Jacob Bessen on How Sicilians are Neighbouring with Migrants

(and the practices we can all learn!)

I’m sharing this interview with Jacob Bessen, an anthropologist and student of David Graeber, with everyone, all subscribers! The topic is incredibly close to my heart—both because I’m deeply attached to questions of neighbouring and political sociality, and because it relates to my own Sicilian roots. Jacob and I had such a wonderful time discussing everything from Pope Francis vs. JD Vance to five key rules for neighbouring well to how Ronald Reagan’s advisor and Robert Putnam got Sicilian women so, so wrong.

I really hope you listen and/or read. I’ve put the video directly below, then a summary of the five rules for neighbouring that Jacob came up with (lived out in modern times by Sicilians and recent migrants, but applicable to all of us, and derived from peasant economies of the past), and then the full interview, which is very very long. I hope you all enjoy, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

Sutera, which is incredible in many ways.

FIVE RULES FOR NEIGHBOURING (a summary)

Neighboring, in this account, is neither friendship nor charity but a third kind of bond, a relationship you build intentionally with the people who are physically near you. We discuss why a depopulating (and re-populating with migrants!) Sicilian town, forced to consistently make and remake its social world, turns out to be such a good place to learn it from. At my request, Jacob distilled what he observed in his time living there into five rough rules of thumb for neighbouring. They are practical, not sentimental, and each one is designed to dodge a particular way that good intentions might go astray or curdle.

1. Audit yourself, and be economic

Start not by simply giving things away but by taking inventory. Look honestly at your space and your possessions and sort them: what do you want to keep purely for yourself, and what would actually be more fun if it were shared or done alongside other people? Framing it this way matters, because it heads off the biggest misconception about neighborliness — that it is a form of self-sacrifice, a slow surrender of your stuff and privacy. It isn’t. You keep a genuine private core (”this is my home, my thing, I need this”) and consciously open up the rest. Sarah connects this to the distinction between private property (which you use to extract value from others) and personal property (which is simply yours to use), and adds a third category the town illustrates: personal property that you’ve deliberately opened to your neighbors. The lawnmower or the Tupperware stops being a source of resentment (“the neighbor who never gave it back”) because, for this select category of things, sharing is the default, something that brings connection and joy, but also whoever needs to can reclaim it when they need it.

2. Show that you’re present

You must show that you are disponible, available, and what you’re available for. Modern houses, built for self-contained nuclear families, are sealed against the world, the smells and sounds and life kept in, and that seal is precisely what has to be broken. In Sutera, people actively mourn the older ways of living around piazzas and street corners, because they wish they could easily see and feel the presence of others nearby and invite them in and go to others without invitation.

Sans very close quarters, nobody can tell you want to be their neighbor unless you signal it. So you have to do visible, low-key work: keep the windows open, spend time on the balcony, greet people outside, be disponibile, which in this culture counts as a virtue. The trick is to invite without dominating. Jacob’s emblem for this is the half pumpkin: a woman he’d just met knocked with half a squash and said, “I have a problem, this pumpkin’s too big, do you want half?” It’s not a “gift” in the common way modern things are.It creates no debt, it’s dressed as a favor to her (help me not waste this) rather than generosity toward him. That’s the opposite of the modern gift, which is about charity and can make too much fuss of both the giving and the receiving. Sarah ties this to political/community organizing: people bristle at being told “I have help for you” but light up when asked for their help. Presence is an open, standing, unforced invitation to co-create a relationship — the social equivalent of leaving a sign on the door that says what you’re up for.

3. Care for spaces that aren’t yours (but become “ours”)

Rights of “ours” are established by tending the commons. Jacob’s example is a friend who, fed up with uncollected rubbish, started sweeping the patch in front of her house; a neighbor saw her, joined in, and now they share a clean, jointly held space. This is why neighborly solidarity tends to bloom exactly where the state has withdrawn — the informal “ours” has to do the work the public sector no longer does. But it goes far beyond litter: it grows into chairs set out on summer evenings, shared drinks, kids playing while everyone loosely keeps an eye on them. The mindset shift is from individual owners to shared participation. It also requires a skill our culture has half-forgotten: unstructured hanging out. In Sutera people don’t ask “what are you doing tonight?” but “are you going out?”: meaning, are you wandering, will we bump into each other at the usual spot? In this context, small towns aren’t boring because people are brilliant at talking, storytelling, and joking. That art atrophies without practice. In contrast, much sociality in much of modern life is organised around consumption rather than presence.

4. Be aware, shut your trap, and lend a hand

The hardest rule, because nosiness and solidarity are tangled together: to have neighbors is to see into each other’s lives, and the same visibility that lets you help also lets you gossip, judge, and expose. Living close to people means you will learn things abot people’s most vulernable bits: their marriages, their parenting, their grief, their sex lives... What proves you’re trustworthy with that knowledge is handling it responsibly (even when you help). Jacob’s story: someone needed work, and someone who barely knew him beckoned Jacob over, asked only “what are his skills?”, and set a job in motion, all without ever using the man’s name or spelling out his circumstances. The help arrives disguised as coincidence and request (”I heard you’d be good for this”), which protects the recipient’s dignity. This connects to a deeper point Sarah raises: people are rarely afraid of helping; they’re afraid of being helped, of seeming needy or vulnerable exactly when they most are. Good neighboring lowers that cost by keeping the intimacy of vulnerability implicit. You’re saying: you get to share if you want to, but mostly, I’m just here.

5. Rinse, repeat, grow

Neighboring is a muscle. You begin with a modest audit and a few shared things, and as the practice becomes natural you find more you can fold others into and more you actually enjoy doing together, because neighbors exist not only for safety but for pleasure and convenience. Crucially, the “ours” must stay open. A neighborhood that binds too tightly (as when “ours” is just one ethnic group) curdles into something xenophobic and dies; healthy “ours” means whoever is here now, constantly reinvented as people arrive and leave. And in the course of the ongoing climate crisis, which will cause ongoing mass migration, this remaking of sociality over and over again is exactly what we’ll need. The tradition does the work, if we maintain it: the “half pumpkin” outlives any individual, if you teach it to your children (as many Sicilian women have). What you’re really building is not a fixed set of friendships but a implicit durable social ritual — one that can absorb newcomers, survive massive turnover, and be handed on throughout the human population.

