Civiltà all'italiana

Quando per la prima volta sono venuta a Bologna, anni fa, ed iniziavo a farmi capire in italiano, le domande erano le tipiche che si pongono sicuramente ad ogni studente erasmus: Come ti chiami? Cosa studi? Di dove sei? Rispondendo a quest'ultima, quasi invariabilmente il dire ”Danimarca” veniva seguito da un'altra domanda ancora: lì al nord sono più civili, non è così?

Da buon'antropologa non capivo proprio la domanda, perchè sentivo la parola 'civile' nel suo senso scientifico; esseri umani si organizzano insieme, vivono insieme in gruppi più grandi di un certo minimo, c'è un certo livello di organizzazione, magari uno stato, ma forse anche no. Nei nostri tempi difficilmente si trovano umani che non vivono in civilizzazioni in una forma o altra, perciò siamo tutti civili. O no?

Troy: The National Order of Things 3000 Years Ago

For reasons not to be elaborated upon here (full disclosure: they involved Eric Bana) I recently chose to use 3 hours of my precious holidays watching Troy again, after spending approx. 7 years on forgetting why I didn't like it. It's (very loosely!) ”inspired” by the Iliad, but I have no intentions of going into all the reasons why I think that was not a successful venture – let it suffice to say that when I studied “knowledge of ancient times” (aka “old-øvl”) in high school, when asked to let us watch Troy in class as “relevant to the subject” (we had been reading and analysing excerpts of the Iliad), our teacher actually preferred to let us watch Disney's “Herkules”, as that was deemed closer to its original source material. Yeah.* But before I digress even further, to what I want to treat you today is a lecture on nationalism and the National Order of Things, inspired by how it was allowed to seep into a film that is supposed to take place more than 3000 years ago, where the very concept of nation would not make any sense whatsoever. Spoiler warning: I am not impressed.

Language as exclusionary practice

The language you speak defines who will understand you. So you speak the language you think serves better to make yourself understood in any given context. Seems like a no-brainer, right? But sometimes you probably also choose a language in order to not be understood, by whoever is the excluded one in the group. It's the dynamics of this that I would like to dig into today.

Global Citizen

About a month ago this picture popped up in my facebook newsfeed. It was posted by Occupy Wall St and reposted by a friend, and it went viral, as these things do. It is, as you can probably see, a draft for a passport for a global citizen, a citizen of the world rather than of any particular state or nation. Now, I do understand what they're trying to say, and I appreciate the effort, but the picture left me thinking. What is actually being said? And what would be the implications? Is it even possible to speak of global citizenship?