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Chapter 1

The Governance of Endangered People

As I walk with my friend Gianni in his natal village high in the mountains of area Grecanica, he suddenly starts speaking in Grecanico. He warns me that if we want to avoid being seen by other villagers who will definitely want to invite us into their homes, an offer we could not refuse, we should head down this dark alley. We are walking side by side with our heads down—thank God he is unable to see the astonishment written across my face. I keep walking and manage to respond in a calm voice that this indeed is a great idea.

I have known this man of twenty-six from the very first days of my research in Reggio Calabria, on the toe of Italy. He and his family are some of the most welcoming people I have ever met. They opened their home and hearts to me and treated me with respect and honor that very few people are lucky to receive. On commencing my ethnographic journey with the Grecanici, the Greek linguistic minority of Reggio Calabria, I tactfully asked Gianni and his brothers whether they spoke Grecanico, a minority language officially recognized by the Italian state. A mumbled “ligo”^GO (“a little”) revealed his discomfort in further elaborating on issues of language and politics. Gradually, as I became convinced he did not speak Grecanico, I withdrew from posing such questions.

Gianni had resisted my ethnographic inquiries for nearly ten months, but our relationship grew strong and transcended the realms of researcher/researched. He and his family provided invaluable ethnographic material along with friendship, but Gianni had always abstained from speaking in Grecanico despite the fact he knew it was the focus of my research. That overcast winter day in his village, hurrying along and shivering under our thick overcoats, our relationship took a sudden turn. He started speaking to me in Grecanico, and continued doing so intermittently whenever we subsequently met back in the city.

When I first arrived in Reggio Calabria in April 2006, a considerable number of local civic actors, professors, politicians, and everyday people, each in their own way, tried to persuade me that working with the Grecanici was a utopian project. It was insisted that “these people no longer use the Grecanico language,” that “the language is dead” and that “the younger generations have no interest in it other than instrumentally seeking a job in the Provincia (provincial government)” through national and EU-sponsored courses. Conflating language with people, actors with multiple agendas and interests made it their personal goal to influence the ethnographer to denounce the existence of the language and declare to an Anglophone audience the fictional character of the minority. Echoing right-wing views akin to those of the Lega Nord and Alleanza Nationale,¹ these political positions were overwhelmingly influenced by the fear of a break-up of the Italian state provoked by the relatively recent recognition of minorities—ethnic and linguistic² (Prato 2009). Both the Silvio Berlusconi government and the more recent transitional government of Mario Monti demonstrated incredible indifference to minority policies, cumulating in the 2013 budget cuts that left the apparatuses of minority self-government bankrupt, with employees going months without pay. The present study is a powerful reminder that official recognition of a minority—linguistic or ethnic—does not, in practice, necessarily secure the lawful benefits promised to the people.

I often felt pulled in different directions as local actors requested I take sides for or against minority politics. Every time I was invited to dinner I was instructed in what I should and should not record in my research. Very often I was asked as to the “progress of my work” and whether “I have found any Grecanici speaking the Grecanico language.” It was automatically assumed by all interested parties involved in the management of Grecanici affairs that research conducted by a scholar from a British university would have international impact, transcending the borders of Italy. They regularly spoke of the capacity of the English language to reach out and communicate local issues to wider audiences. Thus in their fervent efforts to convince me of their stance, actors uncovered complex and entangled pleats of local politics and histories, of which some feature in this book and some not. Apart from their heuristic and methodological value, these other stories, the untold stories, always distorted 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 relationships that constitute minority governance. But I wish to push the argument farther.

While governmentality is the overarching scheme that produces governable subjects, governance captures the creative constellations and interactions between individual actors and institutions, including markets, networks, and the family, on a multitude of scales. Although Foucauldian in its inspiration, the concept of fearless governance takes the governmentality paradigm in new directions. Foucault’s “governmentality” is concerned with how techniques and rationalities of rule render people governable and orient their conduct; he did not have room for unruly populations seeking self-governance at every turn and at any expense. The Grecanici uptake and appropriate the available political and bureaucratic channels of governance, working with these categories rather than being subject to them. In many cases, Grecanici are not “governed” in a Foucauldian sense, but rather creatively and subversively operate within the political and legal parameters. For Grecanici, specific ways of thinking, talking, and performing governance resonate with how conduct is governed in both its mundane and transnational level. Three dimensions of governance are particular pertinent here: (a) the technical aspect that relates to the fabrication of certain kinds of subjectivity and identity as well as discourses and rhetorics of value; (b) the rationale of governance and the relevant forms of knowledge that arise from and subsequently inform the act of governance; and (c) the ethics of governance as “an incitement to study the form and consequences of universals in particular historical situations and practices grounded in problems raised in the course of particular social and political struggles” (Dean 1999:42).

