Internet
The URL as Villaggio Virtuale
Lucia Clark (*)
Italy, Ethnicity, The European Union and the Internet
(*)Harvard University, Cultural Survival, Federazione Internazionale delle Leghe
dei Diritti dell'Uomo
Cultural Survival,
215 Prospect St. Cambridge, MA 02139
Lucia Clark,
6 Graham Rd. Lexington MA 02420
lucia.clark04@post.harvard.edu
The Internet has been one of those pivotal events that have charted a new course for mankind, perhaps of the same magnitude as the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel or gunpowder. With the Internet other phenomena have taken place, a truly world wide market, the instantaneous sharing of information and cultural trends. Much has been said on the fact that globalization has created a world without differences, where national or ethnic identities disappear in a profusion of jeans and fast food, and that we all are becoming citizens of the global village. The term “global village” coined by MacLuhan in his prophetic The Medium is the Massage, was understood to mean that the world would become uniform at the expense of marginalized communities left out by the new economic and cultural realities. If we focus our attention on Europe, we see that even before the advent of the Web, the creation of the European Union (EU) had unified the economic and strategic interests of many countries, with many more who wish to join in. The Internet would appear to be the logical tool to facilitate such union, and indeed many sites have been created for this purpose.
One of the paradoxical results of the cultural globalization caused by the world market and the Internet, with its instant forms of communications, has been an awakening of the ethnic identities that had been “assimilated” during the formation of the European Nation States in the 19th century. Paradoxically, it is the Internet that is the new forum for these ethnic groups. In a world where people routinely leave their hometown, The Global Village has become a series of Global Villages, virtual meeting places where geographical locality has no importance. What is important is the wish to belong, to be connected with that intangible quality that is one’s group identity. Geographical locality has given place to a “locality of desire”. The URL, the little string of letters and dots that opens up the site on the web, becomes the hometown, the place where one is home, no matter in which part of the world one might be. In Europe, the awareness of one’s ethnic roots is a reaction to the phenomenon of globalization and the stifling structure of the Nation-State, that typically tends to ignore or marginalize ethnic minorities, and has particular ramifications on the political arena of the European Union (EU). The creation of a European Union has seen the formation of secessionist groups in many parts of Europe, such as the Catalan, the Basque, and Scottish and Corsican minority movements. Several groups have also sprung up in Italy, where this phenomenon has complex and deep roots. So far the Italian arena has been largely ignored by the international media. Yet, Italian scholars are deeply aware of the resurgence of the “Piccole Patrie”, the small fatherlands, to use the term coined by politician Umberto Fini. And the “dialects”, the ethnic languages that have been marginalized by the Nation State, have defined the identity of the group, and brought together the many European ethnic groups in the same struggle for recognition. Historian Alberto Sorbrero has written, “The violence suffered by ethnic-linguistic minorities is with no precedents, …because it is a despoliation that takes place with the very annihilation of the individuality, the deliberate deprivation of the means of survival” (Sorbrero in Grecia Salentina, Capone editor)
In Italian towns one still sees the “manifesti”, the announcements of various events, on the old palaces’ walls. The web site is the manifesto, and the web is the village, and the Village Square, and the wall.
The first Italian ethnic web sites began as political statements. The Lega del Nord started in 1997, a forum for the one secessionist movement that came to be represented with a political party. The Lega del Nord, later renamed Padania, represents a political party that wants secession from Southern Italy. Other regions, Sicily, Sardinia and Val d’Aosta have already autonomous status. But autonomous status within Italy is not enough anymore. Each Group is eager to join the European Union as an independent State. The southern regions formed a site called Le Due Sicilie, using the name of the Bourbon kingdom that encompassed the entire part of the peninsula south of Rome prior to the Risorgimento. Their version of the Unification of Italy is remarkably different from what Italian children learn in school: Garibaldi is a ruthless invader, and the South was conquered, not “united” with the rest of Italy.
The political messages reveal the profundity of Italy’s ethnic differences.
