Written for Anthro490R, 3/11/1999
The supramundane takes on a central aspect as another method of gaining success apart from the mundane in the lives of the popolino in Naples, in which personal achievement is attained through mediation, negotiation, and flexibility. The mundane and supramundane “domains of mediation” (p 171) which determine the entrepreneurial actions a person takes in his or her quest for a fulfilled life are characteristically individualized and liminal. Everything in the popolino can be and is negotiated and relative, including morality. Actions that in some contexts would be viewed as grounds for eternal damnation may not tie a person’s soul to hell in the popolino, with their flexible views of right and wrong.
The supramundane is a metaphor for mundane existence: those who are viewed as consistent “evildoers” in their earthly life will be condemned to hell in the after-life. It is widely believed that living a sinful, heartless, or unfulfilling life condemns a person both “to oblivion and to prolonged suffering in life and after death”. In other words, ideas of meritoriousness are projected onto visions of the afterlife. Most of the popolino believes they will spend a short time in purgatory to work of their small sins before going to paradise. Some, like Maria, are considered holy in their earthly lives and will probably go straight to paradise. The difference is in whether one’s sins are redeemable or not. If your sins cannot be redeemed, as most of the underworld’s cannot, you will go to hell. If they are redeemable, they can be worked off in purgatory. It is the difference between “evildoers” and “wrongdoers”: the bad people and the good people who do wrong. This principle of redemption gives the popolino, who usually must resort to what is considered sin by the Catholic Church in order to survive, hope and causes them to be fervently religious in their private spheres.
The ecclesiastical concepts of heaven and hell are too absolute for the standards of the popolino, as exemplified by Giovanni’s statement that his grandfather, who was successful on earth, was “too shrewd to be sent straight to heaven and not wicked enough to be in hell” (p 64), and so Giovanni believes that his grandfather, whom he considers a good man, is in purgatory. Religious belief has a negotiated aspect to it to allow death to be a condition that is both conceivable and acceptable for the mundane individual. Conceptions of the mundane are transferred to the supramundane in order that it can be understood. Souls in purgatory are comparable to the living, and can intercede on behalf of the living. Heaven and hell are too extreme. The popolino, who consider themselves in a state of liminality (“earthly purgatory”), require negotiation and meditation in their concept of an acceptable afterlife, so that they can gain their “deserved serenity” (p 64). They must have an afterlife in which they can attain fulfillment, since their lives are so precarious and uncertain, with their semi-legal and illicit work and manner of eking out a living. Religion is informalized in the same way that work in informalized, to broaden its range of negotiability and flexibility.
It is, according to Pardo, “customary for religious doctrine and representation of the afterlife to be negotiated so that supramundane beings of all sorts become important elements of the explanation of success and failure, fortune and misfortune” (p 54). Paolo, for example, explained his and his family’s misfortunes as brought upon him by other people’s envy, and he hoped that the madonna would help relieve him of his “desperation”. Later, when his situation improved, he believed that this was due to the aid of the Bella ‘Mbriana and the madonna. The supramundane is used as an explanatory device.
The connections between the supramundane and the mundane are especially visible in the cases of liminal persons, who are repeat sinners of a more significant variety than the ordinary popolino, such as prostitutes. Since their sins do not necessarily derive from evil, they are theoretically redeemable, and so these women will demonstrate a desire for penance, to alleviate their guilt and hopefully their punishment from God, by showing their good-heartedness and bestowing favors whenever they can. This contributes to their “moral reparation” (p 109), in addition to giving them mundane benefits such as those that stem from the obligation and gratitude of those upon whom favors have been bestowed, and gains them greater allowance in using underworld connections in their enterprises, which practice is normally frowned upon.
Pardo makes mention of a former prostitute who was trying to become honest. She had established herself as having been forced to resort to prostitution due to misfortune and poverty. She began selling smuggled cigarettes, which she could get cheaper than most could using her underworld contacts. This was not viewed as greed but as merely a way out of her sinful life. Most of the popolino is sympathetic to her trying to go straight, and so they support her when they would not support others in a similar endeavor, due to her extenuating circumstances. This prostitute is viewed as sincerely desirous of redemption and honestly penitent, due to her yearly religious pilgrimage and her contributions to street shrines. She is seen as good-hearted and so deserving of a “justifiable death” (p 109).
