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The role and impact of thearchivi della scrittura popolareAnna Iusoa
a Università degli studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’Published online: 12 May 2014.
To cite this article: Anna Iuso (2014) The role and impact of the archivi dellascrittura popolare, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 19:3, 241-251, DOI:10.1080/1354571X.2014.897436
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The role and impact of the archivi della scritturapopolare
Anna Iuso
Universita degli studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, archives for the collection and storage of non-professional writings, mostly life-histories by working-class authors, were establishedin Europe. I indicate their roles in different national contexts and the political andsocial ambitions of their founders. In Italy the collection by individualanthropologists, historians and political militants of autobiographical texts, oral andwritten, was expanded in the 1980s by the creation of a network of archivi della scritturapopolare, dedicated to gathering life-writings in their many forms. The mostimportant was the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale at Pieve Santo Stefano, whereVincenzo Rabito’s typescript is stored. I analyse the aims and achievements of itsfounder, Saverio Tutino, and the evolution of its influential place in Italy’s culturalheritage.
Keywords
Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Saverio Tutino, archives for scritture popolari, Italiananthropology, cultural heritage, memory.
Archives for autobiographies in Europe
Terra matta’s success can be said to have a long history. In some ways it recalls the
case of Jacob Wojciechowski, a worker whose autobiography became a literary
success in the 1930s and contributed, in part, to the fortunes of the life-history
method in Polish sociology. It represented the discovery of a talented ‘ordinary
writer’, exemplifying an insight into the lives of men and women excluded from
the main currents of history but taken to be the real depositaries of Polish
national spirit and identity (Grabski 1982; Markiewicz-Lagneau 1982). In the
1930s, however, the history of the archives for autobiographies had barely
begun.1 Briefly rehearsing it will enable us to understand how its development
has provided the cultural, political and institutional framework for Terra matta’s
success.
Elsewhere I have divided the history of such archives in Europe since the
beginning of the twentieth century into three phases, devoted in turn to the
political history of the nation-state, civic commitment, and ego-documents
(Iuso 2000). In the first category we can put the Polish archives, created in the
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2014
Vol. 19, No. 3, 241–251, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2014.897436
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1920s and 1930s and the earliest examples dedicated to autobiographies. They
had their forerunners in Finnish archives established in the early years of the
century, encompassing oral and written documents as well as non-
autobiographical materials concerning the lives of ‘ordinary people’. The case
of Finland, which became an independent nation-state in 1918, provides a
particularly good illustration of the links between the politico-institutional
context, the gathering of examples of popular culture as a way of retrieving the
national culture which they embodied, and the assembling of life-histories
which provided exemplary personifications of that same culture. In the Polish
case, the collaboration of Thomas and Znaniecki, best represented by their
famous The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918–
20) with its methodological introduction and great influence on American
sociology, inspired subsequent work in Poland, making it the most rewarding
example in Europe for the systematic application of the method of life-history.
Between 1921, when Znaniecki launched his first call for examples of life-
history, and the 1980s a total of roughly half a million examples were collected, a
selection of which were published in the journal Pamietnikarstwo Polskie (Society
of Friends of Memoirs 1982). The close connection between the archives and
politics was confirmed by the events of the 1980s and the fate of the archive itself
after the triumph of Solidarnosc. Identified with the preceding Communist
regime under which it had operated, it was first starved of funds, then largely
replaced by the more recent Karta and the Archive of the Polish Republic and,
finally, largely dismantled. Despite the loss for Polish and European history and
social sciences, its thousands of autobiographies nonetheless provide
opportunities to analyse the history of the archives for the connections between
research methodologies, cultural changes and political regimes.
In the transition to the second generation of the archives for autobiography, a
particularly important experiment deserves to be noted. In 1937 the Mass
Observation Archive was established in England by an anthropologist, Tom
Harrison, the poet (later professor of sociology) Charles Madge and the film-
maker Humphrey Jennings who wanted to create an ‘anthropology of
ourselves’, a portrait of the everyday lives of ordinary people (Calder 1985).2 Its
investigative technique was a kind of ‘participant observation’ at a distance, since
it relied on a 2,000-strong team of observers and diarists who sent in reports and
completed questionnaires on local perceptions and discussions of specific events.
