Natural Time, Political Time: Contested Histories in Northern Italy

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which a post‐peasant society in the Trentino region of northern Italy reworked its past history at a time of political turmoil when the rise of regionalist parties with an Italian version of Thatcherism in their agenda challenged the legitimacy of the Italian state. It illustrates how making a regional, local history entails representing the past as a period characterized by the repetitiveness of events. It is argued that everyday accounts of the past, because they centre on the ideas of social and political order and private property, form the background against which ‘official’ politics is understood. In this sense, everyday local‐level discourses about the past are as political as the ‘official’ ones of party leaders. In making this argument, the article shows that ‘repetitive time’ also represents a device through which social actors place themselves outside ‘national history’ and cast the encompassing nation‐state as the outsider.

La estacionalidad como aprehensión del tiempo: literatura y antropología del tiempo en el Empordà de Josep Pla

“…La antropología del tiempo ha ocupado un espacio discreto en el conjunto de los estudios etnológicos a pesar del rol central que desempeña el tiempo en las culturas. El tiempo es fundamental en ámbitos clave que aborda la antropología en el estudio de las sociedades como la política (Kaneff 2004;Stacul 2005), el parentesco (Testart 2000;Porqueres 2006) y evidentemente los rituales (Leach 1971;Gell 1992). Si nos centramos en el área del Mediterráneo, en los años posteriores a la segunda Guerra Mundial esta región despierta un notable interés en la antropología social dando lugar a algunas monografías bien conocidas.…”

The shared boundary: Sicilian mafia and antimafia land

“…The work that goes into "bounding" can divide village and pastoral life (Mientjes 2010). Indeed, bounding has been associated to the difference between the village space (amenable to circular history) from the linear history of the national ambience (Stacul 2005). Such current work in Anthropology reminds us of how the public sphere formulates on collective identities built on readings of the past (Sorge 2015b;cf Kertzer 1974).…”

Living it on the skin: Italian states, working illness

“…Particularly in the past two decades, neoliberalism has undergirded the transformation of the labor market and the making of citizenship in Italy: “Formal citizenship … was to be waged to establish consent and conformity at its heart …[with] neoliberalism as its ideological warhorse, the freedom of the individual the basic tenet for society” (Ginsborg 2003:296; see also Blim 1990; Donovan 2001; Muehlebach 2007). But, at the same time, the Italian polity may be distinguished from other Western liberal democracies by its famously weak sense of national belonging, a collective mistrust of the state, and its diverse components of “individualism, collectivism, libertarianism, communitarianism, market capitalism, welfare statism, majoritarianism, consociativism, secularism and clericalism” (Koenig‐Archibugi 2003:87, 98; see also Donovan 2003:93; Holmes 2000; Stacul 2005). Moreover, Italy has also been situated as the “backward” economy of Europe, both for its kin‐based economic stronghold and for its apparent “lag” in rehauling its protectionist labor market (Krause and Marchesi 2007:352; Schneider 1998; Yanagisako 2002).…”