Introduction

Ordinary Life and “Ordinary Life”

Ordinariness is everywhere. Indeed, its ubiquity is part of what makes ordinariness so hard to bring into focus as an analytic term, as noted by a number of those who have tried (e.g., Highmore 2002; Sayeau 2016; Sheringham 2006). Seemingly by definition, it is simply the unremarkable backdrop to our existence, worthy of note only when it is disrupted and we are forced, as many people were by the COVID-19 pandemic, to search for a so-called new normal.

As well as being ubiquitous in, as it were, ordinary language, ordinariness and everydayness are also not hard to find in social scientific scholarship. Sociologists, geographers, historians, and political scientists, among others, have discovered an inordinate number of things that can be said to be ordinary or everyday: Stalinism, resistance, utopias, shame, ethics, politics, religion, and violence, to name but a few examples, have been prefaced with one or other qualifier.

In my own discipline of anthropology, ordinary and everyday can probably lay claim to being two of our favorite adjectives (perhaps trumped only by cultural and social, both the subject of recent and extended reflexive critique). Argonauts of the Western Pacific, one of our discipline’s foundational monographs, famously includes Bronislaw Malinowski’s injunction to anthropologists to examine the “imponderabilia of actual life,” “the even flow of everyday events, the occasional ripples of excitement over a feast or a ceremony, or some singular occurrence” (1922, 17). Interestingly, and despite the enduring fame of this remark about the “imponderabilia of actual life” (and the fact that it is frequently misquoted to refer to “everyday life”), Malinowski uses the words everyday or ordinary on only five occasions each throughout the entire six hundred or so pages of Argonauts. The majority of these occurrences are fairly straightforwardly adjectival: a certain ornament is everyday, particular occupations are ordinary, as indeed are some forms of sorcery and magic.

Fast-forward half a century, though, to another great canonical anthropological text, Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures, and things are different. Not only do both words appear with a great deal more frequency (twenty-nine instances of everyday and thirty-three of ordinary), but the grammar of their usage has also changed. They are no longer exclusively adjectival. In the most famous essay of the book, “Thick Description,” Geertz describes the task of anthropology as “looking at the ordinary” (1973, 14). The rest of the book is similarly filled with references to everyday life and ordinary experience not as descriptions of a particular kind of life in a specific place—the wearing of a certain ornament or the preparation of particular foods, say, as in Malinowski—but as abstract nouns. This is despite the fact that they are often invoked to point precisely at the concrete, situated nature of this life, as for instance, here: “The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is, as Schutz says, the paramount reality in human experience—paramount in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly rooted, whose inherent actuality we can hardly question (however much we may question certain portions of it), and from whose pressures and requirements we can least escape” (Geertz 1973, 119).

Something changed, in other words, in the conceptual landscape of anthropology—and, perhaps, more broadly of the social sciences—in the space of that half-century between Malinowski and Geertz. In truth, many things changed, but one important such change was that ordinary and everyday went from qualifying certain phenomena to becoming phenomena in their own right; they earned definite articles (“the ordinary”), becoming, as Geertz puts it several times, a “world” or a “context,” instead of simply marking a specific activity or object as a matter of routine or normality. “The ordinary” as a categorical form came alive in our analyses, detaching from the various particular things in the world it was supposed to mark out. “Everyday life” became a privileged object of social scientific analysis (see Sheringham 2006).

A persuasive case can be made for locating some of the origins of this change in the thought and influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In anthropology, Geertz, for instance, famously drew on Wittgenstein and his disciple, Gilbert Ryle, in making the arguments of “Thick Description,” and a number of Geertz scholars have pointed to the substantial influence Wittgenstein had on him in this regard, with one suggesting that Geertz’s central ambition was to become the “Wittgenstein of anthropology” (Rosaldo 1997; Springs 2008; Shweder 2007). Wittgenstein was also influencing scholars across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom: Rodney Needham drew on Wittgenstein around the same time as Geertz in his critique of structural-functionalist categories (1975), and Edmund Leach acknowledged Wittgenstein’s influence on a very similar and equally powerful argument (Leach 1961; 1984). Like Malinowski when he invoked “the imponderabilia of actual life,” these arguments objected to “bare-bones” or “skeletal” accounts of social life, but unlike Malinowski, they now had a philosophical idiom in which to articulate an alternative. “The ordinary” was no longer imponderable.

The central purpose of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy—if not also his earlier work (see, e.g., Crary and Read 2000)—was to take us away from the search for general laws, abstraction, explanations, and definitions. Instead, he famously enjoined philosophers to “look and see” at the actual usage of concepts in ordinary life. Traditional epistemologists distorted language when they tried to make it ask questions such as “Is this my hand?,” “Does that tree exist?,” and “Do I know this is a bit of wax?,” and attention to ordinary language was the therapy for such distortions. The task of philosophy should not be to explain concepts by abstracting them from their everyday use—asking how we can know a thing, for example, by posing skeptical objections to knowledge in general—but to describe that use and thus understand the ways in which concepts’ meanings and place in the world are inextricably interlinked. Wittgenstein himself gives us an anthropological example of this point in action in his Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough” (2018), in which he criticizes Frazer’s evolutionist explanations of religious ritual and argues instead that what is needed to understand a specific ritual as a practice is “grouping the facts alone” that allow us to see “just the connections” among its elements (46).

