Inside the «black box» of the Northern League’s communitarian populism Ethnography of two local party branches
Elisa Bellè Department of Sociology and Social Research University of Trento - Via Verdi 26, 38122, Trento
[email protected] Panel: Ethnography of populist movements
1. Introduction
From a sociological perspective, the most stable socio-cultural feature of the Northern League is probably its ideologization of the concept of local “territory” (Biorcio, 1997). This process has come about, over almost three decades, through the development of a specific political paradigm based on markedly communitarian traits. A fundamental element in the construction of the Northern League’s political paradigm is the “invention” of a specific language and symbolic order. By mobilizing the “common people” pathos (Canovan, 1982), the Northern League represents itself as the party of the people, able to speak the language of the people (over-simplified and intentionally rough). Moreover, particularly thanks to the personification and symbolization process enacted by Umberto Bossi, the party’s historical leader (Belpoliti, 2012), the Northern League has become a “mask of the people” (De Matteo, 2011). According to this populist paradigm, the “people”, in symbolic terms, plays a role of synthesis (Incisa di Camerana, 2000), representing a homogeneous, non-conflictual unity that produces identification mechanisms proper to a (post)modern Gemeinschaft (Berlin, 1968). According to these considerations, in this paper I propose an analytical framework that does not completely reject the concept of populism, but instead adopts a more detailed specification of it, namely that of communitarian populism. This expression in my opinion makes it possible to avoid the long – and often uninteresting – debate on definition of the party as alternatively federalist,
autonomist, nationalist, and so on. In fact, if we consider the history of the Northern League, the new “homeland” has changed in form over time (region, macro region, Padania etc.), but its definitions have been based on a single, fundamental ideological assumption: the community, understood as a founding myth and unifying paradigm (Aime, 2012). Moreover, my paper conducts more specific analysis of the interpretative category of populism − a sort of “black box” that often remains too vague and generic. To this end, I carry out detailed analysis of several social processes that contribute to constructing the populist community factually. Thirdly, my analysis is not conducted, as usually happens in the study of political parties, by considering the Northern League as a macro actor in the political-institutional arena, but rather by treating the party as an organization that is territorially fragmented and constantly re-produced through the participation of militants and local leaders. The paper is therefore located on the one hand within the framework of political ethnography (Auyero, Joseph, 2007; Kubik, 2009) and, on the other, in that of organizational ethnography (Bruni, 2003; Piccardo, Benozzo, 1996). With regard to the research design, I selected two different local branches of the Northern League, which have been given the fictitious names Contrada and Metropolis. The two branches were selected for their positions, opposite and specular, at the extremes of two analytical axes: a territorial axis and an organisational one. The data were collected through overt? participant observation of ordinary party activities: mainly the weekly branch meetings, but also political and convivial initiatives of various kinds (public demonstrations and events, flyering, social dinners, and the like), and ethnographic interviews with militants and leaders at both branches. In sum, the paper analyzes the ideological-cultural repertoires and the construction processes through which the communitarian paradigm is articulated, assuming the everyday organizational life of the two branches as the analytical perspective. This approach enables a sort of analytical deconstruction of the theoretical “black box” of populism, showing how the concept subtends multiple, different and often interrelated dimensions that jointly contribute to the social construction of the populist community. It will be shown how the communitarian ideal in the local branches was expressed through cultures and social processes both similar to and very different from each other, and related to the two socio-political contexts. More specifically, the paper will present several dimensions characterizing the two ideological communities: the regulation of the party’s everyday life through different repertoires and interactional codes (at Contrada, symbolic-ritual mimicry; at Metropolis, the symbolic-cultural device of the border) and the reproduction of distinctive and differentiated symbolic gender orders (Gherardi, 1995) associated with specific ideal types of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995).
