Stefano Fait, "A gemütlich
Segregation – Multiculturalism and the Iceman's Curse in Italy"
It is useless to
continue speaking German if we acquire Italian ways and mentalities…An ethnic
minority must never lose its fear of disappearing. Once it does, it will
disappear.
– Silvius Magnago, the father of modern South Tyrol
Everyone wants to
be a minority, here; being a majority is unappealing.
– Anton Pelinka, Austrian political scientist, on multiculturalism in South Tyrol
In Italy, as in
France, Iberia and Latin America, hyphenated identities are uncommon. It
is generally assumed that a cohesive civil religion is incompatible with an
emphasis on ethnic and cultural distinctiveness as discussed in the Adsett
chapter. But what happens when this assimilationist logic, stressing what
people have in common, comes face to face with an ethnic identity which
celebrates difference, as in South Tyrol or Québec?
South Tyrol/Upper
Adige, the northernmost trilingual Italian region, on the alpine border with
Austria, has often been celebrated as a model of how ethnic rivalries can be
contained. However, the post-war agreement really was a ‘cold peace’ which
rested on a peculiar reinterpretation of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. The
campaign slogan adopted by the party representing the German-speaking majority
used to be: “the clearer we make the distinction between us, the better we will
get on with each other”, roughly corresponding to the English saying “good
fences make good neighbours”. This compromise, together with a lavishly
subsidized, but also vibrant, local economy – South Tyrol’s per capita income
exceeds the national average by 40 percent, and ranks among the highest in the
world – has ensured that the interests of otherwise competing and
antagonistic groups would not diverge too sharply. But it has come at a
price: ethnic identities and interests matter sensibly more than individual
identities and rights. An arrangement originally designed to protect
ethnic Ladins and Germans – a majority in the region but a minority nationally –
from the encroachments of the Italian State, has produced a ‘fenced society’.
Most people live side by side but separately (nebeneinander), often in
self-enclosed, ethnically homogeneous enclaves, guarding their ‘irreducible
uniqueness’. Mixture (Vermischung), mixed marriages (Mischehen)
and mixed schools (gemischte Schulen) are deemed undesirable; even
nursery schools are ethnically segregated. This is the result of a clash
of two distinct inflections of nationalism.
European
nationalism did not come in a package with individualism and secularism, and
the transformation of the agrarian world produced sensibly different outcomes. The
moral and cultural consensus expressed by the nationalized masses could find a
sense of cohesion and shared identity in opposite directions. In part,
this is because modern European secular narratives have been shaped by both the
Enlightenment and positivistic belief in the malleability of human nature and
society and by the Romantic passion for ethnicity and localism and its critique
of social fragmentation and dehumanizing mechanism. Under the influence of
Romantic aspirations, national identities have been literally invented through
the selective removal of memories of past hybridism and syncretism.
Historically, this
dualism gave rise to two divergent traditions of accommodating cultural and
ethnic diversity within a nation-state. The first is an assimilationist
and contractual model, adopted in Western Europe, and mostly derived from the
Roman and Roman Catholic ecumenical traditions, and from the Enlightenment and
liberal individualist and cosmopolitan values. Its explicit aim is to gradually
absorb diversity within its legal framework and the hegemonic national culture. Nationality thus coincides with civic, voluntary affiliation, and membership is
determined by acquired traits such as a common language and shared cultural
traditions. The second tradition is a particularistic and separatist
model, where minorities are not encouraged to integrate into the larger society
because their cultural identities are held to be not entirely reconcilable with
the values and norms of the host society, and because their members are
presumed to be too firmly anchored to their cultural baggage. Arguably
this is what we have seen in the case of Germany and Austria in previous
chapters, and in Eastern Europe. Within this model, nationality is an
ethno-cultural, ascribed affiliation relying on genealogical criteria.
This difference in
policy had important consequences. Both the German and the Italian
unification processes began during the Napoleonic wars and came to fruition in
the early 1870s. But German Romantic nationalism was impregnated with ruralism,
ethnicism, and anti-cosmopolitism and drew heavily on a symbolic repertoire of
peasants alienated by the ills of modern urban life. Conversely, Italian
nationalism developed along the lines of ever-widening circles of integration
and abstract superimpositions, and an emphasis on a common language, tradition,
history, and on highly formalized juridical and political units that were
inevitably inimical to ethnic particularism. The postulate of a ‘natural
causation’ of politics and society was consistently rejected even by the far
right, and nationalism was seldom associated with völkish themes
(Absalom 1995). Thus, for instance, Italian encyclopedias and
dictionaries consistently stressed the voluntaristic aspects of nationality and
excluded ‘race’ as a constitutive, unifying factor (Gentile 2006).