TRANSCRIPT (cleaned up for clarity):

Sarah: Hello everyone. Today I’ve got Jacob with me, and we’re going to be talking about neighboring practices in Sicily and what we can all learn from them in the complicated crises of the 21st century. Do you want to tell me — who are you, and what do you research in general?

Jacob: I’m an anthropologist. I’ve researched southern Italy, specifically Sicily. I just finished my PhD, spending about two years in a small town in rural central Sicily.

Sarah: On a mountaintop. What’s it called?

Jacob: It’s called Sutera. It’s beautiful — I suggest you look it up, to picture it. It’s on top of a mountain; on a clear day you can see from one end of the island to the other. But it’s been losing a lot of people. It’s one of those towns that 50 years ago had 5,000 people, and now most of them live either in other parts of Italy where there’s better work, or in Germany, here in the UK, or in the US. Sicily has a long history of that.

Sarah: It’s worth saying — I’m half Sicilian, basically. There was a migration where something like a quarter to three-quarters of Sicilians left after World War II. What was it, half?

Jacob: A huge amount emigrated, also before World War II. It’s a really interesting history of capitalism mixing with feudalism, where no one has a future. I’d love to talk about Sicilian history, but I think that’s not —

Sarah: Yeah, no, we have to get to neighboring practices. Maybe a future podcast.

Jacob: But what ends up happening — and we don’t have to go that far back — is austerity. It’s a very familiar story: here in the UK, but also across southern Europe, and it’s strongly tied to things like structural adjustment in Africa. I have a friend doing really fantastic research on that. This town depopulates, and as a result there’s this desire for neighbors. I was really interested in houses initially. They opened a migration reception center in the early 2010s, and the initial idea —

Sarah: The people of the town opened it?

Jacob: The people of the town, yeah. It was very similar to what took place in Riace, if people are familiar with it: they said, “We have these empty houses, and there are these people who need houses. We can give them these houses, help prepare them.” And I thought, wow, that’s really interesting — passing family homes on. But the social relationships people were invested in, and the spatial metaphors for them, were much more about relationships between houses. Part of the loss people felt can be explained two ways. One is that, in the divide between public and private life, they lost this third space. It’s either mine, or it’s everyone’s, and there isn’t really an articulation of a space that’s ours — not everyone’s, and not mine.

Sarah: What do you mean, “ours” versus “everyone’s”?

Jacob: When everyone has access to something, often there’s a sense that the government is responsible for it, or that no one is. If everyone belongs, no one belongs. Whereas the thing about neighbors is there’s a clear articulation of “this is ours” — it’s the people who are here.

Sarah: Okay. So it’s inclusive, but in the sense that a whole bunch of people were invited — rather than “we’re just leaving this here” or “some institution is taking care of it.”

Jacob: Right. It’s attached to a certain form of presence, of being there. The other part is about the forms of solidarity people were pushed into. What austerity does is that you can really only keep certain links; you have less money to support different kinds of relationships. Increasingly it became: when you need help, you have your family, or you have the nation or the government. And neighbors became this thing that was neither — and that had historically represented what this peasant town turned to in the past, whether it’s trading work days or, in a time of crisis... A lot of anthropologists talk about how neighbors are a form of insurance before insurance existed, in its commercial sense. When a crisis happened, that’s who you had to turn to.

Sarah: So there’s a neighboring practice being developed here. And you mentioned to me — in our conversations in restaurants and so on, because we’ve been hanging out for a bit — that some of this comes from peasant culture.

Jacob: Part of it is that a lot of peasant work you have to do in groups. So a good chunk of it is trading work days: all four of us go work on your farm, and the next day we all work on the next person’s farm, and it cycles through. Similarly with technology — things like looms. Often only one family in the neighborhood would have a loom. And one thing that was insisted on — people did weaving, but for fun at this point; it wasn’t their main source of clothing — was that the weaving was done by women, it required at least three women, and all the product had to be divided up evenly.

Sarah: So the infrastructure is built for working collaboratively, largely based on location. They have this tradition of “yes, we do the work together, then we split the proceeds.”

Jacob: Essentially, yeah. And, as any anthropologist will tell you, the small things you do in daily life and the economic structures of society turn into your cosmic view of the world. So rituals, religious life, celebrations — all of these also have a very strong neighborhood element.

Sarah: And how did you get to this topic?

Jacob: How did I get to this topic? Part of being an anthropologist is that you say “I’m going to study this,” and then you find out people are more interested in something else, or there’s a different way of doing it. You should be surprised as an anthropologist. I was doing my master’s in London in 2019, living with a bunch of people from the Middle East and North Africa and from southern Europe, in the austerity, post–Arab Spring moment. Any headline that brought a little hope was desperately shared over the dinner table, and this was one of those things we passed around quickly — “this is really interesting, these people are welcoming migrants in a particular way.” It’s one of a number of towns in southern Europe that did this. And there are these narratives of dual crises — neither of which are crises — a crisis of immigration and a crisis of depopulation. The vast bulk of that is racist bullshit; a big chunk of it is really “we’re repopulating, but not with the people we want.” So that needs to be taken —

Sarah: And that’s especially funny in Sicily, because many Sicilians look like they’re from Tunisia or Morocco, and many of them look more like me — my grandmother had blue eyes, but that’s seen as, “yeah, that came from the Normans when they invaded.” It’s very Mediterranean. I don’t believe in race, obviously, in any biological real sense, but it looks very multiracial by default.

