The Grecanici of Southern Italy. Stavroula Pipyrou
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by the actors for reasons of self-preservation, are destined to occupy the mind of the ethnographer, reminding her that fieldwork is not always about taking or giving but also about not telling.
Gianni’s refusal to admit openly to an outsider that he spoke a language that until recently was deemed inferior, troublesome, and the language of a second-class citizen, epitomizes the fear felt among younger Grecanici that they are not proficient in their own language. Especially during visits from Greek tourists, Grecanici between twenty and thirty feel uncomfortable demonstrating their ability to speak Grecanico in front of an expectant audience, for, despite the fact that Modern Greek and Grecanico have similar linguistic roots, they have developed into two different languages where communication is attainable but not always straightforward (discussed at length in Chapter 2). This uneasiness is partly the outcome of official “schooling’ in Grecanico, whereby the language is no longer a matter of familial pedagogy but passed into the hands of instructors (Grecanici and non-Grecanici), who are competent in Grecanico language, history, and folklore. Consequently, over the last three decades competence in the Grecanico language has been “officialized” with certificates provided by the Grecanico civic associations recognizing linguistic proficiency that secure “rights” and “privileges” to knowledge and future management of minority affairs.
Young Grecanici like Gianni who do not possess such precious certificates feel excluded by the scheme of Grecanici minority governance that privileges book-learned Grecanico over lived experience. Gianni’s refusal to reveal his ability to speak Grecanico should first be interpreted as his discontent with what I represent—a foreign academic whose own competence in Grecanico culture and politics would be certified by the acquisition of a Ph.D. Second, as will become apparent throughout this book, Gianni’s case is characteristic of the hardship entailed in forming relatedness, something that takes a great deal of effort, desire, time, and ordeal and resists any notion of pre-assumed closeness. What Gianni shared with me was his capacity to speak a language learned through family lived experience and his conviction that his knowledge should not have to be certified by an official piece of paper. After the incident in the village, when we met in public in Reggio Calabria we usually conversed in Italian, only to switch to Grecanico when approached by someone with the inability to judge Gianni’s capacity in the language. The language switch operated as a clear demarcation of space (a private conversation), shared origin (I am Greek, he is Grecanico), and relatedness (we are true friends).
Gianni works in a coffee shop in central Reggio Calabria and serves what he calls “la borghesia” (the bourgeoisie). He often complained that a “lot of these rich women know that I am of Grecanico origin. When I serve their coffee they often look at my hands to spot whether they are clean or dirty. Every time they evaluate me in that manner I feel angry and depressed. But then I grind my teeth and mumble “piateteto ston colo”GO (take it in the ass) and I suddenly feel much better. This is my angry declaration that I exist as a Grecanico, I spit in the face of this hegemonic culture that for decades continues to pretend I do not exist.”
Fearless Governance
For decades locally portrayed as dirty peasants of second-class status, Grecanici have developed the means to invert hegemonic culture, promote self-governance, and participate in the power games of minority politics on local and national scales. This book tells the stories of Grecanici who have successfully crafted a place in contemporary politics through minority claims, narrating how minority relations have been turned into contexts of power, authority, and governance. An ethnographic account of the analytics of power, the book demonstrates how nexuses of relatedness have furnished Grecanici with effective and affective governance since their migration from area Grecanica to the city of Reggio Calabria during the 1950s, when they commenced systematic management of Grecanico as a linguistic and cultural asset.
The study of relations sheds light on layers of politics among Grecanici themselves and between Grecanici and various actors who occupy the local and national scene. This has theoretical implications for contemporary anthropology regarding scales of governance that are realized at intersections of local and global encounters. The manner that Grecanici find political representation through a number of avenues, including the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), state policy, local civic associations, family networks, and illegal organizations points to governance facilitated by a matrix of scaled relations as actors make use of available channels of power and authority. Often this multiplicity involves violence, corruption, and mismanagement, all constituting inextricable parts of the social fabric.
I argue that relations that “have turned a multiplicity of persons into a social arena of authority” (Strathern 2005:62) are to be understood in tandem with conventional modes of governance encapsulated in state policies and public institutions (Foucault 2000). As a result, the concept of governance I propose concerns Grecanici claims to difference born out of the creative synergies of everyday affective relations and national and transnational bodies that shape curricula of political action, providing tools to subvert national hegemony. Thus I avoid making any assumptions about a top-down permeation of governmental power in creating forms of subjectivity or resistance. Instead we encounter rebounding, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory realizations of governance that have taken shape in uncoordinated ways in public and private spheres.
Of a Foucauldian tenor, governance has a practical and experiential dimension, as it is directly associated with the management of Grecanico language and culture and the experiential capital invested therein. Throughout the book we encounter Grecanici who talk about other Grecanici, their civil society, their conflicts and desires, and the manner the interests of the minority are governed on local, national, and international levels. Since the end of the 1960s Grecanici have gone to great lengths to promote Grecanico language and culture as a worthy constitutive of Italian heritage. With local and international associations, Grecanici civil society, UNESCO, and the EU all interested in the management of cultural assets, there is a certain anthropological challenge in explicating how large-scale processes of governance converge with local particularity (Wright 2011).3
Although the terms “governance” and “government” are regularly used interchangeably, “governance” captures a broader concept of resource management and decision making by a plurality of actors spanning different scales of politics, as opposed to the exclusiveness of “government” (Shore and Wright 1997; Minicuci and Pavanello 2010; Orlandini 2010). A significant break between governance and government is that the former allows for multidimensional circulation of power between diverse, not necessarily institutionalized actors. The state constitutes only one fragment of power in the contemporary political scene, together with the Church, civic associations, the family and mafia, themselves assemblages of powerful, often abstract and non-identifiable relations (see Herzfeld 1996; Das and Poole 2004; Pizza and Johannessen 2009; Muehlebach 2012). Converging with the idea of “enlargement” (Pizza and Johannessen 2009: 18), governance allows for a more dispersed understanding of processes of decision making, taking equal consideration of local and global actors operating on different scales, with different degrees of success as well as bodily attributes of governance actualized through powerful performance.
Examining the heuristic validity of governance in macropolitical processes such as the EU, Cris Shore suggests that apart from a tool for observation and ideological recast, “European governance” could be viewed as a form of Foucauldian “governmentality,” “a more complex regime of “truths” about the people and things to be governed” (Shore 2009:3). As I argue here, it is not only global actors such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that direct decision making and policy management; local actors and civil society also have an input in this process. This plurality brings attention to interesting intersections of power, which in the management of Grecanico language and culture are rooted in complex relations that intertwine with international and regional governmental institutions, civic associations, and powerful local families. Foucauldian governmentality in relation to norms, regulations, and institutions that reinforce or resist state power is founded on governing “the conduct of others’ conduct” (Gordon 2000:xxix) and is a starting point from which to problematize the multiplicity of