In brief, German
nationalism was more inclined to make a fetish of ethnic identity, that is, to
treat it as something superior to humans, possessing an intrinsic, almost
sacred value, whereas Italian nationalism often manifested an alarming state
idolatry, which would fester with Mussolini’s rise to power. Besides having a
remarkable heuristic value as an analytical tool, this divide can be clearly
seen in Trentino-South Tyrol (TST), where different ethnic groups managed to
peacefully co-exist until the age of European nationalism. Until 1919 a
province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, TST was assigned to Italy by the
treaty of Saint Germain, even though its German-speaking inhabitants – an
ethnic majority in South Tyrol – longed for their reintegration into the
Austrian homeland and especially for the unification with North Tyrol, still
part of Austria.
When Mussolini
came to power, he was determined to force upon the nation a sense of national
identity, in order to make it disciplined and efficient, in spite of the
existing linguistic and regional divisions. This meant imposing an
absolute linguistic and cultural unity for the whole of Italy, which had been
unified less than sixty years earlier. This would include the
French-speaking Aosta Valley, the Slovenian-speaking minority, and the
German-speaking South Tyrol. He then undertook an ethnocidal scheme of
Italianisation of South Tyrol, encouraging thousands of Italian workers to
settle down in its towns,[1]
disbanding cultural and recreational associations, hiring only monolingual
Italian-speaking civil servants and barring access by local elites to positions
of responsibility, forbidding the teaching and use of German language in
public, and having place names, given names and even gravestone inscriptions
translated in Italian.
Eventually, in
1939, Hitler and Mussolini devised a radical solution to this problem: ‘voluntary’
ethnic self-cleansing. South Tyroleans were asked to choose between
staying in South Tyrol and renounce their cultural heritage and declaring
themselves ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and be resettled somewhere in
the German Reich. Approximately 170,000 – 90% of Germanophones and 61% of
Ladins – opted for the Reich and were called ‘Optants’ (Optanten).
The Dableiber, those who refused to leave their land, and there were as
many as 70,000 of them, were regarded as traitors by the others. This
collective trauma left a legacy of pain among South Tyroleans.[2]
After the war,
some of those who had been resettled in the former German Reich began to return
home, but South Tyrol was not restored to Austria. Rome was instead urged
to grant self-government to its German-speaking and Ladin-speaking minorities,
which it did, in 1948, but in a way that would make sure that South Tyrol would
not be able to secede, and which deeply enraged South Tyroleans. The
special status was extended to the Trentini, their Italian-speaking neighbours
to the South, and a new region was created, called ‘Trentino – Upper Adige’,[3]
in which German speakers would once again be a minority with little control
over their own destiny. Then came mass demonstrations, bombing attacks,
the first victims, and troops were sent to police the province: the spectre of
Northern Ireland loomed large in the national debate. Eventually, Rome agreed
to discuss a set of far more meaningful measures of self-government for the
ethnic minorities, the so-called ‘second autonomy package’, which was
originally signed in 1969 and put in place in 1972, although it took twenty
years of fierce negotiations to implement all the measures (137) that it
contained (Paketabschluss).
It was in those
years, late 1960s – early 1970s, that two American anthropologists, John W.
Cole and Eric R. Wolf, did ethnographic fieldwork in TST. They detected a
number of distinctive cultural traits which set Italian-speaking and
German-speaking peasants apart, despite living in the same ecological niche, to
which they had adapted in much the same way. They ranged from settlement and
field layouts (dispersed in South Tyrol and nucleated in Trentino); professional
aspirations; economic and social arrangements (independence and self-government
vs. interdependence and community-orientation, rural life vs. urban life); and,
migration patterns (Italian-speaking emigrants maintained close ties with their
homeland, whereas German-speaking emigrants burned the bridges behind them). But
the most striking divergence was in kinship and family structures. In
Tyrolean families, the first born son (Wirth) would inherit the estate
(primogeniture) and the younger siblings would have to leave (weichen). Alternatively,
some of them were allowed to remain at the farm, and work as farmhands (Knechte,
which also means ‘slaves’). Conversely, ethnic Italian families in TST
divided the estate and the patrimony in equal parts among all siblings. Farmers
would not regard themselves as rulers of an estate, but as stewards. Communities
tended to be inclusive, democratic, reciprocal, and flexible, and families and
distant relatives would enjoy broad social networks (Wolf & Cole 1999).
From this brief
overview of ethnic relationships in TST, one can readily discern that this can
easily result in a brand of multiculturalism in which power struggles between
ethnic groups and interest groups may cause the right of peoples to
self-determination to become a vehicle for the fetishization of group
identities. Indeed, in South Tyrol, TST’s northern autonomous province, every
ten years, the ethnic census requires local residents, including foreign
residents, to identify with one of the three available ethnic designations[4]
– dubbed ‘ethnic cages’ by the critics of this system – which will determine
welfare entitlements (e.g. social housing) and public employment quotas
available to each group, in proportion to their numerical strength. The
political implications of this census are obvious. Eastern Europeans
living in the region are the most likely to self-identify as German-speakers in
the ethnic census, for German was the official language of the Habsburg Empire,
and was commonly spoken across south-eastern Europe. The recent decision on the
part of the ethnic German ruling party to impose restrictions on migrant
workers who are not from Eastern Europe, shows that ethnic allegiance overrides
all other considerations.
