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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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Small-Mindedness Writ Large: On the Migrations and Manners of Prejudice

Michael Herzfeld Published online: 12 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Michael Herzfeld (2007) Small-Mindedness Writ Large: On the Migrations and Manners of Prejudice, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33:2, 255-274, DOI: 10.1080/13691830601154237 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691830601154237

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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 33, No. 2, March 2007, pp. 255 274

Small-Mindedness Writ Large: On the Migrations and Manners of Prejudice

Michael Herzfeld

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Globalisation is not only about commercial goods. It is also about the migration from centres of cultural authority of increasingly standardised but locally inflected forms of racism and other varieties of prejudice. It is often marked by disclaimers that, while appearing to mask racist attitudes with reason and etiquette, actually accentuate their destructive implications by rendering them rhetorically palatable, especially within the intimate spaces of local and national society. Using examples from Italy and elsewhere, I suggest that both racism and its associated disclaimers have migrated together, reflecting the powerful expansion of a global hierarchy of value as well as of intimate forms of resistance to that hierarchy. I suggest that such polite racism is ultimately more dangerous than its more brutish variants because it appropriates legitimacy from collective notions of high civilisational standards. In this sense, immigrants of European origin in countries such as Italy may face its negative consequences with particular force precisely because they phenotypically resemble the host population and therefore represent, for the far right, a threat of racial and cultural miscegenation in an age of declining local birthrates. Keywords: Racism; Prejudice; Disclaimers; Global Hierarchy of Value; Etiquette One of the more extraordinary features of the current literature on globalisation and transnationalism is the extent to which it fastens on the obvious, and especially on the ubiquitous use of logos and slogans. A book title like Benjamin Barbers Jihad vs McWorld (1995) is immediately recognisable (and, one presumes, translatable) because the close analogy between a once-esoteric religious principle and a oncedistinctively-local form of food provides a sense of globally shared knowledge. We all recognise these terms. Yet in that very ease lies a conceptual trap. Localised forms of prejudice and outmoded models of social and cultural change can similarly become
Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Correspondence to: Prof. M. Herzfeld, Dept of Anthropology, William James Hall, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: herzfeld@wjh.harvard.edu ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/07/0200255-20 # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13691830601154237

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generalised to the status of everyday truths, at which point they can easily be invested with a gloss that has all of the universalist allure of rationality and all of the substance of the mean local street. Such a work, for example, is Samuel Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996); the confidence that radiates from those defiant definite articles, the sense that we all already know what is at stake, presages a globalised acceptance of the very localism and factionalism that Barber, in particular, sees as one of the two evils of globalisation, the other being gross homogenisation.1 Some of this literature has pointed up the importance of emphasising interpretive differences that underlie the surface of global discourses and symbols. A good example is James L. Watsons Golden Arches East (2006). But such studies require a commitment to ethnography, a disciplinary tool of social and cultural anthropology that imposes on its practitioners the need to spend long periods of time in highly localised and intimate contact with relatively few people. Not only is it easy to mock such work as merely anecdotal, ignoring the depth and intensity of social knowledge in which it is grounded, but the alternative is both easier to do (it requires no foreign language learning, for one thing) and fits prevailing stereotypes. Disclaimer and Discontent: Globalising Racism In this essay, however, I wish to focus on a related but different matter. Globalisation has seemed to be all about the spread of consumerist goods that are presented (usually through advertising) in a positive light, whether or not we as consumers accept this view of them. The converse phenomenon, on the other hand, has received little attention. This consists in the extraordinary similarity, from country to country, of the forms of discontent, and especially of the discontent that reveals itself as racial and cultural prejudice. Such disreputable attitudes are hardly the stuff of most studies of globalisation. Yet they represent the internationalisation of something that already subsists as an officially disapproved but pragmatically tolerated aspect of national identity. By forms of discontent, I do not so much mean the idiom of protest, although this is an interesting phenomenon in its own right.2 Rather, I intend the common expressions of resentment against, usually, minority populations. These idioms have acquired some startling commonalities around the world, and not only because some of the grosser racisms are so well-known or because academic works appearing to justify them have been translated into many languages and serve to strengthen the hand of politicians seeking to exploit grass-roots discontent with the shifting sands of economic and cultural security. It is not only the racism itself that has gone global. Indeed, perhaps the most striking aspect of this phenomenon is how common the forms of excuse-making for racism turn out to be. They display the features of what Bauman (1977: 21 2), writing of the performed modesty of the musician, calls disclaimers. Such disclaimers are declarations about intentions; racists often claim that theirs are all

