Conclusion

Anthropology after Fascism

As the liberalism that both populist politics and anthropology often target seems of late to buckle under the strain of attack, it has become impossible to ignore the fact that both share several features. Both populist politics and anthropology despise and critique the liberal emphasis on the individual untethered from relations, but they have more than this foe in common. They both emerge from a strain of Romantic, counter-Enlightenment thought, exemplified by figures such as Johann Herder, that place both moral and explanatory weight on communitarian units such as “nations” and “cultures” (Holmes 2000, 2019; Berlin 1976, 1999; Wolf 1999; Wolin 2006); and they both understand themselves to be speaking for ordinary people, not elites, and to be firmly grounded in the pragmatics of everyday life, not in theory, metaphysics, or political principle.

I am not the first to point this out. Douglas Holmes has recently highlighted what he calls “the anthropology operating within Fascism” in analyses of a series of interviews he conducted with figures from the European far right in the early 1990s (2019, 83; emphasis removed). A particular exchange with Jean-Marie le Pen, then-leader of the French Front National, and the analysis that follows are worth quoting in full:

Le Pen: … You must know that in real life, these things [immigration, crime, and corruption] create a lot of suffering for citizens, especially the underprivileged. The problems of housing, family life, education, and unemployment are felt very harshly by people. They feel real anxiety for the future. Thus, these people believe our views to be right because they accurately reflect the dilemmas of real life.… Men perceive reality in two ways: either directly through lived experience of unemployment, poor housing, etcetera, or indirectly, thanks to the media. But when the lived facts become overwhelming, far beyond what is told in the media, you don’t need the media anymore.

Holmes: The message of your presentations is that politics is not merely an intellectual discourse but an instinctual engagement.

Le Pen: Of course! Absolutely true! Human beings communicate not just by their intellects alone but also by their physical sensibilities, their emotions, and their gestures. Probably the worst sin of our time is to overvalue “intellectualism” and to limit humankind to their intelligence alone.

Accusations of racism and Fascism, he insists, are mere “devices” to silence him. He appeals to the listener to escape rarefied ideological engagements and, instead, to reenter the sublime certainties of lived experience. He draws the listener into an intimate relationship in which kinship is conferred—not through rational disputation but through enthrallments that can be read in daily life. He postures as if to say: “Look at me: I am just like you, I believe what you believe, I feel what you feel. These things do not make you a racist; how can they make me one?” (Holmes 2019, 72–73)

Holmes presumably poses the final rhetorical question to an “ordinary person,” but given what is said in the interview about “sensibilities,” “emotions,” “lived experience,” and the overvaluation of “intellectualism” by modern society, it is even more aptly posed to the anthropologist.

Confronting this resemblance may be painful, but it is necessary, for it obliges anthropologists to recognize that they do not have exclusive rights over all their theoretical predilections. Just because Fascism possesses its own anthropology does not mean anthropology therefore possesses its own Fascism. But fetishizing ordinariness and ordinary people, while clearly far from being a sufficient condition for Fascism, is at least arguably a necessary one, and the overlap with anthropology points to elective affinities (or family resemblances) that demand consideration.

The anthropological impulse, methodological and theoretical, to privilege the everyday and the ordinary is clearly motivated by a range of different sensibilities. Perhaps key among those, as Joel Robbins has suggested (n.d., 23), is the (ironically, fundamentally liberal) belief in the summum malum of cruelty, especially on the part of the powerful toward the powerless (Shklar 1989). We may in general be pluralists when it comes to the good, but we are also often monists when it comes to the bad. Fascism, on the other hand, when not directly enjoying cruelty as an expression of strength, is certainly happy to employ it in the service of other ends.

The problem is, as I hope to have shown in this book, that it is more than possible to be both ordinary and powerful. Ordinariness indeed possesses a very great deal of power, of seductive and affective charge, especially when located on a moralized and naturalized scale in opposition to other qualities of which we are supposed to disapprove in proportion. Sometimes it takes a great deal of power, as I also hope to have shown in this book, to appear ordinary or everyday, to make these qualities come alive as virtues worth pursuing and embodying.

So while it might be vain, as well as unreasonable, to imagine that anthropology should abandon its built-in preference for the quotidian reality of everyday life, I hope this book at least serves as a cautionary tale for what can happen when that preference leads us implicitly to assume that the ordinary and the everyday are always “down,” always weaker than whatever they are conjured up in opposition to.

Anthropologists, Predappiesi, and Fascists are not the only people to endow the ordinary and the everyday with special powers. The historian Claire Langhammer has noted the emergence of ordinariness as an important political category in postwar British politics (2018). The trope of “ordinary people” began to appear in films, on the radio, in churches, in the queen’s Christmas Day message, in Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, of course in psychoanalysis, and in sociological Mass-Observation studies. Indeed, a part of Langhammer’s point is that although ordinariness in the Brexit era of British politics is said to be largely defined in opposition to “expertise” (see e.g., Mazzarella 2019), ordinariness as it emerged in the postwar era came with its own forms of expert knowledge: “lived experience and feeling were set against acquired knowledge and training in all manner of areas, including domestic and local issues, national politics and international relations” (2018, 190), as in contrast to the knowledge of scientists, politicians, and elites. Perhaps situated against this backdrop, the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical focus on ordinariness (usually periodized as beginning in the 1930s) looks rather characteristic of its time.