Italy has been a sovereign and unified nation only for the past 150 years. While the validity and strength of the Italian culture is undeniable, its components are varied and profoundly diverse. The Italian “people” are made up of many “peoples” each with a distinct history and a language that is at best a variation of the official Italian. In many cases, however, it is a distinct language that bears only distant resemblance to Italian, and in its strictest form can be as different from Italian as Spanish or French.
The post-Risorgimento and the Fascist governments both attempted to unify these “peoples” by relegating their languages to the state of “dialect” in contrast to the “official” Italian, traditionally defined as “Tuscan spoken by a Roman”. This effort has had only partial success. The great majority of Italians still speak Italian as well as some form of their own language.
In the North, the history of the medieval city-states repeats itself within a vigorous research group, the Lingue Padane, that researches and codifies their languages and formulates new alphabet symbols that render more accurately those sounds that the standard Italian alphabet cannot render. And in a theater in Bologna, every Thursday evening, students, middle aged businessmen and grandmothers attend classes to learn Bolognese, the very dialect that they were forbidden to speak in school.
All the sites, both in the north and south, have taken their languages as a strong symbol of their identity. Their web sites are written in their dialects. In accessing the web page, Sicilians are immediately welcomed by the familiar words of their language. This forms a bond, a sense of brotherhood with the other members, regardless of where they may be. Italian is offered as a choice among the other foreign languages. The “home page” is indeed their home, where they share common interests and speak the same language.
For a member of the Due Sicilie or the Lingue Padane web site, therefore, the very fact of opening the site means making a statement of identity, and perhaps also taking a political stand. But there are instances where writing one’s own ancestral language signifies embarking in a complex search for identity deep into history. A particular linguistic group speaks Griko, a variant of Greek interspersed with Italic and other elements, spoken in a few villages in Puglie and Calabria. The villagers chose to speak Griko only among themselves, using the Italic dialect for communications with schools and work activities. This fact probably saved Griko from the linguistic ax of the reforms launched by the post Risorgimento and Fascist governments. Griko did come near extinction in the post WW2 period, when financial needs pushed many people north, and when intermarriages became more common.
The revival of ethnic pride has been particularly strong in these villages. Partially because the great promises of the Miracolo Economico have not materialized, the disillusion pushed people back to old identities. An interesting development, in the light of the new politics of the European Union, is the active involvement of the Greek government in the affairs of Griko-speaking communities. The Greek government has sponsored several cultural organizations in the area whose purpose is to foster awareness of the Greek ancestral culture. One solution favored by some Greek scholars is to go back to the Greek alphabet and to “cleanse” non Greek words from Griko, substituting them with “proper” Greek words. This solution would of course make Griko unintelligible for its current speakers. And in fact, the citizen of two villages in Calabria, Bova and Bova Marina, have chosen to abandon their ancestral form of Greek, called Grecanico, in favor of modern Greek. I have visited the Middle School of Bova Marina, where sixth graders learn modern Greek, a language that is usually offered only in the Licei Classici, High Schools that focus on classical studies. Their teachers, many of whom have degrees from Greek Universities, assured me that in their eyes this is the only way they will be able to maintain their identity. Only time will tell if this experiment will succeed.