Take, for another example, a well-known paper, “Other Minds” by J. L. Austin (1946), who was a doyen of what is often called “ordinary language philosophy,” a movement that drew extensively on Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, Austin points to how silly philosophical skepticism sounds when applied to the sorts of specific knowledge claims we usually make: if I claim to know that a bird in my garden is a goldfinch, my claim stands or falls on criteria related to its identity as a goldfinch (or not)—for example, does it have the correct plumage or eye markings, can I see it properly, do I possess the right information about goldfinches? So, if I am wrong in thinking it a goldfinch, there is no further implication about my capacity to know anything per se—the problem is one of specific identification, not of general existence. The bird not being a goldfinch does not cause me to doubt its reality. Part of the point here is that “ordinarily” we do not pose the sort of general questions traditional epistemology does (“Does the bird exist?”) but rather specific and particular questions (“Is the bird a goldfinch or a sparrowhawk?”). Similarly, the claim to knowledge here is a particular claim to knowledge and could be satisfactorily upheld or rejected long before arriving at worries about whether one were in fact dreaming the goldfinch or living in a matrix controlled by computers with a fondness for garden-variety birds.

In anthropology, the influence of Wittgenstein on conceptions of ordinariness and everydayness is today at its clearest in a recent turn to what is called “ordinary ethics” in the discipline, in which Wittgenstein is often explicitly invoked. In his introduction to a groundbreaking volume called Ordinary Ethics, Michael Lambek notes that the book’s title “echoes arguments of Wittgenstein and Austin with respect to ‘ordinary language’ ” (2010: 2), and he goes on to posit anthropology as a response to Austin’s call for “fieldwork in philosophy”: “Ethnography supplies case material that speaks to the urgency and immediacy yet ordinariness of the ethical rather than reverting to hypothetical instances and ultimately to reified abstractions.… The individual incident is located within a stream of particular lives and the narratives that are constituted from them, changing its valence in relation to the further unfolding of those lives and narratives and never fully determined or predictable” (2010, 4).

Veena Das’s work is still more explicit in its acknowledgment of a debt to Wittgenstein and especially to Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of him, and her 2020 book, Textures of the Ordinary, is subtitled “Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein.” In its introduction, she declares she is interested in

the everyday … as the site on which the life of the other is engaged but this Other is not the radical Other of either philosophy or anthropology. As an anthropologist I am attuned to concrete others, even daring to suggest that it is in following concrete relations, quotidian turns of events, the waxing and waning of intensities, that we learn to be in the world. I have taken inspiration from Wittgenstein’s idea that the task is to lead words back from the metaphysical to the ordinary and to make do with what words we have in hand. (2020, 10)

Though use of concepts such as the ordinary and everyday life in the social sciences extends far beyond this specific stream of literature, this quote neatly encapsulates the paradox of ordinariness as we think of it, as well as its affectively seductive qualities. “The ordinary” in this quote refers on the one hand to “concreteness,” in the sense that what is ordinary is simply what we find around ourselves (or “in hand”), such as certain ornaments in the Trobriands; on the other hand, while the subjects of such ordinariness are concrete and quotidian, they exist in an ordinary metaphorized as “the site,” singular, spatiotemporal, and specific. Ordinariness comes thus to seem both quintessentially particular—it is whatever happens to be at hand—and at the same time abstract: as a scale, prefixed with a definite article (“the ordinary”) it encompasses all such particularity (cf. Lempert 2013; Fadil and Fernando 2015); wherever we may find it and whatever concreteness it contains, it will always be “the ordinary,” and we should always wish to find ourselves led “back” to it, away from “the metaphysical.”

Regardless of exactly how far Wittgenstein was individually responsible for the emergence of the ordinary as a distinct area of concern in the social sciences, my interest here is in a particular set of grammatical consequences (as Wittgenstein might have put it) of this shift from Malinowski’s “an everyday ornament” to Das’s “the ordinary” and “ordinary life” as an abstract noun. The differences between the two forms of use point to two senses in which we—and Predappiesi such as Valentina—might go “in quest of the ordinary,” as Cavell puts it (Cavell 1988). Put most simply, the difference I want to point to is that between “the ordinary” conceived as a formal category or domain, on the one hand, and on the other hand the stuff in the world this category is supposed to pick out.

Much usage of ordinary and everyday in anthropology and the social sciences is intended to point to particularity and specificity, as in the quotes from Lambek and Das above. This is obviously part of what makes these terms so well suited to anthropological use, given our historical preference for the “small-scale” and for description over explanation (see Heywood and Candea 2023). To understand a phenomenon in this sense of ordinariness is to find it emplaced, to grasp its meaning in a given context, to understand its grammar or the criteria for its use. It is, in other words, to understand it in its concreteness—to be able to point to it within a “web of signification” as Geertz would put it, not to isolate it from that web in order to provide it with a bare-bones universal definition. This is what Cavell means when he describes the ordinary as necessarily conventionalized, contingent, and arbitrary; it is precisely this sense of conventionality, of the ordinary’s rootedness in the arbitrariness and particularity of grammar and language, that he sees as giving rise to the fears of skepticism. This is what anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly intends when she describes “the doing of ordinary life” as “a messier affair” than simple routine or training (2013, 308). This is what Jack Sidnell, Marie Meudec, and Michael Lambek mean when they argue for locating ethics in the “immanent” or “ordinary” by suggesting that “conduct and judgment emerge in specific situations,” or when they say that to speak of immanence “is to acknowledge the temporal and experiential dimensions of the ethical, and the contingent, underdetermined, unfinalized and unpredictable aspects of action and judgment” (2019, 313).

All of the above, with its emphasis on specificity, immediacy, and particularity, is roughly what I meant when I referred earlier to the stuff in the world that we seek to pick out when we call it ordinary or refer to its place in ordinary or everyday life: Malinowski’s Trobriand ornament, say, and its place and meaning in context. So that is one side of the distinction I want to draw: what social scientists want to point to when we call something ordinary. In doing so we draw phenomena out of the realm of the general, the abstract, and the formal, and “down” into the world of everyday life, in all its messy, contingent, arbitrary particularity.