As a result, 20
percent of residents who would rather not identify with any of the official
ethnicities or, given the choice, would check off more than one, have no choice
but to select one. In other words, individuals are to a large extent
defined by their membership in an ethnic group. Ethnic identities matter
sensibly more than individual rights and, even though things are improving,[5]
many, perhaps most people still live side by side but separately, in
self-enclosed, ethnically homogeneous enclaves, guarding their ‘irreducible
uniqueness’, and stigmatizing those who have dared to cross the clearly defined
boundaries. People from different ethnic backgrounds, it is argued by the
German-speaking political leaders, should meet “as little as possible and as
much as necessary” (so wenig als möglich, so viel als notwendig).
The imperative of ‘boundary maintenance’ is inexorable: society must be ordered
in ‘ethnic drawers’ (ethnische Schubladen) (Staffler 1999), which means
that individuals are forced into ethnic straitjackets that define them by their
ascribed roles. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to initiate a reversal
of perspective when social interactions and economic transactions are based on
ethnically homogeneous pre-existing networks of trust –. This is a problem that
has been extensively examined by Patti Lenard in her chapter on immigration and
trust.
This ideal Heimat,[6]
for all its protections from the outside world and its perpetual reproduction
of a ‘geography of avoidance’,[7]
seems to be economically unfeasible and politically unwise in an increasingly
integrated continental economy and in times of mass immigration. The
underlying premise of this model of multicultural coexistence is that ethnic
groups should be highly integrated, self-referential and static, or else
South Tyrol would quickly find itself on the brink of Verelsässerung,
that is, total assimilation, like Alsace, in France (Elsass in German).
As a result of all
this, today Upper Adige is “the one area in Central Europe where there is not a
dominated but a dominant minority” (Pallaver 1990, 70). But the outcome
of this institutionalized compensatory differential treatment and
measures taken to promote the autonomous development of each ethnic
group – whether manifested in sport, media, religion, education, the labour
market, the house market, social amenities, recreational facilities, etc. –
can be usefully compared to J.S. Furnivall’s (1948, 304) disillusioned
description of South East Asian colonial societies:
It is in the
strictest sense a medley, for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by
its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As
individuals they meet, but only in the marketplace, in buying and selling.
There is a plural society, with different sections of the community living side
by side, but separately, within the same political unit.
Life in the South
Tyrol of ethnic quotas (ethnischer Proporz) can also be
contrasted with the Cantle Report’s (2001, Section 2.1) depiction of the inner
cities of Northern England:
The extent, to
which these physical divisions were compounded by so many other aspects of our
daily lives, was very evident. Separate educational arrangements,
community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social
and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a
series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point,
let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges.
Bones of
Contention
Symbols, systems
of signification, and narrative accounts are tied together in complex ways, and
even scientists sometimes end up enmeshed in the cobweb of identity politics.
Between 1878 and
1900, in a political climate ideologically charged due to border disputes
between Austria and Italy, Meran medical anthropologist Franz Tappeiner
(1816-1902) and his colleagues used craniometric measurements and skin and hair
sampling to argue that Trentini[8]
closely resembled the dolichocephalous ‘Germanic type’. Their colleagues
in Trent, Giovanni Canestrini (1835-1900) and Lamberto Moschen (1853-1932),
countered that, according to their own findings, Trentini should be classified
together with their Italian neighbours to the south.[9]
Paolo Mantegazza, one of the leading Italian anthropologists, while clarifying
that his critical remarks should not be intended as a personal attack on an
esteemed colleague and friend, remarked that he could not believe that “the
hyper-craniological faith could be stretched to the point of fanaticism”
(Mantegazza 1884, 355-356). Both sides refused to acknowledge the
physical resemblance of South Tyroleans and Trentini, who had lived side by
side and intermarried for centuries. This is a forgotten tidbit of local
history which shows that even scientific practices may become objects of fierce
struggle and impassioned debate over disputed classifications. This is
far more likely when there is an ongoing conflict between ethnic groups vying
for control of resources and power.