Jacob: Southern Italy in general has a really interesting history of race. It desperately needs more study, because it’s relevant not just within Sicily and southern Europe, but to these “white, but not quite” classes we see around Europe and the US — who are often the staunch supporters of white supremacy, but also often the number-one allies in solidarity. They can swing both ways, because of that middle space they occupy in the racial hierarchy.

Sarah: They have something to defend, in a way. But not these people in the same way.

Jacob: It changes from town to town — there’s a really different politics. This one is caught up in a Catholic understanding of difference, where someone’s moral strength is attached to their ability to help others. And the more different those others are, the better.

Sarah: Tell me more.

Jacob: The most famous example is what recently went down between the late Pope Francis and J.D. Vance.

Sarah: Great, I’m so glad they’re in this podcast.

Jacob: I bet you didn’t expect this is where we’d end up. So, J.D. Vance — I’m no theologian, so if there’s a theologian watching this, I’m so sorry if I mess it up — there’s this idea of an “order of love,” where different kinds of care for other people require different things. Vance essentially said it’s a hierarchy: you love your family most, then the nation, and basically at the bottom of the list, if you really want, you can help people beyond the national boundary. The correction Francis made — and this is really one of the things at stake here — is: no, your love for your family is attached to your ability to love those beyond yourself. It’s thinking of this almost as a muscle: the more you work it, the stronger you get.

Sarah: Not to get too diverted into theology, but I was thinking about — when I was an undergraduate many years ago, the thing people used to proselytize Christianity was C.S. Lewis, because he wrote these little pamphlets, radio essays. And he says you should start by practicing loving your spouse, because that’s hard enough.

Jacob: But in a way, Francis —

Sarah: — yeah, love your neighbor ideally after that. Like, “oh, it’s really hard to love your spouse” — which I agree with; it’s really hard to not devolve into grumpiness and anger. He says start with your spouse. But Francis is saying the opposite: love the stranger.

Jacob: Well — that these things are tied together. And the example of the spouse is such a good one, because if it’s “just focus on yourself, cut out the other relationships in your life, put all your attention on your spouse, and then it’ll go well” — everyone knows that isn’t true. Relationships are all difficult in different ways, but they reinforce one another. Having really good friends often leads to a really good spousal relationship. There’s an interrelation going on that this kind of theology was really invested in.

Sarah: That’s really cool. Okay — should we talk about some of the neighboring practices? I basically gave you homework for this podcast: come up with five-ish neighboring practices you’ve observed, with examples. And ideally we’ll be able to take these with us — even if we don’t live in Sutera, we’re still taking something from them, lovingly.

Jacob: Being an anthropologist is weird, because everything I write is about this place; it’s so embedded here. This is a nice attempt to say it in a general sense. Okay.

Practice 1: Audit yourself, and be economic. The first rule of thumb is surprising, and I say it with an asterisk, because it’ll become clearer as we go. Take a look at your space and your stuff. What do you want to just be yours? What can you offer to your community? What would be more fun if you shared it, or did it with others? The reason this is first is that it keeps us from thinking of this as self-sacrifice — that we have to give away all our stuff — and instead thinking, “what do we want to have with other people?” It also helps because, when neighborliness is going well, it becomes embedded in space.

Sarah: That’s who your neighbors are anyway.

Jacob: Right — it doesn’t require intentional cultivation. It’s “oh yeah, this is the place we hang out in.” But at some point that became the place you hang out in. Neighborliness is really embedded in the way we describe space. One of my favorite proverbs about this, in this small town, is that the house can hold as many people as the host wants. It’s an absolute refusal of any material limitation — it’s a question of will — plus the fact that most houses open onto streets or piazzas in this town. So it’s very literally as many as you’re willing to support. A lot of people would describe both the decline and their desire for neighborliness in the language of their own house: “we used to have these open houses. I really want an open house, but now houses are closed.”

Sarah: So they can have the guests.

Jacob: Though I think it’s less about guests. It’s this image of a time when people could just walk into your home. The invitation still says “this is my space” —

Sarah: It’s funny, because my Sicilian-American dad does this with neighbors who don’t have the practice. He’ll take a glass of wine at 4 p.m. and walk down the street to the one neighbor. Back when I was a kid, it was the one neighbor who was a European journalist — he finished early because he had to submit for the European timeline. So my dad would be like, “Well, Bert’s available,” and just go down the street with a glass of wine. Dutch people don’t necessarily have this.

Jacob: It’s totally “treat this house as if it’s yours.” It’s wanting other people to feel at home here. And — we often say “take everything, use everything you want,” and I don’t think that’s a good method. You have to know “this is my space, this is my thing, I need to have this,” but I can divide my stuff between what I really enjoy sharing and hanging out with people over, and what I have to keep as my home.

Sarah: It strikes me — to be the political theorist here — as a nice third thing in the distinction between private and personal property. Marxists are always talking about private property, which is a problem not just because it’s yours, but because you use it to extract value from other people. And then there’s personal property, which is yours because you’re using it — your house is personal property if you’re just using it, but it becomes private property if you’re a landlord. There’s a nice thing here: there’s personal property, and then there’s personal property that I’ve opened to my neighbors.

Jacob: Right — there are rights entailed in my personal property as well. “I have this, but if you need it...” And this is the opposite of the classic joke about American gated society: the neighbor who never returned the thing.

Sarah: Right, the Tupperware.

Jacob: Exactly — the Tupperware, the lawnmower. This is instead “oh yeah, we share it. Who cares if it’s at your house? Who cares if it’s at mine? When one of us needs to cut grass, it’s there.” And I don’t have to sit around resenting you for not returning it, because as soon as I need it, I say, “hey, can I take it back?”

Practice 2: Show that you’re present.

Sarah: So this is thing two.

Jacob: This is thing two — my first attempt. Like the discussion about open or closed houses, a lot of the question of neighborliness is about how we build the world. Part of the complaint was that new houses were built for nuclear families. The bonds of interdependence that came with peasant labor were no longer there under wage labor, so the house became a site of familial reproduction closed off to the world. You have to signal to other people that these extra-familial connections are wanted — you have to do extra work, where in the past they thought it was obvious, no one questioned it. There’s a word you used, in one of the things you sent me — disponibile.

