Abstract
Elizabeth L. Krause, Unraveled: A Weaver’s Tale of Life Gone Modern, University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2009; 282 pp.; 9780520258488, £37.95 (hbk); 9780520258495, £14.95 (pbk)
For a few years in the 1990s, Italy held the distinction of having the world’s lowest fertility rate. An army of social scientists, politicians, and pundits have since then shed rivers of ink trying to explain how the cradle of Catholicism, once a ‘proletarian nation’ which exported its oversupply of daughters and sons by the millions, could have an official birth-rate of 1.2 children per woman. This ‘quiet revolution’ in reproductive behaviour is the subject of this innovative and uniquely affecting book. Krause, an anthropologist by training, decided to carry out her research in Tuscany, a region where this transformation has been particularly profound and rapid. Even though Tuscany’s city dwellers were among the first in Italy to start limiting their fertility in the late nineteenth century, the region’s rural masses, embedded in the rigid class and gender hierarchies of the sharecropping system and artisanal manufacturing, kept having large families until after World War II, when sharecropping collapsed and small-scale industrialization spread.
Krause’s central argument is that this rapid change occurred precisely because of the social, political, and cultural structures that had sustained and promoted high fertility for centuries. The rural women who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s found themselves able to confront the traumas of the past and embark on their personal, and yet profoundly collective, paths to modernity. Crucial to this transformative ability was memory, which, Krause maintains, ‘people hold … in their bodies, in their emotions, in their senses, even in their muscles’ (141). Tuscany’s newly ‘modern’ women brought these embodied memories of past traumas and injustices to bear on an uncertain but exhilarating present, and began to have drastically fewer children. The author argues that this change was not so much the result of individual choices that can be summated with statistical tools as the product of ‘shifts in the outlooks, or ideological fields, that shape people’s senses of who they are, of their subjectivities’ (227). In light of these theoretical commitments, Krause eschews the reductionism of traditional demography in favour of an ethnographic methodology open to the suggestions of interpretative approaches, including literary theory and even fiction.
Following James Clifford’s assertion that fiction’s Latin root (fingere) qualifies both imaginative writing and scholarship as creative practices, as well as Ruth Behar’s plea for an overtly empathetic anthropology, Krause makes the bold move of devoting the first half of her book to a fictional rendition of the pivotal moments in the life of her main informer, peasant weaver Emilia Raugei, one of the author’s neighbours in the hill town of Carmignano, on the western outskirts of Florence. Before World War II this town was one of the main production centres for the world-renowned Florentine straw hats, and Emilia was a proficient straw weaver. In a series of vividly written chapters, the narrator introduces us to the ways in which Emilia was socialized into the trade as a small girl, as well as to her network of family and friends, with the goal of capturing the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’ (239). Emilia and her large family, for example, are imagined being forced to gather in front of a radio to listen to Mussolini’s 1927 Ascension Day speech, in which the dictator preached the necessity of Italy’s demographic ‘rebirth’. By the same token, in a later chapter the narrator shows us how Emilia, suffering from an ovarian cyst in the immediate post-war years, committed herself to having only one child in the wake of a traumatic encounter with Italy’s authoritarian healthcare system.
In the second part of the book, the author switches to a more conventional scholarly voice, albeit without giving up empathy in favour of the search for scientific generalizations. Ironically, the first person pronoun, absent in the fictional section, abounds in the second part, which can be read as an equally creative and subjective account of Krause’s interactions with Emilia’s social relations, memories, and even silences. In fact, it was not Emilia, but another former weaver in her circle who presented the author with an important interpretative key to understanding the switch to small families. Almost as a slip, this informer brought up the once widespread practice of wet nursing, opening a window onto a trauma-filled past in which children were embedded in exchanges that blurred the distinction between economic and emotional pursuits. With the help of archival records, Krause proceeds to reconstruct how the demands of the trade had forced generations of Tuscan weavers to give up their babies to be nursed by other rural women, often with heartbreaking consequences. The ‘dry’ economy of straw weaving depended on the ‘wet’ economy of nursing, and both these locally embedded activities depended on the coercive power of the global capitalist economy. It was also against the legacy of these traumas that Emilia and her generation devoted their care to increasingly fewer children.
Overall, historians searching for a conventional explanation for Europe’s fertility decline are bound to be disappointed by this book, which refuses to posit universal behavioural mechanisms. Krause, however, presents a different kind of historical truth, embedded in the flesh and blood of specific people and in the materiality of a specific landscape. In the end, the truth that she and Emilia tell has the power and persuasiveness of a beautifully narrated story, one that can make you laugh and cry like life itself.
University of Michigan