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
