Women, war, and text: Orsognese women's experience in a sector of the Italian front in World War II

The narratives that women related to this researcher about their lives in Orsogna, Italy during and immediately after World War II all serve to articulate assumptions about the perceived nature of community. I use data drawn from an examination of 150 narratives recorded in interviews, occurring in spontaneous conversations, and during field observations, as well as from an examination of my own reaction. These narratives allow listeners to participate provisionally in the disorder, dislocation, and privation experienced by the narrators in war. This study makes two significant contributions to our understanding of a community whose cultural fabric remained intact during extreme wartime conditions in one Italian sector. First, the narratives, as texts, reveal how women connected their experiences to the established cultural meanings of those experiences. That is, regular patterns of behavior occur as a result of practices generated in social interaction. Second, the narratives reveal that what was said depends for its full meaning and interpretive power on what was unsaid on beliefs, values, premises encoded in the cultural matrix of the community.