Antigone: the first amoral familist?

Antigone tends to her brother's corpse

The 2017 Maltese General Elections have pushed me to start blogging again after a four year absence from the blogosphere. This is a labour of love, through which I am trying to explore some issues which fascinate me. The attempt to interpret the election results has exposed a series of riddles and commentators are casting their nets wide to resolve them. Certain old anthropological tropes, particularly 'amoral familism' and 'clientalism/patronage' have been exhumed and are enjoying a second life. In these posts I will focus on 'amoral familism'; an old fashioned but provocative concept which never fails to generate reactions.

'Amoral Familism' was first popularised by Edward Banfeld, a political scientist working in Italy in the 1950's. The title of his book "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society" tells you a lot about the patronising orientalising assumptions that pervade the concept. Yet 'Mediterranean' anthropologists felt that this concept was useful and important, despite its obvious shortcomings. The anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain, for instance, whose name is indelibly linked to the study of Maltese society, gave it a great deal of importance in accounting for what he saw as the environmental and political degradation of Malta. 

Over the past few weeks, it has been invoked by the controversial blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia; as in this guest post on her website. In these incarnations amoral familism figures in classic Banfieldian attire; signalling an archaic society revolving around self-serving family-centred codes of conduct which can only be considered as corrupt from the standpoint of modern Weberian bureaucratic state structures. However this interpretation has just been powerfully refuted by Ranier Fsadni, who observes in regard to the strategies of Malta's newly re-elected Prime Minister Joseph Muscat:

 "The most popular narrative is that Muscat appealed to a deeply ingrained amoralism in Maltese society. Both the numbers and Muscat’s rhetoric show that explanation doesn’t work. It’s a recipe for a fundamental misreading of the politics behind the vote. Around 26 per cent of people who voted for Muscat, this time, voted for the PN at some point in the past. Which means that, at least once, they responded to appeals to the common good and to the benefits for future generations – against the appeals to individual self-interest that embodied several Labour campaigns. They weren’t ‘amoral’ then. Why now? Second, Muscat has been very careful to deploy the rhetoric of morality. His machine has spent years positioning Busuttil as the unforgiving snob “who sees everyone as an ant”. In his victory speech, he made sure his supporters knew that, while he and Michelle Muscat, were the ones “most attacked”, he didn’t harbour grudges.

Yes, it’s only words. But he’s using them to appeal to people. And he’s appealing to their moral sense, not their amorality. It’s a sense of indignation and injustice at social exclusion, borne of everyday experience. The anxious drama of feeling you don’t quite belong in a place or a social set, a feeling only incited by the hours of TV programming dedicated to complete makeovers, interior design, picture-perfect food and raising children. Lines of social exclusion are always moral. They’re always justified by the idea of what people deserve. They’re animated by the search for social salvation and avoidance of humiliation. Muscat has harnessed that status anxiety – typical of a very mobile society – and politicised it. He managed to turn the accusations of corruption into false accusations motivated by envy. That’s a moral accusation, too. And a majority of people believed him."

I will argue that the positions taken by Caruana Galizia and Ranier Fsadni are not really contradictory, that a specific moralising discourse does lie at the heart of the Labour Party's electoral success and that the genius of the Labour Party's electoral strategy is its ability to connect two forms of what literary theorist Rene Girard would have called relationships of imitative desire/mimesis. To do so, I will rehearse some of the criticism of 'amoral familism' and indicate how the concept may yet point towards mimetic dimensions of political allegiance. As a starter, I am posting a set of my lecture slides which argue that the amoral familist stereotype obscures: (1) the complex morality which motivates the practical decisions taken by people in Malta and similar societies and (2) their attempts to use storytelling to bridge the divide between "private" and "public" morality.

These arguments can be exemplified by Sophocles' Antigone; usually seen as the paradigmatic example of a heroine who was unselfishly prepared to  die to uphold the higher law which mandated that her brother's corpse should not be left unburied. Her laments as she is led to her death for violating Creon's decrees show that Antigone could herself be viewed as an amoral familist. At the same time this example also exposes the weak points in this concept. This is the scene I am focusing on: 

An extract from Antigones' final lament makes clear that from a moral standpoint we are here at the opposite end of the spectrum to the Spartan ethos of placing obedience to state law first:

"O tomb, O wedding chamber, O hollowed abode ever guarding, where I am walking to my own, the greatest number of whom has perished, and Persephassa has received among the dead. Last of them, I, and by far in the most evil way, I am going down before my life's measure has expired. In arriving there, I nourish the hope, of course, that I will come philê to father and especially philê to you, mother, and philê to you, brother-head, since all of you in death with my own hand I washed and dressed, and gave liquid offerings at your tomb. Now, Polyneices, for laying out your body, I win such things as these. And yet, I honored you for those thinking rightly."