Yet it is from the schools of a Griko-speaking village in Puglia, Calimera, that this message was given to me for the world audience: “I ragazzi "Plasmoniani" vanno aiutati, come giovani alberelli, a rafforzare le loro radici (da dove vengo, chi sono, dove voglio andare?),
Affinchè non diventino belli, alti e rigogliosi e poi alla prima folata di vento
cadano giù. Il Mondo Globale, come abbiamo ribadito più volte, deve essere come un grosso diamante dalle mille e mille sfaccettature (culture diverse) ognuna
delle quali contribuirà ad una grande unica luce. Quale luce, e quindi quale valore, avrebbe un diamante senza le tante sfaccettature? “:
Young people in the process of forming themselves need help, like young saplings, to strengthen their roots (where they come from, who are they, where are they going) so that they will not, once they are tall and beautiful, succumb to the first push of the wind. The Global World, as we have often said, has to be like a precious diamond with a thousand facets, (different cultures), each and every one of which will contribute a unique, huge light. What sort of light, and therefore what value, would a diamond have without all its many facets? (From Calimera Middle School and its teacher Maria Montinaro)
Italy is a land of complex peoples, and its political unity is recent and superficial. In all the European continent, the collapse of the Soviet block and the creation of the European Union have spurred the resurgence of old ethnic identities. European ethnic minorities wish to speak their own language, and in some cases to determine their own place in the EU as sovereign nations. The Internet gives these groups a forum that is no longer limited to geographical boundaries. How the dynamics of the new global society and the evolving Cyber realities will shape the future of ethnic minorities is something that deserves close scrutiny. And the voice of the young needs our attention.
Working Bibliography and URLs
Appadurai, Arjun: Modernity at Large Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1996
Barzini, Luigi: The Italians New York: Simon and Shuster 1996
Clark, Lucia:" On the Brink: Griko; A Language of Resistance and Celebration",
Cultural Survival Quarterly, January 2001, page 56
__________: " My Home Town is a URL in Cyberspace: the Internet, Italian
Ethnic Identities & the European Union". Cultural Survival Quarterly,
January 2001, page 59
De Crescenzo, Luciano: Oi Dialogoi Mondadori 1985
Hull, Jeffrey: Polyglot Italy CIS Educational Sidney 1988
Maybury-Lewis, David: Indigenous People, Ethnic Groups, and the State Allyn Bacon
1997
McLuhan, M: The Medium is the Massage. Ager Producer 1967
Montanelli, Indro: Storia di Roma 1969 Rizzoli Supersaggi 1988
______________. L'Italia dei secoli d'Oro 1967 Rizzoli Supersaggi 1997
______________. L'Italia dei Notabili 1973 Rizzoli Supersaggi 1974
Masciano and Kennedy: HTML the definitive guide O"Reilly and Ass. Inc. 1997
Putnam, Robert: Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy Harvard
Press 1992
Shapiro, Andrew L.: The Control Revolution : How the Internet Is Putting Individuals
in Charge and Changing the World We Know. New York : Public Affairs 1999.
Sorbrero, M. et al.: Grecia Salentina. Problemi e Documenti, Vol.1 Cavallino di
Lecce: No year given. Capone Editore
Stefik Mark: The Internet Edge : Social, Legal and Technological for a Networked
World Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1999.
Violi, F.: Tradizioni Popolari Greco-Calabre. Edizioni Apodiafazzi Bova Marina
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Waters Malcolm Globalization New York Routledge, 1998
Web Sites
History of Internet <http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml>
Due Sicilie <http://www.duesicilie.org/>
Grecia Salentina <http://atlante.clio.it/grecia/default.html>
Grika Milume` <http://www.grikamilume.com/>
Magna Graecia <http://www.grikamilume.com/magnagraecia2.htm>
Padania <http://www.lapadania.it/>
Lega Nord list <http://www.leganord.org/frames/novità.htm>
Storia Della Sicilia <http://www.fscpo.unict.it/vademec/sicilia.htm>
Europe Which Europe? <http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/which.europe.html>
European Charter for
Regional Minority
Languages <http://www.riga.lv/minelres/coe/crml.htm>
La Patrie dal Friul <http://www.friul.net/jentrade.htm>
L;Istrice <http://www.simonel.com/sommario.html>
Liber <http://freeweb.dnet.it/liberi/index.html>
Sa Limba Sarda <http://www.limbasarda.it/>
Minoranze Etniche della
penisola Italica <http://freeweb.dnet.it/liberi/min_it/min_it.html>
Inserito da: Veronesi in data 15/3/2003, 19:24
Scritto in Inglese per la parte Internet di Internet Padano
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