Marco Aime
Eccessi di culture

What is culture? How can we emphasize and/or define the identity of a people or a social/ethnic/national group? How can we define, in purely anthropological terms, the collective consciousness, the elements, and the connotations rooted in them? These are the questions, the thorny enigmas of the 21st century that the renowned anthropologist Marco Aime, professor at the University of Genoa, explains in "Eccessi di Culture," a work entirely non-academic, intended for the reading of the so-called "common mortals" and not for those initiated in academic teaching, rich with important quotes, from Zygmunt Bauman to Francesco Remotti.

In the world we currently live in, it is almost difficult, if not impossible, to label and define a cultural identity: globalization, the communicative opening through the web-matic technology of the Net, and the extreme ease of exchanges from one end of the Earth to the other have virtually mixed in a heterogeneous and "disordered" way the characteristics of a determined people, of an ethnic/social category; the archaic stereotypes of the African black who necessarily wears long colored clothes and plays the bongo, of the Islamic who is necessarily fundamentalist and devoted to Shari'a, but also of the European white, Christian, and wealthy a priori are views that, despite their absolute reductionism and the weak substantial strength of their content, do not cease to be the preserve of most people's mentality, a mentality often manipulated by politics and governments that frown upon this "cauldron" of cultural elements and variables and that, hiding much more pragmatic and concrete motivations (will for power, political-economic intrigues), lead to formulate postulates of national and/or local identities that are always homogeneous, imbued with history and myths created and invented by them to legitimize such ambitions.

The examples in this regard are too many, but it is enough to mention the Northern League to get even a vague idea: Bossi & co. speak of a "naturally" Celtic Padania, white and Christian, inhabited by peoples who demonstrate exceptional working and industrial capacities from time immemorial, a territory where Po and Polenta are the intrinsic and divinely indispensable root. The Islamic, the southerners, the "Rome Thief" are only usurpers of a locus amenus that has known federalism, the autonomy of peoples, and freedom since primitivity; rebuilding the mythical Padania means eliminating the harmful and pathological differences brought by the foreign infectors, restoring cultural, ethnic, and biological-racial homogeneity to a people considered unique in its kind and abandoning the ship "Italy," lost among mafia intrigues and never realized devolution proposals.

But do there exist today, in an era where so-called "collective imaginations" are created, cultural identities so univocal as to arrogate the right to expel (and badly, I would say) who is "different," "foreign," "non-EU"? If it is enough to wander the web and with a simple click feel "American," "English," "Spanish" thousands of kilometers away, why try to homogenize peoples and cultures through historical processes that never existed? These and other questions are posed by anthropologist Aime, who sees in governments, acting to camouflage socio-economic motivations and intrigues for the Chair, the real bearers of this diversification philosophy, subjects who have not yet understood that nothing is the exclusive heritage of a community and that what we (and they) have is given by the continuous and multiple intersection of peoples and cultures over the centuries (from Arabic numbers to the Latin alphabet, passing through the Italian fork, Egyptian shaving, and Indian pajamas).

We have understood, therefore, that the claims of ethnocentrism miserably fall already at the start. However, even the visions of so-called "multiculturalism" and secular fundamentalisms represent serious errors to be eradicated. It is the case of schools that amplify, albeit with benevolent intentions, the differences between natives and immigrants (the issue of the crucifix and Christmas celebrations, for example), of cultural mediators who fall into trite and repeated stereotypes, of the naive Westerner who expects from the sub-Saharan the performance of tribal dances and songs (when perhaps he likes to mix American rap, Congolese drums, and Neapolitan tarantella) and is amazed when this does not happen. It is therefore the issue concerning distinguishing (both negatively and positively) the I/We from the Other/others, the latent and involuntarily reflective desire to place insurmountable boundaries and barriers that limit the acceptance of a mixed and heterogeneous context by nature and not by forced contemporary induction.

In short, to theoretically accept this interesting panorama, a new verbal coinage is required, that is, interculturality, voluntary and equal meeting-without-conflict of cultures, left to act without political-hierarchical interference and conservative jokes, a mixture of colors, flavors, information, words, cultural recipes, and brilliant minds at work over the centuries.