Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
136
Pressures from transnational powers such as the European Union are often received as
illegitimate at the local level. In other cases, the requests of this transnational institution are
difficult to be met by national states. This is made clear by Spyridakis (2011) who shows how the
central Greek government and the local institutions are unable to face such pressures. Close to
Spyridakis’s reflection about Greece, Bardhoshi (2011) investigates the ‘transformation period’
in Albania and emphasizes that the country is caught in-between the requests of the European
Union and the local agenda. Dembour (2000) looks at the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg to demonstrate, through an array of legal decisions taken by the Court in matter of
religious conflict, how ‘Christian beliefs, practices and sensitivities are better accommodated than
those of other faiths’ (p. 221). Sedmak (2011) questions the portrayal of Slovene Istria as a
multicultural setting, drawing attention to the unequal distribution of social power among
different ethnic groups; the Italian minority in Slovene Istria has in fact guaranteed more rights
than other immigrant groups.
These considerations confirm that the European Union’s transnational power is perceived
‘on the ground’ as financial and economic pressure aimed at meeting a capitalistic idea of
modernization, while leaving behind the rights of citizenships. Following Pardo’s (2011) analysis
of Neapolitan and Italian institutions, this weakness can lead, and in my opinion is already
leading, to a de-legitimation of European authority and to a widespread distrust in its institutions.
The rise of anti-European movements and parties seems to confirm this tendency.
There are another two elements, which are really important when it comes to
anthropology in Mediterranean settings. First, as it has been widely discussed by Pardo (1996,
2011), Mediterranean anthropology has engaged mainly with rural villages, contributing to
stereotypes of backward societies held frozen in time and lacking modernization. Since cities are
a demanding anthropological object of study, their empirical investigation requires an
engagement with macro processes. Urban settings offer an opportunity not to be missed;
particularly, in order to engage with the complexity of Mediterranean cultures, avoiding pre-
existent paradigms, such as patron-client, honour and shame and the like, mainly based on an
orientalist, prejudicial approach. Second, Mediterranean people have been often described as
lacking agency and ability to perform any form of resistance. This view has been encouraged by
the mainstream historiography as much as by social scientists. Fortunately, both volumes under
consideration here see people as continuously negotiating legitimacy and citizenship; not as
puppets but as agents, even when operating in disempowering marginal social contexts. A good
example is given by Manos Spyridakis’s (2011) chapter about shipbuilding activities in the
Piraeus. In such a setting, it would be easy to victimize the local workers but, recalling Pardo’s
Naples ethnography (1996) Naples, Spyridakis sees workers as ‘managing their existence’ in an
‘attempt to manoeuvre selectively in order to establish some control over the circumstances of
inequality and to improve the conditions of their life in the context of their collective
employment experience’ (Spyridakis 2011: 167).