2. Research design and methodology The Northern League is a populist and regional Italian political party founded in the late 1980s from the federal aggregation of a wide and varied series of small regional leagues. This was a phase of radical change in the Italian political system, for two main reasons: the collapse of the two major parties, the DC and the PCI, which for decades had provided stable socio-political identities and the dramatic crisis of social trust in political parties resulting from judicial inquiries that revealed systemic corruption between politics and economics in Italy. The area of the party’s deepest and most stable rootedness has distinctive socio-political characteristics: the area of the so-called “deep North” (Diamanti 1996), once firmly Christian Democratic and Catholic, in which the decadent hegemony of the DC party gave way to new political identities. The Northern League, “political entrepreneur” of this systemic crisis (Diamanti 1993), has skilfully ridden the wave of changes by elaborating a political programme no longer based on the left/right dichotomy and the class vote but on populist (Biorcio 2012) and communitarian (Diamanti 1993) forms of post-ideological identification. During almost three decades, the party proposes a radical shift in the twentieth-century’s political citizenship paradigm. Firstly, according to populist political culture, community replaces class. Secondly, the conflict is tribalized (Aime 2012), and it is projected outside the community’s boundaries onto different categories of alterity (southerners, immigrants, Roma, homosexuals), all equally constructed as threatening and deviant ‘strangers’. Consequently, even rights are localised (Gargiulo 2011) in that they are no longer granted by citizenship, but by ethnic membership of the community. Turning now to my research, its purpose was to study practices and cultures of militancy within the party. I selected two different local branches, which have been given the fictitious names of Contrada and Metropolis. The two branches were selected for their location at the opposite extremes of two analytical axes: a territorial axis and an organisational one. Contrada is a Northern League branch in a small town of Veneto (North-East Italy). It is in a central position from a territorial point of view, because Veneto was the birthplace of the Northern League, but peripheral with respect to the political-organisational axis. By contrast, Metropolis, located in a large city of Lombardy (North-West Italy), is peripheral from a territorial perspective. Large urban areas are in fact the places of least consensus (Passarelli, Tuorto 2012) for parties like the Northern League, a “valley-dwelling and provincial party” (Agnew et al. 2002). Metropolis, however, is central on the internal organisational axis because it is close to the managerial, organisational and political heart of the party. My choice also fell on the regions of Veneto and Lombardy because, as well known in the literature on the Northern League (for a recent review, see Passarelli, Tuorto 2012), these are the regions where the Northern League has most firmly established its presence.
Data were collected through overt participant observation of ordinary party activities: mainly the weekly branch meetings, but also various kinds of political and convivial initiatives (public demonstrations and events, flyering, social dinners, and the like). At a more advanced stage of fieldwork, I added ethnographic interviews with some militants and leaders of both branches. The research began in the branch of Contrada, where the observation was carried out between April and November 2011 (with a break during the summer) and then moved to Metropolis, between December 2011 and May 2012. As often happens at the beginning of ethnographic research, access to the field in Contrada was made possible by a guarantor, a figure who “knows both the world of the researcher, and that of the specific organisational segment in which they would like to enter, liaising between the two” (Cardano 2003, p. 125). This first militant negotiated my access by talking to the local leaders of the party. For this work, I immediately opted for non-covert observation, for several reasons: firstly, because of the ethical implications of covert ethnography, particularly in terms of building a relationship based on transparency and trust between the researcher and the social actors in the field. Secondly, in consideration of the extreme difficulty of covert observation, both in practical terms – “passing” (Garfinkel 1967) for a militant was a rather unlikely eventuality – and emotional ones – carrying the weight of a constant fiction about my person and my presence (on this and other fieldwork “pitfalls” see Bruni, 2006).
