the anthropology of venice 489
of them.”6 A historical ethnography of renaissance Venice would attempt
to look something like this formulation. it would search for the multiple
forms of meaning suggested by the recurrent displacements created by
Venice’s precarious position in the shifting global economic and state sys-
tem that stretched far beyond its own realm of political control or cultural
understanding. Such an ethnography would take account not just of per-
sistent verities of place but also of the vagaries of change over time.
The Participant Observerone might start that search with Venice’s most famous native participant-
observer, Marin Sanudo (Marino Sanuto; 1466–1536), the most prolific
memorialist of the italian renaissance. Sanudo worked his way up the
cursus honorum of Venetian public life, but in mid-life the highest honors
escaped him because he refused to serve abroad where he would be out
of the action in Venice. Away from Venice he could not keep track of the
news so readily available on the rialto and in the halls of the Ducal pal-
ace. his career stalled as a backbench senator, but his offices placed him
in a singular position to observe and record in his diaries (1496–1533) the
events not just of Venice but of much of europe: “everything i have seen
and heard i have written down.”7 he used every source of information
he could find from diplomatic reports to Senate debates, and he strived
to hear every bit of gossip by intruding into conversations of others and
by arriving at the Ducal palace early each morning to catch the latest
news. he recorded all this information in his vibrant if often syntactically
obscure Venetian vernacular, which he thought came closer to the truth
of lived experience than latin or Tuscan. for Sanudo, the directness of
Venetian, the language of daily life employed with both other senators and
household servants, gave historical truth to his narratives; and as a guide
to the anthropology of Venice, his prose supplies a linguistically unfiltered
source for the meanings of Venetian culture.8 Sanudo, however, was far
6 george e. Marcus, “ethnography in/of the World System: The emergence of Multi-
Sited ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), 95, 96. Marcus’s primary
exposition of the new ethnography is “contemporary problems of ethnography in the
Modern World System,” in James clifford and george Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 165–93.
7 Marino Sanuto, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, ed. rinaldo rulin et al., 58 vols (Venice,
1879–1903), 5:1066.
8 See the editors’ and translator’s comments on Sanudo’s language in patricia h.
labalme and laura Sanguineti White, eds., linda l. carroll, trans., Marin Sanudo, Cità