‘Southern Europe’ has become, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a symbol for economic underdevelopment and social backwardness. In the Italian national self-description, this view was largely assimilated. ‘Europe’ was ascribed values of a positive otherness, while the Mezzogiorno stood for the Levantine and archaic elements in the ‘national character’ which were suspected to hinder Italy from meeting the standards of the model. The essay argues that ‘Southern Europe’ is not a particularly useful category for unifying very different economic and social realities of past and present. It argues furthermore that seemingly the ‘South’ has become a significant mental bench mark of spatial hierarchy only in rather recent times. But it is nevertheless important to investigate, in the Italian case, the long-term formation process of the underlying dichotomy of ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’. This dichotomy developed within the context of the emergence of ‘Europe’ as a rationalist teleological dogma. It can be found, for example, in the Levantine anthropology produced along with Venetian domination and mercan-tile capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Italian travellers depicted an image of apparently archaic, culturally and economically primitive populations that were living in places located beyond the Sea and ‘out of time’. The same concept of ‘historical standstill’ re-emerges from anthropological representations of Southern Italian ‘backwardness’ in the 20th century. They show how profoundly the dichotomy was interiorised and transformed into a matter of normative self-description.

Raummetaphern der Rückständigkeit. Die Levante und der Mezzogiorno in italienischen Identitätsdiskursen der Neuzeit

PETRI, Rolf;
2007-01-01

Abstract

‘Southern Europe’ has become, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a symbol for economic underdevelopment and social backwardness. In the Italian national self-description, this view was largely assimilated. ‘Europe’ was ascribed values of a positive otherness, while the Mezzogiorno stood for the Levantine and archaic elements in the ‘national character’ which were suspected to hinder Italy from meeting the standards of the model. The essay argues that ‘Southern Europe’ is not a particularly useful category for unifying very different economic and social realities of past and present. It argues furthermore that seemingly the ‘South’ has become a significant mental bench mark of spatial hierarchy only in rather recent times. But it is nevertheless important to investigate, in the Italian case, the long-term formation process of the underlying dichotomy of ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’. This dichotomy developed within the context of the emergence of ‘Europe’ as a rationalist teleological dogma. It can be found, for example, in the Levantine anthropology produced along with Venetian domination and mercan-tile capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Italian travellers depicted an image of apparently archaic, culturally and economically primitive populations that were living in places located beyond the Sea and ‘out of time’. The same concept of ‘historical standstill’ re-emerges from anthropological representations of Southern Italian ‘backwardness’ in the 20th century. They show how profoundly the dichotomy was interiorised and transformed into a matter of normative self-description.
2007
Der Süden. Neue Perspektiven auf eine europäische Geschichtsregion
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/31225
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