3. Contrada
As already pointed out, the Contrada branch is located in an absolutely central position from the point of view of the territorial analytical axis. In fact, it is situated at the heart of the so called “white political subculture” (Trigilia, 1986): a distinctive socio-economic system that for decades marked the North-East of Italy, deeply and pervasively permeating its political culture. The general political culture of this area, and that of the Northern League in particular, can be adequately understood only on the basis of this “strong” local context, which has distinctive and deeply rooted features: firstly, it proposes a locally declined version of the centre/periphery and State/Church cleavages (Rokkan, 1970); secondly, it is based on the prominence of the private (and economic) sphere and interests (Trigilia, 1986); thirdly, it is historically characterized by a widespread antistate localism (Diamanti, 1993) based on suspicion and hostility towards politics. Consistently, the political sphere is, in its turn, characterized by a weak sense of identification and belonging: civil society delegates to it a merely indirect and filtered role, namely that of defending
the autonomy and predominance of the socio-economic dimension, assigning to politics a “light” role, only aggregative but not integrative (March, Olsen, 1989). Turning to the second analytical axis of my research, the organizational one, the small local branch of Contrada feels the effects of its distance from the nerve centres of the party (regional and national) in several ways: firstly, in terms of weak identification with the central leadership and its symbolic and rhetorical repertoires; secondly, in terms of a certain degree of autonomy and freedom with regard to the various forms of centralized control exercised by the party’s federal structures. This location generates a peculiar scenario: on the one hand, a “strong” territorial dimension – homogeneity and social cohesion in the socio-economic frame of the small-medium post-Fordist enterprise; on the other hand, a “weak” ideological dimension – that is, the scant cultural legitimation of politics and political parties. Related to this scenario are distinctive participation and ideologization processes proper to the branch, which I defined with the concept of symbolic-ritual mimicry. This expression is intended to denoted various processes of translation of cultural codes shared at the social level, and evoked and reinterpreted as political repertoires and forms of action and interaction, in order to construct political identity and consensus. I choose the term ‘mimicry’ because of its twofold meaning. On the one hand, mimicry means imitation, namely the imitation enacted by local forms of political participation of forms of civil/communitarian public life; on the other hand, mimicry is also a sort of camouflage: exactly what politics must adopt in a territorial context historically and culturally hostile to political parties and institutions. More specifically, a crucial role is played in the mimicry process by conviviality, a central dimension both symbolically and in the everyday life of the party branch. In fact, the main part of the branch’s weekly meetings was focused on the organization of events in which political aspects seemed to be of minor importance. For example, crucial activities were: the organization of the annual social dinner, an event on which the militants worked for months (careful discussion of the menu, decorations, lottery, invitations etc.); the self-financing events by home sales of commercial products to militants (cosmetics and similar); lotteries organized on the occasion of the main religious festivals, and so on. Even the most openly “political” events (such as the recruitment days on which the annual membership cards were renewed; trips to the various national political appointments) conserved important traits of conviviality, both in their practical organization and in the individual and collective accounts of the militants:
Present at the weekly meeting this evening is Giovanni, a militant from a nearby town who this year is in charge of organizatiing of the trip to Pontida, where an important annual demonstration by the party takes place. Usually this is task of the militants at the Contrada branch, but this year they’re already
busy with orgainzing a festival in town, so they don’t have time to organize the trip. Giovanni has come in order to get information about the organizational procedures (collecting the list of participants, individual participation fees, hiring the bus etc.). Bruno, the branch secretary begins “We, as Contrada’s branch” and proudly explains that they buy copious amounts of food and drink in order to leave “well equipped”. Rita, a middle-aged militant and the secretary’s wife, adds “In order to have a break all together, because it is nice to celebrate all together!”. Pietro, the deputy secretary, recounts that years ago they used to leave a few days before the demonstration. They organized a proper camp, with a gazebo and the branch banner and they cooked “minestorne (soup), soppressa (local type of salami)…”. Rita comments” It was so nice!”. Pietro says “We got up to all kinds of mischief!” [Ethnographic diary, 23 May 2011]
The focus of the militants’ attention, enthusiasm and collective memory is here clearly represented by the dimension of conviviality symbolised by the act of sharing food and drink, which, in its turn, is a very typical element of local sociality (the legacy of a rural culture only recently industrialised). Sharing moments of conviviality was the trait d’union of the branch and the metaphor for collective identity and a sense of belonging – all elements transmitted to the newcomer as essential parts of the organizational culture and competencies, much more important than “purely political” aspects, such as, for example, the content of the demonstration, or the presence of important party leaders (like Bossi, Maroni and similar). Furthermore, the small local context facilitated the overlap between political and social-convivial dimensions also in consideration of the “double role” played by the party’s internal leaders, who simultaneously occupied positions in the local institutions (the branch’s secretary, the deputy secretary, and the former secretary were respectively deputy mayor and councillors in the municipality of Contrada).
