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.