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.
Chapter 2
Meet the Grecanici
A prolific number of studies on minorities have shed light on the historical and political genealogies of what is meant by minority status in Europe (see Cowan 2000, 2010). Scholars such as Jennifer Jackson Preece (1997), Mark Mazower (2004), and Jane Cowan (2010) examine the historical predicament of developing a comprehensive UN framework toward the protection of minority populations after 1918. Looking at the issue of the minorities from a top-down perspective, these studies delve deeply into the logics of treaties and the thorny position of minority recognition on a pan-European level. Subsequently, nation-state recognition of minorities was a criterion of identification and UN membership to accord with a vision of a multicultural Europe (Prato 2009; Cowan 2010). From a bottom-up perspective, other studies in Europe have highlighted the precariousness of the term “minority” for the inclusion of alloglot populations as meaningful constitutives of the national fabric (Karakasidou 1997; Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2001; Ballinger 2003; Zografou and Pipyrou 2011). Language as a semantic web of collective identification is interlinked with xenophobic evocations of “second-class” citizenship, violence, fear, inclusion and exclusion (Herzfeld 2011b; Knight 2013a; De Munck and Risteski 2013).
With twelve languages officially recognized by the state, Italy can boast the greatest diversity of regional and minority languages in Western Europe (Dal Negro and Guerini 2011). The legal framework concerning the governance and protection of linguistic rights is drawn directly from the EU and the Council of Europe. Moreover, under the auspices of UNESCO and other international bodies the debate over the preservation of endangered minority languages has gained momentum in the last two decades. With an ever increasing engagement in recording endangered languages and promoting linguistic rights of minority populations all over the world there is a fundamental need for anthropological research to investigate the links between purely linguistic research, the social and political interests of linguistic minorities and the various scales of governance where minority politics are realized. We can no longer deny that the complex web of views of minority populations themselves, local and national government, as well as European Union guidelines, synthesize a picture that introduces practical and theoretical incommensurabilities into minority studies (Fishman 2002; Pipyrou 2012). The Grecanici find themselves in a paradoxical position; from the outside they are viewed as a vulnerable minority on the verge of extinction, yet they simultaneously exercise fearless governance of their own language and culture.
Speaking Grecanico, a language categorized by UNESCO as “severely endangered,” the Greek linguistic minority of Calabria is one of two Greek speaking populations in South Italy.1 A considerable number of national associations for the protection of endangered and minority status languages in Italy, such as the Lega per le Lingue delle Nazionalità Minoritarie (LeLiNaMi) and the Comitato Nazionale Federativo Minoranze Linguistiche d’Italia (CoNFeMiLI), talk of the Greek linguistic minority of South Italy as occupying an isola (island). The metaphor of an island existing within inland Italy is a strong cognitive sign that captures notions of marginalization, economic, and social isolation and victimhood. The metaphor of the “island” not only echoes the closed and static communities, prevalent in the anthropology of the 1960s with all the inherent problems of contextualization and analysis, but somehow reinforces stereotypes