Meanwhile, the vital role notions of ordinary or everyday life have played in twentieth-century French literature and theory has been documented in fantastic detail by Michael Sheringham, who traces the development of such notions from Charles Baudelaire through to anthropologist Marc Augé (2006). Sheringham argues that the period 1960–1980, in particular, witnessed an explosion of intellectual, literary, and academic interest in the everyday and that—despite differences in the thought of figures such as Roland Barthes and Michel de Certeau—taken together, this interest was a distinctively French intellectual response to particular historical changes (rapid modernization, the events of May 1968, the fall of structuralism, and so on).

In France today, the political scientist Catherine Neveu has shown that invocations of ordinariness can serve both depoliticizing and politicizing ends, sometimes distinguishing “normal people” from the “dirtiness” of institutional politics and valorizing them for standing apart, and sometimes legitimizing contemporary forms of government focused on notions of participation and citizenship (2015).

In writing on contemporary meditation practices, Joanna Cook has described the ways in which ordinary life has come to take on particular salience in the field of metacognitive interventions, such as mindfulness, in mental health (2023). The aim of such practices is to invest everyday activities—for example, washing up—with heightened levels of awareness and attention with the idea that, by changing how one relates to ordinary life, one is able to effect much broader alterations to the ways in which one relates to one’s mind, alterations that can help stave off psychological crises and improve resilience.

In all of these cases, what matters to people is not just something or some set of things that “are” (by nature or by virtue of an analyst’s judgment) ordinary, but the claim that some things are ordinary. It matters that scales such as “ordinary life” or persons such as “ordinary people” exist and that they denote a specific kind of content, different in each case. In all these cases, the form of ordinary life has come to take on a life of its own, beyond the actual life it is intended to denote, and often it is valorized as a form precisely insofar as it can be perceived as ordinary.

As Neveu and Langhammer both note, analytical usage of ordinariness in the social sciences is often similarly implicitly (or explicitly) normative. In the discipline of history, there is of course a broad family of historical writing that includes the Annales school in France (e.g., Braudel 1981), Alltagsgeschichte in Germany (e.g., Lüdtke 1982), and the microstoria of Italian scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg (1980), in which the small-scale has come to matter as more exemplary of “real,” “concrete” life than events or great men. None of these various movements are exactly identical with one another, but they all share a concern with scaling down historical narratives away from macrostructures and toward Braudel’s “realm of routine” and “ordinary experience.”

As emblematic of this tendency in recent anthropology, take the following section from Veena Das’s recent Textures of the Ordinary, in which she quotes her own closing sentences from a previous book, Life and Words, in critique of French philosopher Pierre Hadot’s vision of “spiritual exercises” (Hadot 1995):

I conclude my book Life and Words, somewhat scandalously, with the following words:

“My sense of indebtedness to the work of [Stanley] Cavell in these matters come from a confidence that perhaps Manjit did not utter anything we would recognize as philosophical in the kind of environments in which philosophy is done … but Cavell’s work shows us that there is no real distance between the spiritual exercises she undertakes in her world and the spiritual exercises we can see in every word he has ever written. To hold these types of worlds together and to sense the connection of these lives has been my anthropological kind of devotion to the world.” (Das 2007: 221).

I say ‘scandalously’ because the kind of philosophical formation that Hadot is thinking of is about scaling heights, whereas I am trying to wrest the very expression of spiritual exercises away from the profundity of philosophy to the small disciplines that ordinary people perform in their everyday lives to hold life as the natural expression of ethics. (2020, 109–110)

Note the shifts of scale in the space of just a few sentences: first Cavell is praised for showing that “there is no real distance” between the spiritual exercises of philosophy and those of an “ordinary person”; then Hadot is attacked for “scaling heights” (“up” into philosophy and away from the ordinary, one assumes); then Das herself argues she is trying to wrest spiritual exercises “away from the profundity of philosophy to the small disciplines that ordinary people perform in their everyday lives.” Despite the praise of Cavell and the claim in the quoted paragraph to be trying to “hold these types of worlds together,” Das’s scalar vision opposes ordinary life to what she elsewhere calls “the hallowed halls of philosophy,” in spite of the fact, one might point out, that this vision itself is of course derived from the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Austin (2020, 96), who spent their careers in such hallowed halls.