Where the initiative foreshadowed the archives of the second generation was in
its determination to unearth the views of ordinary, especially marginalized,
groups whose voices would collectively make up a ‘history from below’ in
contrast to official histories. Thus the second generation of archives, created
mainly in Germany, Austria and Italy between the 1960s and 1980s, tended to
focus on specific groups – soldiers, migrants, women and children, political and
trade union activists – in the effort to record the lives of those who might
otherwise have disappeared from history. The archives were generally small-
scale, collected written and oral texts and were designed to conjugate social
Anna Iuso
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knowledge and political commitment. Their organizers were often academics
and intellectuals who had come from the same social background being studied;
and their intellectual production in the form of books, films and exhibitions was
intended as part of the wider project of recovering and re-establishing collective
identities that had been lost or remained hidden.
In Italy, the best example of this effort to produce active social knowledge was
undoubtedly the Archivio della Scrittura Popolare, established in 1987 at the
Museo Storico in Trento. Despite its relatively modest dotation of ca. 650
documents and a specific focus on texts produced during the First World War,
the Trento archive took on a major intellectual and organizational role in the
systematic reflection in Italy on the nature of popular writing. For two decades
national seminars were held there on themes such as the nature and location of
popular autobiographies, writing by women and children, letters written to
celebrities.3 In the same year the archive took on the role of coordinating the
newly created Federation of the Archives of Popular Writing (Federazione degli
Archivi di Scrittura Popolare; FASP) which brought together a great variety of
similarly inspired but more loosely organized and poorly resourced research and
cultural centres based in universities and local communities.4 Until the
Federation faded away in the mid-1990s, its activities consisted largely of
initiatives organized by the archive in Trento. Finally, Trento provided the
occasion for the first international meeting of directors of archives of popular
writing in seven European countries (Antonelli and Iuso 2000).
Parallel tradition
Before we reach the third generation of the archives of scrittura popolare, where
Terra matta is located, we need to remember that at least since 1945 the social
sciences in Italy have been concerned with the collection of life-histories,
mostly in oral form (Clemente 2013). Their practitioners created a research
tradition parallel to the work of the archives, with the two traditions coming
together – as the membership of the FASP indicated – in the involvement of
academic historians and social scientists in the initiatives organized by the
archives in the late twentieth century. The longstanding interest in popular
culture (tradizioni popolari), attributing importance to the everyday lives and
ideas of ordinary folk, was shared by intellectuals on the boundary between
anthropology and literature. Among them stand out the peasant-poet Rocco
Scotellaro (1954, 1956), the sociologist and writer Danilo Montaldi (1960,
1961, 1970), the sociologist, poet and non-violent activist Danilo Dolci (1956)
and the anthropological writer Franco Cagnetta (1975), who were among the
first to demonstrate the value that oral autobiographies could bring to
ethnographic research. The voices that those authors included in books fusing
anthropology and literature had already come to be seen as a legitimate part of
academic enquiry, notably in the work of Ernesto de Martino, whose first
fieldwork in Lucania between 1949 and 1952 included the collection and
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transcription of autobiographies by rural workers (Gallini 1986, 105). His
encouragement to collect oral life-histories was followed up by historians (e.g.
Bosio 1975; Passerini 1984; Portelli 1985), sociologists (e.g. Ferrarrotti 1981,
1986) and anthropologists (e.g. Gallini 1981).5 As far as the collection of written
texts is concerned, the publication of the exchange of letters between a
researcher, Annabella Rossi, and Michela Margiotta, one of her semi-literate
subjects in a study of tarantism originally inspired by de Martino, was especially
significant (Rossi 1970).6 Most of the texts gathered, in part produced, by these
traditions of research were not stored in public archives but remained in
university or private hands. An exception was the case of a life-history collected
by the anthropologist Annamaria Rivera (Rivera 1984) whose first volume was
stored in the Trento archive and published at a time when both academic and
public attitudes towards the topic of memory had begun to change.
Right to memory: autobiography as heritage
The emergence in France and Italy of a third generation of archives for
autobiographies occurred in the 1980s and 1990s at a time when Europe was
discovering the pleasure and the duty of memory, a taste for the past and a
repositioning in relation to its history. In spite, or because, of the rapid passage of
this ‘short century’, it could not finish without shocks to memory. The last two
decades have seen the reopening of some of the century’s major wounds, in
particular the Shoah, raising issues of the nature of witnessing and the
‘legitimacy of memory’ (Agamben 1998; Wieviorka 1998), generating major
analyses of the relation between human beings and their pasts (Hartog 2003) and
between memory and its necessary correlate, oblivion (Todorov 1995; Ricoeur
2000). Along with the impulse to recover collective memory which the debates
on the Shoah exemplify, the West has been grasped by a kind of ‘mania for
autobiography’, the counterpart on the individual level of the retrieval and
revaluation of the events of major public importance. This passion is confirmed
by the publishing industry’s enthusiasm for anything that smacks of
autobiography, memoir and diary and by the coeval but clearly not coincidental
establishment of archives for autobiographies across Europe, representing the
leading edge of the ego-documentary wave of the late twentieth century. The
archives have rejected any limitation by theme to the documents they accept:
everything is acceptable. Attention has turned away from the content of lives of
authors and their relation to a social or historical context towards authors
themselves, their relation to the practice of writing and to the telling of their
life-stories. In these archives an autobiographical text is no longer considered
simply a resource to mine for data but rather a kind of monument, a unique
deliberate commemoration of an individual’s story. Authors are no longer
informants but subjects, for the most part at least present if not active. So the
document-archive becomes the monument-archive, taking at least two forms.
