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By Root 603 0

that attempts to co-opt discontent over massive economic change will automatically feed the forces of reaction and prejudice. In the Thai community, where this tendency to adopt "officializing strategies" and the cooptation of nationalist and royalist rhetoric is strong,2 the community leaders spoke out strongly on the importance of lending a helping hand to foreigners and the Muslim minority in the country's southern regions in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami that devastated entire communities; they argued that, as victims of a targeted eviction, they were particularly well placed to understand suffering, and so-although destitute-they held an auction of old clothes and used the proceeds to send two volunteers and some much-needed supplies to one of the stricken areas. One of the leaders argued that compassion was a particularly Thai virtue-but he deployed this to champion tolerance, empathy, and inclusion.3

In the same way, one of the leaders of the Via degli Ibernesi group who had been particularly willing to accept help from the Alleanza nazionale was also vociferous in his condemnation of the Vatican's intolerance of gays and of the general tide of racism that was infecting the entire country's attitudes toward immigrants. Others, be it said, were less generous. But I want to emphasize that there is no necessary connection between localism and racism or other forms of intolerance, and in fact what has impressed me throughout both field projects-one in Italy, the other in Thailand-has been the firmness with which some reject the seductions of intolerance in the midst of their own sufferings, even as they recognize the bitterness that drives others in far less attractive directions.

None of this will make much sense except in the further context of a consideration of the history of nationalism, both in Italy and elsewhere. I have already attempted a brief comparison of the respective situations in Greece and Italy, showing how the very different relations between the state and its constituent regions in each of these two countries is reflected in the production of scholarly discourse about national and local traditions.4 Some of that comparison is also present in earlier sections of the present book, inasmuch as I have indicated that the passionate defense of culturally intimate secrets, which in Greece primarily concerns the defense of the national level of cultural identity, in Italy more commonly concerns a local region or city. The fragmentation of Italian identity contrasts powerfully with the homogeneous face presented by officialdom of the Greek people and their state.

And yet there are also points of similarity. Not least among these is the deep awareness of cultural and moral flaws in the body politic-flaws that are accounted as such under the censorious gaze of more powerful countries that have appointed themselves the arbiters of international political ethics and cultural values. In Greece, the entire structure of justification invokes past events-the Fall of Adam and Eve as an explanation of common personal weaknesses and failures, the fall of Constantinople in 145 3 as the source of that "oriental" taint that other European states use to marginalize Greece in the context of pan-European development. In Italy, while the occupation of the land by numerous foreign powers is often invoked to explain its extreme fragmentation, the same idiom of justification is particularly apposite to the forms of everyday legal practice. In the very shadow of the Vatican, its historical domination of the city never a moment out of mind, the specter of original sin looms large: it informs the laws, explains deeply ensconced social habits, and provides an ethical alibi that is increasingly important in a country now painfully aware of the difficulties of maintaining a reputation for such ideals as democracy, transparency, and efficiency.

These values form part of an ethical framework by which the outside world judges a country's performance. The resulting hierarchies are also reproduced internally, as in the north's contemptuous