Sarah: Yeah — that you’re an available person.

Jacob: Right, it’s a virtue. There are a handful of ways of saying this, but the rule in general is: how are people going to know you want to be their neighbor unless you let them know? At the same time, we fear overly domineering neighbors, so you have to do this in a way where you’re extending an invitation to co-create a relationship. One of my memories — and this is maybe the first example of something that happened constantly — is that I’d just moved into the town, and a woman came over holding half a pumpkin. She said, “Listen, I have a problem. This pumpkin is too big. Is there any chance you want half a pumpkin?” And I said, “Yeah, I could take half a pumpkin.” So the whole thing wasn’t established as a debt. It’s also wonderful in this concept of waste: “No, no, I need your help to keep this from going to waste.” A lot of food-sharing came this way — “I made too much, and you’re welcome to it.” It’s a medium for extending a relationship. And you don’t always have to accept it. It’s even different from “oh, welcome to the neighborhood, I made you cookies.” It’s “I made too many.”

Sarah: Because there’s something in the super-modern idea of the gift that’s like, “I’m being generous to you.” That’s not solidarity, it’s charity.

Jacob: Yeah — this is inviting someone in. “I’ve done this, would you like part of it?” is really different from “I’m giving you part of our collective economy.”

Sarah: And obviously it’s implied: next time, you have too much pumpkin.

Jacob: Exactly. And it shows someone you’re thinking of them. These acts lead to something larger — there’s a big academic word for it, sensorium — but when you’re in a neighborhood where people are close together, everyone knows it. Not because people are saying “we’re best buddies,” but because there are smells and sounds moving through walls. The idea of the closed-in family comes from that hermetic seal — the smell of food doesn’t leave, the sounds of the house don’t leave. So keeping the windows open, greeting people when you see them outside — it helps that Sicily is temperate, so you can keep windows open and spend a lot of time on your balcony — but demonstrating that openness is actually the thing people miss. People often feel, “I’d love for this to be more of a neighborhood,” but there’s no way for others to see they have that desire.

Sarah: You need a little sign outside your door: “here are things I’m up for.” Literally, maybe. That’s often how mutual aid turns into neighborliness — “here’s what I have that I can share,” and relationships come from what you have, as opposed to what you’re doing. In my organizing training, we often say that when you want to recruit people, it’s not good to just tell them “I have stuff for you,” because they can get offended — especially in our society, people will say “I’m fine, I don’t need your help, I’m not that needy.” Whereas if you ask them for their help, they’re like, “oh, I could be involved.” So it seems like there’s work to do here.

Jacob: One of my favorite things — there’s a long tradition in southern Italian organizing of saying “we’re going to do some organizing stuff, and we’re also going to hang out,” and those two things are seen as mutually supporting. The social and the political are both necessary. There’s a group I work with and really love in Palermo, and they have aperitivo con motivo and aperitivo senza motivo — aperitivo with a motive and aperitivo without a motive.

Sarah: I love that. What’s an aperitivo with a motive?

Jacob: “We’re inviting Sarah to speak about her recent book, and then we’ll get drinks and all chat and say what we thought.” And without a motive, it’s “it’s Tuesday, come over.”

Sarah: Cool. So you need to show that you’re disponibile.

Jacob: You have to demonstrate to people that this is the kind of relationship you want.

Practice 3: Care for spaces that aren’t yours — because this helps establish rights of “ours.” Sorry, this is three; I’ll be better. I was just talking to a friend complaining about a lack of public cleanup. She started cleaning up the area in front of her house, and then her neighbor saw her and joined in, and now they have this clean area together. This is why we often see neighborhood solidarity becoming really strong when there’s an absence of something like a state to provide services — that third space becomes really important for maintaining common things. And this can blossom, instead of just being about trash cleanup, into “we have this whole infrastructure of chairs that we put out, and we sit together and have drinks in the evenings, or we let the kids go out and play and we all know someone’s watching them.” A lot of this is about cultivating space and seeing yourself not as the owner but as a participant in it — where old people sit and chat, where young people play. Having some food and drink and sharing something there is really key. And I think that’s one of the easiest things to wrap your head around.

Sarah: But it’s still pretty rare. It’s still hard for people to imagine — “maybe I should grab three people and go clean up that weird strip between the two roads.”

Jacob: Yeah, but it then becomes a space we can use for our activities. I remember in my neighborhood as a kid, you’d finish your homework and go outside and hang out until other kids came, and then you’d meet up there.

Sarah: You were lucky, I think, because even by my time that was seen as a bit scary. I’m 35 — it depends on the place.

Jacob: I’m 31.

Sarah: Wow, you were lucky then.

Jacob: There’s this whole skillset of just hanging out. People in this town won’t say “hey, what are you doing this evening?” They’ll say, “are you going out?” — meaning, are you wandering around? Because we’ll bump into each other, or we’ll be at our neighborhood spot, and I’ll know where to find you. People think small towns are boring — that’s not my experience, but it’s because people are really good at talking. They’re really good storytellers. It’s an anthropologist’s paradise: just sitting together, people telling stories, making jokes. The art of chatting is really different from “we’re going to make plans to go see this new bar that only does Star Wars–themed drinks.” That becomes about the space you’re trying to visit, rather than just hanging out together in a space that’s yours.

Sarah: And you need to practice, otherwise the town might be boring.

Jacob: Oh, it would be very boring.

Sarah: Okay, so that’s the third one.

Jacob: Practice 4: Be aware, shut your trap, and lend a hand. The fourth is a little trickier. The interesting thing — or perhaps the problem — here, and this is something people like Silvia Federici have thought a lot about, is that something like nosiness or gossip and something like solidarity are often really entangled, even though they’re not the same thing. Part of having neighbors is that you see into their lives. A huge amount of our latent knowledge, almost our proverbs about neighbors, is the fear that they understand: “what if the neighbors see?” is the classic 1960s America — “what would the neighbors say?” If you have a good relationship, they’re going to see. But if you have a bad relationship, they’re also going to see.

