Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [121]
Today displays of exceptional courtesy are often the instrument of provoking fear in others rather than expressing unease about one's own circumstances. Some forms of civility are thus anything but civic in the uses to which they are put. Ruthless power-mongering can adopt smoothly pleasant manners. The rough side of Roman life is nevertheless an equally important part of the picture. Quarrelsome behavior, which may occasionally confirm "folkloric" memories of an earlier age, today provokes as much irritation and derision as it does amusement, particularly among the educated intellectuals who run bookstores, organize town meetings, and attend classical concerts and scholarly lectures.
While measured tones and ironic jokes may achieve the "accommodation" that is so central a feature of Romans' image of themselves, outside observers, who have their own experiences of exclusion to recount, often see the Roman style in less flattering terms. A Sardinian barman who had operated for a long time in Monti, and was proud of the agonistic interactions of his home island, expressed deep dislike both for the contempt that he sometimes encountered in Rome and for the opportunistic friendliness that he also saw as characteristic of Romans. Recall, too, the furniture restorer who allegedly chased away the police officer who professed friendship in order to extract information.
Aggression is rarely valued for itself, but a clever response to provocation often does elicit approval. In a particularly nice demonstration of poetic justice, a jeweler had discovered the mechanic from a different zone who had stolen one of the wheels of his rather luxurious bicycle. He forced the thief to pick up the stolen wheel and give him a ride on his own bicycle back to his own house, where the thief had to replace the stolen wheel and then leave with his own bicycle minus one wheel.
Culture and Custom
The Sardinian barman nicely captured the segmentary fragmentation of culture that still characterizes Italian life: "Union is fine when it's divided," he remarked, and added, "That means you aren't imposing a new culture on me." With such logic, in which culture itself becomes an explicit item of negotiation, the capital city is able to remain as determinedly provincial as any small town.
The concept of cultura is a useful device for explaining social and political differences, and for negotiating one's own position in social and political debate. It reflects a complex and historically deep relationship between social-science discourse and local ways of reifying identity, very much like the use of the term kastom in Melanesia. To avoid the embarrassment of expressing racist attitudes directly, a relatively liberal merchant described Gypsies as having "a culture of theft, of non-work"; while he in principle favored the idea of offering them fixed employment he feared the effect of that supposedly endemic cultural trait and so "I don't want to be the first" (nun vojo esse' 'r primo) to take them on. Thus does the determinism of culture become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This merchant also showed awareness of the disgraced genealogy of the concept of race (razza), a product of its incarnation in Mussolini's Fascist regime, but thought that the term genetica was less offensive. Yet his slide toward politically (more) correct language did not really change the underlying racial determinism of his position, as his rhetorical demand whether I thought it was easy "to disassemble my culture" (smontar la mia cultura) then made abundantly clear.' This innatism also has notable political ramifications. A politically conservative observer might charge the citizenry with a "culture" of refusing to take responsibility and blaming the state for all its ills; since citizens elect their leaders, one such person observed, they should not blame the state for its failure to reform the banks and eliminate the ubiquitous misery of usury at the same time. Here, however, culture itself becomes a scapegoat, a so-called explanation that in practice