Today I participated in the refreshments event that the branch organizes every year on the occasion of the Epiphany. This has become a traditional event for the town as it has reached its 29th edition. The celebration involves the arrival of a rag doll, which resembles the Befana, in the main square [...]. The branch, which is located only a few meters away from the main stage, keeps its doors open for the occasion and offers refreshments to anyone who would like to enter. After the rag doll has arrived, after the music and after the applause, the municipal administrators, the mayor and the council members get on the stage. Among them are Bruno, Pietro and Giorgio, managers of the branch. After talking and greeting people, they get off the stage, and remain a little while to talk among the gathering of people in the square. Then they go back to the branch. People swarm back and forth, from the square to the branch. [Ethnographic diary, 5 January 2012]
In the above excerpt, the contiguity between politics and community ritual is evident, not only at a symbolic level but also at a spatial one. In fact, the events took place in a restricted part of the main
square surrounded by the main local “institutions”: church, town hall, the town’s biggest pub, and the party branch – a sort of spatial synthesis of local civil life. The borders were subtle, fluid, porous, and the different levels (ritual, political, institutional) were mixed. Divided between ritual mimicry and institutional legitimation, the party’s presence eluded official visibility, appearing subtle and being confused with the convivial dimension, thereby becoming even more pervasive by virtue of its vagueness. The symbolic ritual mimicry code worked as regulatory mechanism not only in the public events organized by the party, but also in the everyday life of the organization, in more “private” moments shared by the restricted circle of militants during internal meetings. In particular, this code was fundamental for reproduction of the branch’s gender and masculinity orders. More specifically, I identified a mimicry code that I labeled family-branch: a composite set of organizational practices, interactional codes, and discursive repertoires that shaped the party’s routines on the symbolic model of a traditional, extended, rural family. A crucial element in this gender reproduction process was the couple composed of Bruno, the branch secretary, and Rita, his wife. Both played a decisive role in the construction of a specific symbolic gender order in the organization: Bruno, as secretary, was the main source of political authority and prestige. Moreover, he covered the highest institutional role: that of deputy major of the city council. In parallel, for some years Rita had been constantly engaged in organizational activities. She informed the militants about and involved them in the party’s events. Most of all, she coordinated the female group in the preparation of those events. Rita’s account of her militancy was significantly permeated by gender elements: My husband attended the Northern League’s meetings from the beginning. They met at a pub or in someone’s home, also at our place, always here and there… But because they mainly met at the pub, I didn’t go… So it was only men, in a pub, there were no women. Then, when they opened the official party branch, here in the main square of the town, also women joined, and I did as well. We women started to go to the weekly meetings, every Monday evening. […] When they needed help, we helped, we [the women] were in charge of the organization: cleaning up, preparing food and drinks, contacting the militants…We were there! We prepared… how can I say… the backstage: the organization. [Rita, 53 years old, interview]
The founding story of the party is one of exclusive masculinity well represented by the physical space occupied by the party: the pub – that is, a place that in the local culture of a small town in the province of Veneto is exclusively reserved to men. The opening of official premises allowed mixedgender forms of participation. In fact, the headquarters became a sort of symbolic translation of the domestic sphere in which women could find legitimate collocation and a role coherent with the symbolic gender order dominant in the party – a traditional, patriarchal symbolic gender order that