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good * a defence of cultural purity, protection of the innocent young from pernicious foreign influences or alien religious values, even sympathy for the plight of the immigrants themselves. They are uses of tact and of etiquette to mask, in many cases, the opposite of what the speaker is actually asserting. A classic example of this type of rhetoric is the anger expressed by working-class Italians at Romanians who work in nero * without permits (literally, in [the] black [economy]) * and who are said to have been so employed by the left-wing Rome municipality while Roman workers languished in the doldrums of unemployment. By calling such arrangements exploitation, right-wing critics can reasonably claim to be supporting the rights of immigrants even as their real constituents understand full well the nature of the message thus promulgated. They can thus mobilise an intimate complicity of cunning without overtly offending their targets and so giving the latter any obviously justifiable cause for complaint. Disclaimers can appear in many different contexts, but they all serve to highlight something that can never, in fact, be known with any certainty: the innermost desires of the speaker. Thus, for example, when a Greek conference-goer prefaces a talk or critical comment with the self-admonishing remark, na mi poliloyiso, Let me not go on at length, we can be reasonably certain that the speaker actually will (and intends to!) do just that (the Italian equivalent is an admittedly terser but hardly less ` breve, Ill be brief ). The intention of the musician is to perform a disingenuous saro modesty that is in fact quite immodest (and is understood as such); that of the conference-goer is similarly to perform a restraint that everyone knows to be entirely fictional. As with excuses (see Herzfeld 1991: 92), no one (usually) challenges these claims, because all wish to be able to count on the ready availability of such conventions in other contexts where their own interests are at stake. Those who groan at the speakers subsequent verbiage or mutter savagely that the musician was only speaking the truth are, in effect, reminding us that they, too, understand the rules of the game. Racists disclaimers are not disclaimers of artistic ability or even of the longwindedness that sometimes passes for ability in academics. They do nonetheless share the fundamental sense of self-contradiction that underlies most ordinary and more benign disclaimers: they are denials of an identity that is also an ideology. In this case, the ideology is that of racism. It may be uncomfortable to treat aesthetic restraint or academic pomposity within the same framework as racism, but the very success of racism often depends on precisely this assumption of the trappings of normalcy. Disclaimers are reassuring, not because they are necessarily factually convincing, but because they are familiar. In this, they follow the principles that Austin (1971) identified as characteristic of excuses. Disclaimers do not presuppose belief in their sincerity, although in some cultures the performance of sincerity (see Handler 1986) * like that of secrecy (see Herzfeld 1985: 207 9) * includes the articulation of disclaimers. But they do lay claim to acceptance * a social convention, not a psychological inner state, and a convention that requires general complicity in maintaining an agnostic stance with regard to its truthfulness in particular situations.

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Barber (1995: 281) was being prescient when he identified the paradox of the age as lying in the coexistence of globalising and localising factors. But his argument, which is weakened from the start by an almost Huntingtonian view of otherness as expressed through tribalism (a revealingly exoticising term!), is also based on untested and seemingly ethnocentric assumptions about key Western values, as well as by the common tendency among writers in this field to distinguish between the language and the rhetoric of political alignment, respectively. Thus, Barber holds that the processes of globalisation and tribalism weaken democracy and civil society. Such a view overlooks the fact that these concepts, too, are often refracted through very specific cultural and political ideologies (see, for example, the essays in Hann and Dunn 1996). They share a common terminology, but their self-proclaimed practitioners may not share common intentions or ideological terrain. Here we may take our lead from Stacia Zabuskys (1995: 7 8, 21) excellent analysis of the remarkably divergent uses of cooperation as a stated common goal of the various factions and national groups that together operate the European Space Agency. Do George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac mean the same thing by liberty? And would either of them recognise his perspective in the language of the cognate liberation? From here it is an easy step to reminding ourselves that liberators from one perspective are often terrorists or bandits from another. What Barber identifies as the key, twin processes of cultural change themselves feed the passions of the racist; the idea that Europe is a continent of distinctive cultural individualisms now threatened by both ethnic difference and commercially generated homogeneity (and that if ethnic difference comes from a vaguely defined East, then homogeneity comes in parallel fashion from the far West on the other side of the Atlantic) is well established, with a distinguished intellectual lineage as well as deep (and deeply disturbing) political resonance. In this context, the tact of the racists disclaimer lies precisely in its capacity to blunt the hard edge of hatred for external consumption, much as populist invocations of democracy and civil society can be cynically deployed in support of truly Gramscian (or Huxleyan!) visions of complicity in ones own engagement in dictatorship, racism and intolerance. The morphing of liberalism (as in its neo incarnation) shows how easily this semantic slippage occurs. And these are phenomena that are amplified by the ubiquity and pervasiveness of todays electronic media. Let us return for a moment to matters of definition and analysis. Racist disclaimers are commonly designed to convince listeners that the speaker is in fact a nice liberal with a conscience * a compassionate racist, to reappropriate some of the favored bromides of the political right wing around the world. Such appearances of common ground also invoke the old rationalist image of universal truth and tolerance * itself paradoxically identified with the parochial concerns of a triumphalist West. Because so much of this rhetoric appeals to universalist claims of common sense, its reproduction around the world is self-naturalising; it appears to flow from its obvious status as what everyone knows * a real discouragement to any form of

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`, dissent. (The Italian anthropologist Silvana Miceli (1982) correctly identifies ovvieta obviousness, as a key to any cultural system.) It derives some measure of selfconfidence (as well as inspiration) from an extreme political right that can claim respectability precisely because the fear of persistent threats to European and North American self-satisfaction is increasingly embodied in parliamentary process. How can a soft-spoken, gentlemanly parliamentarian be taken for a fascist? Once we see that this can and does happen, we can also begin to explain why the rank and file on the street often feel no pressure to follow suit with equal restraint and courtesy. They can take cover behind the urbane manners of their leaders, whose elegant words may actually portend something very nasty indeed. If politeness was once (and is still) a weapon of the mafia in Italy, where it serves as the proverbial velvet glove for a whole range of extortionist iron fists, the voice of sweet reason also provides the moral reinforcement * a perverse appeal to a global value once thought to have been unassailably left-liberal * to which the thugs can turn as uncouth but well-meaning followers. Respectability is a mask; it serves many purposes. But above all it is about commanding respect * which may accrue to the learned and the urbane in some settings, but that the mafioso demands as the price of a friendship that the victim is in no position to refuse. This kinder, gentler violence has grown commoner with the globalisation of racism. Discontent with the sudden immigrant presence today, as in the rise of fascism in 1920s and 1930s Europe, can all too easily mean that the aggrieved protests of local subaltern classes are drawn ineluctably, or so it seems, to the siren call of populist orators. People easily learn conventions that, like the words and music of folksongs (and also like the language of NGOs), cross linguistic and other cultural boundaries with ease. While some instances of this process may be attributable simply to the necessity of responding locally to an already globalised idiom of power, other instances may be the products of that power itself, in all its expansionist fury. This is part of an exploration of the inculcation of social models that we can see in the reproduction of uncouth masculinity in working-class youths (see Bourdieu 1982; Herzfeld 2004; Willis 1981). To summarise the key issue, such notions may * as heirs to notions like tradition, which indeed they often invoke * be the self-fulfilling prophecies (the poor will always be poor, malcontents will never be satisfied, and so forth) that discursively and instrumentally serve the interests of those who instead master the subtleties of modern etiquette. And as men, particularly, become frustrated with their inability to achieve the status associated with modernity, smilingly kept in thrall as they are by their condescending clients and political patrons, the aggression that they learn in the workplace may become correspondingly channeled toward manifestly different others in their midst. While some of this dissemination of discontent can certainly be attributed to the active volition of social movements, a great deal of it reproduces and exploits media forms of expression. Included in this range of discontents is the widespread critique of political corruption and other formulaic evils, forms of racism directed against immigrants of various kinds and in quite varied contexts, and the rejection of