Sarah: This reminds me of living in a polyamorous network, because you do know crazy stuff about other people — and people have very different ideas of what should be shared. I remember once mentioning to a group, “oh, this person went to the gym recently with this other person, they’re helping them learn the gym.” To me this was innocuous, but no — even that was seen as, “they’re actually really sensitive about that,” not even getting to sex or love. You learn very quickly to moderate what’s shareable — not that I’m great at it.

Jacob: To a certain extent, whether it’s neighbors or polyamorous relationships, it’s about living with people. You’re just going to find out about things — we’re not that coordinated, stuff’s going to happen. The way you prove you’re worthy of that knowledge is to handle it with responsibility and to try to help. There’s an anthropologist, Clara Han, who has great work on this, but one example from my own field site: someone needed a job. It had reached the point where they were trying to figure out how to take care of their kids. I was their friend, and I was talking with them, and someone who didn’t know them at all — I was out one night — did the finger, the little beckon, “come over.” And they just said, “What would he like to do? What are his skills?” We had a little chat, and this eventually became part of how this person was put in contact with a job. So on the one hand, the person who beckoned me over was doing the absolute minimum verbally — she didn’t use his name, she didn’t say “I heard about this, and therefore that.”

Sarah: And I’m not sure he’s ever known this was part of how it ended up happening.

Jacob: No, I don’t think so. But I think he absolutely knows it came from somebody looking out for him. Because at the end it’s like, “Oh, I heard you’d be good for this job.” Something has happened socially —

Sarah: It’s better, in a way, if it’s made to appear very natural and needed.

Jacob: Exactly. And there’s no acknowledgment of, “Yes, here are your personal circumstances, we need to go into detail about this.” It’s really just keeping it as much of a secret as you can while also trying to help. And that stems from this problem: you don’t want someone exploiting your secrets, you don’t want someone laughing at you. That’s a pretty common fear. And yet place-based solidarity really depends on having knowledge of other people. Trying to work through that tension is always flawed and tricky.

Sarah: Right — because in a way what you need is people who know just a tiny bit more about you than you’d necessarily have divulged, because that’s actually where your point of vulnerability lies. And I think the main reason people struggle with this — I live in London, which is statistically one of the places in Europe where people know their neighbors the least — and my experience as a mutual aid organizer, running a food cooperative in my neighborhood, is that the problem isn’t that people don’t want to help each other. There are a couple of Scrooge-like characters in any neighborhood, but most people really want to help their neighbors. It’s that they’re terrified, or anxious, or unsure — depending on the person — about being helped.

And the worst part for them is they don’t want to seem like scroungers, like they’re needy. And the time when you’re most helped is usually the time when you’re most vulnerable — you’ve lost your job, your spouse is sick, your kid did something tricky. The point where your neighbor can most help you is the point where you’re vulnerable and, in some sense, unable. People are so afraid of being seen as vulnerable and unable.

I’m a secular Jew, to be clear, but I think there’s something nice in the Catholicism on my dad’s side of the family — or at least certain traditions of it — that suggests being able to receive care is also a virtue. That there’s something you need to go through in that experience. How would you even know what care is worth if you’re not humble enough, weirdly, to receive it?

Jacob: Yeah. And I think a huge amount of it is about framing. This is like before, with the half of the pumpkin — it’s about what you’re acknowledging and what you’re not. So often it’s, “Oh, Sarah, I have this extra thing,” or “Any time you want to come over” — and that could be because I know you’re struggling with housing, or you’re in a difficult relationship, but what I say is, “I’d love for us to do a sleepover.” It has the same effect, but what it isn’t acknowledging is actually the most important part.

Sarah: Like — you get to share if you feel like talking about it, but I’m just here.

Jacob: Exactly. And there’s a different kind of trust between neighbors than the trust you have with your best friend. A good neighbor isn’t necessarily the person you go to every afternoon to explain your whole life and let into your most intimate secrets. That might be the relationship you develop — but it might also just be someone you feel you can rely on.

To give you an example that really captures it, and that shocked the way I think about people needing neighbors: I helped set up — there’s a woman I love dearly, whose husband had passed away recently. A family who’d recently migrated were looking for a home, and they moved into the house next to her. And her response was, “I just feel safe again.” They went on to build a more blossoming relationship, but it was that sense of safety — that there’s a place to fall into — that I think is really the key to this history of neighbors. This almost insurance-like network you can trust.

Sarah: That’s so nice — the safety of having other people nearby. Okay, so let’s say the three things again.

Jacob: The three things: be aware, shut your trap, and lend a hand.

Sarah: So “be aware” is knowing what people near you might need, and then addressing it in a tactful way.

Jacob: Yeah. And — I don’t want to say we do this in the US, I think it’s a famously British thing — of averting your eyes when somebody’s having trouble.

Sarah: Would the Sicilians do that?

Jacob: I don’t want to generalize, but working to be a good neighbor means taking into account what’s going on — not having that reaction of shame, and instead acknowledging it.

Sarah: Maybe it’s the person who just hands you a tissue on the train when you’re crying and doesn’t ask you anything.

Jacob: Exactly, that’s such a good example — as opposed to the other people who react like it’s an attack on them: “You’re crying on my train.” No — here’s a tissue.

Sarah: Right. So just being aware without needing to be super involved. And keeping your trap shut, so people don’t feel like everything’s going everywhere —

Jacob: — and so they can trust living near you.

Sarah: And what’s the third one? Lend a hand — or a tissue. Makes sense. We should just have a sign that says those three things.