reproduced, in organizational terms, the classic gendered divison of labour, assigning to men the productive-public-on stage moments and to women the reproductive-domestic-backstage ones. This symbolic division was not enacted only by the secretary-wife couple but also by the entire group of militants: [Weekly meeting] The group discusses the impending social dinner (scheduled for Saturday evening) and preparation of the venue, the town’s sports centre. Rita speaks to Pietro, the former secretary and one of the branch’s leaders “Saturday, the men can work to cover the floor with the protective linoleum, and the women can organize the lottery”. Pietro: “Fine”. The group also discusses the tasks programmed for the day after the dinner, on which they have to dismantle everything (tables, protective linoleum, chairs, and so on). Giovanna, a middle-aged militant, asks Rita “Are we women needed as well?” and Rita answers “Yes, because we have to clean up”. [Ethnographic diary, 9th May 2011]
As we can see from this second excerpt, the gendered divison of labour was very strict, and it was respected by the members of the group: there was a clear and firm division between male and female tasks, which were associated with two separated symbolic spheres. I interpreted the performance of family-type gender codes within the branch not only in terms of a learned and shared gender culture but also as repair work on the symbolic gender order (Gherardi, 1995) compromised by the presence of women in the political space of the branch. If women were not “in their place”, namely the household, it was possible, at least, to attenuate the symbolic extent of the encroachment by bringing the household to the party.
4. Metropolis
With respect to Contrada, the Metropolis branch is located in an exactly specular
position.
Regarding the territorial analytical axe, this second branch is very peripheral: in fact, medium-sized and large towns are traditionally areas of weak and unstable consensus for the Northern League, a political party that over the decades has remained rooted in small local contexts (Passarelli and Tuorto 2012). This weakness is partially off-set by the branch’s absolute centrality on the other analytical axis, the organizational one. In fact, Metropolis is extremely close to the managerial and political core of the Northern League, and direct contacts with national party leaders are frequent. Hence, in this second case it is the aggregative power of the party – understood as managerial and bureaucratic, but moreover as symbolical source of collective identity and ideological belonging – that provides the branch with the cohesion denied by its hostile territorial location.
Apparent in Contrada is the strong influence of the “territory”, whose power is based on the direct connection between socio-economic structures and symbolical ones: the community, the ideological topos of the party, is in Contrada strictly connected with the socio-economic context. By contrast, in Metropolis the socio-cultural complexity of the territorial context is, in symbolic and ideological terms, a structural weakness. In fact, in Metropolis it is almost impossible to reduce the social complexity of a large, international and multicultural city to the culturally and socially homogeneous communitarian model. It is exactly on this structural weakness that the branch’s participatory processes are founded: the community is constantly re-built in a mise en scéne process variously displayed (through activities, discourses, relations). In an apparently paradoxical way, the less the community is rooted in the social structure of the city, the more it is constantly and pervasively displayed in terms of symbolical representation. The mise en scéne of the community is mainly based on a distinctive process that I have termed the symbolic-cultural dispositive of the border . The device is reproduced principally through the well-known, typical populist process: the identification of an “us”, a collective identity defined in opposition to a “them”, an alterity, whose nature may be extremely varied but is always hostile and threatening. One of the alterities most commonly utilized in the constant process of construction of borders is, not surprisingly, that of migrants: a traditional, well-known theme for the Northern League, reelaborated on the basis of the specific local context and focused mainly on the issue of migrants’ visibility in the metropolitan context. The diffusion of “ethnic shops”, the aversion to the so-called “campi nomadi” (peripheral areas in which Roma live in caravans), or to islamic places of worship: the threat is always declined as