The analytics of governance highlight the workings of “practices of freedom and states of domination, forms of subjection and forms of subjectification” rather than dictating any liberating strategies (Dean 1999:34, original emphasis). Clearly, then, we discuss forms of power not directly and necessarily identified with domination, or with homogenizing frameworks imposed on local particularity; governance is neither pure freedom and domination nor consent and coercion (Foucault 2000, 2001a). Human subjectification and agency are viewed not as properties of a utopian sphere that lies outside relations of power and domination but as shaped within nexuses of relations that may be hierarchical, illegitimate, irreversible and exceptionally personal. Thinking about the materialization of governance through various techniques, practices, languages, and performances may clarify “how forms of domination, relations of power and kinds of freedom and autonomy are linked, how such regimes are contested and resisted, and thus how it might be possible to do things differently” (Dean 1999:37). The concept of fearless governance that I propose resonates with managing multiscaled relations that are delineated between the state, family, Grecanico civic associations and the ’Ndrangheta (Calabrian Mafia), to name but a few protagonists. Governance is located in three main pillars of Grecanici life that are inextricably interrelated—civil society, relatedness, and performances.

I argue that this governance is fearless because it is based on principles of navigation (see Ben-Yehoyada 2012) through complex channels of politics and representation, in the face of the potential danger and violence associated with hegemonic politics. Employing sharp senses, seeing, hearing, feeling, and imagining, Grecanici foresee and embrace the possible hazards of confronting conventions of governance. Heterogeneous elements of superiority, justice, self-perpetuation, violence, and morality are brought together as Grecanici fearlessly contest and skillfully maneuver the intricate, multiple, and often contradictory realizations of governance. Fearless governance does not negate violence, fear of failure, and discrimination but rather embraces them in uniquely creative ways.

Examining Classical and Greco-Roman texts, in his book Fearless Speech, Foucault (2001b:15–20) describes fearlessness as the courage to say anything based on qualified knowledge. The speaker must believe that he or she is speaking the evidential truth based on his or her view of morality. The proof of fearlessness is in courage, the fact that a speaker says something dangerous and different from what the majority believe is proof of fearlessness. The fearless person must be in a position to take a risk, to potentially lose something, incur anger, put friendships on the line, invite scandal, lose debates, and even run the risk of death. Sure of one’s own genealogy, pedagogy, and status, the fearless speaker always appears less powerful than the one with whom he or she speaks, with arguments that come from below and are directed above. The fearless speaker has a certain relationship to danger, moral law, freedom, and duty and is critical of the political status quo, and would rather risk death than choose a life of security, flattery, and silence.

Although the fearlessness discussed by Foucault can only be found in acts of speaking, the fearlessness I propose can also be actualized through bureaucratic management and bodily performances. Grecanici challenge the top-down governmental status quo through fearless acts spanning a wide range of political channels. Grounded in their knowledge of their minority culture and language—often certified through government and civic schemes—they risk personal friendships and the wrath of official law as they pursue power and political representation through scales of civil society, clientelism, and illicit activities. Thus I must draw attention to the ways macroscale governance (such as minority policies) converges with local desires to control, regulate, dominate, and govern their own affairs. Toward this pursuit, the conceptual limits of the “field site” need to be extended to facilitate a more holistic understanding of multiscaled relations, “a means by which to engage ethnography with emerging resonances of society with the contours of a nascent social” (Holmes 2000:6).

Language, Victimhood, and Governance

Grecanici of today are by no means poor, yet collective recollections of social discrimination and racism—especially during the first decade of their migration to Reggio Calabria at the end of the 1950s (Pipyrou 2010)—are rife. Accounts pertaining to the miseria (socioeconomic poverty) provoked by two world wars, trans-Atlantic and European migration, and forced relocation after the devastating landslides of the 1950s are languages of representation and social justification for multifaceted political and ideological dispositions. These particular languages constitute tools of governance embedded in particular lexicons of representation historically employed by Grecanici. Pamela Ballinger (2003) has suggested that languages of representation are organized around specific cultural constructs, one of which is victimhood. The trope of victimhood is part of a wider lexicon employed by disenfranchised people around the world, and which in turn has shaped a commensurate global platform for claims to difference. Nevertheless, local actors do not uncritically adopt tropes of representation, but mold them according to their own desires. The kind of victimhood claimed by Grecanici has lived historical depth and is shaped by a fusion of collective and individual histories of local flavor (cf. Toren 2013). The following three vignettes delve into the complexities and contradictions of the victimhood trope as a tool of governance.