A little earlier in her lament, she refers to herself as having become a metic (a foreigner resident in an ancient Greek city state who lacked citizenship rights) and points out that none of the official philoi (royal advisors to the king) was weeping for her:

"O city and its men of many possessions, o Dircaean springsand precinct of Thebes rich in chariots, at least I possess thee as witnesses to how unwept by philoi and by what laws am I going to the rock-entombed vault of my unprecedented mound."

Thus in her final hours Antigone, one of the last surviving members of the ancient royal house of Thebes, effectively loses her citizenship and is regarded as an alien migrant by the state bureaucrats whose rules she has disobeyed. Her rejection of Creon's decrees is made possible because she is obeying a higher law which values the love of her dead parents and siblings above her status as a law-abiding citizen. 

Antigone is led before Creon in this ancient Greek vase

Although Antigone might appear as the textbook example of an amoral familist, her final words make clear that she wishes her death to make a public statement and that far from acting amorally, she sees herself as someone who deserves to be remembered for her piety by the Theban political elite:

"O paternal city of the land of Thebes and ancestral gods, I am being led away. I delay no longer. Look, magnates of Thebes, at the sole and last one of the royal line, at what I suffer from what sort of men, having piously rendered piety."

Clearly a sharp divide between public and private morality was not perceived in ancient Greece and far from Antigone acting amorally in public in order to further her family interests in private, she saw her virtuous activities in favour of her dead brother as being quintessentially moral actions which deserved to be made public and honoured by the elders of the city. This echoes the points made by Ranier Fsasdni above about how the Labour Party's rhetoric in Malta invokes moral values and does not focus solely on a straightforward appeal to self-interest. My next post will argue that Banfield's concept still contains an important insight, not so much about the values which motivate political allegiance in societies like Malta, but about the competitive social relationships which drive it.     

Malta: The problems of Scaling Hospitality

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The Mediterranean – I commented a few months ago in a separate blog entry - seems to be full of bad guests and even worse hosts, these days.

The stresses of hospitality, I agued, were not at all new. The rules and obligations of hospitality have preoccupied humanity since the days of Homer. By looking at hospitality in Greek Myth, I sketchily outlined the ways a host can be a bad and nasty one:  refusing to accept guests; failing to provide care; destroying the guests under his protection; trapping the guest and preventing him from moving along their journeys. Valid points, today as they have been 3,000 years ago. 

If you're still unsure what bad hospitality is all about, I recommend you watch Season 3 Episode 9 of Game of Thrones. The recent events that have rocked Malta in the past 48hours add another one to the list: A bad host, is, primarily, the one who applies the rights and duties of hospitality in the wrong places.

The flow of events need not be repeated in much detail. Unless the Europe Union would practically intervene to shoulder the burden, AirMalta flights, at the command of the newly appointed Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, would ferry the recent Somali arrivals back to Libya. A written order from the European Court of Human Rights - claiming a breach of human rights - halted these plans.

Yet, despite the Court's insistence on the breaking of ‘human rights’, it is interesting how at the local level – both in political discourses and in the surge of commentary and counter-commentary - has been, with a notably precious few exceptions entirely framed in the language of 'hospitality'.

The arguments in favour of keeping the migrants, to start off in a light and easy way, are clear: the guests that have arrived at our shores have fled from poorer and more dangerous places. This, at the very least, entitles them to some basic and immediate goodness, shelter and care until their long term plans are sorted out. It is not difficult to find these arguments couched within the discourse of religion and Christianity, thanks to us being the first and best descendants of this fellow’s disciples:

I'm watching you, Joe...