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The first was invented by Philippe Lejeune, a literary scholar who had shifted
his attention from literature proper to the autobiographies of ordinary folk.7
Towards the end of the 1980s, he invited his radio audience to send him
autobiographical texts – an open-ended invitational practice he has maintained –
which became the basis of the Association pour l’autobiographie et le Patrimoine
Autobiographique (APA), established in 1992 at Amberieu-en-Bugey, but with
reading groups in Paris and Lyon and annual meetings of the membership. The
distinctive feature of this association, leadingme to describe it as an ego-archive, is
that it is built around the direct relation between writer and text. The writers
themselves meet annually to discuss their lives, memories and writing practices;
texts from the archive are read and analysed in the annual meetings and
commented on in the association’s journal La faute a Rousseau. Lejeune’s creation
was inspired by, but deliberately distinguished from, the second model of a
monument-archive, the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN) at Pieve Santo
Stefano, where the original typescript of Terra matta arrived in 1999.
Saverio Tutino and the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale at Pieve
Like the APA, the ADN was created by a single determined figure, in this case
a journalist, Saverio Tutino, rather than an academic.8 Tutino had had a
remarkable career as a foreign correspondent for several leftwing newspapers,
was famous for his interviews of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung,
and therefore needed no introduction when he arrived at Pieve in 1984 with the
vague idea of establishing a literary festival. The notion rapidly took shape in the
form of a competition open to all for the best autobiographical text with a cash
prize (2 million lire at the time) and a guarantee of publication.
When he established the archive, Tutino was largely unaware of the existing
examples of the genre and their collection practices and was therefore convinced
that he was creating something new and unique (Iuso 2001). It did indeed differ
from the Polish precedent mentioned above insofar as the autobiographies to be
collected were not restricted to texts produced by members of a single social
category, nor were they destined to be analysed. The interest in soliciting them
was simply ethical and social: to build up an Italian memory bank that might later
be useful to historians and anthropologists, but which was first of all intended to
preserve the individual voices of ordinary folk that Tutino considered had for too
long been unheard. Tutino’s own life provided the impetus for this task.
Communist from an early age, he had become a journalist in order to provide
detailed, and by no means uncritical, information on the actual application of
communist ideology. After years of journalism he seemed to have become
convinced that this approach had ignored the voices of individuals, lost in the
focus on the masses. How best to enable these voices to emerge? The question
was explicitly posed and elaborated in his own diaries. Tutino himself not only
kept a daily diary for many years but came from a family background in which his
parents had kept a diary, and his brother and one of his daughters had eachwritten
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autobiographies. So his background, personal practice and ideological
commitment all encouraged the idea that individual voices could best be heard
through their own writings and the narration of their lives (Iuso 2012a).
With three decades of activity, more than 7,000 texts collected, its own
journal and initiatives attracting general and academic attention, the ADN has
been an unquestionable success. Several factors help to explain it. First, Tutino
succeeded in attracting the active and continuing involvement of young people
from Pieve itself – Luca Ricci is an example – and from the surrounding area.
Their role in organizing the archive, publicizing it online and helping to get
some of the autobiographies published has been fundamental. Second, the ADN
immediately received support from Pieve’s municipal council which provided it
with the legal basis for its existence in perpetuity, offered free use of the public
buildings to house the archive, and provided financial assistance, in particular by
assuming the cost of the salaries of two employees. Third, Tutino, the town’s
mayor and local enthusiasts quickly grasped that the creation of a national
memory bank in a town with few resources, just 3,500 inhabitants and largely
destroyed in 1944, could nonetheless benefit from the attraction exercised by the
surrounding Tuscan towns rich in art and culture (Anghiari, Sansepolcro and
Monterchi, for example) and achieve a distinctive place in the region’s tourism
circuit. Pieve would create its own novel form of patrimony in the shape of an
archive of memories and would thus recover the visibility that had vanished as a
result of destruction in the war. Fourth, Tutino’s own reputation and extensive
network of contacts helped, on one hand, to secure the presence of nationally
known cultural figures to serve on the Prize jury and attend the award
ceremonies and, on the other, to attract the regular interest of press, radio and
television. Among the many regular visitors to the ADN from the world of film
and theatre, Nanni Moretti has made a particular contribution by converting
some of the personal stories from the archive into short films. Thus, thanks to the
combination of those factors, in the course of the past thirty years the Archive has
achieved the original ambition to become the ‘capital of Italian memory’.