invasion, appropriation and contamination of the public space, understood in an essentially proprietarial sense. [Weekly meeting] This evening the branch has a “special guest”: a regional councillor who has recently promoted a law against so called “ethnic shops”. The councillor proudly explains the political reasons for his proposal and cites as examples the “Chinese cafes and bars” that never comply with the rules on opening and closing times, whereas Italians respect them. He speaks about the Chinese cafè near his house, “that shit Chinese” which always closes at 2 in the morning?. And then people come out and hang about on the street, shouting, causing a mess, and drinking beer “Almost all of them are from Morocco… drunk, under my windows! But I assure you that I’ve succeeded: they’ve had to close. Because if you call the health department for cleanliness measures, or the police for the bills… if you want to break somebody’s balls, one way or another you can find a reason”. [Ethnographic diary, 27 March 2012]
Following a well known discursive pattern, the councillor overlaps the public order and security dimension with that of the migrants’ public visibility: the lack of decency that disturbs the right to sleep of the “natives”, becomes the generic fault of migrants (that becomes, literally, “noncommunitarian”), who show no respect for the rules of the community, in which they are only guests, not citizens. Thus the public space is an invaded space and the councillor’s attitude is deliberately persecutory. This is just one of the multiple possible variations of the securitarian issue that has dominated the Italian political debate in recent years, crossing the boundary between rightwing and left wing parties, but being paradigmatically interpreted by the Northern League – a logic adoptable (and adopted) for several, diverse aspects of collective life in public spaces that reduces the domain of politics progressively eroded by the public order domain. Besides the “classic” alterirty embodied by migrants, there is another type, usually little considered in studies on the Northern League (with the exceptions of Avanza, 2007, 2009; De Matteo, 2011) that provokes frequent, widespread and pervasive hostility: homosexual and transsexual alterity.
[Weekly meeting] The city councillor reports on the activities of the municipal council for families, of which he is a member. He says that at those meetings he feels completely lost, because there are only lesbians and transsexuals and a “normal person” is confused. “You can even believe that the city is only populated by persons of this kind, instead of normal people, the people that you can find on the street every day, like me and you” (pointing to a militant). Sandra, a middle-aged militant intervenes to say “Yes, by now it is exceptional to be normal and we, as the Northern League, are exactly that: normal, and we have to defend the extraordinariness of normality”. [Ethnographic diary, 4 December 2011]
The collective expression of hostility towards this specific variant of alterity considered “deviant” allows a symmetrical process of self-representation of the group as a normal and normative community. In fact, the self-proclamed normality of the Northern League’s community, with its values of morality and bourgeois decency (Mosse, 1985), becomes the measure of “other people’s” deviance and, therefore, the norm – a process related to a specific gender and masculinity culture that we may define as hetero-patriarchal. As already pointed out, the Northern League, party of the “territory”, in Metropolis constantly draws alterity/identity borders, making the territory a space of control and defence. Coherently with this paradigm, the principal forms of militancy are based on military codes and rhetoric. Firstly, the “military of militancy” is regulated by the ordering principle of hierarchy:
