Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
way for the banning of ethnic foods, the persecution of street vendors whether
Jewish (during the Jubilee of 20009) or west african, the attempts to reduce the
use of Chinese and other foreign writing systems in signage displayed in public
spaces, the hounding of Roma, and the determination of police officials to “pro-
tect” white citizens from immigrants.
indeed, when i wanted to film a very peaceful antidiscrimination protest
on Via dei fori imperiali, i was stopped by a police officer who told me, “it's
for your own safety” ( È per la Sua incolumità ). The officer's disingenuous expla-
nation invoked menace at multiple levels. Not only did he use an expression of
polite concern to hint that disobedience on my part would not be tolerated, but,
consciously or (more probably) otherwise, his security-based rhetoric implicitly
invoked older discourses about “dangerous populations” worthy of mussolini's
surveillance of the left-wing working classes.
such an affectation of concern reproduces, i suggest, the same ambiguous
logic that we find in the practice of tolerance and its underlying model, hospi-
tality: a rhetoric of generosity that always carries within itself implications of
potential contempt and even violence, whether (in this case) against the immi-
grants and demonstrators or against a pesky individual with a camera. in the
Roman context, this particular version of encompassment turns on the logic of
what anthropologists call political segmentation, a point that requires some fur-
ther elaboration.
Despite its status as the national capital, Rome exhibits precisely those fea-
tures of extreme localism that more generally characterize the italian nation-
state. where else in the world does a country's historically most stable government
include members of a party—the Northern league—that periodically swears to
dismember the nation-state and declare the independence of its most prosperous
regions? in the much-despised capital of this self-dismembering polity, solidari-
ties are inevitably fragile and transient, and social interaction has long reflected
that fragility. This is “accommodation” in social practice: Rhetorical flexibility is
always preferable to direct attacks and belligerent language. all social relations
in Rome are friable; they are classically “segmentary”—that is, relative to each
social actor's relationship to the parties to each dispute. while segmentation ex-
ists everywhere, it gains particular prominence in a city where districts affect to
despise each other, but split internally—sometimes on clearly spatial lines—to
contest more restricted sets of material and affective interests. allies today are
foes tomorrow and allies again the day after; the weakness of human nature is
taken as a given, so that enmity should not be permanent (who, after all, is per-
fect?), but should reflect only a provisional and situational separation of interests
in the totally understandable flux of social life.10 such adaptability is the stuff
of which that self-ascribed Roman characteristic of accommodazione is made.
Romans explain their adaptability by reference to the long centuries of Vatican
repression and the necessity of coming to terms with such absolute power. There
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