Tutino’s conviction that the ADN must become the place where individuals
have the opportunity to leave traces of their unique voices has been fundamental
to its work. However, although that goal might seem simply to copy the
objectives of some of the archives I have already mentioned, the distinctive way
it has been interpreted should not be missed. For the ADN the text is neither
simply material for a ‘history from below’ nor just an anthropological occasion
to provide an opportunity to be heard to people whose voices are usually
inaudible or ignored. Rather, the researchers invited to contribute to the
Archive’s work should collaborate with the autobiographies’ authors in
constructing new texts out of the originals. Once Tutino had learned of the
existence of other archives, this preferred method of working became the rule.
He linked to the ADN’s activities a number of academic specialists in life-
histories in an effort to create a kind of open laboratory, establishing in 1995 a
scientific committee to oversee the appropriateness of the work undertaken on
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the texts. However, giving equal respect to the perspectives of the academics, the
demands of the ADN and the expectations of the authors proved very difficult.
In fact, in 2004 after two conferences and a few publications the committee was
disbanded, caught up in the dilemma marking every discussion on the
publication of the kinds of text the ADN received – and particularly central in
the case of Terra matta. Should they be published exactly as they had been
written? Or was it legitimate to intervene on them to facilitate both reading and
publication? The intellectuals on the committee favoured scientific rigour; but
the interest of the ADN was to secure publication and the widest possible
diffusion of its texts. However, the disbanding of the committee has not meant
the end of collaboration with its members. The journal Primapersona has become
a meeting-place for intellectuals and non-professional authors, supporting the
right not only to write one’s own memoirs but also to debate how they should
best be used and circulated.
New frontier
At present the ADN is developing a new initiative in the form of the
digitalization of its archive. From the outset its policy had been to insist on visits
to the archive in person in order to consult the texts. To reach this out-of-the-
way place was understood as a kind of pilgrimage, an analogy to the retracing of
the path of memory itself, which only a few dozen people managed each year.
It was a destination to be reached only with difficulty so that the several
thousand life-histories with all their individual and collective significance could
be appreciated in quasi-seclusion. From the Archive’s point of view, the
necessity of the journey to Pieve underpinned a conception of the institution as
part of Italy’s heritage to be appreciated only in situ and thus an irreplaceable
feature of the cultural and tourist circuit.
However, technical advances create both new demands and new ways to
preserve heritage. The symbolic emphasis on the uniqueness of the Archive’s
remote physical location has been reversed: openness has replaced restrictiveness
of access with the intention of enabling the ADN to enhance its reputational
aura by the dissemination of its patrimony rather than simply by the storage of
specific contents. The process of digitalization, now two years old, began with
the most famous document stored at the archive: the life-history written on a
bed-sheet by an Emilian peasant, Clelia Marchi, who had begun to make use of
this component of her dowry for her autobiography shortly after being widowed
(Marchi 2012).9 The sheet is displayed each year at the award ceremony for the
Prize but has to be preserved under glass for the rest of the year. Digitalization
therefore made this document available in a way that had been impossible until
then. Within very few years the entire contents of the Archive will become
available online, enabling for the first time not only a much wider appreciation
of the material form of the original documents but also the expansion of
comparative research on their contents.
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Archive effect
In conclusion, I want to note a largely unanticipated consequence of the
establishment of archives for autobiography. Perhaps it could have been
imagined many years ago when Saverio Tutino gave instructions to the first
group of readers of the texts entered for the Prize on how to sort out false from
genuine autobiographies.10 ‘False’ in this context refers to those texts composed
with the specific intention of participating in the Pieve Prize as if it were a
literary competition, identifiable by the incongruities of dates and the
improbability of details and by reference to the actual lives of their authors. The
genuine autobiographies had then to be read with extreme respect for the lives
narrated, to be ‘listened to on tiptoe’ as Tutino suggested, and for judgements on
their authors to be suspended in favour of concentration simply on the texts.