1. Writing a New Statuto

During summer 2006 I was asked to translate the statuto (constitution) of a new cultural association from Italian to Modern Greek. The initiative was conceptualized in Greece as an attempt to unite “Greek-speaking” populations worldwide. This in itself would not be such an interesting matter, as there are numerous associations in Reggio Calabria representing the Grecanici minority, regularly being formed and disbanded. Nevertheless, this new association for which I had the opportunity to observe genesis came as a direct reaction to upheaval among local Grecanici civil society leaders on issues of cultural heritage and ownership (extensively discussed in Chapter 3). The issue that roused emotions and challenged authority over linguistic heritage related to a 2006 public quota for 300 people to be educated in Grecanico language, history, and culture, with the further aim to select a small number to work as civil servants at the Grecanici sportelli linguistici (linguistic help-desks) (I Foni Dikima 2006:30). Echoing the frustration voiced by Gianni at the opening of this book, it appeared that the allocation of places was based less on “origin” and more on “education,” which did not go down well; non-Grecanico candidates were more likely to enter the course than those of Grecanico origin. The statuto I was given to translate addressed the debatable issue of exclusivist rights to linguistic heritage and governance. We read in the introduction to the document, article one:

With the initiative of Mr … (a Greek national) the proposed association will act in Greece (Athens and Thessaloniki) and Italy (Calabria and Puglia) with the aim to understand and address the multifaceted aspects of the Greek linguistic minority in Italy and more specifically in Calabria and Puglia. These communities appear to share common cultural, historical, and financial considerations. With the collaboration of the Grecanico associations … and the employees of the two Greek government institutions of…. we intend to unite as many Hellenophone associations around the world as possible. The ultimate aim of this “alliance” is the financial and political benefits of the subsidizing schemes toward the minority. Moreover, the appropriation of the Grecanico culture by various associations and individuals motivated by personal interest should stop. For this reason, the proposed union could only be positive for the development and promotion of the Grecanico language all over the world. The current multidimensional Mediterranean development demands a more centralized organization, one that could address any arising matters more efficiently.

Treating Hellenism as a preordained category of relatedness, what the founding members are pleading for in this constitution is a centralization of operations for the linguistic minority to yield better political and financial returns and the desire to take a local campaign global. The aim is prolific capitalization on subsidized schemes from sources such as the EU, Greek and Italian states, and UNESCO. The second point, emerging directly from the first, is that any exploitation of the Grecanico language by associations, institutions, and individuals driven by personal interests should be emphatically avoided. It is clearly suggested in the statuto that Grecanico language and culture are the victims of predatory appropriation. What we are confronted with here is an unprecedented event in the Grecanico associazionismo (associationism) toward centralization that would impose new forms of governance regarding the financial and political future of the minority.

2. I Glossama den ecchi na petheni! Ecchi na zì!GO(Our Language Will Not Die! It Will Live!)

In April 2010, in a very emotive but affirmative tone, the province councilor of the Partito Rifondazione Comunista—Federazione della Sinistra, Omar Minniti, attacked the Silvio Berlusconi government for a budget cut for the linguistic minorities recognized in Italy by the 482/1999 law. The annual amount allocated to the Greek linguistic minority had been reduced to 165,000 euros from the initially approved 460,000 euros. This amount of money was intended to cover the salaries of fifteen people employed in the eleven sportelli linguistici that operate in the province of Reggio Calabria. Closing down the sportelli, Minniti argued, would constitute the final blow to a language that is still in use by a few thousand people. That would be the ultimate chapter of a “cultural genocide” committed against the Greeks of Calabria, who constitute an important piece of national history. He went on to plead with the deputies and senators to pressure the government into reconsidering the cuts so that the Grecanici communities and civic associations would not lose their financial resources vital to maintaining “in life the flame of the Hellenophone diversity.”⁴