[Weekly meeting] This evening there are two young district councillors invited to speak about their first year of political experience. They are critical of the institution [quale?], saying that very often it is pointless. Gigi, a very experienced militant and former secretary of the branch (about 60 years old) disagrees and proudly declares that in 19 years of the district council he has missed only two sessions “Once I was in hospital, I’d had surgery. The second I was in Sardinia. I would have gone, but they called me at 3 o’clock for an unplanned session at 7 p.m.!”. And then he adds “They [the two young councillors] are right, the sessions are now pointless, but it’s because now the party is in oppostion. Once it was very different, when the party was in government. The two young councillors don’t react but continue their account, saying that institutional life is very bureaucratic, they spend a lot of time on useless activities, talking or listening to the other council members’ speeches. Gigi interrupts again and says that he never left the council until the end of the sessions, except when “the secretary called me”. On saying that, he smiles at the provincial secretary, who is on the other side of the room. The two youngs stay silent, showing a respectfully attitude. [Ethnographic diary, 22 May 2012]
In spite of the anti-elitist rhetoric (typical of populist formations), the relations and interactions at the Metropolis branch are structurally and pervasively based on a hierarchical principle. In this sense, the top-down division in the party is constitutively ambivalent: the party leader (here represented by the provincial secretary) is a man of the people who, thanks to his capacity and work, is now in charge. This is a sort of re-elaboration of the self-made-man myth translated into politics. These common roots imply a peculiar representation of verticality, which does not assume the traits of deference, but, on the contrary, of comradeship. This code allows, on the one hand, the exhibition of virility and informality between militants and leaders and, on the other hand, the celebration of hierarchy. Here the connections with some features of totalitarianism, and, in particular, of fascist political culture are evident from the point of view of a precise ideal of virility (Bellassai, 2011; Mosse, 1980, 1996). Finally, militancy is a belonging achieved with time and “in the field” associated with three main requisites: length of service (that not necessarily coincides with age), dedication, and loyalty to the cause. The “good militant” must first show respect for those who entered and defended the community before him (see the attitude of the old Gigi towards the two young militants and their respectful reaction). The good militant must give absolute priority to militancy (only two missed sessions in 19 years; leaving before the end only if called by the secretary). The militancy codes described tend to coincide with a specific ideal of hegemonic masculinity (Connel, 1995; Connel, Messerschimdt, 2005) based on comradeship, virility, sacrifice, reverence for hierarchy and leaders. The counterpoint to this hegemonic masculinity is the place assigned to women in the organizational life of the branch, which contributes to constructing a more general, symbolic gender order. Firstly, similarly to Contrada, at Metropolis gender tends to perform
masculinity and femininity in terms of a rigid and dichotomous division of roles and scripts. This process of symbolic construction is reproduced especially through the division of organisational tasks: reproductive and “private” tasks for women (cleaning, preparing, organizing), productive and public ones for men (in general, being protagonists of political events). But women are not only part of an internal symbolical order clearly confirmatory of a more general ideology. They constitute, in symbolic terms, a terrain of ideologization, a sort of metaphor or embodiment of the threatened community [Christmas dinner party] Gigi comes to my table and says that “We [the militants] have thought about it and decided to take me home by car”, because public transport is not much used, especially at night. I thank Gigi, who goes away. After a while Giovanni, another militant, tells me exactly the same thing. He adds that on the bus that I have to take there are few Italians and numerous immigrants. He says that it could be dangerous, especially for a “young woman” on her own. [Ethnographic diary, 23 December 2011]
The above excerpt (like similar episodes) illustrates a particular version of the already analyzed processes of construction of a threatening otherness in the metropolitan space, here personified (as usual) by immigrants. To be noted is that the threat against the community of natives is here declined in terms of a sexual threat against the “women of the community”, for whom the “native” men are obviously responsible. The public space always harbours a specific feminine danger, related to the sexualisation of the feminine body subject to the non-bourgeoisly regulated primitive and indecent desire of the “non communitarian”.