Valentina’s life is eminently ordinary in this sense. She does all the sorts of things that social scientists often characterize as ordinary or everyday: she goes shopping, cooks, cleans, sees her family and her friends, has arguments with them sometimes, and does them small acts of kindness at others. She does these things in her own particular, specific, and concrete fashion. The context in which she does these things is in many ways remarkable, but in that sense every context is remarkable, insofar as it generates ordinary life in all of its specific particularity.

That is one sense in which we might use the words ordinary and everyday. The other sense, which emerged, at least in anthropology, at some point in the fifty years between Malinowski and Geertz, is somewhat paradoxically different. In this latter sense, ordinary life has become a formal category—indeed, in some branches of the social sciences the category—of analysis. It has grown, in some cases, a definite article, as “the ordinary.” In other words, it is itself rather far from being ordinary.

The point of invocations of ordinariness in the social sciences is often to take us “down,” as Das and others have it, into the granular specificities of life in all of its particularity. Yet in labeling such specificity as everyday life, ordinary life, or the ordinary, we pull it back “up” again into the realm of formal categories and abstractions. This is why we might be perfectly able to understand what social scientists mean when they tell us that some phenomenon is or is not a part of everyday life in some context, while also remaining unconvinced if these social scientists were to try to tell us that ethics or values inhere in the realm of everyday life or that we should examine everyday life instead of something else, such as social structure or events. In the first case, “everyday life” is being used to qualify another phenomenon, while in the second case, it has become a phenomenon in and of itself. In the first case it is almost synonymous with context, whereas in the second cases it has become a particular kind of context.

We could think of the twin meaning of the everyday by returning to our garden goldfinch and thinking in terms of the distinction Cavell draws in his reading of Austin’s “Other Minds” paper between “specific” and “generic” objects. Cavell’s point is that it is uncharitable for Austin and others to deploy the goldfinch sort of case as an example of the nonsensicality of skeptical questioning, because skeptics themselves do not choose examples in which correct description or identification is at issue. Bits of wax, tables, tomatoes, and so on are chosen instead, because, Cavell argues, the point is that they should be invulnerable to objections of the sort one can make to claims of identification. There should be nothing else to doubt about them but the claim to existence. Cavell calls these “generic objects,” as opposed to “specific objects.” The distinction is not about the nature of the object, but the kind of knowledge of it we can have (Cavell 1979, 76–77).

My point here is that we have, in general, used the categories of “the ordinary” or ordinary life as if they were what Cavell calls generic objects, even though our point in using them is very often to turn something else—some particular thing or practice—into a specific object. We have become very good at distinguishing the equivalents of goldfinches from sparrowhawks: at showing how context affects how we understand and experience phenomena. But in the process, we have invested one particular kind of context with enormous levels of metaphysical significance. Part of what I want to do in this book is to bring the formal category of “ordinary life” back down to earth: to examine a context in which ordinary life as a form has become an object of interest, work, and desire.

In some ways this doubleness of the ordinary is unsurprising. Geertz himself (1973), alongside Marilyn Strathern (1995, 159) and others, made the same point about culture, and one might wonder whether ordinary life has in some ways come to take over the function of culture in anthropology in the wake of some disillusion with that concept. Yet there is something particular to notions of everyday or ordinary life not quite captured in the notion of culture, though some, such as Raymond Williams, equate the two ([1958] 2001). There is nothing inherently oxymoronic in the idea that culture can be both form and content, specific variation and general category of such variation, whereas there is something more of a performative contradiction in the invocation of “the ordinary” as a general category, for the purpose of insisting that we examine it, instead of general categories. In other words, in this sense we are still like the skeptical philosophers in Wittgenstein’s garden, asserting their knowledge of a tree: when we speak of “the ordinary,” we often do not sound very ordinary at all.

In this respect, we have something in common with Valentina and other Predappiesi, whose quest for ordinariness is also precarious, if for different reasons. Indeed, I raise this distinction between the form and content of the ordinary not to point out a paradox, but because I argue in this book that the same thing that happened to anthropology (and other social sciences) between Malinowski and Geertz happened to Predappio, too, in a process that began, in fact, in the same year in which Argonauts of the Western Pacific was published (see chapter 1). Just as in anthropology the idea or form of “the ordinary” came to take on significance beyond any particular context in which it might be used—came, as it were, to have a life of its own—so, too, in Predappio, over the past century, the form or idea of ordinary life has come to have an existence apart from the actual practice of living.

What I want to suggest is that the form of ordinariness or everydayness—the presence of a particular kind of scale of existence (Lempert and Silverstein 2012; Summerson Carr and Lempert 2016) that we can label with those words—can have an ordinary, everyday life of its own. As forms and categories, in other words, “the ordinary” and ordinary life are themselves not context-free: they have their own specificities and particularities depending on how, where, when, and why they appear. As I will describe here and throughout this book, “the ordinary” as a form has a history (or histories); it is, like any other phenomenon, specifically located when it is invoked; and it has its own social life. Indeed, pursued in this way, one might better speak of “ordinaries,” rather than “the ordinary,” in much the same way as Austin’s ordinary ornithologist would speak of varieties of bird, instead of asking whether or not “the” bird exists.