3. UNESCO and the Grecanico Language as Immaterial Patrimony for Humanity.

During 2013 the Calabrian regional government proposed that the linguistic minorities of the region be recognized by UNESCO as “heritage of humanity.” Complying with the UNESCO category of intangible heritage introduced in 2003, the candidacy was heralded by local civic associations, politicians, and regional government as the ultimate acknowledgment of minority contribution to humanity. In April 2013, Tito Squillaci of the Associazione Ellenofona Jalò tu Vua, Bova Marina, Reggio Calabria, appeared emotional as well as cautious about the effects of a positive outcome for the application. While he was optimistic that the candidacy would revitalize the study of the language and culture in a more scientific manner by competent people, he closed his announcement by adding that “it is well noted that today more people talk about the Grecanico language instead of actually speaking the language. If the candidacy serves to stimulate a serious and objective test of reality, demystified, and change the actual state of things, then it is welcome.”⁵

* * *

The three short ethnographic vignettes presented above tie together questions of ownership, victimhood, and governance of minority issues. With scales of minority representation ranging across local civic associations, regional politicians, transnational state and non-state bodies, and minority policy, all with the burning desire to present local issues on global stages, there is also conflict and contestation as to who has the right to represent whom. In some cases, individuals have consciously championed themselves as living heritage: cultural artifacts with the authority to govern Grecanici affairs and condense the whole minority into their own persona (see particularly Chapter 6).

But what is the genealogy of such thinking behind conceptualizing Grecanico language as immaterial heritage of humanity and Grecanici as victims? What forms of governance brought about these developments? To explore the historical formation of such powerful governance influenced by global frameworks and local desires, we must keep in mind the multiple levels of interests that are invested in minority decision making processes. In some forms of governance the hegemonic position of the state is fearlessly challenged. Local civil society has always looked to civil society of global scale to find space to articulate rights to difference. More than ever, the power of the state for political representation is fragmented, as actors turn to UNESCO, the EU, other nation-states, and illegal organizations to provide accessible channels of governance and information communication.

Victimhood has been part of Grecanici experience for decades. Entwined with social discrimination, extreme poverty until the 1960s, and emigration, victimhood has an experiential, rhetorical, and pedagogical tenor. Since the unification of Italy in 1861, Grecanici villages have gradually become depopulated owing to extreme conditions of poverty, high levels of mortality, migration, and natural disasters (Martino 1979; Bevilacqua 1981; Dickie, Foot, and Snowden 2007). The torrid conditions of many Grecanici villages always attracted the interest of state institutions such as the Associazione Nazionale per gli Interessi del Mezzogiorno (National Association for the Interests of the South) in 1928 as well as private media outlets such as the Milanese journal L’Europeo in 1948. Grecanici felt “in their skin” what it means to be second-class citizens. Narratives of victimhood of the early 1900s are systematically circulated in Grecanici civil society and families, communicating feelings of bitterness and ambivalence. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially under Mussolini’s policies that fiercely promoted monolingualism (Cavanaugh 2009:159–160), alloglot Grecanici children were often the target of discrimination and abuse from teachers who spat in their faces, feeling repelled by the language. Subsequently, many parents avoided speaking Grecanico in front of their children, shielding them from further stigmatization. The Grecanici migration from ancestral villages in area Grecanica to Reggio Calabria in the 1950s highlighted once more the degree of prejudice and the divisive line between urban and rural populations in Italy (Teti 1993). Uneasiness looms within every narrative regarding those years. Domenico, fifty four, remembers,

We were called paddhechi, parpatulli and tamari^GO (all derogatory of peasantry). To an extent people still call us these derogatory terms. Until the beginning of the 1970s there was a street in my neighborhood called Lu Strittu di Paddhechi (The Street of the Peasants). Despite the fact that the majority of us are educated and have money we are still perceived as second-class citizens. Paradoxically, the language that once brought such problems is now worthy of praise. We must feel proud of our language for it is the language of the Ancient Greeks of Magna Graecia. Others want to capitalize on our language. They want to claim it for themselves. Once they were spitting in our faces, now they want to claim all the privileges of this language.