It is with the argument that migrants need to be pushed back into the sea that things start to get interesting for an Anthropologist. Joseph Muscat's argument - adopted and endlessly repeated by his followers - is basically as follows: We Maltese have been good hosts, taking in migrants, saving them from the Sea, feeding them etc. for way too long. Our resources are now at an end; there is no more room for new guests. The European Union - a community of nations who are, in theory at least, equal to each other - need to start shouldering their part of the burden. We've been good hosts, they've been bad hosts at our expense. We're the laughing stock of Europe, trodden over by our neighbours who obviously think we're inferior to them. It needs to stop. We'll become bad hosts and throw the guests out. If the league of friends refuses to host parties, then the parties have to stop.

I told you, the parties have to stop

Joseph Muscat's weaving of Hospitality, Nationalism and European politics, seems to be the most natural thing in the world, but it puts its finger on a problem of Hospitality which has preoccupied anthropologists of the Mediterranean for ages.

For a good part of its history, the study of Hospitality has been largely drawn to sorting out and navigating its moral mazes, ambiguity and fickleness (ex. Hospitality is couched in the discourse of pure gift giving but is obviously interested and calculated; hospitality draws the stranger in but also is a tool through which the potentially dangerous foreigner is kept at some distance; it offers the stranger resources yet keeps him from managing them; the objects of hospitality can be at once life giving - such as water - or life destroying - such as poison). 

Michael Herzfeld, however, took research into hospitality in a completely new direction: what makes Hospitality so important is that it can be scaled, expanded and amplified to describe relations between larger entities and imagined communities.

I will explain.

Hospitality primarily refers to the personal relationship between an individual guest and an individual host. This relationship offers an evocative image and language: the house is opened to the guest, doors are open, and dinners and spaces are shared. Yet, as Herzfeld notes, anthropologists have often encountered that this basic image could be used to describe the relationships between larger conceptual entities. Villages can also be hospitable. Nations can also use the discourses and imagery of hospitality: they can invite tourists into their territories and cities and histories; they can accept migrants from the rough seas. Hospitality is a shape shifter, and can expand and contract and move along contexts to inhabit the way relationships between increasingly large communities – Family, Village, Region, Nation, Continent – are morally described and are expected to behave. 

However, if you think that the above image adequately 
represents the scaling of Hospitality, then you're wrong

Scaling hospitality, however, is not easy. It is not easy because, say, the Village is not simply a larger version of the family, no matter how hard it tries to picture itself as so. A nation is not a large village. The EU is not a big nation. So in moving up the scale, Hospitality, or its discourse, has to deal with constructs that are increasingly difficult, complicated and themselves bound to other processes (ex. Inter village trading and feasting, national contraction and industry, continental politics).

Attempts at representing nations as being an enlarged version of their countrymen have been made, however.

And this is where the problem lies. 

Both those Maltese in favour of migrants and those against them are bad hosts because they have scaled hospitality onto the level of National and Regional politics in a simplistic way.  Once one starts to talk at the level of intercontinental migration flows, illegal migration, asylum, one is no longer simply talking about hosts and guests: one is now into the realm of international human rights and EU politics. 

The European Court of Human Rights has slapped us on the wrist, telling us that throwing migrants out into the sea because the rest of the European Union has been a bad host who let Malta do all the good hosting is not reason enough to refuse to accept asylum seekers. 

The Court has reminded us that this is why we have law in the first place! Largely because the fates of migrants are way too important to be left to the fickleness of hospitality. As anthropologists and Game of Thrones have adequately noted, hospitality is a fickle thing: offering good and extended hospitality, while being, in theory, required by some divine law, is also bound to so many other variables: the moods of host and guest; their current resources; the relationships of the host with other possible hosts or peers; one’s vague perception of who the complete stranger is. Hospitality, anthropologists have noted to the point of disgust, is likely to fail as much as succeed. 

The Maltese case, is therefore a lesson about the scaling of hospitality, and how bad hosts and bad guests are primarily those who insist upon their rights and obligations – to stay and to send away; to feed and to poison – when the matter is simply not one of hospitality but of international law.

Nêpoinon: Ancient Greek and contemporary Hospitality (or why Anthropologists ought not to laugh at the Classicists)

The Mediterranean seems to be full of bad guests and even worse hosts, these days.

The study of migration, especially that of Sub-Saharan refugees/illegal migrants into Europe, has never been my focus as interest, strange as it may sound to an anthropologist-in-training from Malta. It was only when I did my fieldwork stint in Ceuta, that I was practically forced to take a look at the matter in slightly more detail.