Jacob: Practice 5: Rinse, repeat, grow. And then the last one gets back to what we were talking about earlier — this really is a muscle. When I talk about “auditing,” there’s this sense of, where do you even start thinking about your neighborhood, your neighbors, the things you can share? As you become more invested in that process, it becomes more natural, and you realize there are more things you can incorporate others into, and more things you enjoy doing with other people. That’s an important thing to stress: people have neighbors not just because it’s a matter of safety, but because it’s fun.

And — it took me over an hour to get here on the subway —

Sarah: No, no — but also, welcome to London.

Jacob: Thank you. Exactly — that’s what I’m saying: it’s way more convenient if you want to hang out with the people who are near you. There’s a reason it goes that way. The other element is that neighbors and neighborhoods die as soon as they become too tightly bound.

Sarah: What do you mean by that?

Jacob: A term I’ve used is “ours” — thinking about our spaces, our things. But that has an almost xenophobic register; it could be taken that way. So it’s about figuring out how to make this a place that can accommodate more people. Whoever is there, it needs to be constantly reinvented and regrown — not letting it become “ours” as in these four people, but “ours” as in the people who are here. Using that space-based designation is really important.

Sarah: Similar to Jewish concepts like doikayt — like, well, we’re here, so this is where we belong.

Jacob: Exactly, because we got here. And this is one of the major shifts between looking at neighbors ethnographically versus philosophically or psychoanalytically. Some of the writing on this says the neighbor could be anyone. But in practice it isn’t anyone —

Sarah: — it’s the people who are there. And you’re right that they could be people who are different from you, maybe someone annoying, but it’s not everyone in the world. It’s not a universal. It’s people who are flesh and blood, in the same space.

Jacob: Yeah, and that’s really important to remember, because that narrative — the neighbor is anyone, the neighbor is universal — is an all-or-nothing thing.

Sarah: It’s either incredibly sentimental and therefore impractical, or it’s terrifying and then you don’t want to do it. Something this connects to for me — I write a lot about organizing and activism, and there’s endless, mostly boring, infighting on the left. One thing people struggle with is they first idealize the movement: “There are all these other people in the movement with me, this is amazing.” They go through a literal new-relationship-energy phase, but for activism. And then there’s the disillusionment phase — “Oh damn, I’m in this movement with these people and they actually suck.” I think there’s something wonderfully moderating about the idea that the person isn’t necessarily your friend, though they may be — and they’re not an enemy, and they’re not a complete stranger. They’re your neighbor. This middle thing. It’s going to be specific and particular and annoying and fun and interesting and weird, all at the same time.

Jacob: And a lot of it depends less on trying to change them or choose them, and more on the kind of infrastructure you build socially to have that relationship. So it’s good for thinking about organizing, because it’s such an infrastructural and space-based question. What’s our half pumpkin? What are our rules for being here, implicitly? How do I tune myself to your needs without letting your needs dominate me? These questions aren’t necessarily about you and me anymore, but about the type of infrastructure we can build together.

Sarah: Right — because we might move, but someone else will need half a pumpkin, and now we’ve got a ritual. That’s so nice. Okay, let’s talk about the relationship to migration, because I think that’s very important and very counterintuitive. Let’s be real — right now we’re in the UK, you actually live in the US, and in both places there’s a huge fear of migration. I’m curious how the folks in the town you’ve been in see what they’re doing with the people who’ve migrated in, and what you think lets them think about it differently.

Jacob: I think they see themselves as working between their own experience and what they see on TV. There’s something we brush aside, which is often, “He’s a really good guy — I see him every day.” And here they’re talking about someone who’s migrated from, say, Africa. Part of the difference is this idea of neighborliness, or reception. It has to host people with very different politics. Often there are people with quite xenophobic stances who are nonetheless attached to the people who are there, who feel a sense of responsibility — because it’s about caring for the place and caring for their neighbors.

Sarah: So there might be a person who’s like, “I’m not even sure how I feel about foreigners, but we have this foreigner here, and we have this tradition of doing this thing, so we’re doing it.”

Jacob: Exactly. And it really started a bit top-down — with a group of organizers in the mayor’s office who said, “Let’s open this up.”

Sarah: This is really interesting to me, because we’ve been talking about this as though it’s a beautiful “history forever” thing, but almost every good social movement has its secret little committee, you know?

Jacob: Exactly. And it still has its own secret little committee — there’s the question of how do we stage this so that it becomes part of that history. Both things are true. It becomes framed in a certain discourse, which is very much the Catholic discourse I mentioned before: the inability to support your neighbors is a you problem. Part of it is the structure of representation and judgment around moral behavior. “This guy’s going through some stuff, and it’s on you if you can’t handle that.” That’s a failing — not something where you should turn to other people and say “this guy sucks,” because you’d be outing yourself as someone who’s unable to handle it. So part of it is: where does the moral onus lie in living together? There are surely still people in the town who opposed the project, but overwhelmingly, once people build their politics up relationally —

Sarah: — it’s a really different demand. Like, we’re starting from the principle that if someone else has a problem with this town, it’s on all of us. And if you’re not here for that, we’re going to judge you.

Jacob: Yes. So you start from “help the guy next door,” get to know that person, and that helps change your political background.

Sarah: And do you think people actually change their politics, or do they make new room in their existing politics that somehow lets these people in — or some combination?

Jacob: In terms of electoral politics, it’s hard to guess. But one of the big problems is that there was such a disjuncture between leftist politics and tradition in southern Italy. There’s an old paradigm called “comrades and Christians” — this is really 1960s Italy, and in all fairness those comrades were awesome; the writing from that period is really great. At the same time, current Italian politics has no major communist movement. The weird thing is that a lot of Catholic social teaching, communist tradition, and small-town peasant tradition have come together, and what they’re now opposed to is largely neoliberal austerity.

This is a really different place from somewhere like London. London’s solution to migration, in much of its major cities, is a kind of cosmopolitanism, a multiculturalism — which, as we know, has both its benefits and its failures. This looks really different. Part of why I’m interested in it is the relationship between the historic peasantry and the newcomer class, and how those two groups might be organized in solidarity with each other — as opposed to what we were talking about at the beginning, where the middle class has to demonstrate its loyalty by pushing outsiders away.

