Lingering social infrastructure: A study of Apennine villages and their postal offices

Many villages located in the central Apennines in the Italian region of Abruzzo have been suffering from depopulation, decline of sheepherding economy, amenity desertification, and earthquakes, notably the one of 2009. Postal offices are often the last state institutions which remain in these places. By using the community economies approach and the method of reading for economic difference, this paper seeks to draw attention to the emotional and caring work of the postmasters and to explicate how they help abate isolation, improve wellbeing and provide a sense of citizenship to the rural communities they serve. In doing so, it attends to the absences in the conventional regulatory economics discourse of postal offices and redescribes them as a universal, even if lingering, redistributive social infrastructure. It also discusses the unacknowledged costs of the emotional and caring labor of postal employees which evade the traditional economic purview and suggests possible policy interventions. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation, interviews and desk research). • Rural postal offices can be an important social infrastructure. • Postal offices can abate isolation and improve the wellbeing of rural communities. • Postmasters bear unacknowledged emotional costs of serving rural communities.