About a hundred
years later, in 1991, German hikers discovered a well-preserved corpse, still
half buried in a glacier on the South Tyrolean border with Austria. It
turned out that the corpse was not that of a mountaineer, but of a man who
lived in the region thousands of years ago and who was christened ‘Oetzi the
Iceman’, because people initially thought that he had been found in the
Austrian Oetz Valley. Since 1998, despite the protests of those who found
this decision appalling and degrading, Oetzi has been on display in a
refrigerated chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano/Bozen,
the capital town of South Tyrol, and has immediately become an object of
desire. Hundreds
of tourists from across the world[10] line up every day to catch a glimpse
of the mummy through a small stainless steel window. As the oldest preserved human
being, he has acquired a true celebrity status and, from an invaluable treasure
for palaeontologists, he has turned into a huge business venture, spawning a
veritable ‘Ice Man industry’, with countless commercial ramifications, from
books and documentaries, to tours, holiday packages, and escorted hikes to the
site of discovery, to special recipes, dishes, and menus, to merchandise. His
image appears on cups, t-shirts, postcards, key chains, calendars, notepads,
mouse pads, backpacks, etc. Now even Hollywood stars are joining the
Oetzi-cult. It is reported that Brad Pitt got a new tattoo of Oetzi on
his left forearm, perhaps because the Iceman himself had 60 tattoos, allegedly
for shamanic/therapeutic reasons.
Now, because the
body was found on the Italian-Austrian border, a legal battle ensued between
Italy and Austria over the ownership of Oetzi, which soon became a clash
between North and South Tyrol, Innsbruck and Bozen. Bolzano eventually
won the dispute when a topographic survey established that the resting place
lay inside South Tyrol, less than a hundred yards from the border. For the
first time since the annexation, South Tyroleans had reason to rejoice for not
being part of Austria: their special status meant that every archaeological
finding would fall under the provincial jurisdiction.[11]
This also meant that the ancient man initially dubbed by the media Homo
Tirolensis, and portrayed as the first Tyrolean, really was Homo
Tirolensis Meridionalis (‘South Tyrolean Man’), with potentially serious
implications for the future relations of the two ethnically related, but
politically separated neighbours. Many Austrian Tyroleans thought that
they had been robbed. After all, his name was Oetzi, like the Austrian
Oetz valley, not Schnalsi, as he should have been called, if he had been found
in the South Tyrolean Senales valley. This was but the latest of a string
of altercations between Tyroleans, with the northerners accusing the
southerners of taking unfair advantage of Italian multicultural policies to
pursue their own interests to the detriment of their Austrian ‘cousins’.
This story is important
because it highlights the limits of identity politics when the need to
emphasise diversity leads to the iconization of symbols of difference, even if
it is the body of a deceased man, turned into a relic. Oetzi has been
turned into a South Tyrolean saint, the object of a secular, spontaneous
devotion. A hunter, a travelling salesman, a shaman, an outlaw, or a
warrior, no one really knows who this man was. Nevertheless, his body,
preserved forever in a sarcophagus monitored by multiple sensors, together with
his goatskin leggings, axe, grass cape, longbow, arrows, fire-making kit, and
backpack, is now part of a mythologizing process, which closely resembles the
cultification of Lenin.
This is
unsurprising, given that the cultural construction of ethnicity is grounded in
objects, symbols, institutions, places, and habits. The perpetuation of
undiluted cultures and ethnicities has much in common with the
preservation of this warrior hero, media icon, and ancestral patriarch. The
5,300-year-old mummy is in many ways an allegory of how local power struggles
have led to the fetishization of group identities. When certain ethnic
identity markers are less readily accessible, or their content is thinning, or
they are questioned, or no longer as distinctive as they used to be, and
therefore less relevant –this is precisely what is going on in South Tyrol, as
the new generations appear to be less interested in ethnicity – then it becomes
necessary to develop and introduce some new ones (Wrong 1997). In other
words, apart from the ordinary symbolic manipulation for commercial purposes,
the hype surrounding Oetzi is possibly an indication of a decline of real
cultural differences, or at least of a much less polarized division between
South Tyroleans and Alto Atesini. This has forced ethno-political
entrepreneurs to find new ways to mobilize intra-group solidarity. This
secular relic is therefore a promise of immortality for the current
multi-ethnic arrangement of the province, the guarantee that South Tyroleans
will forever continue to exist as a distinct ethnic group. As the body of
the mythical ancestor[12]
has stood the course of time, so will the South Tyrolean identity (Bergonzi
& Heiss 2004). What is even more interesting is that all this is
occurring as North and South Tyroleans, who share virtually the same tradition
and language, are undergoing a process of schismogenesis (Bateson 1958). Partitioned
into two subgroups by the border, and therefore lacking those checks and
restraints that prevent progressive differentiation, the division is becoming
dialectically heightened to the point that it is spinning out of control and
leading them to increasing rivalry and hostility. This could lead,
eventually, to the breakdown of pan-Tyrolean ethnic solidarity, similar to the
way in which, in the post-war years, Austrians distanced themselves from
pan-Germanism as seen in the previous chapter. An event that would appear
all the more baffling, given the otherwise stubborn commitment to the ‘one
Tyrol’ ideology (Landeseinheit), which finds eloquent expression in the
old folksong ‘There is only one Tyrol’ (Tirol isch lei oans). Ultimately,
the nature of the alleged Iceman curse, which has thus far claimed the lives of
7 persons somehow related to the discovery of Oetzi or to research conducted on
his body, might well be that those coming in close and prolonged contact with
Oetzi are bound to be torn apart from their loved ones, and this is just as
true for ethnic groups.