The problem of how to assess those writings, mostly ungrammatical and usually
unable to translate the details into a coherent narrative, remained. At this point it
became vital to distinguish between the life and the ability to recount it,
between grammar and the ability to convey happenings, emotions and
sentiments without recourse to any literary skill. Of course readers were not to
succumb to any pointless fascination exercised by ‘exotic’ ungrammatical texts
or to the temptation to consider poor writing in itself a criterion of a good
autobiography. Texts needed to communicate effectively either exceptional
events or everyday events that might have happened to anyone, representative in
some unspecified sense of a common social reality.
The very existence of ‘false autobiographies’ showed how the Pieve Prize had
come to be known about and attract the attention of some ambitious authors.
It also points to a further consequence: the appearance of genuine
autobiographies that had been written not spontaneously but with the specific
intention of competing for the Prize. They have now been a reality for at least
fifteen years, revealed by the insertion of space on the document consigning the
text to the archive in which authors are invited to say why they have written
their autobiographies: in several cases it contains the honest declaration that the
primary motivation had been to enter for the Prize. In other words, the Archive
has indirectly provided not only encouragement to life-writing but also specific
models – in the shape of the prizewinning texts that have already been
published – for composition. This is one way in which the array of
autobiographies, at least in Europe, can in part derive from a practice that is
much less spontaneous than might be imagined. In the past, the contexts that
have prompted people to write down their lives have been various: the tribunals
of the Inquisition, the training-schools of communist parties, the academies of
the seventeenth century, and the asylums of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries for the mentally ill. Of course we do not yet have the means of
assessing the scale or quality of the autobiographies involuntarily solicited by the
very existence of the archives themselves. But, as is particularly clear in the
method of calling for contributions that the Polish archives adopted, they have
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come to occupy a perhaps increasingly important place in a system of cultural
circularity, unimagined when the ADN was established.
Notes
1 The term ‘archive for autobiographies’ (archivio autobiografico), which appears for thefirst time in Lejeune (1991) indicates a centre with the status of foundation orassociation to store autobiographical texts written by non-professional writers.
2 Although the original project was abandoned in the 1950s, it was revived in the1980s; the entire archive is now stored at the University of Sussex. Details of thepublications deriving from the original and later materials can be found on the MassObservation website at: http://www.massobs.org.uk/publications_1974_onwards.htm.
3 The papers presented at the seminars were published in the journalMateriali di lavoro.For further information on the archive’s work and publications, see http://fondazione.museostorico.it/index.php/Progetti/Principali-ambiti-tematici-di-ricerca/Archivio-della-scrittura-popolare.
4 The list of members gives a sense of their variety: Archives of Popular Writing basedin Trento, Genoa and Este, the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Bibliotecainformatizzata dei Libri di Famiglia; the Centro cultura popolare in Alessandria,the Coordinamento centri demologici toscani in Siena, the SovrintendenzaArchivistica Toscana in Florence, the association ‘I giorni cantati’ in Rome, theAlfabetismo e cultura scritta centre at the University of Perugia, the Archivio dellacultura di base in Bergamo, the Centro iniziative culturali in Bolognetta (Palermo) aswell as individual adherents from the universities of Siena, Bari, Verona, Pavia,Trieste, Milan and from the Piedmont regional administration. Work at the archive atthe University of Genoa, directed by the historian Antonio Gibelli and containingmainly autobiographical accounts, was particularly important in creating a grassrootshistory of the 1914–18 war. For a general survey of the work of such archives increating a ‘history from below’, see Lyons (2010, 2012).
5 Especially interesting in this genre is the 400-page transcription of the life recountedby a Tuscan woman, Io so nata a Santa Lucia. Il racconto autobiografico di una donna toscanatra mondo contadino e societa d’oggi (Di Piazza and Mugnaini 1988).
6 The book included an influential essay on the concept of ‘popular Italian’ (italianopopolare) by the linguist Tullio De Mauro (Rossi 1970, 43–75).
7 For information on his work see his website: http://www.autopacte.org/.8 For the history of the ADN and the importance of Tutino’s role, see two issues of theADN’s journal Primapersona: 2004, 12, ‘Vent’anni di archivio’; 2012, 25, ‘CaroSaverio’. The story of the Archive has also been reworked as a piece for the theatre,written and performed by Mario Perrotta (Perrotta 2009).
9 See Iuso (2012b) for a preliminary analysis of the relation between women’s writing,needlework and embroidery.
10 On the role of the various groups of readers, see Ricci and Santangelo (2014), in thisissue.
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