Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [49]
As Franco Lai has pointed out, moreover, the kind of cultural determinism that rejects conflict as dysfunctional reflects as much the assumptions of anthropologists and others as it does the actions of particular local people who find it convenient to blame the envy of others for their own failures.15 These local people, too, are engaged in a war of stereotypes, which they use to strategic and sometimes violent effect,l" and this influences their decisions and actions. Social actors are often well aware of the political value of being able to deploy stereotypes of themselves by way of explaining away perceived weaknesses or claiming particular strengths. In this sense stereotypes, like invocations of "culture," are interesting for what they tell us about the relationship between daily social life and the intellectual imagination.
The actual practice of the law and its various realizations-taxation, regulation of zoning and traffic, and so on-both borrows from ordinary social life and infuses it with its own rhetoric. Ecclesiastical casuistry about when lending money at interest was reasonable or when the forcible baptism of Jewish children was a virtuous act provided a convenient template for the secular management of legal principles." The very rigidity of the law provides a shield for those who know how to manipulate its language; the knowledge that it contains intentional ambiguities-it, too, is the product of mortal minds-allows social actors to assume its flexibility in advance, at least up to a point. This widely shared knowledge, which allows every citizen to calculate the probable costs of various infractions, is the key to practical survival; its illegal dimensions borrow the rhetoric of law, while the operators of law in turn depend heavily on a real-life flexibility that is nowhere to be found in its surface discourses. Civic rules and the civility of social practices are deeply and reciprocally entwined.
The distinction I am making between the civic and the civil is thus an analytic one. It is not a description of two separate spheres of social action, and it is not helpfully reduced to the antinomies of new and old or foreign and local. The distinction is like that between official and folk religion, a misleading discrimination that serves only the church's hegemonic interests; ecclesiastical attempts to purify ritual practice of its vernacular elements are above all demonstrations of power that overlook the shared origins of both idioms.18 Original sin, similarly, belongs as much to popular attitudes as to formal doctrine and makes nonsense of any rigid distinction between them except in a rhetorical sense. In the same way, too, the legal principles of civic management and the social practices of civility are mutually entailed. For example, legislators and police officers may benefit from the legislation against corruption-legislation created, moreover, by fallible human beings who live among the populace at large-because a compliant populace may be willing to offer them small inducements so that they will keep quiet about more egregious offenses. Sometimes such trade-offs are embedded in formal legislative and administrative practices, as when the comprehensive payment of a percentage of all fines