The Grecanici of Southern Italy. Stavroula Pipyrou
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languages of complaints and restitution—and thereby remake both representations and experiences of suffering (Kleinman et al. 1997:x). Narratives of victimhood have rhetorical potential that is performative and thus constitutive of difference. The intense interest surrounding the Grecanico language and culture over the past fifty years has formed a pool of “trained Grecanici” who are readily disposed to the rhetoric of victimhood and represent the public face of the minority. These people have mastered techniques and languages of global governance, and such is their competence that it has come to shape a particular social aesthetic among the population (Cavanaugh 2009:6).6 Gradually developed into a pervasive tool of governance by Grecanici civil society, it targets national and international policies for linguistic minorities. Gone are the days when Grecanici needed to suppress their language out of fear of discrimination; to claim that they have entirely disposed of the stigma of the second-class citizen would not be true, but for those with “official” training the language that once brought them shame now brings recognition.
Recognition came after many decades of struggle as linguistic minorities increasingly played an important role in local and national politics (Salvi 1975; Albano-Leoni 1979; Cavanaugh 2009), cumulating with the controversial Law 482/19997 promising promotion and protection of languages covered by the law (Coluzzi 2007:57–58; Prato 2009; Dal Negro and Guerini 2011). Classified by UNESCO as severely endangered, it is the notion that the Grecanico language is distinctive and rich yet “in danger of extinction” that mobilized national and international organizations to approach Grecanici as people rather than a linguistic “anomaly.” Since the 1970s the Association Internationale pour la Défense des Langues et Cultures Menacées (AIDLCM), argued that Grecanico “could enrich everybody … the loss of which would be irreparable … and constitutes a part of the heritage for which Italy is responsible.” In 1975, AIDLCM claimed that “the Greek culture of Calabria lives its last decade … the last Greek shepherds live their last humiliation. The Greek community of Calabria constitutes an island colonized economically and culturally, in a region itself underdeveloped and colonized … a fact for which the Greek community is not responsible. To leave things as they are at the moment … would be to bear the burden of a real cultural genocide” (AIDLCM 1975; quoted in E. Nucera 1984/5:41).
Omar Minniti’s plea in the above vignette replicates the language employed nearly four decades ago by the then AIDLCM—now Comitato Nazionale Federativo delle Minoranze Linguistiche Italiane (CONFELMI)—which is powerful, explicit, and conflates biodiversity and genocide with linguistic survival. The combination has a powerful rhetorical resonance, “the powerful moral capital attached to the charge of genocide has nonetheless paradoxically made for the term’s increasingly broad application by groups … claiming past persecution” (Ballinger 2003:129–30). Apart from highlighting the contribution of Grecanico language and culture toward a general Italian public good and the danger of extinction, AIDLCM claims compensation from the Italian state on the grounds that Grecanico constitutes an inextricable part of Italian heritage. Compensation claims are justified by what Brackette Williams (1989:409) has termed “embodiments and patterns of cultural enactment.” As Omar Minniti and Tito Squillaci suggest, contemporary Grecanici are embodiments of culture and tradition.
Looking Far, Far Away
Grecanici public figures have long been looking outside Italy for glimmers of hope for wider recognition of the minority. Angelo Romeo, in his Naràde d’Aspromonte (1991), a compilation of articles from the 1980s, was looking to the European Community for Grecanici minority recognition as a matter of international urgency. In their search for effective political representation and disappointed by Italian state neglect, people like Romeo looked outside Italy to enhance their minority position within the state, believing that recognition of the minority would come from global actors and persuade the state to act likewise.
It has been argued that difference is realized on a global scale through a common set of formats and structures of governance that mediate between cultures and ultimately scale difference along a limited number of dimensions. As a result, only some kinds of difference are promoted while others are submerged (Wilk 1995:111). While this is true, ethnographic engagement with minorities sheds light on the manner in which local actors resourcefully engage with these frameworks without necessarily succumbing to them. The intersection between global frameworks of representation and governance and local particularity is a central theme of this book. This junction is best captured in the development of the governance of Grecanici affairs from a local matter to an issue of global import. Other equally important actors captured in inchoate categories such as “civil society,” “family,” “friends,” “clients,” and “mafia” introduce more diversity in scales of governance and representation. Such categories of analysis have become organizational tropes of Grecanici governance, and I examine them here as scaled-up and scaled-down. Civil society can operate on local to global scales, and family is scaled-up to evoke kinship between Greece and Italy (as proposed in the new statuto) or scaled down to include only one’s own close family. This book focuses on civil society and relatedness, the international management of Grecanico heritage, friendship, language policy, interstate activism, and minority management as diverse forms of governance based on the fearless pursuit of aggressively dense sociopolitical networks. This is not an ad hoc analytical imposition. As we will see in the following chapters, actors introduce narratives within which all the above categories are enmeshed with one another. Ignoring one aspect in favor of another would leave the picture incomplete and lead to unavoidable misrepresentation.
Marilyn Strathern (1996) has asked where one cuts the network that could yield endless ethnographic and analytic narratives. Exploring Grecanici everyday relations that cut across national and transnational borders, we are inevitably faced with scales of governance where actors of local and global caliber are drawn into the same fearless game. I account for a form of governance that encompasses encounters between numerous actors who frequent the arena of Grecanici minority politics. In looking at the minority I delve into people’s knotted worlds, realized in intersections of relations endowed with power between family, friends, nation-state(s), civil society, EU, and mafia. I present these actors in such an order that overt contradictions become apparent to the reader—for instance, bringing the EU and mafia into the same analytical framework. This is far from a methodological tactic, rather a focus on emic discourses. International, national, and local actors thus appear to work on different scales, but all claim a level of expertise regarding the management of Grecanico language and culture. In doing so they produce discourses and vocabularies of representation, some of them familiar, others completely alien to the minority, but which equally give rise to pervasive forms of governance.
Family and Governance
Relatedness is the connecting thread that runs throughout this book and exemplifies Grecanici governance. From an early age, Grecanici are encouraged to conceptualize themselves as parts of a wider nexus of relations. Relations form the basis for governance and are provided in conventional terms of kinship (see Chapter 4), kin-like relations (Chapter 5) and mafia (Chapters 6 and 7). In this context “we would call the relation a self-similar or self-organizing construct, a figure whose organizational power is not affected by scale” (Strathern 2005:63). Strathern examined the knowledge that is implicated, produced, and abducted in kinship relations and argued that we can call
the relationship an organising trope with the second order capacity to organise elements either similar to or dissimilar from itself. Hence the relation as a model of complex phenomena has the power to bring heterogeneous orders or levels of knowledge together while conserving their difference. It allows concrete and abstract knowledge to be manipulated simultaneously. (2005:63)
Family in Italy constitutes a part of a complex dialectical relation between family, civil society, and the state; relatedness is ever present in all levels of politics (Ginsborg 2001:97). Grecanici families, apart from being constituted through “complex systems of relations of production, reproduction, nurture, love and power,