You thought Malta was odd? Try this for size.

Malta and Ceuta share a number of similarities: Both are small; both share a long history of being conquered and re-conquered; both are active, strategic ports, bringing in all types of people from all across the lake and beyond. On a less positive note, both places have been marginal societies on the periphery of much larger political institutions (Ceuta - Spain - EU / Malta - EU/British Empire). Accordingly, they have both been kept under a tight political leash, gaining political recognition (based on a fiercely strong local identity and patriotism) in the recent decades. For reasons this entry will not go into (read my thesis, out December 2013), both consider themselves/are considered to be, at once, bridges straddling Europe (Christianity) and Africa (Islam), and thanks to their geographical locations, guard-dogs and buffer zones of the EU against the 'new' phenomenon of Sub-Saharan illegal migration.

Spot the difference!

So it surprises little that, given the generally same conditions, I heard things in Ceuta that largely resonated with those I had heard in Malta. Migrants, sub-Saharan and Moroccan border-workers (transfronterizos), are described as a danger (un peligro) to Ceuta. Ceutans have properly given their poor neighbours (vecinos) a hand, offering them jobs, state-welfare, assistance with any sort of abuse or other domestic problems, first-rate health care (many Moroccan women give birth in Ceuta/Spain) ... and they are still around! Not only are they still around, but they demand more - ever increasing access to Spanish resources, ever increasing protection and access. The Moroccan is a bad guest - a 'moro' - who not only over-stays his welcome, but also brings his friends to the party uninvited and consumes resources - jobs, welfare, funds - that threaten the Host.

This also makes locals angry: because the big northern dogs seem passive while the uninvited guests eat all the cake.

But the bad guest is complemented by a bad Host, on two levels:

1) Both Ceutans and Maltese have been repeatedly embarrassed by researchers, studies and inquiries which claim that guests, refugees and illegal migrants have been treated increasingly poorly while their legal situation is resolved. I do not know about Malta, but in Ceuta such accusations deeply touch local citizens, who actually insist that they're the victims in this story.

Like this, but less cute.

They develop concepts of a 'ceutan reality' (realdad ceuti), the idea that only locals really know what is going on. It de-legitimizes the academic outsider (de fuera) and is deeply annoying to an anthropologist.

2) Both are accused for keeping their guests for inappropriate amount of time - delaying the progress through which the guest can leave and carry on with his journey. Exceptional work by tons of researchers have described the small border towns of the Mediterranean as waiting rooms. But without entertainment.

I would want to leave that place too.

Now, the interesting bit is that all of this is often discussed in terms of laws and constitutions and regulations. In effect, I would hazard to say that all this migration business seems to both Ceutans and Maltese as being an new thing (algo nuevo). Most Ceutans recall that problems really started in 1986, when the Inmigration act was passed. In both cases, the legal structure has failed to accommodate the patterns and movements we are seeing. The result is one of dissatisfaction, confusion, scratched heads and the idea that national integrity is slowly being undermined by the invading and increasingly hostile other.

The fact is that what we have talked about is not new.

 Not at all.

 It is rather the main theme of one of the oldest stories of the Mediterranean - the Odyssey. I would also risk my neck to say that while anthropologists have largely entered the confusing world of legal rights and obligations, they have also ignored the complicated but invisible world of the classics. Anthropologists have shunned the classicists, those weird cousins apparently cut away from society, translating and re-translating cool tales from the past and having conversations with themselves no one can understand. But I think they might offer us some concepts that might still be useful for us. Really.

"But, honey! Odysseus..." "NO!"

Thus enters a certain Harry L.Levy, with his 1963 article "The Odyssean Suitors and the Host-Guest Relationships". Levy is primarily (of course) writing to fellow classicists, because he thinks that Odysseus' killing spree at the end of the book - where he massacres the suitors who for ages had been feasting using his resources while trying to get it on with his wife - was a little bit...out of character.

His main point does not interest us, but his argument does. For as he goes along, Levy gives us three main components to the Guest-Host relationship we anthropologists have called 'hospitality'. And they strongly resonate with our current situation.

1. On how to be a good guest: 

Being a good guest has nothing to do with reciprocity, Levy argues. Being a good guest does not involve offering hospitality to people who had offered you theirs in the past. Rather, a guest is someone who "does not overstay his welcome, and has due regard for the substance of the host, who on his part must offer it freely".

