locals, further enhanced through endogamy. As far as the Grecanici were concerned, the local Reggini were stupid, inferior, and dirty. Young male Grecanici were instructed by their mothers never to marry a Reggina, for she incorporated all the negative traits of a forestiera (foreigner): dirty (morally and physically), inferior in terms of blood, and destined to deceive him. Many of my Reggini research participants argue that Grecanici are like a tribu Africana (African tribe) because they continue to this day to favor endogamy. Reggini regularly argue that “not changing the blood for centuries has a knock-on effect on their intelligence let alone the health of their children.”
Examined in a broader historical framework, Grecanici cannot be contextualized separately from numerous other cases where local communities and disenfranchised peoples find themselves living in the shadow of the Global North, albeit geographically belonging to it (Pipyrou 2013, 2014a). Historically, Calabrians, let alone the Greek linguistic minority, were always conceptualized as peripheral and oriental (Schneider 1998; Moe 2002; Perrotta 2014). Nevertheless, anthropologists have recently brought attention to what can be viewed as a systematic push—mainly by bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—toward a rigid classification based on national competence and hierarchies of value (Wilk 1995; Palumbo 2003; Herzfeld 2004; Pipyrou 2012). What Berardino Palumbo (2003, 2010) calls “Global Taxonomic Systems,” are institutionalized paths through which transnational agencies shape and organize the global imaginary and act as instruments of governance that shape attitudes, emotions and values on a global scale (Palumbo 2010:38). Categories of national competence thus become essentialized measures of economic, political, and moral success (Knight 2013b:157, 2015). In this classificatory schema, large populations are inserted into “hollow dichotomies” such as progression and backwardness. They are not only classified as “such and such,” being denied ideological, political, and historical process, but pervasively imagined as possessing a future disposition firmly located in present imaginaries. These classificatory schemata are contemporary social cartographies that, as Richard Wilk (1995) argues, attempt to succumb local particularity to global uniformity.
Nelson Moe (2002) argues that social cartographies concerned with the Italian south as radically different from the north were shaped before the unification of Italy. The origins of these cartographies are to be found in the formation of European cultural identity between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. The “Southern Question” is the outcome of such classification, with deep political and scientific roots (see Schneider 1998; Moe 2002; Perrotta 2014). Furthermore, the work of criminal anthropologists—developed between 1870 and 1914—claimed scientific objectivity through positivistic methods that pervasively bound civic groups: “refusal of the rights and obligations of citizenship to those beyond this boundary could therefore rest on rational, scientific arguments” (Moss 1979:484).
It is commonplace to return to Cesare Lombroso when discussing physiological determinants with far reaching ideological and political implications. Rightly criticized by scholars inside and outside Italy, Lombroso’s (1980:11) argument concerning the Grecanici of Calabria concentrated on specific physiological and social characteristics that provided a negative deterministic basis for portraying populations. He tells us that Grecanici are of medium height, stubborn, wild of heart and spirit, and with a passion for dominance. For Albanians in South Italy, he notes that they used to resemble the Slavs and the Serbs, being tall, with straight teeth and nose, small eyes, and nervous. They are excellent runners and hunters. Their hearts are fearless and they consider vendetta imperative (Lombroso 1980:40). Similar to other criminal anthropologists such as Alfredo Niceforo (1987) working on delinquency in Sardinia, Lombroso’s work was detrimental in the sense that it created the basis for ongoing discussions regarding the “delinquent zone”: the South (Moss 1979:483).
In “Calabria in Idea,” Augusto Placanica (1985) calls for in-depth social studies that do not attribute a priori validity to such biology-based classifications. Nevertheless, Lombroso’s “scientific” arguments about the Grecanici and the Albanians of Calabria are important in this discussion for another reason. They are creatively reworked by local intellectuals and then redistributed in a more intimate fashion to become important tools in the hands of policy makers and civic groups. Locals tend to play with reworked Lombrosian arguments that in some cases justify familiar classificatory schemata about the Other. Present physiological, moral, and political human taxonomies tend to have a pervasive past. We read in Edward Lear, the famous English author, artist, and poet who traveled to Calabria and Sicily in the 1830s and 1840s,
According to our friend, Bova (… all of whose inhabitants speak a corrupt Greek and are called Turchi (Turks) by their neighbors) is a real old Grecian settlement, or rather, the representative of one formerly existing at Amendolía, and dating from the time of Locris and other colonies. The Bovani are particularly anxious to impress on the minds of the strangers that they have no connection with the modern emigrants from Albania. (Lear 1964:53)
Taking into consideration that the above snippet was written during Lear’s journeys in the autumn 1847 in the provinces of Calabria and Basilicata (Lear 1964:11), there are clear traces that negatively colored differentiations were cultivated among adjacent populations in the area Grecanica18 (Brögger 1971:29).
The initial stages of my fieldwork were influenced by my own pessimism regarding the future of my research. Acting on the advice and warnings of local gatekeepers, and myself alien to the ongoing local conflicts, the first three months I spent collecting material on the minority through all possible resources other than the Grecanici themselves. Without access to the people, I was under constant fear that my research would spell disaster. Such was my terror during these initial months that I could not appreciate the depth of data one can collect through peripheral resources. One such source was a historian from a southern university with whom I spent endless hours historically contextualizing Grecanici. Many of our fascinating conversations would end with him maintaining that the Grecanici “non hanno paura di niente” (have no fear of anything). “They are fearless” he told me many times. Did he share Lombroso’s positions? I have regularly asked him to elaborate on what he means by “fearless.” Does this relate to political, financial or kinship affairs of the minority? Is a fearless minority a paradox or oxymoron? But perceptions of Grecanici as fearless were shared by other local actors and, as I was to find out, by many Grecanici themselves.
Fluid Environments: Experiencing the Landslides
From the dawn of the twentieth century the area Grecanica has suffered from regular alluvioni (landslides) as the result of excessive flooding in Calabria, with irreversible effects on the economy and physiognomy of the region. Such was the power of an ever changing landscape that the novelist Corrado Alvaro was prompted to argue for a sense of fatality and conceptualization of life as enmeshed in images of torrents (1950:234, also Teti 2008).
The floods of 1951 and 195319 that struck Messina, Metramo, and Reggio Calabria left hundreds of families homeless (Pipyrou 2016). The hydrogeological problems of the area Grecanica had long been identified but it seemed that there was no governmental desire to deal with the situation effectively, highlighting a more general neglect of the Italian periphery. In the 1950s floods, and again in the 1970s, Grecanici literally experienced the soil disintegrating beneath their feet, destroying their properties and leaving them homeless. Human lives, homes, and livestock were lost in the floods. After the floods of 1951 the Italian government implemented a scheme concerned with relocating whole villages to other parts of Italy (see Pipyrou 2016). To this detrimental political decision science gave consent. Ironically, according to the report of the government technical committee that accessed the hydrogeological conditions of Calabria, “the necessity to transfer the populations is not only dictated by the danger provoked by the landslides but also by the fact that in some areas the populations will never achieve a stable economic level.”20 Voices that proposed resolutions to the extensive environmental and financial problems exacerbated by the floods existed, but were overlooked.21
Vito Teti (2008)