Domenico is hardly alone in articulating his claims to difference through victimhood as often Grecanici civil society appropriate buried histories in order to “authorise contemporary moral and political claims” (Ballinger 2003:14). Nevertheless, narrating victimhood has a rhetorical potential (Carrithers 2005). In the same manner that the trope of victimhood provides a framework to articulate bitterness and dissatisfaction about the past, it provides scope for future possibilities. In their seminal volume on social suffering, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock have argued that cultural responses to the traumatic effects of political violence often transform the local idioms of victims into universal professional 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, along with the desires and strategies of their members” (Yanagisako 1991:324), are in constant danger of slipping 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 ’ndrina^CD (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 relations constitute an intertwined web of polysided networks that bring together a conglomeration of people and collectivities that are by no means mutually exclusive—civic associations, state politicians, ’Ndrangheta, kin groups, and global organizations. The fact that civil society in Reggio Calabria poses an anthropological paradox in incorporating clientelism as well as clandestine and illegal activities, stems from older accounts according to which southern Italy is characterized by a civic ethos that prompts hierarchy and exploitation, that deprives the individual from happiness and security, civic cooperation and ineffective public policies (Putnam 1993). Insofar as civil society is associated with a particular notion of democracy and civility, associationism in Reggio Calabria will always throw up a paradox, for it is characterized by all the symptoms of societal ills.

In Reggio Calabria, actors move from relation to relation or simultaneously to various points of relatedness and never assume a permanent position—that of patron or client—as power is very elusive. As many ethnographers argue, clientelism effects vertical and coercive relations, and power is seen to be exclusively concentrated in the hands of politicians, economic lobbies, mafia, the Church, and other administrative and juridical institutions that monopolize and perpetuate the conditions on which they thrive (Chubb 1981, 1982; Auyero 1999; Medina and Stokes 2002, 2007). Such approaches have paved the way to investigate clientelism as created and directed not only from above but also from below, highlighting the complex relationship between local and national politics. The approach from the “client’s point of view” (Moss 1995; Auyero 1999) is then valuable but does not adequately explain how power is transformed in contexts of economic affluence or when clients are contextual patrons and vice versa. In distressing economic contexts it is easy—yet not unproblematic—to assume that the roles of patron and client are fixed or readily observed. But often the roles are not so easy to distinguish and may constitute one and the same thing.

Here again we need to take into consideration that power may be variously visible, or purposely cultivated as nonexistent (Foucault 1994, 2000). If we examine the poles of a relation rather than the relation itself, we run the risk of missing the transformative synergies of governance and co-produced knowledge. Dorothy Zinn (2001) employs the category of raccomandazione (recommendation) in order to argue that there is a common cultural reference between various forms of clientelism that run through quotidian life, political and economic lobbies, and organized crime. In that sense raccomandazione provides a common ground for dialogue, in Bakhtinian terms, thus not locating patrons and clients in fixed positions since their political volitions are perpetuated in a dialogic fashion (2001:48). The category of raccomandazione provides scope for analyzing familial clientelism, as there is a clear distinction between a raccomandazione that comes from a person outside the family and an intrafamilial raccomandazione.⁹ In the latter case, the family assumes a particular role and thus we refer to a kind of “autoraccomandazione,” “since there is an implicit familial privilege exercised in a public and apparently meritocratic space totally diverse from those that refer to private businesses” (67).¹⁰

Grecanici adopt the roles of the client and patron first and foremost within kinship relations. At the core of Grecanici ideology for difference, there is an aggressive and fearless desire for unbounded and unconditional relatedness. Trust endows relations with a particular ethos, meaning, morality, and legitimization. When examined closely, these relations are characterized by forms of reciprocity and exchange. Grecanici exchange money, favors, words (in the form of positive and negative gossip) love, and people (in the case of endogamy). Grecanici engage in clientelism in their own families, civil society, and the state and the phenomenology of these relationships will become apparent throughout this study.

Politicized Relations

Grecanici politicization comes as the direct result of moving across relations that connect various people and collectivities to different modes of governance. Through multiple forms of relatedness Grecanici make their way through rebounding, intersecting, and overlapping channels of political representation and power. Often, political analysis in Italy has been approached through dichotomical conceptual frameworks (Cento Bull 2000). More specifically, southern Italian societies have been criticized as sustaining vertical relations of hierarchy established by agents such as the state, political parties, the Church, and the mafia (see Cento Bull and Giorgio 1994; Lumley and Morris 1997). Since the unification of Italy. this particular criticism, the Questione Meridionale (the Southern Question) has been mainly developed within a dualistic conceptual framework—North Italy/South Italy—where social, economic, and political differences pertaining to the South were explained in a comparative fashion (see Schneider 1998; Pipyrou 2014a; Perrotta 2014). According to Nelson Moe (2002), the disposition to categorize the South as the exotic other (Italian and European) had already been constructed in Italian and European history comfortably before the unification of Italy. The North/South cultural categorization fostered deeper political and economic interests and provided an ideal vehicle for rekindling age-old conflicts and channeling hatreds (Gribaudi 1996:85; Pipyrou 2014a:248). New approaches during the 1980s tended to move away from any attempts at comparison, but they resulted in homogenizing southern Italy in terms of economics and politics without allowing space for inter- or possibly intraregional differences. Dominant themes to address sociopolitical change included subculture, cultural values, rationality, and loyalty (Cento Bull 2000:10). Fresh approaches emerged from the edited volumes published by Einaudi in the 1980s on Calabria, Puglia, and Sicily. By adopting different analytical frameworks, the authors of these volumes sketched the basis for “contextualising without generalising” (Morris 1997). Instead of comparing the South with the North or portraying the North as the ideal to be achieved, the new studies discussed the South within the South. Thus phenomena such as familism, clientelism, corruption, and the mafia were approached in a new light and examined in relation to the kinds of civil society and politicization they effected (Piselli and Arrighi 1985). From the heterodox Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and the “critical ethnocentrism” of Ernesto de Martino to contemporary scholars, the southern question still has analytical potential and ethnographic validity (see special issue of Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2014).