This is something that I've heard to the point of disgust in Ceuta. But in the context of state assigned legal rights and statuses, these discourses are either ignored, or, worse still, seen as undisciplined residues of emotion and anger that have failed to submit to proper bureaucratic regulation and process. It is easy to label such attitudes as 'racist' - the hatred/fear of the other - as the Ceutans are very often labeled, but I argue that this gets us no-where. The mechanics of hostility towards the stranger must be analysed at the deeper levels of exchange, belonging and ownership - something anthropologists excel at.

First and foremost, the good guest should wear clothes at his host's house

2. On how to be a Good Host:

This is where things get interesting. I quote Levy who in turn quotes Menelaus when hosting Odysseus' son:

"Telemachus, I really shall not hold you here a long time, eager as you are to return home. I should even blame another man who, as host, loves too much or hates too much: everything is better in moderation. It is just as evil to push out a guest who is unwilling to leave as it is to retain one who longs to depart. One should entertain the guest who is present, and send on the one who wishes to go" 

This is an interesting concept: the idea that a host can be a bad host for being too much of a host. It is hard to encounter in daily discourse, though.

The Odyssey, however, is full of it. Just to give one example which reminds us of Malta, Hermes (the messenger god) becomes terribly angry at the nymph Calypso for keeping Odysseus trapped on her island, instead of letting him continue on with his journey. He tells her not to be selfish and let the good fellow go... other men will pass by her island, eventually. And, presumably, at that time self-satisfying alternatives existed already.

 I would like to be hosted by a bad host, too.

The idea that locals are 'bad hosts' because they keep migrants from moving on, is widespread in discourses about migration. Yet they are often overlooked until until one really starts to talk to the migrants themselves. And in a parallel case, quite like Odysseus, we have migrants, who, while grateful for the support and resources given to them, also become increasingly hostile to the structures that keep them bound. In Malta we therefore have repeated burnings and break-outs. In Ceuta, we have encountered break-away groups who live in the mountains and the hills and violent street fighting.

Through such discourse, the rescuer also becomes a racist, selfish host whose only desire is to stop the migrant and break him/her down.

Such dynamics cannot be ignored. We seem to have systems of law that are locking locals and migrants into a stalemate where one feels like a bad guest and the other feels like a bad host. More importantly, these attitudes are completely ignored and unaccounted for.

3. Nêpoinon

What happens to people who do not follow the rules of hospitality? In the Odyssey it is Nêpoinon - revenge without retaliation.

In Greek myth, the gods protect the stranger. Refusing a stranger is dangerous indeed.  Levy quotes one of the suitors, who reproaches the suitor chief, Antinous when he strikes Odysseus, who enters his own household disguised as an old man: "Antinous, you did not do well in striking the wretched wanderer. You are doomed if by chance he is some god from heaven!"

Similarly, because bad guests eat the livelihood of their host, and thus rob him of his ability to live (also known as murder), the gods tend to take revenge.

In both cases, of course, the gods, being all-powerful, can inflict violence which cannot be reciprocated. It is the final word. That's what makes them gods. 

Old man?! OLD MAN?! Reciprocate this...

We live in a system of hospitality which has been deserted by the gods. The divine law (themis) that has regulated hospitality and made it work, has been replaced by a secular law that seems unable to engage with such dynamics. The result, as I pointed out, is a sense of dissatisfaction without end - a negative reciprocity of bad hosting and bad guesting.

So why is the Odyssey important?

I conclude on two points: First, because the Mediterranean has seen a wealth of new ethnographies that have observed a rather interesting phenomenon in the Mediterranean. James Verinis, Liliana Suarez-Navas, Maurizio Albahari....have all noted how within the legal gaps, existing local institutions are dispensing rights other than those of the state. Guests are recognized as hard-working, diligent and loyal and, sometimes, slowly, integrated into daily life on an individual albeit slow level. In due time, they might be symbolically incorporated in physical or fictive kin rituals (husbands, godparents etc) and might even end up running them! Hospitality is important, because it is just as real as State law and sanction, and is also the a powerful force behind practical integration or rejection.

Second. It is especially important because in this day and age, we do not have Nêpoinon. Hospitality, has been stripped of its legal authority. If Zeus doesn't guarantee order, then, well who will?

