The Grecanici of Southern Italy. Stavroula Pipyrou
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from view simply because of their presumed ordinary form and their inchoate quality in justifications of governance. Let me clarify by contemplating the following propositions:
1. Here, we are all one family.
2. They used to be like brothers, they used to be a family.
3. Do you believe me when I tell you that I see you as part of my family?
4. Of course they turn to the ’Ndrangheta. If one has a family to support, I ask you, what can one do?
5. Born in the family of … (the name of the family).
6. Now you are part of the family (the ’Ndrangheta family).
7. Suniu ’ndrinaCD (I am ’ndrina—I am family).
8. Clan is the term imported by the English journalists, here we have family.
9. Vote for … (the name of the politician) … protector of the family.
The noun “family” in the above propositions is used with a variety of meanings and directions. The actors employ it in an ever ambivalent but always inclusive trope of identification. Family refers to social, biological, religious, or political relatedness, it is extended to encompass moral and social reasons and justifications, it symbolizes the unity of a political party and is offered as rhetoric in personal deliberations. It spans a wide range of phenomena: legal and illegal political and economic action, ’Ndrangheta, patronage and clientelism, onore (honor—with direct reference to the honorata società [honored society] that is ’Ndrangheta) and omertà (code of silence—with direct reference to a wide cultural consensus that transcends the ’Ndrangheta), and particular rites of initiation and endogamy, to name but a few. The economic, religious, and political language in Reggio Calabria is the language of relatedness and family. As a result, material interests and family sentiment are not regarded as opposing means of identification. Thus, previous dichotomies that located the study of the family in modern/traditional, rural/urban, nuclear/extended, biological/social, instrumental/sentimental fall short in taking into consideration the creative interweaving between symbolic, material, and emotional dimensions of family.
“Family,” similar to the pronouns “I” and “we” or “they,” is inchoate (see Fernandez 1995; Carrithers 2008). As a trope of moral imagining, family has the “capacity to condense distinct doctrines and ethical strains in a fan of pliable associations that can be variously distilled and infinitely elaborated” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999:6). The inchoateness of the Grecanici family facilitates a further anthropological critique based on actors’ engagement in conflicting, blurred and knotted relations of governance. This is a further anthropological critique of Euro-American kinship as we know it, and is captured in a series of deformations and re-formations of relatedness. This is most evident in the family of ’Ndrangheta, a very powerful mafia omnipresent in the social and political history of Reggio Calabria (Paoli 2003; Lupo 2009; Dickie 2011;Truzzolillo 2011). One might wonder why mafia families require an initiation ritual in order to establish familial ties between people who are already biologically related. A simple answer could be that the ritual is important to unite nonbiological affiliates. However, the new constitution is still labeled the “family” and not ’Ndrangheta par excellence. This new form/family brings with it the reworked heterogeneous seeds that constitute it while simultaneously conserving their difference.
In its conceptualization, ’Ndrangheta is already based on kinship. The ’ndrine (cosche, clans) are biological families in their majority, where the members are fathers, sons, uncles. ’Ndrangheta interprets the family as separable from the state, posing an oppositional relationship between the two. In ’Ndrangheta rhetoric, their family is defined in a state-dominant/’Ndrangheta-subordinated dichotomy. Nevertheless, by adopting an essentialist language of authority and sovereignty, paradoxically ’Ndrangheta emulates the language of the state—whose claims are fashioned on the language of kin and family—but is careful to keep it distant by placing kinship as the condition par excellence for governance. In other words, in local imagery, ’Ndrangheta is completely self-identified with the master trope of family; ’Ndrangheta is the family. In this ethnographic scenario, family is an ambivalent term that allows the superimposition of strong lines of relatedness among people who simultaneously occupy diverse roles.
Notions of strict biology need to be deformed and ritualistically treated in order for a new socio-religious entity to emerge under the “biological” rubric of the family. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon argue:
Once the focus of inquiry includes both inclusions and exclusions, both the amity and the violence at the core of kinship, and both the egalitarian and hierarchical lines of relation, ambivalence emerges as an important avenue for understanding the complexities of kinship relations … an emphasis on ambivalence yields insights into the nature of kinship as it is shaped by the (dialectics of power) tensions and contradictions between differential relations of power and resistance, individual agency and desire, and diverse rights, demands and obligations … attention to ambivalence and emotional valences produces a different perspective not only on kinship and family but also on the meaning of social structure and the means of theorising its determining influence. (Franklin and McKinnon 2001:18–19)
As we will come to see in the following chapters, in Reggio Calabria family is always an open-ended category and takes many forms as actors evoke it in various contexts. In the same way that I am concerned with the familial boundaries formed by Grecanici, I am equally concerned with how these boundaries are bridged and broken, and the phenomenology of relatedness that conditions politics and becomes constitutive of Grecanici governance. Relatedness as governance will be discussed throughout the book, but for now I would like to unpack further the connection between family and state—whether one can actually exist without the support and mediation of the other. For this reason I concentrate on cases of conflict and collaboration in order to examine their interdependence.
Family and Clientelism
Grecanici fearlessly pursue unrestrained relatedness that cuts across state-sponsored schemes, civil society, family networks and the ’Ndrangheta. This dense relationality opens multiple overlapping channels for political representation and power. Grecanici politics (and to a wider extent the politics of Reggio Calabria) are based on clientelistic networks that in their conceptualization are familial,8 and furthermore, the language that frames clientelism is usually the language of family and kinship. The study of clientelism could provide points of continuity or discontinuity between various systems of relatedness and governance due to the fact that clientelism is not a monolithic mode of representation and should not be treated as such (see Zinn 2001). Grecanici engage in clientelistic relationships to gain access to certain channels of power. Examining the present political conditions in Italy, one is compelled to assess the connection between the family, clientelism, and corruption. Paul Ginsborg borrows a familial metaphor to question the relevance of clientelism and family by asking “are these two terms Siamese twins, locked inextricably together in the history of the republic, are they identical twins, are they twins at all?” (2001:102). Despite being unable to define the relationship between family and clientelism in precise kinship terms we cannot deny their intractable relevance. In my view it would be rather unfruitful to establish an argument of the “amoral familism” kind as developed by Edward Banfield (1958), that attempts to explain Southerners’ inability for collective visioning located in the deep politics of the family, or whether the amoral familism ethos provokes or is the result of specific economic and political conditions (Silverman 1975). Clientelism is not merely a distribution of political and economic resources and favors in exchange for political support but generates and depends upon affective and emotive relations. Neither can it be seen as a one-sided phenomenon because older forms of clientelism are coupled with contractual corruption, opening a spectrum of relationships (Chubb 1982; Moss 1995).
Clientelism as a network of relations (Boissevain 1974) is not confined solely to two parties—the patron and the client. Clientelism is equally observed in civil society (Chapter 3), to catch one end of the spectrum, as well as in everyday family affairs. In their fragmentation, these