Cultural determinism and its ethnographic critique: The discursive shift in Italian social research

Abstract The Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama described the Chinese as familists and Chinese society as a low-trust society. Such allegations about family values and social virtues stem from the discourse of cultural determinism, which was prevalent in Italian social research during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1958, American political scientist Edward C. Banfield proposed the hypothesis of “amoral familism” to explain the inability of residents in a small southern Italian town to form associations for collective interests. This hypothesis later inspired another political scientist, Robert D. Putnam, who quantitatively tested it through his study of the performance of democratic institutions across Italy’s regions. Banfield and Putnam focused on political organization and democratic institutions, respectively, and attributed their underdevelopment to local culture and history. In this way, they contributed to the discourse of cultural determinism, which is theoretically rooted in the political philosophies of Hobbes and Tocqueville. Drawing on diverse social practices, his ethnography reveals the complexity and integrality of local Roman society, offering both a critical reflection on and a transcendence of the discourse of cultural determinism.