But there is
another sense in which identity politics has major commercial implications.
These days, DNA-screenings are performed on a number of peoples, particularly
if they live in remote places, in which case they are known as founder
populations, that is, human groups descending from a small number of ancestors
(founders). They represent an enormous opportunity for clinicians,
because their genetic variations become amplified, with a higher allele
frequency. Instead, the rest of their genome remains substantially the
same, given that very few mutations are introduced from the outside (‘genetic
noise’). These studies can only be useful if both the environment and
lifestyles have remained unchanged, playing a minor role in genetic variation,
and isolated populations come closer to the ideal conditions. This should
facilitate the highly profitable and immensely helpful medical research into
the genetic determinants of common disorders.
The Alps, with their narrow valleys and scattered settlements would appear to
be extremely promising for genetic analysis of complex traits. And,
indeed, there is an ongoing population research project, called GenNova, which
is being conducted by the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the
European Academy[13]
in Bolzano/Bozen – which also hosts an ‘Institute for Mummies and the Iceman’ –
in partnership with the universities of Harvard, Munich and Lübeck. Their
homepage[14]
says that ‘several of South Tyrol’s remote Alpine valleys and villages,
especially some Ladin communities and other communities of the Val Pusteria,
Valle Isarco and Val Venosta, have basically maintained the same geographical
conditions, small-scale economic structures and above all, limited mobility
since their settlement in the Neolithic period, leading to
genetic-environmental ‘microisolation’. Such small, visible pockets of
microisolated populations, together with unique genealogical and medical
documentation, make South Tyrol an ideal location for research in the
field of genetic medicine.
Understandably, German-speaking media reports of this project often betray the
crypto-colonial fascination with the “virgin”, “the pristine”, the ‘Otherness’
of peoples “living close to nature”. Now even genetics appear to be
committed to the preservation of the ethnic Garden of Eden, where South
Tyroleans are most themselves, at their most pristine, unsullied and immune for
centuries from the diluting influences of foreign cultures and genotypes (Pinggera
et al. 2006). These communities have ostensibly marched through history
in ordered ranks, keeping their ethnic heritage intact and becoming sites of
moral values where pristine native culture intersects with a primordial
landscape. However, critics have questioned the value of this kind of
research, on the ground that population geneticists ignore the significant body
of ethnographic literature pointing to the mobility of the human species and to
the contingency and plasticity of human cultural expressions and of
group-boundaries. They believe that scientists have fallen prey to the
so-called ‘classificatory fallacy’ (or ‘essentialist fallacy’), in that they
have mistaken artificially constructed and constantly negotiated and contested
categories for natural categories.
Indeed, in deeply divided multicultural societies like South Tyrol, it is not
always easy to disentangle scientific reasoning from preconceived notions of
self-identity, and professional agendas from political agendas. For
instance, let us consider Germanic kinship and inheritance systems.
Traditionally, Germanic ethnic aggregations (Stämme) comprised a few
thousand families and defined their identity in relation to a common ancestor
and to their consanguinity (endogamy) (Gasparri 1998). It was customary
for the members of peasant patriarchal clans to be unilaterally related to each
other and to trace their genealogy back to the alleged founder of the lineage,
that is, to their common ancestor. The patriarch was the highest
religious, political, and legal authority of the clan and decided when it was
time to transfer his power to the first-born son, together with the knowledge
of the body of norms and practices of the lineage, according to the inheritance
right called Anerbenrecht. It is therefore far more natural for
South Tyroleans than for Alto Atesini to think of their heritage as part of
this ‘ancestral inheritance’ (Ahnenerbe). Because we cannot assume
a basic literacy in genetics and biological evolution for most South Tyrolean
readers, many might erroneously understand genealogies in terms of genetic
continuity – some sort of Eternal Recurrence – and regard their existence as an
epiphenomenon of perpetual bloodlines. This would in turn exacerbate the
existing tendency toward the fetishization of culture and identity, or
neotraditionalism, whereby ethnicity is seen as timeless, bounded, discrete,
and organic, the permanent and inalterable property of a primordial ethnic
group.
Indeed, the
implicit assumption is common, that the authentic South Tyrol is rural and that
genuine South Tyroleans are healthy and sturdy mountain farmers. Those
who have to leave the countryside for urban settings are presumed to be eager
to reconnect with their rural roots, whenever possible. This belief
recreates and commercializes a mystique of the natural and redeeming
authenticity and purity of the Alps as a getaway from the pressure of urban
daily life and from the corrupting influence of modernity, especially Italian
modernity. The Alps are then viewed as an ideal space of subversive
nostalgia, for those longing for a more genuine identity. It is through
this psychological transference that environmental conservation (Naturschutz)
and ‘homeland protection’ (Heimatschutz) become closely
intertwined in the South Tyrolean self-narrative.