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established political and religious authority in favour of allegedly new and unmistakably consumerist models of life satisfaction. People move, but so do ideas * activated by people, to be sure, and thus, like people, not always with benign effect. The globalisation of racism and its attendant courtesies is one such example. I want to make a very specific case here for the importance of ethnography, a practice that maintains an intimacy of focus despite the tremendous expansion of its purview (Ferguson and Gupta 1997; Marcus 1998). This expansion of ethnography, moreover, has not disqualified more traditionally local ethnography, but has broadened the context in which it is conducted; my own work in Rome, for example, reflects transnational processes as well as the intimacy that a very localised focus of research activity made possible * which is why I am now able to write about the global character of racists disclaimers and other such matters. At the same time, in the hands of both non-anthropologists who have appropriated the term and anthropologists who really do not want to conduct long-term and sometimes decidedly uncomfortable research, ethnography has sometimes appeared to wither away in favour of superficial cultural analyses of media representations. The risk is clear: when we are dealing with globalisation, we can all too easily pick up on the Western surface messages, and the absence of intensive local fieldwork allows this to happen in ways that also encourage complicity with the dominant forces of neoliberal capitalism. At times it seems that we are experiencing a double irony: local tradition has become an aspect of world heritage, while the apparently global messages of Western industry, religious propaganda and political hegemony are received through the multiple prisms of highly localised cultures and perceptions. Never has the case for meticulous ethnography been more urgent; but, by the same token, it has become increasingly important to insist on the comparative perspective that the growing demands of area-studies specialisations have sometimes made impracticable. When we turn to the globalisation of racism, this dilemma becomes even clearer: we actually know very little about how and why the formulaic language of racism puts down roots so easily, and we can only find out if we observe the process in a number of different places and social and cultural contexts. The international political arena today is one that is itself not necessarily racist in principle, and indeed it often seems rhetorically hostile to racism. Yet it often turns out to be compatible with some of racisms milder expressions, their compassionate face a Trojan horse for much more dangerous developments. In a parallel sense, it would be very easy to consider the rise to power of populist prime ministers * Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Thaksin Shinawatr in Thailand * as nothing more than examples of the triumph of neoliberal capitalism; and to some degree that may indeed be a realistic explanation. But what are the consequences in each of these countries for local actors? If they reinforce local patterns of patronage and clientilism, what do we gain or lose by calling them examples of globalisation? If, on the other hand, they are not simply global, why are the protests against them sometimes also so similar to each other? Why did one have the sense of watching parallel developments? To be sure, these men rose to power in the same way: media tycoons who founded nationalist

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political parties and campaigned against corruption, only to be charged with it themselves at terminal risk to their political careers; both notoriously thin-skinned, to the point of threatening the liberty of the media from which they sprang to high office; and both masters of populist campaigning, fiercely anti-intellectual, and contemptuous of their critics. But why both, almost simultaneously, in countries so far apart? These politicians participated in a populist reaction against serious public intellectual activity, social analysis, and critique. And they, like their American contemporary, benefitted from rising fears of foreign subversion even as they inveighed rhetorically against intolerance. Their stance of pious rejection of racist actions and of religious intolerance cannot obviate the fact that their policies sustained both. It thus played out the performative logic of the disclaimer on the grand scale: we will not put up with any overt expressions of intolerance, they implied, but of course we cannot help it if its targets act to bring trouble on their own heads. I am reminded of the old Cretan politician who announced that he would not take a single vote from animal-rustlers and of his colleague who introduced legislation to punish that practice. The animal-rustlers with whom I worked knew exactly what to make of such claims and demonstrations of fealty to law and order, especially as one of these politicians was the patrilateral first cousin of a particularly notorious animal-thief (see Herzfeld 1985). If the rustlers were impressed by the politicians declarations, then, it was not by any threat to their officially illicit (but locally admired) activity, but by the sheer brazenness that these politicians shared with them * they were, after all, from the same cultural background. Tactful Tactics: Democratic Rhetoric and Racist Practice Of such paradoxes is cultural intimacy made (Herzfeld 2005). It is no coincidence that the Cretan highlanders are known as the fiercest and most loyal citizens in times of war. The knowledge that precisely those politicians who threaten their most cherished but technically illegal social practices are the ones who have made the continuation of those practices possible is the enabling dirty secret of their devotion to the nation. The equivalent cultural intimacy of the neoliberal state is the shared but muted recognition that the leaders policies, framed in a language of equal opportunity, actually favour the special interests of the ethnic or cultural majority (and usually only of one segment of the latter). My argument can be summarised quite simply. It is that there is in the world a largely Western European-inspired hierarchy of moral and social values, which I have called the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004, 2005). In this hierarchy, terms like democracy (see Connors 2003) share a common historical heritage with such mafia-friendly terms as respect. These notions, which include a vocabulary of regretful disclaimers such as those I have mentioned, all have to do with the rise of a certain kind of individualism, historically well-known in Europe and its colonies and related to the ownership of property; morality, in this system, presupposes the

