Between 1943 and 1945 thousands of southern Italian peasants marched on their villages and towns and took over, red flag in hands, proclaiming the establishment of ‘independent’, ‘popular’, or ‘red’ republics. The peasant republics did not last long, a few weeks, sometimes a few days—yet implemented revolutionary measures such as the abolition of latifundium and the re-distribution of land, an egalitarian distribution of food, a democratic fiscal system, and the formation of popular tribunals and people’s armies.
This paper uses the forgotten history of the southern peasant republics to conceptualize an anthropological approach to socio-political revolutions. To this end, the paper understands revolution an experiential-existential and ritualistic lens, tied to the notion of liminality. The argument holds that the revolutions in the southern Italian countryside were liminal social dramas, in which there was a structural relationship between the cognitive/ideological, affective/emotional, and conative/behavioral dimensions of people’s lived experiences. By investigating the peasants’ words for clues on their sense of time and place in history, the article aims to show that the peasant struggle involved a quest for meaning and self-grounding under historically concrete conditions of political and existential uncertainty.
On the comparative theoretical level, this paper contends that scholars should disentangle the study of revolutions from structures, causality, and ideology and make comparison at the level of symbolism, ritualization, social forces, and forms.