5. Conclusion
To conclude, I briefly discuss the initial questions on which my paper is based and concerning the problems relative to the label ‘populism’, the possible innovations that ethnography can bring into the debate, and the role of social scientists in the study of populist political phenomena. On the basis of my circumscribed case, I shall put forward some main considerations specifically related to my research but, in my opinion, applicable to other research topics and contexts. Firstly, the two party branches that I have studied present a “final” political paradigm that is analogue: at the core of this paradigm is a unifying ideological element, namely the community. This common element, however, is only the final outcome of two very different ideologization and identity processes. In fact, construction of belonging to, and the collective identity of, the two branches is characterized by an opposite and symmetric movement: from a “strong” territory to a
weakly legitimized political sphere in the case of Contrada; from a “weak” (as socially complex) local context to a “strong” role of the party (as the principal source of identification) in the case of Metropolis. Hence, in seeking to enter the “black box” of the notion of populism and, in my case, of the community (as a possible declination of populist ideology), we are faced with much more complex and nuanced processes, deeply rooted in the different social contexts analysed. At a more general level, this consideration underlines the importance of precise, detailed sociocultural contextualisation in the study of populist phenomena. Some features usually associated with populism, in fact, may still be useful analytical categories (in my case, for example, the concept of community, the identity-alterity dialectic), but they risk being vague and generic when not adequately contextualised. From the lack of contextual analysis may ensue superficial analysis, or even outright misunderstanding of the social processes that generate the populist phenomenon under study. The case of my research is a good example of something that could be interpreted with the same populist label (the community) but instead hides completely different social worlds and processes. In this sense, a double change is needed. First, a theoretical change: political phenomena have long been contested by the domains of political science that interpret politics as a more or less autonomous sphere, and by political sociology, which stresses the interconnections between politics and society, reading political phenomena as results of social phenomena, and not vice versa. An innovative interpretation of populisms should in my opinion prefer this second option, privileging the analysis of the various social worlds that give rise to populism understood as the epiphenomenon of societies. Secondly, a methodological change is needed. Thorough understanding of populism and of its different contextualisation first of all requires a new legitimacy of qualitative research methods and, in particular, of ethnographical methods. Notwithstanding the renewed vitality expressed by ethnography in recent years, ethnographical studies concerned with political issues still remain very marginal. And this is surprising, if we consider ethnography as “social research based on the close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, in which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way they do”. (Wacquant, 2003, p. 5)
In this sense, ethnography in general and political ethnography (Auyero, Joseph, 2007; Kubik, 2009) in particular is a particularly suitable methodology for entering the “black box” of populism and deconstructing it, because it makes it possible to capture the practice of politics, but at the same time the signification of these practices (culture/meaning/making), the confusions, emotions, and
uncertainties that, although inherent in all forms of political action, mainstream political analysis dismisses or ignores as either “noise” or anecdotal information irrelevant to what “really matters” (Auyero, Joseph, 2007). Political identities are not fixed and stable; rather, they are undefined and fluid, constantly subject to/the object of hegemonic processes aimed at fixing their unfixable sociohistorical flow (Dirks et al., 1994). If we change the point of view from a macro to a micro level, our understanding of this constant flow will certainly be deeper and closer to its complexity. Moreover, this approach must necessarily be interdisciplinary: this type of analysis must remain open to concepts and analytical tools deriving from different disciplines, primarily anthropology and history given their capacity to give “thickness” and nuances to local cultures. Finally, a last consideration concerns the importance of gender and masculinities studies for a renewed analysis of populisms. In spite of the multiple, close connections between populist culture and gender orders, this is an issue extraordinarily ignored by scholars (Weyland 2010). Yet, as we have seen in the case of my research, populisms very often evoke and use traditional and patriarchal gender orders to reinforce their ideology. Furthermore, the cultural linkages between these two ideological dimensions (gender and populism) are powerful: the “seduction” of a harmonious, nonconflictual and mythical past, typical of populist ideologies, is strictly related to a traditional gender order in which masculinity and femininity are ruled, like other aspects of social life, by the immutable laws of tradition and nature. In the specific case of my research, the interrelated analysis of gender and political cultures yielded better understanding of the political phenomenon under study, opening, albeit in a very circumscribed case, a promising route to a renewed conceptualization of populism. References AGNEW John, SHIN Michael, BETTONI Giuseppe (2002), “City versus Metropolis: The Northern League in the Milan Metropolitan Area”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 26, n. 2, pp. 266-283. AIME Marco (2012), Verdi tribù del Nord. La Lega vista da un antropologo, Laterza, Roma-Bari. AVANZA Martina (2007), Les “purs et durs de Padanie”. Ethnographie du militantisme nationaliste à la Ligue du Nord, Italie (1999-2002), Thèse de Sociologie, EHESS, Paris. AVANZA Martina (2009), “Les femmes padanes militantes dans la Ligue du Nord, un parti qui «l’a dure»”, in O. Fillieule, P. Roux, Le sexe du militantisme, http://www.cairn.info/le-sexe-dumilitantisme---page-143.htm, pp. 143-165.
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