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primacy of an individual person with the freedom to make choices but the obligation to respect the equal rights of others. The content of this system changes through time, and such changes are reflected at local and national levels as well; for example, where patriarchal authority may once have appeared to exemplify the acme of orderly existence, it is now disapproved as socially and morally retrograde and its place has zyu been taken by a rhetoric of equal opportunity (O rek 2004 on Turkey; see also Herzfeld 2005:58). This leads to some revealing paradoxes, as when the conservative president of a country that has never elected a woman to his office * an opportunist who has shored up his political basis by increasingly opposing abortion rights (also framed as a matter of choice) and an exponent of capital punishment who claims to support the right to life * castigates Islamic societies for their restrictions of the rights of women. In such debates, all sides share a rhetoric of choice, individualism and human rights, and this semantically slithery rhetoric creates the impression of a largely Western-inspired and timeless set of eternal verities. The predominance of that rhetoric, moreover, permits a complicit engagement with the persistence of values that contradict it. If the formal values represent a nominal espousal of international norms (or at least forms), there is an often gleeful and always surreptitious acceptance of the role of very different ideas in the everyday experience of local identities * ideas that often seem to emanate from the very authorities that deny their existence. This complicity is the aspect of cultural intimacy that permits and even reinforces loyalty to the idea of the nation-state, an idea so abstract in itself as to be virtually unsustainable without such anchoring in the familiar world of pragmatic social experience. Prejudice easily enters this space: officers of state may preach the values of tolerance and coexistence, but they will use the same language to justify immigration quotas and racial profiling. Such practices provide a model for less delicately disguised forms of discrimination. This hierarchy of values is not only about racial and cultural status. It also, more effectively than money, determines economic judgments as well. Its effects can be catastrophic. A female Thai citizen who owns no property, for example, cannot easily get a visa to go to the US even if her friends there are willing to act as guarantors, because the stereotype of the poor Thai woman who works for a prostitution ring is too deeply ensconced in the US immigration bureaucracy and in the larger national will simply confirm imagination * so much so, in fact, that producing a fiance the suspicion rather than overturn it; this complicity, moreover, is structural, since the womans property rights at home are far more restricted than those of her male compatriots, thanks to legislation that was introduced as part of the Siamese states alignment of its bureaucracy to the values and practices of the Western powers. And these structurally replicated injustices are not only about crossing national boundaries. An Italian artisan is forced to turn to usurers because the banks will not make loans to those who do not have real estate as collateral. Usury is illegal, and those who are known to have recourse to it are shunned as bad bets for investment; the result is that a blanket of silence protects the usurers (as well as their accomplices, lawyers and bank officials who illegally refer desperate customers to them) and thus

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sustains a constant supply of victims for their voracious crimes. Despite very real attempts by some authorities to break the vicious cycle, moreover, the fact that the trial of at least one high-ranking church prelate for running a loan-shark ring ended with acquittal sustains the conviction, whether justified or not, that the dominant structures of society protect evil-doers disguised as its moral guardians. The effect of these situations is that relatively marginal people discover that they have less than the full qualifications for citizenship even though property ownership is formally not a criterion of full personhood in either Italy or the United States. Tribal peoples in Thailand cannot get school and other services for related and even more consequential reasons: they do not possess even the purely abstract property of national identity that underlay the European emergence of nationalism (as Richard Handler 1985 and others have demonstrated). To be a full person has long meant to be among the haves, and those cultures that expect to play global roles must similarly be able to boast proud national heritages. In exactly the same way, the illegality of discrimination sustains the persistence of its unofficial forms. There is even a monumental model for this paradox * the restoration and maintenance of enemy monuments as a way of claiming a higher cultural morality, of tolerance and humanism (Rabinow 1989: 299). At the level of everyday discourse and practice, too, pious anti-racism serves to protect the very attitudes that its practitioners claim to oppose.3 Disclaimers (I am not a racist) must therefore not be taken either at face value or as evidence of hypocrisy; the trailing conjunction but that follows them shows clearly, to those in the know, that racism forms one of the bases of fellowship in a nation-state that ostensibly rejects it. The point is precisely that all concerned understand what is at stake. Kapferers (1988) remarkable analysis of the racist undertow of Australian egalitarianism is a particularly illuminating case study of this embedded paradox, and the disclaimers that I have discussed here are both the expression and the instrument of its diffusion * initially within communities, but also then, with great rapidity, across national, linguistic and religious lines. Some of my best friends are . . . . is such a formula. There are few places in the world where its use does not produce both a cringe and a complicit wink of recognition. The term racism itself has thus become a commonplace, open to appropriation on all sides: just as (for example) the Greek colonels used to describe communism as red fascism, so many majority populations invoke the rhetoric of anti-racism to justify their defence of what they want to claim is a beleaguered majority. (Think, for example, of the Afrikaner claim to an African tribal identity.) One of the oddest manifestations of this tendency is the extraordinarily bitter animosity displayed in many Western European countries today to the arrival of East Europeans. These migrants, many of them destitute, are often the target of particularly disdainful rejection by local residents. It would be all too easy, as Anton Blok (2001: 115 35) has done for ethnic rivalries in the former Yugoslavia, to attribute such animosity to the narcissism of minor differences. There is indeed much merit in such a