Advertising
campaigns for tourism promotion make the link between environmental management
and the multiple meanings and uses of the ‘touristification’ of heritage even
more apparent. In the South Tyrolean tourism industry it is not unusual
to encounter traces of ethno-nationalistic rhetoric such as the expression “the
obstinate love of the people for their homeland” (hartnäckige Heimatliebe
der Menschen) or quotes such as, “every man has a homeland and should love
and honour that patch of land where he was born” (Jeder Mensch hat eine
Heimat und soll das Fleckchen Erde, wo er geboren ist, in Lieb’ und Ehren
halten). These words, found in a tourist brochure, were taken from a
poem by the nineteenth-century German poet and writer Julius Wolff, and were
used by the South-Tyrolean Dairy Association as a caption for the photo of two
blond children drinking milk while sitting in the mountain grass.
Within the
ethno-environmentalist model “Homeland and environment” (Heimat und Umwelt),
Heimat is the ubiquitous and constitutive feature of a defensive
strategy against the globalised and secularised ‘outside world’ which combines
landscape preservation, economic protectionism, and the attempt to restore the
perceived harmony of the past and the moral qualities associated with the
countryside. Yet South Tyroleans should not be seen as passive recipients
of the effects of this manipulation of signs and signifiers. They also
play active roles in the dynamic conversion of the particular into the
universal and back again, and they deliberately try to market a particular
approach to modernity and multiculturalism, transformed into a fetishized
commodity. In other words, today’s South Tyrol is also a brand name
closely identified with authenticity. By the same token, South Tyroleans,
as they dress in traditional garb, play traditional instruments, sing
folksongs, and try to anticipate the tourist’s expectations are, as it were,
human billboards, with a corporate identity who seek to generate brand loyalty
among tourists/consumers while catering for the demands of the local tourist
industry.
What is truly
fascinating is that, far from restricting the jurisdiction of commodization, as
in Igor Kopytoff’s model (Appadurai 1999), South Tyroleans are resolutely and
purposefully committed to its expansion, as the only viable remedy to the
increasing depopulation of mountain areas, and as a way to express their
lifestyle. Self-objectification and self-commoditization via the resurrection,
invention, and staging of folkways are palatable because they provide hard
currency and symbolic capital, and revive practices that would otherwise have
no place in everyday life. In this way, South Tyroleans can assert their
group identity and teach traditional values, ideals and norms of behaviour to
the new generations. The focus is on building a sense of continuity with
the past and integrity in the present, and retaining an appearance of
authenticity, spontaneity, worth, genuineness, and plausibility, that is,
of collective identity. At least for young people, who are gradually losing the
sense of ethnic self-preservation (Selbsterhaltungsgefühl), being South
Tyrolean also means voluntarily consuming one’s own identity, choosing to be part
of a ‘tribe’, but only insofar as it is in their economic, social and political
interest to do so (Maffesoli 1996).
I therefore have
to disagree with Oliver Schmidtke’s contention that “the pragmatism of a
primarily managerial approach to a common market and the highly emotional
reference to the endangered Heimat are not very compatible” (Schmidtke 1996,
298). South Tyrolean identity has served to protect and expand business
opportunities. What is more, a fast-shrinking global marketplace causes
distinctiveness to become commercially attractive, and at the same time it
intensifies regional competition, fostering economic and cultural chauvinism. Hence,
identity politics should be seen, at least to some extent, as a natural
outgrowth of mass consumerism and the struggle for symbolic hegemony. It
follows that there is no inherent tension between commercialism and
traditionalism, and between exchange-value and use-value. Cultural
preservation and business are simply two sides of the same coin, and the commercial
exploitation of objects and practices (including a people’s genome) may lead to
native essentialism – the idea that group members have a primordial attachment
to their traditional ways of life and worldviews – which, incidentally, seems
to enjoy a broad appeal, and not only in South Tyrol (Brumann 1999).
Dominant
Minorities
It is only fair to
say that the alpine region has never been welcoming to foreigners, newcomers
and underrepresented minorities. Witch-hunting was endemic in the
isolated rural societies of the Alps and their foothill (Trevor-Roper 1969) and
minorities such as Gypsies, Jews, Karrner, Hutterites, Sinti and Roma, have
been systematically discriminated against, harassed and persecuted by
institutionalised lynch mobs for centuries in Switzerland, Austria,
Trentino-South Tyrol, and Slovenia. They were regarded as ‘imperfectly
assimilated’ or ‘inassimilable’, and treated as ‘matter out of place’. These
itinerant, cosmopolitan, boundary-transgressing ethnic groups violated the deeply
entrenched taboos and imperatives of societies where priority was placed “on
keeping people judiciously apart, on maintaining delicate balances that made
possible long-term accommodation” (Barber 1974, 256). This is precisely
the state of affairs in Upper Adige.