This sense of a specific, plural, contingent, and ethnographic category of ordinary life also chimes with insights from scholarship on the roots and history of interest in “the ordinary,” as well as some philosophical inquiries into ordinariness. Charles Taylor, for instance, has famously described the “transvaluation of values” by means of which “the locus of the good life” shifted “from some special range of higher activities” and became placed “within ‘life’ itself.” “Under the impact of the scientific revolution,” Taylor tells us, “the ideal of theõria, of grasping the order of the cosmos through contemplation, came to be seen as vain and misguided” (1989, 213). Taylor locates the origins of what he calls “the affirmation of ordinary life” in the Reformation and its opposition to any form of mediation between God and worshipper. The monastic life is repudiated, and the personal commitment of the ordinary Christian becomes the yardstick of religious value. We will see in chapter 1 some of the genealogical links between these developments and the thought of early Fascism.

In that first chapter and the next, I will show how the categories of ordinariness or everydayness themselves—not just the things that might fall within them—came to take on a special and particular salience through Predappio’s remarkable history and relationship to Fascism, just as they have in the history of anthropology. Predappio, in many ways, owes its existence to the pursuit of a very particularly Fascist vision of what ordinary life should look like. Moreover, in the remainder of this book, I will aim to show that today, Predappiesi work to shape, create, and pursue a different but equally particular vision, or set of visions, of the form of ordinary life.

My claim is not that Predappio is unique in this regard but that it is an especially acute case of the more general fact that the form of ordinary life—like its contents—is not a metaphysical reality deserving of a definite article, a privileged locus of truth and virtue, but an always precarious and contingent effect of work and effort, and an effect that will differ depending on what kind of work goes into it and to what end. Valentina and others like her are not seeking to descend into an ordinary life that is already present at some fundamental level of reality. They are trying to produce a sense of ordinariness with its own specific formal attributes. The threat to that attempt does not come from another general or fundamental phenomenon such as skepticism, or violence, or rupture, as it does in accounts that take the status of ordinariness for granted. It comes, like the townspeople’s sense of ordinariness, from the specifics of their history and indeed precisely from their actual ordinary lives insofar as they are suffused with what they seek to escape from (Das 2020, 66).

As I noted earlier, this book, in other words, is partly—like the majority of work in anthropology—an ethnography of everyday life in a particular context, the unmarked, habitual, routine existence of normal people. But it is also an ethnography of “everyday life”: the intensely marked efforts in life (and sometimes scholarship) that go into creating a certain scale at which things can be classified as “routine” and “normal.”

On Certainty and Damned Fascists

I lived and carried out fieldwork in Predappio intermittently over the course of four years between 2016 and 2020. However, I have also known the town for most of my life. An aunt of mine by marriage was born in Predappio, and my maternal family have a summer house in a village about a twenty-minute drive further into the Apennine mountains toward Tuscany, which I have been visiting most summers since I was born. To get to this village you have to drive through Predappio. I can remember being struck even as a child by how different Predappio was from its neighbors. I can also remember, once I had reached an age of political consciousness, the shock I felt looking out of the car window at the architecture, the tourists in black, and the busts of Mussolini outside the souvenir shops. While such buildings, people, and objects may be found scattered throughout Italy, nowhere are they so thoroughly concentrated in such a small space, and nowhere else are they freighted with the weight of Predappio’s particular history as Mussolini’s birthplace.

However, after four years of sustained fieldwork there, what most struck me was that life in Predappio passes largely without discussion of Fascism. The features of the town that leave outsiders open-mouthed in horror and others in wonder pass largely without comment from Predappiesi themselves, as we have seen in Valentina’s shopping trip. Like the characters in China Miéville’s wonderful 2009 novel The City and The City, who inhabit one of two warring cities that occupy the same physical space and have to learn to “unsee” what belongs to the enemy, it is as if Predappiesi such as Valentina have developed a blind spot for exactly what appalls (or, in the case of certain sorts of tourists, delights) outsiders about their home. This is the puzzle I want to explore here and to a large extent throughout this book, as it connects to the ways in which ordinariness matters in Predappio.

It would make perfect sense to find strong sentiments and attitudes toward Fascism in Predappio, which is more suffused and saturated with the symbolism, history, and politics of Fascism than possibly any other place in the world, as I will describe. To many other Italians, and to those abroad who have heard of it, it is simply impossible to think of Predappio without thinking of Fascism. Because Mussolini was born there, because he is buried there, because it was built by the regime in its favored architectural style, because it was mythologized by the regime and tourists were brought there to wonder at Il Duce’s humble origins, because neo-Fascists have come on pilgrimage to it ever since Mussolini’s body was returned, because a Google image search for Predappio returns shop windows with busts of Hitler in them among its first results—for all these reasons and others, many Predappiesi have spent most of their lives lying about their origins to outsiders. As people often told me, as soon as you said you were from Predappio, other people would make assumptions about you: sometimes this would produce a positive reaction, and people would extol the virtues of your erstwhile fellow citizen; more often it would produce a negative reaction, and you might find yourself the object of frowns and whispers (see chapter 5). In either case you could not avoid your conflation with whatever people took Fascism to be. As Roberto Bui, a prominent Italian intellectual and member of the Bolognese Wu Ming collective, put it in a series of blog posts about Predappio (see chapter 6), “it is not just a question of ‘one tomb in a cemetery’: the whole town is a projection of Il Duce’s body, and is seen as his extended sepulchre, the place of veneration for his remains. Throughout Italy, that is what ‘Predappio’ means” (2017; my translation, italics in original). This neatly encapsulates very widely held attitudes to Predappio on the part of outsiders who know of its existence: it is impossible to divorce it from Mussolini and his politics.