Just us, I think.
Which is why we need to read those meticulous translations again and again.

The Boston Bombings: the failure of a Marriage and a Migratory Project

In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, there is a tremendous amount of speculation regarding the motives of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who appears to Americans as a walking contradiction in terms; being on the one hand a well integrated American immigrant boxer, living in wealthy Boston suburbs with an all-American wife and daughter and appearing on the other as a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist engaged in a punitive jihad against the United States. The difficulty Americans seem to have with merging the two images is very telling as to how far apart these two "characters" are in the social drama projected by the media to white middle class America. Equally telling is the puzzlement about his racial origins. Despite being a prototypical Caucasian, he was described as "dark skinned" in the initial media reports; betraying a pressing desire to conflate the categories of non-white foreigner, Muslim and terrorist. And the attempt to find an outside agent who taught Tamerlan radical Islam shows how difficult it is to accept that violent terror can develop from within American society, rather than stemming from some form of external contamination.

Tamerlan's parents. His father is to the left, while his mother, bearing a passing
resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, is in the centre holding the baby Tamerlan.

I think an alternative interpretation of Tamerlan's motives is possible, which would focus on his family's status as migrants eager to live the American dream and integrate fully within US society. As their upwardly mobile social aspirations were blocked, it seems that the modern ambitious fashionably dressed young lawyer-couple who were Tamerlan's parents (pictured above) grew increasingly disillusioned about their own prospects within the society. In fact his father had to adopt a manual job as a mechanic and his mother was reduced to administering cosmetic facials at home to make ends meet. It seems that they responded in different ways to their predicament, with the mother turning to fundamentalist Islam in an understandable attempt to draw upon her roots to fashion an alternative Muslim subjectivity which could preserve her dignity in the face of the modern "Western" civilization, which increasingly rejected her. By contrast the father took an alternative route: continuing to maintain an agnostic secular modern identity, while simultaneously growing increasingly distant from his wife and his elder son. 

The internal tensions between the couple exploded when the Tamerlan's  parents' marriage broke up and his father returned to Dagestan. Against this background, his mother's arrest for shop-lifting a year after her husband left is revealing, particularly because one of the charges was for wanton damage to women's clothing. Bearing in mind that she was trained in cosmetics and how concerned she was to dress fashionably in a Western style when she entered the United States, the shop-lifting episode reads like an unconscious revenge against the system of aesthetic values which initially attracted her and represents the nadir of her migratory journey. Not only was this ideal of beauty, which she had once successfully sought to internalise and now regarded as un-Islamic, emblematic of a society which ultimately rejected her and her family. It also stood between her and her husband as indicated by her response to her husband's criticism of her decision to wear the hijab: "This is what Muslim men are supposed to want." Thus the division between Tamerlan's parents reflects different and radically opposed solutions to the failure of their migratory project:

The couple now: Tamerlan's father somewhat resembles Brad Pitt,
while his mother seems to have walked out of a medieval Persian manuscript.

   

Maltese and Arab Soundscapes

I must admit I really enjoyed this politically incorrect comedy clip by Harry Enfield; if for no other reason that  he takes the mickey out of both British and Arab ways of expressing emotion:

Actually celebratory gunfire is not a uniquely Arab ritual. It seems North Americans are also particularly fond of this practice, judging by the Wikipedia page dedicated to it, which is dominated by accounts from the Middle East and the USA. Trawling through the internet revealed this gem of a question, which also indicates an affinity between the way some North Americans and Arabs think: "Muslims shoot guns i the air to celebrate .why cant we?


So what is it all about? Perhaps we in Malta may be in a good position to understand it if we compare Arab forms of celebratory gunfire to Maltese festa fireworks:  

This goes to show how festa celebrations are at least partly about triumphing over the enemies of your village or faction and that a feasting/warfare model is a better analytical framework for thinking about festas than religion/ritual as such. By linking Maltese village feasts to warfare, we are in a better position to build on Jeremy Boissevain's path-breaking work in this field back in the Sixties:

At the same time, the close and ambiguous relationship between feasting and warfare is the subject of this classic ethnographic film:

I tried to address this subject in a lecture I gave to some Australian students a while back. I'm reproducing the abstract here:

"This lecture will seek to explain the uncomfortable status of religious feasts (or festas) as a tourist attraction by advancing a theoretical explanation of these events which places the social dynamics of rivalry between equals at their heart. Inspiration will be sought from Rene Girard and Simon Harrison, to compare festas to feuds and to argue that they are a kind of symbolic warfare which requires transformation of self in order to achieve victory, which is identified with a temporary reconfiguration of patterns of dominance within the community. It is against the backdrop of this symbolic warfare that the statue of the saint acquires totemic presence, both as representing the unity of the group and as a sacrificial figure which can unite the warring doubles."

