Theory Travelling through Time and Space: The Reception of the Concept of Amoral Familism

The American political scientist Edward Banfield formulated the concept of amoral familism in 1958, in The moral basis of a backward society and defined it as follows: ‘maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise’. With this concept, he i...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	International journal of politics, culture, and society culture, and society, 2020-09, Vol.33 (3), p.365-388
Main Author:	Huysseune, Michel
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Anthropologists Anthropology Clinical Psychology Concepts Cooperation Culture Debates Decolonization Democracy Developing countries Disputes Eurocentrism Familism Fieldwork LDCs Modernization Nuclear family Personality and Social Psychology Postcolonialism Power Putnam, Robert D Revival Rural areas Rural communities Science Social Sciences Society Sociologists Sociology Space and time Travel
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	The American political scientist Edward Banfield formulated the concept of amoral familism in 1958, in The moral basis of a backward society and defined it as follows: ‘maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise’. With this concept, he intended to explain the political ineffectiveness of the inhabitants of a small town in southern Italy. From its publication, Banfield’s book has engendered an impressive amount of controversies, remarkable for their longevity, since they initiated in 1958 and are still on-going. This article provides a critical overview and theoretical reflection on these controversies. After contextualizing in the introduction these controversies in a broader theoretical and historical context, I first provide an overview of Banfield’s research and its early reception (until the mid-1970s) in the international academic community, mainly amongst anthropologists and rural sociologists. A second section addresses the Italian reception, including the revival the concept underwent following the publication of Robert D. Putnam’s classic Making democracy work in 1993, and the importance this book attributed to the concept. A third section analyzes how within Italy scholars also provided important critical assessments of his fieldwork and critiques of his concept informed by postcolonial theory. In the conclusion, I propose to interpret the longevity of the concept and the persistence of the controversies it engendered.
ISSN:	0891-4486 1573-3416