The present study moves away from previous dichotomic frameworks of political analysis. Instead it locates the analytics of governance in the validation of relations. The analytical validity of the relation rests on the fact that it has the power to connect paradoxical sources of representation, cut across hierarchies, and establish new forms of knowledge. Links may be created between innumerable individual or collective bodies that possess different degrees of power and knowledge. The space that is mapped from these dense criss-crossings delineates a reticular form of minority governance that enables the actors to accommodate their material and nonmaterial needs.

Actors move between individual and collective points of reference without being exclusively identified with any of them, provisionally adopting their political idioms of representation. Foucault’s notion of the productivity of power also points to the understanding of Grecanici governance as perpetually charged by the actors’ constant kinesis across various types of relations. As opposed to stasis, kinesis allows “the productivity of power” (Gordon 2000:xix), that is, the effect of realizing relations on every possible level or event “differing in amplitude, chronological breath, and capacity to produce effects.” These nexuses of relations, most publicly celebrated in religious manifestations and dance (Chapter 7), precisely because they have acquired an authoritative status, allow actors to use various channels (clientelism, family, friendships, political parties, global bodies) to find political representation. A person claims a relation in the same manner that s/he uses and abuses bureaucratic channels. The claim lies in the assumption that power “can be exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (Foucault 2000:94); it is neither focalized nor bounded. Power relations depend on and operate through more local, low level, “capillary” circuits of governance (Foucault 1994). The metaphor of capillary circuits allows for a conceptualization of governance as the direct product of connecting and managing various points of otherwise unconnected multiscaled entities. Grecanici successfully use their networks of relations to move to various and sometimes seemingly unconnected sources of representation. In this sense they accommodate personal and collective, economic, political, and emotive needs.

The chapters of this book are very neat illustrations of governance in different domains and levels. Examining the Grecanico civic associations (Chapter 3) demonstrates that when it comes to institutions that are deemed “of the state,” we notice a shift to rather exclusivist tactics of managing power, especially when compared to more traditional contexts of clientelism and favor accommodation. This is the direct result of the official recognition of the linguistic minorities by Italian law and their subsequent link to local self-government. Nevertheless, clientelism is highly sought among kin and close friends (Chapters 4 and 5). In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 the direct connection between kinship, governance, and religion and the interfaces that this entanglement entails is discussed. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the techne of governance by focusing on ’Ndrangheta as a particular sovereignty that poses relatedness at the core of its conceptualization. Subsequently, Chapter 7 is concerned with embodiments of governance that celebrate power and the dissemination of mafioso personhood through the tarantella dance.

It would be a mistake though to treat all Grecanici relations as one and the same thing. Forced or voluntary migration, as well as dense kinship and mafia networks, suggests that Grecanici political claims were emphasized or suppressed in different historical and political periods. Minority interests are developed in accordance with opportunities provided by political fluctuations in Calabria, Italy, Greece, and the EU. Paying close attention to multilayered forms of relatedness facilitates a deeper understanding of minority politics and how actors may seek to empower themselves. It also sheds light on the techne, episteme, and ethos of governance that underlies minority politics.¹¹ While power relations “are unequal and hierarchical, they are not ‘zero-sum games’ in which only certain actors have power at the expense of others” (Dean 1999:69–70). Grecanici governance is an example in contemporary political anthropology where a minority has become successful in appropriating multiple channels of representation that have paradoxically transformed a poverty-stricken, subordinate population into a politically prosperous piece of living history.