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description. But it also has different histories in different places, and we can hardly ignore that historical specificity. Pragmatics of Prejudice: Reflections on the Italian Experience Some especially rich illustration of such introverted racism can be found in Rome, the capital of a country that takes pride in the fact that even its fascists were not particularly sympathetic to the Nazis persecution of the Jews.4 There is a noticeable hierarchy in the expression of prejudice in Rome against, in descending order of intensity, Roma, Albanians, Romanians, Bosnians, Ukrainians, and Russians. But why should these people be the target of an animosity at times noticeably greater than that meted out to people of colour? Part of the reason may be a simple fear of economic competition, undergirded by a racist assumption that Europeans will represent a more serious threat than others presumed to possess lesser capacities. But I suspect that something far more insidious is at work as well: a fear of invisible racial contamination by those who appear to be like us but who, in the rhetoric of a nationalist cultural pride fuelled by UNESCOs statistical hierarchies (we own 70 per cent of the worlds works of art), are felt to be culturally far behind us. Race and culture merge in an alchemy of fear. Here David Horns Social Bodies (1994) provides a useful historical backdrop to a pervasive fear of miscegenation, recently reinforced by alarmist interpretations of the very low birth-rate.5 Clearly the economic factor is also extremely important. But competition from populations that can infiltrate themselves into local society ` (literally, occasions far more fear than that implied by those labelled as vu cumpra Do you want to buy?) * the mostly African hawkers whose relegation to the ranks of the powerless and culturally deprived is signalled by their own stereotypical adoption of the Southern Italian dialect phrase by which they are collectively known.6 The hierarchy of immigrant groups is partly determined by economic factors (the poorer ones tend to suffer more discrimination) as well as religion (here the effect reverses that found in Greece, an Orthodox country as opposed to predominantly Catholic Italy). But the more insidious aspect of this hierarchy is grounded in ideas about racial purity and the city that are at least pan-European, if we are to believe such writers as Raymond Williams (1973) and George Mosse (1985), and that are also bound up with idealisations of local bodies and a fear of invasive presences (see also Linke 1999).7 These ideas are rapidly becoming close to universal as largely Westernderived values spread on the wings of international trade and those other processes that have succeeded to the place of overt colonisation * the global hierarchy of value. In Italy, the local hierarchy of prejudice does of course have specific historical referents. In rhetorical form but also in specific content, the rejection of East European immigrants as drunks and perverts and the sexualisation of sta gente, those people, as prostitutes and pimps * overlooking the role of local Italian operators and middlemen * are directly related, in rhetorical history as well as political lineage, to Mussolinis project of creating clean (for which read cleansed)

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cities, itself now to be read in the concentric contexts of recent Catholic agitation against Muslim and Orthodox corruption of Italian family values, the attempt to exclude Muslims from Europe at the highest levels (e.g. the pronouncements by Giscard dEstaing; see also Holmes 2000), as well as of increasing globalisation of American xenophobia and Christian supremacism. Respect for culture becomes cultural exclusivism, all of it couched in terms that are immediately compatible with local categories of kin and community, and thus deeply appealing at a time of great economic and political uncertainty. Within this framework, hostility appears to grow precisely from the ease with which the populations in question * unlike, for example, visibly exotic West Africans, or well behaved orientals such as Philippine nationals, but in contrast with the Chinese migrants (Italianised as a mafia cinese and resented for their apparently impenetrable language in combination with an all-too-familiar politico-economic modus operandi) * are able to merge with the local population. It is especially when these more visibly foreign immigrants gather in large concentrations, where their collective difference is perhaps impossible to ignore, that one finds systemic prejudice against them. But even difference is not enough to create categorical prejudices. Indeed, I suspect that it would not have been possible to mobilise anger against the Chinese had the familiarising term mafia not been applied to them first; in this context, the difference implied by their mysterious language appears instead as a kind of code of impenetrable gesture and silence, a new rule of that masculine-mafioso `. What makes them dangerous is not that they represent a foreign silence called omerta presence, but the fact that they have assimilated to aspects of Italian culture that Romans regard as the worst effect of the South on their own, predominantly Southern Italian, culture, including the ability to keep dangerous secrets out of circulation to the detriment of local interests. And in this they more closely resemble the East European immigrants, who, like them, are associated in the popular imagination with prostitution and drugs. Sexuality clearly offers one means of mediating this suspect similarity to the conceptual advantage of local people. Indeed, the heavy engagement of East European women in the sex trade, particularly in an area of Rome (Suburra) that was the red light district of ancient Rome, appears as a disruption of the ultimate form of intimacy.8 The fact that the greatest hostility is sometimes shown to those who seem most similar is again not simply a matter of the narcissism of minor differences, although it may often be that as well. It seems, rather, to be a direct consequence of ideas about purity. I have been especially struck, in the heart of Rome, by the real fear of miscegnation that appears to underlie resentment of the East European migrants as opposed to those of Asian or African descent; it seems that the dangers of an internal Other swallowing up the locals are genuinely alarming especially to those of strongly localist outlook. Thus, when I pointed out to a man who objected to the presence of East European prostitutes in his old home area that people there liked to boast this had been the red-light Suburra district even in antiquity, he retorted that those ancient women were our stuff (roba nostra) * a clear sexualisation of the lines of