So, had I arrived in Predappio to find a town full of more or less convinced partisans of Mussolini and Fascism, I would not have been surprised. Mussolini is Predappio’s most famous son, and he built the town itself, together with the economic and tourism infrastructure that brought it wealth and fame throughout the years of his regime. Some elderly people there knew his family well and tell stories of his infancy that they heard from their parents and grandparents. Moreover, although most of its wealth, prestige, and prosperity disappeared after the war, those who kept coming to Predappio, those who continue to bring money and commerce to its businesses, are all of one particular political color. There are plenty of reasons why people in Predappio might be, or call themselves, Fascist.

But neither would I have been terribly surprised to find a town full of convinced anti-Fascists, possessing absolute moral certainty in regard to Fascism. The region in which it is situated, Emilia-Romagna, has one of the most famous and vibrant traditions of republicanism, socialism, and anticlericalism in Italy, and Predappio is no exception: before 2019 it had never elected a mayor from any party but the Italian Communist Party and its descendants. In fact, as I will describe in the next chapter, Mussolini himself was a fervent and convinced socialist when he lived in Predappio, just as his father, a local councillor, was. Given this heritage, one perfectly plausible reaction to socialist-turned-Fascist Mussolini would be to disown him vociferously. So there are also plenty of reasons why a morally certain anti-Fascism in Predappio would make sense.

Indeed, in a great many places in the world one might reasonably expect to find at least one of these attitudes about Fascism. It is a subject on which people often, certainly in Europe and the United States, tend to feel quite strong moral sentiments, rather than apparent neutrality or ambiguity. As far back as 1940, the US Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a New Hampshire man jailed for calling a local official “a damned Fascist,” on the basis that these were not words protected by the First Amendment because they were “fighting words,” which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Even in 1940, the man did not need to specify what in particular about being a Fascist required damnation for the Court to reach such a verdict. Today, knowing all we do about the events of the five years that would follow this case, such specification is, for many people, even more redundant.

Despite the fact that a recent resurgence of interest in Fascism has led people (back) to debates about exactly what it is and how to define it (see chapter 5), rarely if ever have such debates led people to question its moral valence. Many people use the word as the Supreme Court interpreted the man to be doing, as insulting and offensive in itself, akin to accusing someone of a crime (and being a Fascist is a crime in several legal jurisdictions). I suspect, in other words, that for many readers of this book, the negative moral judgment implied in describing someone or something as “Fascist” is a form of basic moral certainty (see, e.g., Lichtenberg 1994; Markie 1986; Pleasants 2007, 2009). One need not explain what it is about being a Fascist that produces such negative moral judgment, and indeed if one did, it would sound rather peculiar in many cases. As the man from New Hampshire implied, a Fascist is damned for being a Fascist, and nothing more need be said.

Often much more is said about Fascism, depending on the way that language is being used. Many historians take considerable pains to describe all the reasons that Fascism or, more precisely, Fascist regimes or individuals deserve the negative moral judgment that usually comes with the word. Writing the history of Fascism, though, is a very specific way of using the word, and even in this sort of case most historians do not write as if they understand their duty to be persuading the reader of the evils of Fascism, Indeed, it is hard to imagine a mainstream historian writing as if people require persuading of such a claim. Rather, the point is to document in ever more accurate detail why we believe this claim and to remind us why we do so.

Things are more complicated in Italy, despite the existence of laws putatively designed to punish the expression of positive sentiments or intentions regarding Fascism (Heywood 2019). As well as morally ambiguous attitudes to Fascism—encapsulated in the stereotypical assertion that, though he made some mistakes, “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time”—there are also many people who believe Fascism to have been a largely or wholly positive force. A great many such people visit Predappio on a regular basis, whether for one of the three annual anniversary marches or as a day’s excursion to visit Mussolini’s tomb and buy a replica manganello (a club that Fascist thugs used to beat their opponents) from one of the souvenir shops that line the main road. These people are often perfectly open about their opinions on the matter, and on the anniversary days many of them appear in black Fascist uniforms or in T-shirts bearing pro-Fascist slogans, and they are not arrested or otherwise sanctioned for it (see also Gretel Cammelli 2015, 2017; LoPerfido 2018).

One might, as I’ve suggested, imagine that among people who actually live in Predappio, one would find such strongly held convictions, or forms of moral certainty, about Fascism, whether for or against. Predappio is, as the quote above from Roberto Bui suggests and as I will illustrate throughout this book, a metonym for Mussolini as far as most of Italy is concerned, so having an opinion about the one is usually the same as having an opinion about the other. The history of Fascism and the history of Predappio have always been intertwined, so its inhabitants have had quite some time to make up their minds on the subject in either direction. They have also had one hundred years of practice in answering the questions of outsiders, for whom their home is entirely defined by its relation to Fascism. Yet people in Predappio largely do not place themselves in either camp in relation to historical Fascism or their contemporary visitors in black and indeed, as I will describe, go to some effort to avoid discussion of the subject.

A number of possible and plausible explanations for this lack of open moral certainty regarding Fascism spring to mind. For instance, one might point to more general facets of the broader national and international political climate: the gradual decay of the strong anti-Fascist sentiment that animated the postwar Italian constitution, the collapse of Communism and of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the failure of the Italian state to enforce anti-Fascist legislation, and the recent rise of nationalism and anti-immigrant feeling in Italy and elsewhere. These factors are all likely to have played a part in shaping Predappiesi’s attitudes toward Fascism, especially as those attitudes seem to have varied somewhat alongside such wider geopolitical changes, as I will describe.

