Introduction

In this paper we examine the relationship between family and the spatial distribution of kin and affines in the small north Puglian town of Ascoli Satriano. We have two main aims : first, to investigate neighbourhood organization and the ways in which it has changed over time; and secondly, to explore the links between families and the wider kinship networks of which they are a part. Both these topics have been under-researched. We know far less about the spatial divisions and internal dynamics of southern agro-towns than their central Italian counterparts. Furthermore, despite a strong post-war anglo-american anthropological interest in southern Italy, there have been few recent specialist monographs on family and marriage; none that explore the wider ramifications of kinship systems. Early work by Davis and others on patterns of co-operation between extra-familial kin and affines, and on neighbourhood organization has not been sustained (Cronin : 1970, Davis : 1973, J & P Schneider: 1976). In these circumstances, the recent criticism of both Levi and Kertzer that too little attention has been paid to kinship beyond the household is fully justified (Levi : 1990, Kertzer, Hogan & Karweit : 1992).

The main spur to the reappraisal of the significance of both neighbourhoods and wider kinship groupings has come in part from the work of a new generation of indigenous ethnographers that has been more concerned than their anglo-american predecessors with the formation of wider kinship groups and informal associations (Minicuci : 1989, Palumbo : 1991, Resta : 1991); even more from a revitalized social and demographic history of the southern Italian family. In particular, Delille's revisionist historical analysis of lineage organization, repeat marriage and contrada structure in early modern southern Italy both challenges the established anthropological view that south-west Europe is characterized by nuclear families and bilateral kinship, and breaks with a style of historical and anthropological analysis which, in recent years, and especially in the Italian south has tended to over-privilege the study of household organization and variations in marriage patterns narrowly defined (Delille : 1988).

Yet despite these advances, our knowledge of southern Italian neighbourhoods and of the range of variation in the ways in which households are grouped into wider kinship and territorial units both in the present and the recent past is still fragmentary and uncertain. What meaning can be attached to the named rural and urban contrade and casate so often encountered in notarial accounts of seventeenth and eighteenth- century north Puglian towns? What is their social and ritual content? How far can Delille's analysis of Campanian quartiers lignages (whose lingering twentieth -century presence in San Marco dei Cavoti has been confirmed by Palumbo (op.cit.)) be extended to other parts of the southern mainland?

These problems (which are particularly acute in the mobile and commercially dynamic communities of the north Puglian Tavoliere) are neatly posed by Delille himself (op.cit. Parte Seconda, II, 1-2.). While he is perhaps right to suggest that despite their apparent chaos, disorder and amorphousness, Puglian towns are as tightly structured as their Campanian equivalents, his 'solution' - matrilineal inflexion, repeat marriage with distant kin, affinal re-linkage - is less fully specified. What are the spatial dynamics of Puglian 'lineages'? How are they politically represented? In what ways are neighbourhoods bounded? Do they share the same corporate trappings - contrada chapels and midwives, ritual competitions - or values of civiltà as their Campanian or central Italian counterparts. Without further specification, Delille's analysis offers an important but limited advance on Davis' (1973) earlier formulation of matrifocal neighbourhoods in Pisticci. Similarly, Da Molin's recent survey of household composition and marriage patterns between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in south Italy (and especially Puglia) presents an illuminating account of the distinctive features of southern family systems - nuclear families, early marriage, neolocality, a paucity of living-in servants - but provides few clues to the articulation and significance of wider kinship or affinal ties or the relationships between households within or between neighbourhoods (Da Molin : 1990).

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