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demarcation, using language that would have come easily from a long line of Italian social fascists and their predecessors, from Cesare Lombroso to Benito Mussolini. Such sentiments have appeared very much at the same time as Romans have begun to engage more deeply than ever before in forms of local political participation. Indeed, their localism is notorious, but it is also the source of much re-energising of the body politic at a time when national political institutions appear discredited to critics on the right and the left alike. It is hard to see bitter racism and politically benign activism in a common framework, but I want to suggest, provocatively, that to do so is not to equate them but to explain how and why they have emerged in more or less the same historical conjuncture, as two sides of the same global hierarchy. More particularly, I suggest that the resentment often expressed over the presence of a Polish Pope in a Vatican that has been evicting poor Romans from apartments in the area, only to replace them with larger numbers of East European immigrants, fuels a vaguely stated but commonly invoked conspiracy theory, and allows workingclass Romans to attack the most powerful religious institution in their midst with a degree of moral authority. Indeed, they can even claim a measure of sympathy for those people, who often end up paying exorbitant rents for living in very crammed conditions, thus drawing both the contempt of the locals for their allegedly unsanitary lifestyle (note again the concern with cleanliness and pollution) and the locals affectation of sympathy for these unfortunates and high dudgeon against a religious institution that so cynically exploits them! Such affectations partake of the character of the racist disclaimers I mentioned earlier. These sentiments tend to appear most strongly among those who, disaffected from the former Communist Party and its various splinters and outraged by the Lefts failure to achieve just housing policies, have drifted close to * and in some cases right into the hands of * a recently revitalised neo-fascist movement, direct successors to the old Movimento Sociale Italiano and beyond it Mussolinis social fascism,9 full partners in the recent Berlusconi government and a bulwark within that gerrymandered but oddly unbudgeable institution against the persistent localism of the third party in the government, the once (and perhaps again-to-be) separatist Northern League (Lega Nord). For its part, as the price of national power and in exchange for promises of regional autonomy under a British-inspired model of devolution, the League had, formally if not whole-heartedly or unanimously, abjured its goal of independence for a new country, Padania, consisting of the Italian lands north of the Po and with its capital at Venice. There is in fact a set of curiously overlapping collusions here: between the pro-Vatican and the anticlerical elements in the neofascist Alleanza nazionale party; between the passionately anti-Roman Leghisti who scrawl slogans such as Roma ladrona (thieving Rome) on walls and the equally passionately localist romanisti (Roman localists and passionate supporters of the Roma football club) who battle the supposedly pro-fascist Lazio football teams supporters in graffiti and catcalls at every opportunity; and between anti-Semitic thugs who suddenly discover their sympathy for the oppressed Palestinians and their comrades who laud the contributions of Romes Jews to the citys culture and history.

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These apparent paradoxes, moreover, are nothing new; they were part of the ideological fabric of Mussolinis life and times, and already then had a long prehistory. What is theoretically and also ethnographically important here is that appeals to notions of difference (alterity) will not work. A subtler instrument of comparison is required, because these apparent paradoxes are all ironic recognitions of the fact that it is not difference but familiarity that breeds contempt; conversely, it is not sameness or identity that creates the conditions for cooperation, but the recognition of a difference that is judged to be interesting. Indeed, one could argue that in Italy similarity generates a disposition to create unstable coalitions * the history of Italys postwar governments illustrates this with operatic panache. But such divisions never seem to lead to the threatened collapse of the country; rather, they become collusive debates about the risk of a creeping, unseen invasion of the foreign into the body politic of the Roman citizenry. One consequence of this approach is that it becomes important to see racism as a form of political protest * not an attractive one from our point of view, to be sure, but more comparable with the left-wing and liberal attempts to restrain the excesses of economic neoliberalism than one might initially expect (or want to admit). As the idea of national and local heritage gains worldwide currency, aggressive uses of localism as a form of exclusivism also gain force * whether as government policy or as civil protest. It would be very easy, under these circumstances, to say that the language of political dissent had become global, but this would be to miss the extraordinary range of motives that can hide behind a common language * as Kapferer (1988) so cogently demonstrates for Australian and Sri Lankan forms of nationalism (showing that mateship and gentle humanity can easily be transformed into collective hatred). Kapferers work is seminal for the kind of argument I have been sketching here, because he draws attention to the ways in which seemingly benign signifiers may mask ideologies of decidedly malignant import. I suggest that the growing sense of globalisation actually fuels and intensifies such negative responses to ideals of cultural coexistence, making the idea of a truly global society increasingly improbable. I have taken the position here that globalisation, whatever else it may be, is not about a necessary process of unidirectional homogenisation. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth. Let me suggest, indeed, two rather mischievous parallels. Just as moralities with a clearly articulated discourse of rules and prohibitions allow skilled social actors to dissimulate more widely varied and deviant patterns of behaviour than is usually possible in the context of looser systems, and just as bureaucrats usually prefer highly prescriptive sets of instructions precisely because these allow a greater latitude of interpretation behind a signifying parade of certainty and clarity, so the apparent globalisation of cultural signifiers affords plenty of play to reworkings of the rhetoric of diversity, tolerance and social justice. Often, in fact, such reworkings then serve the goals of those we would most probably regard as inimical to those very values.

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There is already a body of interesting work, for example, on the rhetorics of democracy in Thailand, suggesting that the importation of a discourse originating largely in Western Europe has spawned a whole array of terms that look wonderful but perform rather suspect tasks: civil society (prachaasangkhom), participation (khwaam suan ruam), democracy (prachaathipatai), transparency (khwaamprongsai) and so on (Morris 2004). (Although I have mentioned the Thai terms here, the common practice of replacing them with English-language equivalents illustrates the proximity and ubiquity of concerns to stay aboard that global hierarchy of value.) Moreover, the public cynicism that comes with the abuse of these notions, fuelled by criticisms of the populist Thaksin government as much as of its predecessors, suggests that these reworkings of fundamental meanings are well understood by their intended consumers, who are also privy * however indirectly * to international idioms of critique. They, too, generate a form of cultural intimacy (Morris 2004) * a recognition of familiar evils as somewhat reassuring just because they are familiar * that sustains the willingness of citizens to collude in their own submission to the prevailing system (what Connors 2003, in Gramscian vein, calls democrasubjection). Such paradoxes have appeared, tellingly, in numerous polities at more or less the same time. If one compares the Thaksin and Berlusconi governments, not only is one struck by the extraordinary convergence they display in their political and judicial histories, their thin-skinned responses to criticism, and their managerial understanding of political process, but one can also discern in public reaction a similar degree of cynical deconstruction of these terms. There are, to be sure, different resonances in these two countries in which threats often take the form of exaggerated politeness (the stereotypical Italian mafioso expression ci penso io, Ill take care of that, comes to mind). The difference in the degree to which people are prepared to express criticism directly in public is cultural, but in both countries it often plays right into the hands of those who wield power cynically; people who protest are either uncouth or subversive, and they threaten the short-term well-being that populist economics have restored to some without alleviating the anxieties * or the accompanying racism * of others. Familiar Face: Migrations of an Attitude What this brief comparative excursus suggests is that not only do the ideal-typical terms of democratic, egalitarian discourse convey a range of often quite different meanings, but they also evoke critiques that are similarly liable to multiple interpretations. Consider the claims of Roman rightists to feel sorry for the exploited immigrants who now live in their erstwhile dwellings * a situation that was made possible in part, as they themselves somewhat ruefully acknowledge, by their own reluctance in earlier years to purchase rather than rent their living spaces and by their willingness to accept such dependency as a feature of their local culture. Their protest against the Vaticans alleged cruelty appears to be quite self-serving, although I would

