculators, corrupt officials, dithering politicians, deceptive clerics, and shady thugs. As Herzfeld picks apart the messy story of Monti’s transformation, he ranges widely over many aspects of life there and in the rest of the city, richly depicting the uniquely local landscape of globalization in Rome.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226329123
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael Herzfeld is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and has taught at several other universities worldwide. He is the author of many books. 

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Overture: Encountering the Eternal City

Chapter One: Sin and the City
            Genealogies of Imperfection
            Monti: Paradoxes of Poverty
            Sociable Spaces
            Meeting the People
            The Village in the City
            Agonies and Agonistics
            The Cadences of a Cultural Preserve

Chapter Two: Popolo and Population
            The Artisans
            The Shopkeepers
            Intellectuals and Politicians

Chapter Three: The Wages of Sin
            Accountability and Accommodation: Introducing Original Sin
            Original Sinners or Elder Brothers?
            The Dialectics of Casuistry and Tolerance
            A Passion for the Past

Chapter Four: Refractions of Social Life
            Segmentation and Subsidiarity
            The Civic and the Civil
            Association Life
            The Premises of Conflict
            Theaters of Piety and Peculation
            A Clergy Scorned

Chapter Five: Life and Law in a Flawed State
            Laws and Regulations
            The Limits of Law
            The (Disreputable) Origins of Legal Loopholes
            Indulgent Complicities
            Forgiveness and Calculation
            Sacred Images and Sinful Spaces

Chapter Six: Scandals of Sociability
            Friends Who Strangle
            The Cultivation of Fear
            Restitution and Redemption
            Friends Best Avoided
            A Family Friend?
            Local Narratives: Swaggering Victims
            Credit and Default
            Banking on Fear
            Tactful Silences

Chapter Seven: Extortionate Civilities
            Accommodations Civil and Civic
            Discommoding Complicities
            Uncivil Pleasantries, Unpleasant Civilities
            Culture and Custom
            Peaceful Politics
            Condominial Civilities
            Lessons in Civic Civility
            Spatial and Stylistic Violence

Chapter Eight: The Fine Art of Denunciation
            The Logic of Denunciation
            Performances of Policing
            Fractured Authority: The Multiplicity of Policing
            Extorting Coffee and Campari

Chapter Nine: Tearing the Social Fabric
            Renters and Owners
            Lawyers and Illegalities
            Eviction and Evasion: The High Stakes of Time and Place
            Gentrification and the Last Frontier
            Endgame

Epilogue: The Future of Eternity
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Evicted from Eternity demonstrates the distinctive promise of Europeanist anthropology and its relevance for the discipline more generally. Herzfeld’s resolute commitment to a refined local ethnographic purview yields a text that is decisively about ‘Europe.’ It is not merely a superb analysis of the famous Monti district of Rome or a contribution to the ethnographic literature on Italy, but the finest ethnography I know of to examine rigorously how the abstract processes of European integration are manifest in the daily lives of its citizens and, in this particular case, discernible in the transformation of virtually every aspect of their emblematic urban landscape. The text succeeds as a documentary account of contemporary human predicaments, as a moral inquiry into the nature of justice and injustice, and as a passionate narrative imbued with feeling and pathos. Herzfeld has drawn on his formidable scholarly acumen and his vast ethnographic experience to craft an analysis that is truly distinguished. Evicted from Eternity deserves to be acknowledged for what it is: a masterpiece.”

Douglas Holmes

"An illuminating immersion in the numerous intricacies compounded in the changing urban dynamics of Monti, Rome's oldest district. . . . [A]  striking, sophisticated and detailed ethnographic account of the daily aporias encountered in the heart of 'classic Rome.' "

Anthropological Quarterly - Mariella Pondolfi & Phillip Rousseau

Evicted from Eternity is, quite simply, one of the finest ethnographies to emerge from research in postwar Europe. . . . Herzfeld’s meticulous and astute analysis of an urban village sheds light on the remarkable degree of fragmentation that characterizes Italy and its capital. It is also a morality tale for our times. Outstanding.

Choice

Un livre magnifique.

— Cristiana Panella

Social Anthropology

An illuminating immersion in the numerous intricacies compounded in the changing urban dynamics of Monti, Rome's oldest district. . . . [A]  striking, sophisticated and detailed ethnographic account of the daily aporias encountered in the heart of 'classic Rome.'

— Mariella Pondolfi & Phillip Rousseau

Anthropological Quarterly

"Un livre magnifique."

Social Anthropology - Cristiana Panella

A wonderful book—very exciting to read. Herzfeld has selected the extraordinary historic city of Rome to portray a riveting drama of eviction, class identity, neighborhood solidarity, and place attachment in the face of escalating gentrification. Housing shortages and the allure of neoliberal market logic have corrupted city officials and owners alike, resulting in a politics of fear of newcomers, the church, and the state. This ethnographer’s acute grasp of language use and Roman forms of civility produces a rarely seen glimpse of how cultural heritage, real estate interests, and nationalism collide to destroy local residents’ lives and homes. Both scholars in the social sciences and practitioners in historic preservation and urban planning will enjoy this look into the consequences of neoliberal land use practices.”

Setha Low

In this work, Herzfeld’s exceptional talents as a linguistically sensitive ethnographer and passion for social justice illuminate processes of gentrification in Monti, a neighborhood of Rome near the Colloseum known for artisan workshops, petty thievery, and a vibrant set of social relations wonderfully and cynically impervious to both papal and state authority. Constituting a form of neighborly civility, these relations are losing ground to an encroaching ‘civic’ consciousness. By juxtaposing the civil and the civic—and by exploring the Vatican’s ‘logic of indulgences’ as a template for, among other things, condoning violations of the building code—Herzfeld transcends old arguments regarding corruption in Italy. A case study of eviction from one apartment complex brings home the tragedy of displacement while exposing a contemporary irony: right-wing political parties have garnered some support among ‘red’ working class tenants, disillusioned by the Left’s participation, along with the church, in the real estate development of Rome’s historic center.”—Jane Schneider, CUNY Graduate Center

Jane Schneider