In some sense we can see a version of what Michael Herzfeld calls “cultural intimacy” (2016 [1997]) at work in Predappiesi’s attitudes to their heritage. As I describe later, many Predappiesi have stories of personal encounters between Mussolini and their parents or grandparents, and they tell these stories—in private homes or in lowered tones in public among friends—with a degree of pride at their proximity to a man who shaped globally significant events. But there are rarely any nudges or winks here (Herzfeld 2016, 6). Although some few on the extreme right in the town may feel pride in identification with the man himself, any sense most Predappiesi have of being held together by their unique relationship to Mussolini does not usually come with any form of identification with him. For the most part, what is culturally intimate here—that is, what is held back from outsiders—is simply open acknowledgment of their home’s history: as I have noted, many Predappiesi have tended simply to lie to outsiders about even the fact of being from Predappio.

The explanation I want to focus on for the way in which Fascism is treated in Predappio today is in some ways as general as those offered above, but it also takes on a specific inflection in Predappio, one that will bring us back to ordinariness. Predappio is a comune of approximately six thousand inhabitants, most of whom live dispersed in the countryside surrounding the town itself or in peripheral and even smaller villages such as Predappio Alta, Fiumana, and San Savino. As in small communities everywhere, most people who live in Predappio itself know one another and one another’s families very well indeed. They know one another’s working and living circumstances, habits and preferences, and histories and frequently the histories of one another’s parents and grandparents as well. They interact with one another on a routine basis, at church, in the local bars, at town council meetings, in restaurants, and casually on the street.

They do so regardless of their ideological coloring and what they happen to think about Fascism. Giorgio Frassineti, the mayor of Predappio over the course of much of my fieldwork, was, for instance, from the Democratic Party (PD), the successor to the Italian Communist Party. He is “of the left,” as every postwar mayor of Predappio has been before 2019, and he is frequently referred to as such by his constituents, warmly or otherwise. When he passes one of the owners of the shops selling Fascist “souvenirs” in the street—as he does frequently, because it is impossible for him not to do so in a town so small—he might greet them as he would any other constituent and sometimes pass the time of day. Though he told me he avoids entering the souvenir shops if at all possible, this is at least in part because, while mayor, he was afraid of being photographed inside by a passing journalist and getting into even more trouble with the left in the region more broadly than he already is, for reasons I describe in chapter 6. His objection to entering the souvenir shops is largely practical, in other words, rather than principled. I have also known him to make an exception to this rule when prevailed upon to drink a glass of Mussolini-themed wine with one of the proprietors.

The village abounds with examples of this sort of everyday pragmatism. Some people, for example, will explain their lack of objection to the Fascist anniversary marches by pointing to the money they bring to the town in the form of visitors to the souvenir shops and to local restaurants. Those who oppose the marches will often cite the very same thing in support of their own arguments and claim that they bring money only to a small number of families and that to most they bring only inconvenience, closing the roads and swamping the village with rowdy, badly behaved men. Going back further in history, such pragmatism becomes, at least at times, only more pronounced, as I will describe in chapter 2: people’s memories are filled with amusing or rancorous descriptions of voltagabbana, or turncoats, whose ideological coloring changed depending on what was perceived to be advantageous. The sort of pragmatism involved in these stories is merely an extreme—though prevalent—form of a generalized attitude of pragmatism that many people hold in relation to their home’s Fascist heritage (see Herzfeld 2009 for comparable examples of Italian pragmatism).

We have returned, in other words, to the question of the ordinary: of the vagaries of social life, instead of theories and ideologies; of messiness and practicality, instead of coherence; of just “getting by.” Predappiesi, like anthropologists, recognize the need to take la vita quotidiana and its requirements into account. You cannot live in Predappio without living with Fascism. Because this book—like any ethnography—is partly intended to be an account of such quotidian existence, in a small but rather unique context, then it will also be concerned with the practical requirements for this existence. Indeed, it would not be terribly difficult to tell the story of Predappio and its ambiguous moral epistemology of Fascism as one of gradual accommodation to the fact that thousands of neo-Fascists descend on the village every year and that some benefit has been gleaned from this, at least by some; or to the fact that there are few Predappiesi whose parents or grandparents did not wear a Fascist uniform at some point in their lives, as is true in towns and villages across Italy.

This story of pragmatic accommodation to Fascism as both an intrinsic part of Predappio’s past and an everyday feature of its present is only half the story, however, just as remarking on the similarity between Predappiesi accommodations to everyday life and ideas about everyday life in anthropology masks some important differences between them. That is because a marked concern for pragmatism, and indeed for the category of ordinariness, was at the heart of the Fascist project and of the creation of Predappio itself, as I show in more detail in chapter 1. In other words, the ordinariness of Fascism in Predappio—its pervasive invasion of so many aspects of existence and the fact that Predappiesi have come to live with that—is not itself ordinary; it is marked and significant and has always been so.

Out of the Ordinary

So, the other half of this story is that the ordinary or everyday accommodations Predappiesi make to their town’s extraordinary heritage and politics, their distinct lack of moral certainty in regard to Fascism, is not itself another kind of certainty. It does not “go without saying” that thousands of men in Fascist uniforms marching through your town three times a year deserve no comment. It is not obvious that there being a dictator’s tomb next to the graves of your grandparents should pass largely unremarked. You do not naturally take it for granted that your home is famous the world over as a premier site of neo-Fascist pilgrimage.

Predappio is not really an island. Its inhabitants are perfectly well aware of the celebrated or infamous status of their town in Italy and abroad. They know there is nothing ordinary or everyday about that status, even as they often behave as if it were ordinary and everyday. Like social scientists, in some ways (and in a different sense, as I will show in chapter 1, like early Fascists), Predappiesi have come to invest significance not only in everyday or ordinary things but in everydayness and ordinariness itself, as a scale. It has come to matter to act as if ordinary life in Predappio really were just plain old ordinary.