Sarah: And it strikes me that even now, many decades into what we’d call integration projects, they’re uncomfortable projects. They ask a lot of both parties, in ways that are difficult to — I don’t want to say “justify,” because that might sound bizarrely racist — but in a way it asks the immigrants to assimilate, sometimes more than might be desirable, and it also asks a lot of the existing people to think, “Well, we now have these people who are incredibly different living near us.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t do processes of integration, but there’s something nice about the way it’s done in this village, in that both parties are building an infrastructure together. And the infrastructure is about the fact that they’re neighbors — it’s not necessarily erasing difference, nor erasing the sense of placeness.

Jacob: The existential end of the town is terrifying for people — the worry that everyone will leave. The nice thing that makes this work — and maybe this is the difference between types of integration — is that there’s an understanding: we have this tradition we’re attached to, we care about this place, but we also need to rebuild our social world and our social infrastructure. We take for granted in cities that there’s this group and this is their identity, and that group and their identity, and the future will continue regardless. A place with an existential threat of depopulation makes obvious for everyone that forms of social connection have to constantly be remade and reinvigorated. That’s why it’s good to think from — there’s no presumption of social immortality. We’re in a moment where social institutions and social life feel really denigrated, and yet, unlike the people in the town I lived in, we don’t think of it as something that needs to be actively remade. Instead of using integration as a metaphor, it’s really that we need to remake sociality. It’s not just a question about migration — it’s a larger social question about our time.

Sarah: We’re not just mixing existing things together — together we’re going to build something new, even if it has roots. That’s really nice. I was struck by some of your writing about women and families. I don’t know if you want to bring that in here, if it fits.

Jacob: Totally. One reason I’ve liked thinking with the idea of neighbors and neighborliness is that when we talk about social reproduction, we usually talk about it in terms of the family, or we zoom out and talk about society. What thinking about neighbors lets me do is think about how a specific relationship gets remade — one that isn’t the family, and isn’t society in general. And it’s a very informal relationship.

Sarah: It’s also not like there’s a board of neighbors telling you, “You’re not neighboring correctly, stop that.”

Jacob: Well, sometimes there is, and it’s terrible —

Sarah: Like — what do they call it, a homeowners’ —

Jacob: Yeah. You can tell neither of us owns a home, because we don’t know about these things. But not that kind of home. There is that. Though the interesting thing about thinking about neighbors historically is that only bad neighbors make the historical record. The histories we have are of neighbors fighting each other and going to court — that’s the vast majority of it. We don’t have much of “this person had that person’s back,” unless we really read against the grain. So histories of neighboring are really hard to write.

Sarah: Tell me more about these women, and the “amoral family.”

Jacob: So the “amoral family” is an idea that comes from a Reagan-era administrator who got his start in political science by going to southern Italy without speaking a word of Italian —

Sarah: Perfect.

Jacob: — and coming to the conclusion that here, no one helps each other; they only care for their families. And this gets reproduced, because the archetype is: “You’re associating wrong, you’re doing public life incorrectly, and therefore it’s immoral.” He — as one of Reagan’s associates — called it amoral, not immoral.

Sarah: Amoral.

Jacob: Yeah — they have no moral bonds beyond the family.

Sarah: Okay, right. And is this associated with the assumptions people have about big Italian families and the mafia?

Jacob: Exactly. A lot of it is this post–World War II moment where they’re trying to create a certain kind of national politics, and these are people not committed to that national politics. So if you don’t have a recognizable form of public collective life, you’re seen as not having it at all. And somehow, from southern Italy, this gets invented as a diagnosis for, say, inner-city Boston. This is the guy who invents the idea of broken windows policing.

Sarah: Right — so there’s this whole language of “you have to use state violence, because there’s no life here beyond this.”

Jacob: And the interesting thing that gets shown by reading older ethnographies is that a lot of the work of neighboring comes down to women.

Sarah: Did you observe this too, watching?

Jacob: Yeah. There’s an expectation that the head of the family provides the family’s future, so there’s a narrative of investment in the family that’s gendered male, and investment beyond the family that’s gendered female. I describe it that way because there were all these times where men would give something, share something, do something — and they’d describe that action as “well, my mother would do it like this,” not “my father would do it like this.” So it was often men acting through female memory and connection.

One of the most fun things about thinking about neighboring, for me, is that normally when we think about social reproduction we use the family at the small scale, or society at the larger scale — and we say the family is too small, or too heteronormative, or too culturally specific. Neighboring gives me a third option, which is in no way all-encompassing: let’s just follow one type of relation through time and think about how it works. This isn’t absolutely true, but one thing I found is that it’s often these memories of mothers, these memories of female action. The same reason American politicians said “you have no public life” is because it was gendered female — a lot of the actual work of sharing was among women. This probably happens in many places: the informal networks of solidarity and care had this gendered element, and people would often think back on “this is the site of my mother’s action.”

Sarah: And do you think this Reagan guy missed the wider kinds of civic bonds because they didn’t look like what he thought men should be — or were — doing?

Jacob: Yeah. His name is, I think, Edward C. Banfield. And this is a classic — I’m being peak anthropologist here — this guy came in looking for something, didn’t find it, and concluded those forms of social solidarity don’t exist.

Sarah: What do you think he was looking for?

Jacob: Attachment to the nation-state. Something that looked like citizenship —

Sarah: Like: signed petition, vote.

Jacob: Right. And instead he saw — or failed to see — a bunch of women going, “I got some tomatoes from my garden. Also, how’s your baby? You can bring her here for an hour if you need.” It’s really this distinction between formal and informal networks of solidarity. There’s not much going on at the mayor’s office; there’s a lot going on in the side streets, between people’s houses.

Sarah: But he wasn’t there.