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not presume to claim any degree of certainty as to their actual motives. But they somehow know that, if they are to expect any sympathy, they must also show it * to the very people whom they also, from the vantage-point this moral high ground affords them, despise for an alleged lack of culture. The irony is all the more remarkable in that working-class Romans carry a defiant awareness that other Italians despise them as uncultured southerners; racism is not so much hierarchical as, in the best Evans-Pritchardian sense (see Evans-Pritchard 1940), segmentary * relative to context and nested in a moveable hierarchy of violence and contempt. These are traces of a conceptual migration here, of both racism and political participation, both of which (although in very different ways!) are recognisably modernist ideals. They are particularly interesting because they are reactions to an image of globalisation, which they also reproduce in the sense that they are found around the globe in widely differing places. They do not necessarily reflect the effects of political activism in spreading certain ideas around the world. But the fact that they surface in many different places is prima facie evidence that they represent globally recognisable signifiers. What is much less clear is that they also represent the same signifieds. On the contrary, it may well be that they are clear evidence of how discourse may create (or be used to create) a sense of common cause, whether supporting or opposing the principles of social justice. If the common cause is simply the expression of bitter discontent and a sense of grudge against the world, it also suggests that the malcontents of todays demonstrations and discriminations are able to mobilise through form rather than content, appearances rather than substance, rhetoric rather than evidence. In Italy, the public appreciation of rhetoric is so developed that such appreciations flourish like the best of wine grapes in rich, supportive soil. Racists know that they live in a world where they cannot speak too openly of their racism if they want to be allowed to move forward, but they also know that they can tap into a large reservoir of sympathy * all the more so if they are able to sound a voice of regret, the modern equivalent of the English public schoolmasters This will hurt me much more than it hurts you, or of certain arguments voiced in the United States against bilingual education on the grounds that Hispanics will thereby be discouraged from learning the English that would open up real opportunities for their advancement. These pieties conceal sources of real embarrassment; to the extent that the sophisticated politician needs the street thug, the latter must be prevented from appearing too much in the public eye. Yet the thugs presence is also a reassurance, a cultural necessity. Like all forms of cultural intimacy, such incongruities are both to be shielded from outside inspection, and yet at the same time provide the glue that holds the populace together and in place behind the state (and perhaps also behind its recently rightist government). No one in power can afford to admit to racism. Racism, at least in overt form, is unacceptable; even (or perhaps especially) the leaders of Alleanza nazionale must take care to dissociate themselves from it. The deep animosity displayed toward East Europeans is re-deflected as concern for their

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welfare or, conversely, as resistance to the foreign power of the Vatican (and here the Right can make an especially effective and subtle play for the affections of the disaffected foot soldiers of the Left). At the same time, this systemic animosity already possesses a reassuring feel of global solidarity despite the fact that it has been filtered through the specificities of Italian history and culture. Racism, in this context, is also globalised, and so it appears to share something of the inevitability and solidity of rationality; like other globalisms, moreover, it masks perduring cultural differences which are then deployed in the form of exceptionalist declarations of innocence. In the end, all disclaimers appear to merge into one. In the land that has given us the organisation SOS Razzismo, one of the commonest expressions of intolerance is a denial: Non sono razzista, Im not a racist. After all, the people this individual attacks are not even those of colour; they are fellow-Europeans, who just cannot adapt to the local ways (it is said). Razzismo has a broader meaning in Italian than is customary with its English equivalent. The term is used for virtually any kind of intolerance, whether based on phenotype, gender, sexuality, religion, or virtually any other categorical identification. While this conflation serves the useful purpose of demonstrating the common ground of virtually all collective modes of organising hatred, we may legitimately suspect that it also makes the deployment of a rhetoric of tact much easier. If it is racist to attack Ukrainians, for example, those who do so defend themselves on the grounds that they are defending their economic interests and cultural values. The actual racism that underlies such attitudes * especially the fear of miscegenation * is not obvious when the immigrants skin colour is palpably similar to that of the locals. This occlusion of underlying ideological positions enables racists to deploy a profoundly courteous and sympathetic rhetoric in defence of their views. Their opponents call their bluff by insisting on the term razzismo, but, in the absence of a specifically racial component in the immediate context of confrontation, the discourse is all about good manners (those people keep getting drunk and our children cannot use the square as they always used to do). It is presented as a defence of purity (those people are prostitutes and pimps, and our women are inevitably embarrassed even to walk in their own neighbourhood), so it also preserves nowunfashionable patriarchal idioms in the guise of respect for women. The old malavitosi (underworld thugs) who formerly held sway in the central districts of Rome still recall their major role as being the defence of their (that is, the neighbourhoods) women against harassment. Not all Roman racism is restricted to attacks on European migrants. We must not minimise the racism that is directed against non-Europeans in Italian society; it is neither minimal nor without serious dangers for the future. But the ostensibly subtler racism that is directed against European immigrants reveals the logic by which racists can appear to tolerate African and Asian migrants who are, after all, entirely visible as outsiders, and who may on occasion make useful allies against other forestieri (foreigners) such as Milanese or even Neapolitans.10 I recall seeing an obviously