My account of this will in some ways resemble other anthropological accounts of ordinary life. In a recent book chapter devoted to “the politics of the ordinary,” Veena Das, for example, describes the efforts of a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) worker to bring water and electricity to an “unauthorized colony” in Delhi (2020). “What could ever be of theoretical interest, one might ask, in the trivial details in which the perils of everyday life here are expressed,” Das asks rhetorically (59–60), before concluding the chapter with the thought that it is in such attempts to “bring about an everyday that could be better, more attuned to their desires” that the “politics of the ordinary” is expressed (92). Her distinction between the “actual everyday,” in which people are entangled and enmeshed in their daily lives, and the “eventual everyday” they wish to create resonates in many ways with my characterization of life in Predappio.

In Das’s account, the “eventual everyday” is the object of work and construction, just as I will describe “everyday life” in Predappio. But in Das’s account, the “everyday” character of the “eventual everyday” appears given: the politics of the provision of basic infrastructure like water and electricity is taken to be exemplary of “everydayness.” The NGO leader she describes strives for something (basic infrastructure) that Das is comfortable describing as everyday, for understandable reasons—whereas throughout this book, I will seek to draw attention to the fact that one of the things Predappiesi strive for is a sense of “everydayness” itself. The everyday character of debates over basic infrastructure, as we will see in chapter 6, is precisely a part of the politics of scale at work in these debates, not given in their nature or a result of my classification of them. In other words, it is true that there are certain political questions that we might, with Das, readily scale as “ordinary” or “everyday” and that are important to Predappiesi; but it is also true that those scales themselves are important to Predappiesi, too.

In describing this rather particular “quest for the ordinary,” this book combines two key anthropological insights of the past two decades. The first is that a scale—such as “ordinary life”—is, in the words of E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert, “a practice and process before it is product” (2016, 8–9). Anthropologists (and other social scientists) have increasingly come to attend to the ways in which certain phenomena are scaled by actors themselves as, say, “local” or “global” (e.g., Latour 2005; Helmreich 2009; Tsing 2000, 2005, 2012; Glück 2013; Lempert 2012); “public” or “private” (e.g., Gal 2002; Benhabib 1998; Özyürek 2006); or “national,” “regional,” or “civil” (Ben-Yehoyada 2017; Candea 2012; Ferguson 2006; Mitchell 1991). This is true even though, rather than because, anthropological and social scientific analysis is itself replete with its own metaphysics of scale: “we ontologize scalar perspectives, rather than ask how they were forged and focused” (Summerson Carr and Lempert 2016, 8; see also Strathern 2004). That is perhaps especially true, as I have suggested above, of the scale of the ordinary and the everyday: in addition to the standard trope of “everyday life” (e.g., Schielke 2009) and the particular school of “ordinary ethics” we have encountered (e.g., Das 2007; Lambek 2010), we also have “everyday resistance” (e.g., Scott 1985), “everyday utopias” (e.g., Cooper 2014), “everyday religion” (e.g., Ammerman 2007), “everyday politics” (e.g., Boyte 2004), “everyday shame” (e.g., Probyn 2004), and “everyday violence” (e.g., Bourgois 2009), to give just a few examples. This book, in contrast, seeks to put the scale of the everyday in question: to ask what it looks like in a specific context and how it is shaped as such through practice and action.

Because the everyday is shaped, formed, and cultivated in Predappio, the second key set of anthropological insights this book draws on emerges from what is often called the anthropology of ethics (e.g., Laidlaw 2002, 2012; Faubion 2001, 2011; Lambek 2000, 2015a). These insights boil down to the idea that what people do in and with their lives is at least in part shaped by the values and virtues they pursue—that cultivating the virtue of Islamic piety, for example, means engaging in a certain set of practices that are seen to generate and to sustain that virtue (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006).

Recent literature on ordinary ethics has formed an important set of conversations within the broader anthropology of ethics, and a great deal of recent debate in the discipline has focused on the question of whether ethics resides in the domain of ordinary life, inherent in the everyday interactions we have with others, or whether it is more properly located in reflective projects, focused on the cultivation of ideals and virtues (e.g., Clarke 2014; Heywood 2022, 2023a; Laidlaw and Mair 2019; Lambek 2015b; Lempert 2013; Robbins 2016; Zigon 2014). I will engage with some of these debates throughout the course of this book. What I will seek to show where I do so is that combining the notion of scale as an outcome, not a premise, of human action with an interest in the virtues people strive to cultivate allows us to see ordinary or everyday life as the object, not the site, of ethical work.

Certain scales—both in our own analyses and in the lives of those we study—can come to take on ethical import, can come themselves to seem valuable and worthy of pursuit. This is true, I think, when we instrumentalize notions of “the ordinary” against anthropological arguments in favor of attending to the “transcendent” and vice versa, just as it is when we claim that failure to attend to “neoliberal political economy” ignores “the real, systemic causes of inequality,” as Summerson Carr and Lempert note (2016, 8). This ethicizing of scale also takes place, as I will describe, in contemporary Predappio.

As in much of the literature on ordinary ethics, the pursuit of ordinariness in Predappio is not a clearly set out or easily articulable project, as is, say, Saba Mahmood’s description of pietist Islam (2005). It is not like a creed or a religion with a list of tenets, and of course not all Predappiesi feel the same way about it or pursue it in the same fashion, though I think my descriptions of generally held attitudes would be easily recognizable to most who know the town.