Jacob: He wasn’t there. And this has repeated itself in sociological studies. The guy who wrote Bowling Alone —

Sarah: Robert Putnam.

Jacob: Robert Putnam — also starts out doing this in southern Italy, looking at social and symbolic capital and civic participation. His argument is essentially that because of how southern Italy was ruled 2,000 years ago, it never developed a culture of citizenship, whereas the north has this civic involvement. And what people are quick to point out is that in Bowling Alone he says American civic life has changed in the past 20 years, whereas in his story about Sicily it stayed the same for about a thousand years.

Sarah: It’s wild. Especially wild when you think about Sicily — a place that’s been invaded by so many different groups of people, so obviously there are huge changes happening by necessity.

Jacob: Absolutely. So there’s this bizarre link in theories of social life where they point to southern Italy and say, “This is not correct.” It’s the juxtaposition against which we define proper civic participation, proper political life — and then we use that as an archetype elsewhere. And it’s super racialized and super gendered: “Women are doing too much here, and that reminds us of people of color back home.”

Sarah: Yes.

Jacob: It’s this bizarre traffic in political science.

Sarah: And it’s also a very specific idea of what the good life is — a hyper-national, hyper-individual existence. Look, there are of course big problems with Sicilian government, no question. But it’s possible — and in fact true in many ways — that you can get a different bouquet of things. In Sicily, at least in certain parts, they’re actually pretty good at the neighboring part of the good life. And maybe they haven’t got, often because of external forces — the north takes a lot of wealth from the south in various ways — some other forms of governance we might want. But it’s funny that these external theorists can’t even imagine that.

Jacob: It’s important to remember that the background of everything I’ve been saying about neighboring is terrible. It’s forms of austerity and abandonment and forced migration. It’s people making the best of a really difficult situation — very different difficult situations — and they’ve used living together as an idiom to talk about “how do we —”

Sarah: Do you mean the Sicilian — the “native,” in quotes; I don’t like that word, but — people who’ve been living in Sicily for generations, having a hard time because of poverty and other problems?

Jacob: Yeah — forms of rural abandonment, a lack of investment in the community from the government, just a lack of jobs. There’s not opportunity in this community, and there’s a much longer history of the nation, or the region, trying to discipline the center of the island. So both groups are in this position — whether it’s the existential threat of depopulation or the existential threat of forced migration — where no one needed neighbors for good reasons, because everything had gone well.

Sarah: In fact, what we find is that when people gain wealth, they tend to become more isolated — they see their friends less, and they pay for services that pull them away from each other. That’s a very common economic finding.

Jacob: Whereas there — there’s the classic point that when some kind of disaster happens, natural disasters and post-war scenarios, people fall into doing mutual aid because it’s an efficient way of getting things together. That’s really the context we’re talking about.

Sarah: And I think it’s also, realistically, what’s coming for all of us. Unless you’re watching this because you’re a billionaire for some reason, this world — scarred by climate change, migration, and depopulation — is coming for many places. This is a different thing I researched, but birth rates are going down; they just are, in lots of places. And — I’m not using this in a racist way — interestingly, the global south is also taking a big nosedive in birth rate, which will eventually mean population decline. That’s coming for all of us. So the world you see there is, in many ways, a thing we’re all heading toward, whether we know it or not.

Jacob: This gets back to the fundamental point: in those moments — post-disaster, forced migration, depopulation — it’s made clear that sociality, society, what connects us, is something we need to reinvent and remake. It’s not something we can take for granted. And once that becomes marked and explicit, there’s a huge opportunity for creativity. Part of what was interesting about the place I worked in is that it does both: they absolutely say, “We’re not saying we have the same lives as our parents, but we have these moral commitments that we want to figure out how to articulate in a very different context.”

Sarah: Maybe this is a great note to end on, but you were telling me about some of the older folks there — a lot of old people who die don’t necessarily have children, or the children aren’t there, and so they have cars. And in this reinvigorated, previously peasant economy, the thing you give away is the cars: “I just don’t need these cars — someone else, please, have these cars.”

Jacob: Yeah. And there’s an incredibly complicated Italian car insurance system, but the point is that older cars are cheaper to insure, so to people with limited means these old cars actually have a higher value than a new one. But also — this is a place with no supermarket, no public transit. So it’s a situation of carpooling; people are driving each other everywhere. Just like the half-pumpkin example, the idea that “this is my car and no one else gets in it” would be absurd there. Cars operate somewhat like buses — “Yeah, I’m going to this part of town, I’m going to this town.”

And this is a really interesting story to end on: one of my close friends is a guy from Syria. Someone asked me for a favor — “Can we go to the supermarket, this specific one, because I want to buy stuff for my daughter’s birthday party on Monday? I don’t have family, I’m not Christian.” They knew I would take them on a Sunday, when they couldn’t go elsewhere. The guy walked away, and my friend said, “He shouldn’t do that.” I said, “No, it’s fine, dude, what are you talking about? I can drive on a Sunday, it’s totally fine.” He said, “No, no — you should frame things not as ‘I want you to do this’ or ‘will you do this for me,’ but with we. ‘Would it be good for us to go to the supermarket, because then I can do this?’” A fun thing to do together. So there really are these small frames of language, which are about how you position yourself and others, and what connects you.

Sarah: That’s so nice. And I think it’s really great to recognize that this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as manipulation or insincerity. It’s that both of you are taking on a different mindset about the thing.

Jacob: Yeah — it’s establishing that as a point of view you can think from. And any articulation of “we” is deeply fragile. That’s a classic point, but it’s also what makes this grammatical fiction of “okay, we’re thinking from this postulated point where we are unified.”

Sarah: It’s so nice. Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ll put lots of links to your stuff, if you want. And everyone can comment and ask questions, and you can comment back.

Jacob: Yeah, please do. I’m thinking about how to bring this further — this is the first time I’ve tried to articulate it to a broader public.

Sarah: This is going to be great. I’m really excited to see what people think. Please leave your comments, we’d love to hear. Thank you so much.