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Asian woman, probably Philippine, energetically wielding a Northern League banner at a particularly well-attended and well-publicised rally in Piazza Repubblica, in the heart of Romes historic centre. And a local Philippine woman, married to a merchant operating in the central square of the district where I lived, equally warmly endorsed her husbands contemptuous hatred of the Ukrainians who flocked to their cardinals church, located on that same square * even though he also employed numerous Eastern Europeans and professed great affection for them as individuals (another classic form of disclaimer, cf. Some of my best friends are Jews). Im not a racist: the phrase, which often prefaces dialect-inflected complaints, announces its own disingenuousness, a necessary adaptation to a globalised rule of tact. It calls on individual friendships as evidence for the absence of a generic hatred, thereby implying that the vast majority of those despised others are worthy only of contempt by comparison. The use of local accent and lexicon shows that racism, like McDonalds, is always and forever inflected by local culture. And yet it is also, in the same way, forever recognisable. Paradoxically, it is its self-denial, the disclaimer, that guarantees that wide recognition. In this guise, it travels easily across the globe: for example, the Greek who protests in identical terms * dhen ime ratsistis, alla . . . (Im not a racist, but . . . ) * will have no difficulty understanding this form of globalism. It is the badge of an expanded, familiar, and * to its members * comfortingly disreputable fraternity. Parochialism of any variety paradoxically travels better and further than cosmopolitanism, as the experiences of international agencies such as the United Nations and the European Space Agency demonstrate. The ubiquity of standardised disclaimers, moreover, shows that racism has infiltrated the etiquette of exclusion around the world, creating a durable but obstinately intangible fellowship of global parochialism: small-mindedness writ large. Racists have concomitantly developed great skill at masking their hatred as a means of displaying it. Their favoured device, in one form or another, is the elegant regret of a humanism wounded and betrayed. It takes on an air of bafflement at how reasonable people can find the speakers best intentions so evil, and it invokes a respect for clean individuals, as opposed to the stinking crowd. In claiming to preclude categorical prejudice altogether, it proclaims that very stance: Im not a racist, but . . . . The reverberating silence that concludes such disclaimers, a silence that ostensibly dares the listener to object and so secures and expands complicity, may yet prove longer, louder, more subtly insidious, and thus far more corrosive of human coexistence than the most belligerent scream of fascist rage. Notes
[1] We can indeed see this in Huntingtons (2004) subsequent diatribe against the weakening of the Anglo-Saxon tradition in American society through the burgeoning of immigration from the Hispanic world. It is also apparent in the growing rejection of the learning of foreign languages as a matter of policy. Barber is right that cultural isolationism is the other face of global homogeneity; more questionable is the widespread assumption, which he apparently

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[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8] [9]

[10]

shares, that a sharing of cultural forms means a reduction in the range of meanings available to consumers. A PhD student at Harvard, Maple Razsa, is currently writing a dissertation on the antiglobalisation movement in Croatia. Although he has focused his ethnography on Croatia specically, this research entailed a considerable amount of transnational travel, with direct observation of both the commonalities and cultural differences that such movement brought to the fore. At a very different level, Zabuskys (1995) account of the multiple readings of such an apparently common term as cooperation in a multinational bureaucracy, in this case the European Space Agency, raises some very similar intimations of the limits of supposedly transnational vocabularies. The preservation of an Islamic mosque in a Christian country can be a particularly solid form of disclaimer in itself. There are parallels elsewhere. I suspect, for example, that the initial resistance of some local Muslims to the Thai states restoration of the Krue Se mosque in Pattani after the violent military attack in 2004 was not only a defence of religious turf but also a recognition of the hegemonic implications of the intervention itself. The authorities did consult with local people about the restoration, and this seems to have secured the compliance of the vast majority. I conducted research in Rome principally in 1999 2000, with fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Washington DC) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, neither of which is responsible for the views expressed here but to both of which I am immensely grateful. I have made numerous subsequent visits and have especially focused on issues of gentrication, eviction, and historic conservation and its social consequences. Comparable in this respect is the Greek case (on which, see Halkias 2004; Paxson 2004). See Krause (2005) for a study explicitly linking fear of declining births with racism against an economically powerful minority, in this case the Chinese in northern Italy. The irony is that many of these immigrants are driven by a work ethic that local Italians would recognise as admirable because it represents a European mode that Italians ruefully, with full acknowledgment here of a commonplace of cultural intimacy, say they themselves have not attained. Such an ethic may be rooted in a protestant (in the Weberian sense) reformism such as that of the Mourid Islamic sect of Senegalese immigrants (Carter 1997: 71), itself out of Africa and therefore antithetical, in the folk evolutionism of Italian racial prejudice, to the European ideals it in fact partially resembles. For many northern Italians of fascist persuasion, the Mezzogiorno (southern region) represents the intrusion of Africa into the Italian cultural and racial world. It is perhaps worth recalling here that Canada rejected many Jewish immigrants during the Nazi era on the grounds that Jews were by denition urban people and therefore unt to shoulder the heroic and pure task of taming nature by living in the countryside (Abella and Troper 1982 83: 54 5). This is where I have conducted eldwork; the area is now heavily gentried. See Herzfeld (2001). In 2005 Mussolinis granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, having been expelled from the newly respectable Alleanza nazionale, proclaimed her own splinter group the true heir of social fascism, which relieved the Berlusconi government of too direct an association with Mussolinis heritage and name or, more disturbingly, with any obligation to represent itself as socially compassionate. At the rank-and-le level, however, the rhetoric of Alleanza nazionale activists remained that of social responsibility, here conceived as a defence of the poor against capitalisms support for the alleged incursions of innite hordes of immigrants. Neapolitans do get some solidarity from Romans, who consider them to be makers of superior coffee and comic melodrama, and to have a more sophisticated (but still southern!) dialect.

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