However, unlike some of the literature on ordinary ethics, I do not think this somewhat nebulous quality of the pursuit of ordinariness as an ethical value comes down to an inherent quality of ethics more generally. Instead, I think it is built in, in some sense, to the nature of the project I describe: as we have seen earlier, once ordinariness is marked out and explicit, once it becomes in and of itself an object of concern, it ceases to be ordinary. So pursuing ordinariness as a value requires one to do so sotto voce, if one is to do it well. Indeed, we will see in chapter 2 the distinction Predappiesi draw between two exemplars of ordinariness precisely in terms of how self-conscious and declamatory their pursuit of ordinariness is. Loudly proclaiming one’s ordinariness, as early Fascist propagandists sometimes did of Mussolini, for example, is itself quite far from being ordinary and is liable to make one look as if one doth protest too much.

Though the chapters of this book are thematic in so far as they treat particular topics, they also narrate a broadly chronological story about the way in which ordinary life as an ethicized form or scale has become detached from the reality of ordinary life in Predappio over the past one hundred years and has taken on a life of its own. In chapters 1 and 2, I will set out the historical conditions that led to ordinariness becoming a key concern there, both in the particulars of Predappio’s own history and its imbrication in the broader intellectual and political currents of Italian Fascism. Chapter 2 will also commence the story of how Predappiesi relate to this history, a story that will continue throughout the book.

In chapter 3, I describe the ways in which that history continues to live on in contemporary life in the ritual marches that dominate the town on three key anniversary dates every year. I describe the development of these ritual marches over the postwar period and the history of Predappiesi relations with them. I show how Predappiesi react to these rituals—as they do more generally to invocations of Fascism—by conscientiously performing a version of everyday life, despite the “carnival of Mussolini” going on around them. In chapter 4, I discuss Predappio’s urban space and material heritage, which is almost entirely dominated by the style of the Fascist regime. I point to the ways in which the use of Predappio’s urban space is marked by attempts to empty out its history, in contrast to classic anthropological and sociological accounts of everyday space as the accumulation of memory.

Chapter 5 describes the place of talk about Fascism in ordinary language, noting the ways in which such talk evinces skepticism about ever truly being able to identify a Fascist and the fact that such ambiguity contrasts with the ways in which non-Predappiesi identify the town as practically synonymous with Fascism. Chapter 6 extends chapter 5’s discussion of the place of politics in Predappio by juxtaposing two debates: one, an international controversy over a proposal to site a documentation center on Fascism in the ruins of Predappio’s old Fascist Party headquarters; and the other, a local set of debates over the management of the town’s recycling. I show how the scales of “international” (and “abstract”) versus “local” (and “ordinary”) are outcomes of the course of such debates, rather than premises for them.

In concluding the book, I return to some of the larger issues I have sought to raise in this introduction: that sometimes, at least, “being ordinary” takes work and that what exactly being ordinary means as an ideal toward which one works will vary depending on historical and social circumstances. That is a descriptive claim about life in Predappio in particular. Being ordinary in Predappio does not, when I describe it here, mean being ordinarily wealthy or ordinarily tall or short, fat or slim; it means—in regard to ethics, to space, to kinship, to ritual, and to politics (for to be ordinary, as I try to show in chapter 6, is not the same as to be apolitical)—having little or nothing to do with the subject that everybody else in Italy associates with Predappio: Fascism.

Anthropology and Populism

Anthropologists writing about the recent rise of populist movements have increasingly begun to worry about the overlap between some of the underlying ideas behind such movements and some of our own preferential disciplinary assumptions (e.g., Holmes 2019; Mazzarella 2019). To take but one recent example, Annastiina Kallius has evocatively described the ways in which the Fidesz regime has dramatically transformed the epistemological landscape of Hungarian politics, ushering in an understanding of truth that is closer to Romantic, counter-Enlightenment visions of it as connected to power and emotion than to straightforwardly representationalist or correspondentist conceptions (2023). The problem with constructing an anthropological account of such a transformation is that populist critiques of representationalism and advocacy of a more relational epistemology echo countless anthropological arguments of the past few decades. Because our own roots are partly based in the same Romantic and counter-Enlightenment genealogy (one that Douglas Holmes masterfully described at the turn of the millennium in Integral Europe), this should perhaps not surprise us. But the implications of this overlap have yet to be confronted.

I hope the claims I make in this book regarding the distinct but related senses in which ordinariness has been important to Fascism, Predappio, and anthropology help spur such confrontation. The ordinary and the everyday have long been foundational concepts in our discipline and the wider social sciences, but their ubiquity should not blind us to the variety of uses to which they can be put. In politics, just as in academia, adjectives such as ordinary, grounded, everyday, concrete, and real are often wielded like weapons of war against those with whom we disagree, just as they once were, as I will describe, by Mussolini’s regime (and see Langhammer 2018). Nobody ever wants to be on the side of the abstract, the detached, or the metaphysical, let alone of the elite. In the social sciences, a great deal of the responsibility for this state of affairs lies with Wittgenstein, whose ideas I have drawn on already in this introduction and who—because of his monumental impact on thinking about the ordinary—will continue to loom over the rest of this book in somewhat spectral fashion.

Human life is, of course, messy, complex, contingent, and routine in any number of ways, and I would be a strange sort of ethnographer if I thought otherwise. But sometimes it becomes particularly important to people—Fascists, Predappiesi, politicians, philosophers, or social scientists—that it be seen to be so. The claims people make in pursuit of this goal can be powerful and seductive, and the hierarchy they produce—in which the good is always “down”—is often disguised or naturalized. We will fail to understand such occasions, I suggest, if we do not take into account the ordinary life of concepts such as “ordinary life” themselves; and unless we attend to their instrumentalization, we will fail to notice that such instrumentalization serves a range of political ends, not all of which we may wish to see realized.