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