Alexander Langer,
a South Tyrolean green politician, journalist, and writer, ostracized in his
own community for his hostility to ethnic segregation and for his alleged
betrayal of his own ethnic group, committed suicide in 1995. In a short
autobiography, he recalled the day that he was late for school and saw other
children that he had never seen before, entering the school from a different
entrance, which he had never heard of: “it wasn’t my entrance, I did not know
them, the whole place was different, and there were fewer children”. It
was then that he realized that an entire side of the school was reserved for
children from a different ethnic background, with their teachers and their
recreational area, their gate, and their schedule. This early experience
made Langer’s resolve to denounce and combat social segmentation, ethnic
segregation, and separate education unshakeable. But even after his
death, this state of affairs has not improved significantly. His dream of
a society whose main slogan would be “the more contact we have, the better we
will get on with each other” has not come true. The official motto of
this formal democracy is still “to count, to weight, and to divide” (zählen,
wägen, teilen) (Baur et al. 1998).
Under Mussolini’s dictatorship,
the only way for ethnic German children to study German was through a network
of illegal, underground schools in farm-houses called Katakombenschulen.
Today, it’s the other way round, and there are ethnic German parents who
must hire Italian teachers for their children sub rosa, because South
Tyrolean and Alto Atesini pupils are not supposed to mix and learn about each
other’s culture. Integration cannot go too far, for Italians must
continue to play the role of the ‘perpetual foreigners-within’ as
Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos describe in their chapter. In the
words of Siegfried Brugger, a former South Tyrolean People’s (SVP) chairman, “we
need no new type of South Tyroleans, who are a mish-mash, with a little bit
German, a little Ladin, a little Italian. This is a political approach which is
old-fashioned and has been superseded” (Quoted in Pallaver 2005, 203).
The South Tyrolean
People’s Party is a Sammelpartei, that is, a party with a cross-class
electoral appeal representing an ethnically homogeneous constituency. It
was founded in 1945 and has since managed to secure the votes of nearly all
South Tyroleans and Ladins, invariably gaining the absolute majority of votes
and seats in local elections. Oliver Schmidtke reports that, in the
1990s, a group of people, all wearing their folk costumes, appeared on an
election campaign poster in support of the SVP, with the slogan “We South
Tyroleans” (Wir Südtiroler). Schmidtke correctly argues that the poster
seems to suggest that those who share that identity should cast their vote for
the SVP (Schmidtke 1996). However, the obverse could also be posited:
those who express a preference for the SVP are expected to dress, act, look,
and feel like Südtiroler, at least once in a while. “My ethnicity right
or wrong” (Mir sein mir) is still the dominant attitude in this corner
of Europe. After all, in a less ethnically divided society, the party
would lose considerable ground, because the very reason for the existence of
the “guardians of the homeland” (Heimatschützer) would disappear, and a
crisis of legitimacy would ensue (Pallaver 2005).
This is why the
SVP maintains a peculiar attitude to autonomy, and concentrates its efforts in
perpetuating inter-ethnic divisions and prioritizing social cohesion and ethnic
conflict (Volkstumkampf) over individual rights (Rossi 1980). This
approach is noticeably reminiscent of the collectivist “Liberty of the Ancients”,
understood as “active and constant participation in collective power”, and is a
far cry from the modern notion of liberty as private independence against the
subjection to arbitrary power (Constant 1988). Freedom as intended in
South Tyrol is a group right, not an individual right, a subject Andrew
Robinson in Chapter Two reflects on the importance of both personal autonomy
and communal identifications in the pursuit of a meaningful life.
In order to preserve the “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft)
which keeps all South Tyroleans bond to one another and to the party, the
SVP has invested heavily in ethnically based and party-linked social and
cultural associations, knowing that, in the long run, they would ensure the
propagation and hegemony of the party’s ideology (Schmidtke 1996). In
this respect, we should highlight the fact that, as part of the compensatory
package, more than 90 percent of the tax revenue generated in South Tyrol is
then returned to the province and that 70% of the budget is spent on the fixed
costs of the ‘hypertrophic’ public sector which provides ethnically
differentiated goods and services. This translates into a tremendous
amount of financial backing for the party’s essential purpose of preserving the
status quo by avoiding conflict through compromises rather than through
integration. Akin to Suzanna Reiss’ (Chapter Four) trenchant analysis in
Canada, South Tyrol’s provincial government budgetary provision for 2008 has
allocated 380,000 euros (~ US $575,000) to cultural investments such as the
concert of the folk music band Kastelruther Spatzen and a folk music
festival to be held next year.[15]
It is small wonder
that given this almost embarrassing ‘liberality’, which benefits all ethnic
groups, albeit not equally, open interethnic conflicts only resurface during
times of economic and political crisis and are instead silenced in periods of
economic expansion (Obkircher 2006). Still, a social system in which
resources are distributed among ethnic groups according to their numerical size
is more likely to succumb to envy and greed; because if one group obtains more
goods and prestige, the other groups will correspondingly perceive themselves
as losing worth. It can only work when the cake is large enough for all
to share, and nobody knows what the future has in store for Italy and Europe
(Wakenhut 1999).
Viewed in this
light, one has to admit that the modernizing process in South Tyrol has, at
least contingently, deepened the ethnic rift, instead of bridging it, possibly
because ethnicity is vague enough a concept that it can be used to forge
consensus around shared material interests, while concealing ulterior motives
that might actually be contrary to the public interest. I do not believe
that multiculturalism is necessarily bound to be “a formula for manufacturing
conflict” (Barry 2001), but the fact remains that South Tyrolean identity
politics is premised on a victim status that has outlasted its usefulness, and
now prevents local people from accustoming themselves to hold multiple, fluid,
hybrid identities and affiliations.
References
Absalom, Roger.
1995. Italy since 1800. A Nation in the Balance? London and New
York: Longman.
Appadurai, Arjun
(ed.). 1999. The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barry, Brian M.
2001. Culture and equality: an egalitarian critique of multiculturalism.
Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University press.
Bateson, Gregory.
1958. Naven: A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of
the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view.
Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press.
Baur, Siegfrid et
al. 1998. Zwischen Herkunft und Zukunft. Meran: Alpha & Beta.
Bergonzi,
Valentina, Hans Heiss. 2004. ‘Progressi e limiti del regionalismo’. L’Alto
Adige/Südtirol dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Memoria e Ricerca, 1,
pp. 79-100.
Brumann,
Christoph. 1999. ‘Writing for Culture. Why a successful concept should not be
discarded’. Current Anthropology 40 (supplement): S1–S27.
Cantle Report.
2001. ‘Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team’. Chaired by
Ted Cantle. London: The Home Office.
Constant,
Benjamin. 1988. ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns’.
In Biancamaria Fontana (ed.). Benjamin Constant: Political Writings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Furnivall, J.S.
1948. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and
Netherlands India. London: Cambridge University Press.
Gasparri, Stefano.
1998. Prima delle nazioni. Popoli. etnie e regni fra antichità e medioevo.
Roma: Carocci.
Gentile, Emilio.
2006. La Grande Italia. Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo. Laterza:
Roma-Bari.
Istituto
Provinciale di Statistica (IPS). 2006. Barometro linguistico dell’Alto Adige.
Bolzano: Provincia di Bolzano.
Langer, Alexander.
1986. Minima personalia. in ‘Belfagor-Rassegna di varia umanità’, 41(3).
Maffesoli, Michel.
1996. The Time of the Tribes. The decline of individualism in mass society.
London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Mantegazza, Paolo.
1884. ‘L’Antropologia del Tirolo’, La Natura, 1. 355-356.
Obkircher,
Raimund. 2006. Tensioni etniche e situazione socio-economica in Sudtirolo, Archivio
Trentino, 2, pp. 125-135.
Pallaver, Günther.
1990. South Tyrol. the ‘Package’ and its ratification. in: Politics and Society
in Germany. Austria and Switzerland, 2(1/2), pp. 70-79.
Pallaver, Günther.
2005. ‘The Südtiroler Volkspartei and its ethnopopulism’. In: Daniele Caramani
& Yves Mény (eds.). Challenges to consensual politics. Democracy.
identity. and populist protest in the Alpine region. Brussels: Peter Lang,
pp. 187-208.
Pinggera, Gerd
Klaus et al. 2006. Medizinisch-genetische Forschung in Südtirol; 1: Gene und
Geschichte - in Stilfs - Langtaufers – Martell. Bolzano/Bozen: EURAC.
Rentschler, Eric.
1993. ‘There’s No Place Like Home Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934)’.
New German Critique 60(3), pp. 33-56.
Rossi, Pierre.
1990. The political ecology of ethnicity: the case of the South Tyrol.
M.A. thesis in Political Science: UBC, Vancouver, Canada.
Schmidtke, Oliver.
1996. Politics of identity. Ethnicity, territories and the political
opportunity structure in modern Italian society. Sinzheim: PUV.
Staffler, Gudrun.
1999. Migration und Ethnizität in Südtirol. Zur sozialen Konstruktion von
Fremdheit und Ethnizität in einer pluriethnischen Gesellschaft.
Diplomarbeit. Philosophie. Universität Wien.
Trevor-Roper, H.
R. 1969. European Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and
Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row.
Wakenhut, Roland.
1999. Ethnische Identität und Jugend. Opladen: Leske und Budrich.
Wolf, Eric R. and
John W. Cole. 1999. The hidden frontier: ecology and ethnicity in an Alpine
valley. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wrong, Dennis H. 1997. ‘Cultural relativism as ideology’,
Critical Review 11(2): pp. 291-300.