Signora Pina is in a similar situation due to her sexual sins. Like the prostitute who offers favor-bestowing to anyone without being seen as envious, signora Pina is generous to all in expiation of her sins. Her misfortunes, especially the problems of her daughter, are attributed to God’s disfavor of her because of her sin. She is also working toward redemption, by being good-hearted and generous, and a benefactress to any who needs her. “Signora Pina’s helpful behavior is a direct answer. . . to the Christian theodicy that explains human suffering as a test of faith and as a means to the punishment of the soul and to its subsequent redemption” (p 51). She hopes for a mitigation of the punishments for her sins, and that she will have the sympathy of her contacts to help her in purgatory.
Petty moneylenders are also considered liminal and ambiguous, not really approved but nevertheless tolerated as an active part of society. Since they are moderate and reasonable, their sins are redeemable, and like prostitutes, they must have the same contrition and strive towards reparation. They are useful people but still problematic morally and so the codes of morality are flexible around them in order that they are not marginalized, but allowed to remain in society. These liminal persons will work toward moral reparations because ‘becoming honest’ gives them the strong sense of personal and communal identity that the rest of the popolino “derive from the interaction between the practical and moral and spiritual aspects of their lives” (p 67).
Children are also liminal persons, because they are neither male or female as yet, but their liminality is only temporary. Their existential ambiguity extends to their relations with the supramundane: they are ‘innocent souls’ who require more protection from the living and the dead than do adults. Their relationships with the sacred supramundane change as they become adolescents, when confirmation will concretize their relations with the sacred, making them more direct and definite.
Though a person can use both the supramundane contacts of his dead kin, who act as guardian angels, and his mundane contacts to further his entrepreneurialism, the relationships of the living with the dead are different than with the living. “Mundane and supramundane contacts are approached simultaneously but in profoundly different ways and with substantially different expectations” (p 171). Mundane contacts are transacted, while supramundane must be earned. The prostitute had access to both the mundane (her underworld connections) and supramundane (her religious devotion to the Madonna) contacts, though in different ways. She was still working toward deserving the supramundane protection of the Madonna. The emphasis on either the mundane or the supramundane as a primary resource depends on personal experiences and beliefs. Because the prostitute lives a life of (enforced) sin, she will necessarily depend upon her mundane contacts more than her supramundane contacts until she is more deserving of supramundane help. In helping herself by improving her situation and working toward redemption, God will help her, a concept the popolino believes in firmly (‘God helps those who help themselves’). Good-heartedness, therefore, is “central to the representations of human activities that refer to the supramundane as a locus of identity” (p 104).
In practice, then, the “venial sinners” are normalized while they remain symbolically liminal through establishing a non-equivalent relationship between the meanings of liminality and ambiguity and that of marginality. When the material successes exceed the boundaries of what the popolino consider acceptable, and greed is not an appropriate explanatory device, the local morality attributes their successes to liminality explained by sin. Since sin and liminality go hand in hand, the repentant behavior of liminal persons is pivotal in incorporating them into the established order of society. In this way a person can be successful without inviting the excessive envy, and hence the evil eye, of others, remaining an active member of the community while simultaneously reinforcing the popolino’s ideas of entrepreneurialism.
Existential precariousness is resolved through entrepreneurial work. Establishing oneself as a pivotal member of the community, with widespread contacts, and gaining a reputation for good-heartedness gains the respect of the popolino, and one will be counted in with the good, not the liminal, when the popolino considers the afterlife and classifies each person according to their ideas of right and wrong. Work and entrepreneurship justify one’s existence and future mitigation of punishment in purgatory. Entrepreneurs are aware of the relationship between their generosity, their reputation (others’ opinions of them), and their self-worth. A heartless person, says Pardo, “risks social ostracism and God’s punishment” (p 56), and so it is in one’s own self-interest to be generous. In addition, fear of reprisals, both punishments in the hereafter and in the earthly sphere, strengthens people’s concerns with meritoriousness (deserving good). Moral values play a direct role in the popolino’s conceptions of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurship, both as an explanation of deserving success and not deserving success (by reason of liminality based on sin). The popolino’s entrepreneurship and capitalist spirit gives them an “individual-oriented cooperative spirit, market-oriented mentality and sense of solidarity” (p 164). They gain a strong collective identity through self-fulfilling work.
Personal fulfillment, in both the mundane and the supramundane lives, is subordinated to the “successful negotiation of. . . the moral and normative value of their actions” (p 171). Individualism plays a primary role in the concepts of accomplishment in life and the achievement of deserved serenity and grace. The popolino does not hold homogenous beliefs about the exact boundaries of right and wrong, which is why they have a collective idea of liminality, to classify those persons who do not fit into their versions of the ecclesiastical definitions of good and evil persons. The entrepreneur benefits from his ability to conceive his own “morally and normatively manageable” (p 171) version of the Church’s concept of intermediation as a strategy for achieving supramundane protection.