Finally here is a Spanish Flamenco dancer. I seem to hear the same explosive tense rhythms in her dance as I do in the fireworks and the gunfire:

Two Italian Women Who Lost Faith

This shot is taken from Pietro Germi's classic: Seduced and Abandoned 

In the first case, here is the sixties' musical goddess Mina, warning her faithless lover that the woman he is chasing after does not really love him:

And here is a Neapolitan maid from the eighties film "Cosi Parlo' Bellavista", whose had it up to here with her washing machine:

Are their postures that different? Mina is of course much more poised and self-assured. But both of them are confronting directly the person/object that is letting them down. Mina's graceful controlled gestures suggest a much more volcanic emotion bubbling up beneath, which the maid makes explicit by directly "man"- handling the offending machine. All of this adds content to Anthropologist Jill Dubisch's claim that there is a poetics of womanhood in the Mediterranean, that complements her colleague Michael Herzfeld's Poetics of Manhood. Dubisch writes:

"My landlady’s litany of complaint illustrates one way that a woman might perform “being good at being a woman,” in this case by showing the suffering she undergoes in fulfilling all her duties. Women are responsible for the physical and spiritual well-being of their families, and the women who crawl on their knees up to the church with infants on their backs dramatically illustrate the suffering they are willing to undergo to fulfill these obligations, in this case offering prayers and vows for the well-being of a child, vows that they have now come to fulfill. Such obligations don’t necessarily entail suffering, of course, but they may be expressed in other public ways. On more than one occasion, for example, I have seen Greek women pursue young offspring with food. In one case, I saw a mother at the beach follow her child into the water in order to feed him his lunch. Here is another example of maternal-ness performed in a public context."

How to Release Your Inner Native

         

After an exhausting day at work, nothing could be more refreshing than a dose of energetic folk-dancing, courtesy of Youtube. The two clips shown here come from very distant traditions. Bhangra is traditional Punjabi dancing, while Stavros Flatley & son are fusing Irish and Greek dance forms. But what they have in common is the humour, energy and sheer comic intensity of the performance.

What also connects these links is that the dancers are in each case subverting a very proper and restrained British set of bodily dispositions. Living, as I do, in a in a postcolony, I really appreciate how the Bhangra dancers start off by reproducing a typically British upper-class colonial conversation on the verandah about some exotic ritual one of them claimed to have observed; only to gleefully let rip by erupting into a very energetic folk-dance after a minute or two. In this way they allow their "inner native" to break through the facade of colonial civility and celebrate their freedom from the dominance of British manners and the imperial power plays they allow. 

I notice very similar patterns of behaviour in Malta, where a rough car mechanic dressed in a grimy sweater and jeans would obsequiously address an upper-class male client in English, saying: "do you understand, dear?" while delivering a complicated technical monologue in Maltese, which he knows is quite unintelligible to his client. Having symbolically feminized the client and eliminated the power/status gap between his working class dress and language and the other's neatly tailored suit, he then feels free to over-charge him on the basis that the client clearly belongs to a superior class and thus, while he could afford to pay for a good service, he could not possibly have the time to waste discussing the technical innards of a car. 

The 'Garaxx': Still the true inner sanctum of the Maltese male

Instead of being a simple expression of cultural goodwill, I see this as the skillful appropriation and reversing of imperialist nostalgia by the subaltern, who seeks to subdue and dominate his former master. By comparison, Stavros is an economic migrant in the colonial metropolis. By emphasizing the comic aspect of the dance, he is practically compelling the British audience to laugh at his ability to enact and transcend their stereotypes about hirsute, passionate and tactile Greek men. Yet showing how well he can understand and live up to their stereotypes also indicates that he cannot be confined by them. He thus makes his audience laugh in surprised acknowledgement of their own casual stereotyping and also gains the upper hand in the situation: