The Grecanici of Southern Italy. Stavroula Pipyrou
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history, culture, and language can be manipulated to serve contextual political and economic purposes. At present, the confines of the area Grecanica provoke a conflict between the interested comuni, materialized on many levels and appropriated according to diverse political views. As many Grecanico associations protest, the desire exhibited by residents of nearby areas to be included in the area Grecanica is mainly dictated by the benefits of financial subsidies (from Italy and the EU) and has little relevance to the Grecanico language.
A Few Words About Reggio Calabria
Research on which this monograph is based was primarily conducted in the city of Reggio Calabria on the toe of Italy, in neighborhoods inhabited by Grecanici after their migration to the city at the end of the 1950s. The city of the agrumi (citrus fruits) and gelsomino (jasmine), Reggio Calabria is the largest urban settlement in the region of Calabria, situated between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas. Calabria9 is the most southern region of mainland Italy between Basilicata and the island of Sicily. Mainly mountainous,10 Calabria is divided into five provinces, Catanzaro, Cosenza, Crotone, Reggio Calabria, and Vibo Valentia, all maintaining a certain degree of administrative autonomy.
The province of Reggio Calabria is divided into 99 comuni. The comune of Reggio Calabria covers an area of 236 square kilometers, split into 15 quartieri (neighborhoods). Of a population of approximately 184,500, over 42 percent are employed in wholesale, 11.5 percent in manufacturing, and 10 percent in the construction industry, while only 4.5 percent are involved in agriculture.11 The city itself is an architectural melting pot of the old and the new, a blend of different styles, epochs, and attitudes, with architectural reminders of destitution and despair. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Reggio Calabria was a border town under the Spanish viceroy’s direct administrative control and was repeatedly destroyed by Turkish and Saracen pirates. From the seventeenth century until 1860 it was part of the Kingdom of Naples under the Bourbon dynasty. In places, Reggio Calabria is reminiscent of the medieval city that once was, circled by 17 towers. In 1783 large parts of the urban area were totally destroyed by an earthquake, only to be rebuilt by the Bourbon army under the instructions of the engineer Giovan Battista Mori.
Reggio Calabria was unified with Italy on the arrival of Giuseppe Garibaldi on the 21 August 1860. On 28 December 1908, the city was again devastated by an enormous earthquake that left almost 15,000 people dead (Dickie et al. 2007). Aid arrived immediately from many sources and the city started being rebuilt (Pipyrou 2016). Complexes of baracche (temporary hutments) were constructed in order to accommodate the homeless, with most of the new settlements being named after the benefactors (Villaggio Svizzero, Villini Svezzesi e Novegesi, Baracche Nazionali, Inglesi, Barracchamenti Militari of the Ferovieri, Americani). The baracche, visual reminders of the aid received, were situated on the northern periphery of the city, crowded between the Santa Lucia, Caserta, and Annunziata relief drains and the gardens of the quartiere Santa Caterina.
Citizens of Reggio Calabria, Reggini, exhibit pride in living in the city of Fata Morgana,12 a mythological mirage formed by the reflection of the Sicilian city of Messina on the water of the Messina Strait. Situated on the southwestern coast of the Calabrian region, right opposite the Sicilian port of Messina and facing the snow-capped peak of Mount Etna, Reggio Calabria is blessed with one of the most beautiful coastal promenades in Italy,13 Via Marina (also known as Via Lungomare), which has inspired much poetic and philosophical prose. It is here that monuments and archaeological sites from the classical periods—the Greek Walls and the Roman Baths—are located. On warm and fragrant summer nights Reggini stroll along Via Marina exchanging views on politics, philosophy, culture, and love.
One of the most important locations in Reggio Calabria is Corso Garibaldi with the homonymous Piazza Garibaldi. Together with Via Marina, Corso Garibaldi is the city’s heart, the historical center and the main place for philosophizing, socializing, shopping and flirting. In the area of Callopinace, in the Piazza Duomo situated on Corso Garibaldi, stands the neoclassic cathedral of Reggio Calabria, dedicated to Maria Santissima della Consolazione who, together with San Giorgio, is the beloved patron of Reggio Calabria. The former is celebrated on the second Saturday of September when the devoted Reggini form a glorious procession from the Santuario di Santa Maria della Consolazione, in Eremos, to the cathedral of Duomo. San Giorgio is celebrated on 23 April. In the Piazza Duomo during the patronal celebrations the Reggini honor their patrons by dancing the tarantella amid the sound of the Organeto and the Tamborello.
Grecanici started migrating to Reggio Calabria from their rural villages of origin in Aspromonte at the end of the 1950s to join the small number of relatives that relocated before World War II. Nowadays, the biggest concentration of Grecanici are found in the quartieri of San Giorgio extra14 and Sbarre, while a considerable number also inhabit the quartieri of Ravagnese and Gebbione. They live in kinship clusters where three generations of family occupy the same palazzo (a multilevel building). On their arrival to Reggio Calabria, the Grecanici were met with hostility and contempt because they were perceived as the embodiment of two “negative” traits. First, they were alloglots and as such faced the hostility of non-Grecanico-speaking populations. Second, they were peasant Southerners, thus already “second class citizens” (Pipyrou 2014c). Grecanici thus experienced the stigma of inferiority (Petropoulou 1994:191–92, 1995:4), often called paddhechi,15 parpatuli,16 and tamarriGO17 (all derogatory of peasantry) by the local Reggini. On their part, the Grecanici cultivated a discourse of isolation and superiority toward the locals, further enhanced through endogamy. As far as the Grecanici were concerned, the local Reggini were stupid, inferior, and dirty. Young male Grecanici were instructed by their mothers never to marry a Reggina, for she incorporated all the negative traits of a forestiera (foreigner): dirty (morally and physically), inferior in terms of blood, and destined to deceive him. Many of my Reggini research participants argue that Grecanici are like a tribu Africana (African tribe) because they continue to this day to favor endogamy. Reggini regularly argue that “not changing the blood for centuries has a knock-on effect on their intelligence let alone the health of their children.”
Examined in a broader historical framework, Grecanici cannot be contextualized separately from numerous other cases where local communities and disenfranchised peoples find themselves living in the shadow of the Global North, albeit geographically belonging to it (Pipyrou 2013, 2014a). Historically, Calabrians, let alone the Greek linguistic minority, were always conceptualized as peripheral and oriental (Schneider 1998; Moe 2002; Perrotta 2014). Nevertheless, anthropologists have recently brought attention to what can be viewed as a systematic push—mainly by bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—toward a rigid classification based on national competence and hierarchies of value (Wilk 1995; Palumbo 2003; Herzfeld 2004; Pipyrou 2012). What Berardino Palumbo (2003, 2010) calls “Global Taxonomic Systems,” are institutionalized paths through which transnational agencies shape and organize the global imaginary and act as instruments of governance that shape attitudes, emotions and values on a global scale (Palumbo 2010:38). Categories of national competence thus become essentialized measures of economic, political, and moral success (Knight 2013b:157, 2015). In this classificatory schema, large populations are inserted into “hollow dichotomies” such as progression and backwardness. They are not only classified as “such and such,” being denied ideological, political, and historical process, but pervasively imagined as possessing a future disposition firmly located in present imaginaries. These classificatory schemata are contemporary social cartographies that, as Richard Wilk (1995) argues, attempt to succumb local particularity to global uniformity.
Nelson Moe (2002) argues that social cartographies concerned with the Italian south as radically different from the north were shaped before the unification of Italy. The origins of these cartographies are to be found in the formation of European cultural identity between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. The “Southern Question” is the outcome of such classification, with deep political and scientific roots (see Schneider 1998; Moe 2002; Perrotta 2014). Furthermore, the work of criminal anthropologists—developed between 1870 and 1914—claimed scientific objectivity through positivistic methods that pervasively bound civic groups: “refusal