I have written elsewhere of the paradoxes of this kind of theorizing, in which an antitheoretical or antiphilosophical argument is put forward in deeply theoretical and philosophical terms, as akin to the problem of Dumbo’s feather: Dumbo, the eponymous hero of the classic Disney film, can fly because he has big ears, but because he dislikes his ears, he tells himself he can fly because he has a magic feather (Heywood 2018). In analogous fashion, this sort of vision of the ordinary has giant, Wittgenstein-shaped philosophical ears, but because it has been taught to see philosophy as a problem, it prefers to tell itself it has an ordinary magic feather. In fact, there is little that is ordinary about most anthropological talk about ordinary life.

Perhaps one of the most obvious instances of this point about the gap between the form or ideal of ordinary life and its reality in action is the inspiration for Das’s argument, Wittgenstein himself, who spent much of the last twenty years of his life trying to persuade people not to do philosophy, while, in fact, doing philosophy. By this I mean not only that he sought to challenge the ideas most people had of what philosophy was (metaphysics, broadly speaking); he also ruined what might have been the brilliant academic careers of several of his students by using his influence over them to persuade them to pursue occupations he saw as more “ordinary,” such as medicine or car mechanics (Monk 1991, 430, 618, 840). Wittgenstein himself was aware of the paradox involved in both senses. Intellectually speaking, for example, he wrote in an unpublished chapter of Philosophical Grammar that “all that philosophy can do is to destroy idols … and … that means not making any new ones—say out of ‘the absence of idols’ ” (cited in Monk 1991, 760). Idolizing the absence of idols is in many ways an excellent description of some contemporary social scientific writing on ordinariness.

Wittgenstein was also eminently conscious of his own extraordinary position. For instance, his biographer Ray Monk cites him excusing the fact that he persisted with philosophy—while doing his best to oblige various students to abandon it—on the basis that he was special: “There is no oxygen in Cambridge, he told [Maurice] Drury [a brilliant student who Wittgenstein urged to get a job ‘among the working class’ (Monk 1991, 28)]. It didn’t matter for him [Wittgenstein]—he manufactured his own. But for people dependent on the air around them, it was important to get away, into a healthier environment” (780). Yet Wittgenstein was clearly not himself entirely satisfied with this explanation, and throughout his life made repeated attempts to “ordinarify” himself.

In fact, in these repeated attempts, we can see a striking example of exactly the argument I have been making throughout this book. Wittgenstein, in many ways the father of much of our thinking on ordinariness, actually spent a lot of time engaged in precisely the activity I have described Predappiesi as engaged in: “doing being ordinary” or, as Monk puts it, “joining the ranks.” As in the examples above, Wittgenstein often did things not simply because he was interested in the things themselves, but at least in part because he believed those things to be ordinary and ordinariness was what he was pursuing. He enlisted in the Austrian army as an ordinary soldier in the First World War and repeatedly resisted being commissioned as an officer, despite the fact he hated his fellow soldiers and the entire experience of military life (Monk 1991, 277). After the war, when he was a primary school teacher, he insisted on being posted to the most rural backwater he could find, and once again hated the experience and despised his fellow villagers, leaving in disgrace after being physically violent to his young charges (473–475). And in the early 1930s, he decided he would move to Soviet Russia with one of his students and become an ordinary working man on a collective farm. This last project came to nothing partly because, as British Communist George Sacks recalled, “the Russians told him his own work was a useful contribution and he ought to go back to Cambridge” (821).

Monk sums up this last example of Wittgenstein’s pursuit of ordinariness and its failure as follows: “It is also, of course, one more manifestation of his perennial desire to join the ranks. The Soviet authorities knew, just as the Austrian authorities had in 1915, that he would be more use to them as an officer than as a private; and Wittgenstein himself realized that he could not really tolerate life among the ‘petty dishonesty’ of the ordinary soldiers. Yet he continued to wish it could be otherwise” (1991, 828).¹

At the very heart of our thinking on the ordinary, in other words, we find a man who was anything but ordinary, just as Predappio is anything but ordinary, but who went to extraordinary lengths to try to make himself seem so, just as Predappiesi do. And his attempts to do so only endowed his already extraordinary aura with even greater mystique and authority for many of those around him.

I hope that one insight for anthropology to have emerged from my description of the cultivation of ordinary life in Predappio is that if we are truly to hold the worlds of philosophical concepts and ethnographic description of ordinary life together in some fashion, that must surely involve treating the philosophical concept of ordinary life as a part of ordinary language like any other part—asking what is at stake in all these various sorts of claims that some thing or person is ordinary, and what forms of politics and ethics are contained in the ways in which people moralize scales such as ordinary versus abstract or ordinary life versus philosophy, instead of simply replicating them ourselves.

As to Predappio itself, I have tried to shy away from pronouncing judgment on the ways in which people there seek to manage their relationship to the troubling heritage of their home. One can easily imagine a number of forms such judgment might take. For instance, one might cast the cultivation of the everyday in Predappio as a sort of “weapon of the weak,” a form of resistance to the high-flown, abstract debates about Fascism in which Predappiesi are forcibly implicated by the accident of Mussolini’s birth in their town (e.g., Scott 1985). Such an analytic perspective, however, would again simply replicate, rather than interrogate, the scalar politics at work in opposing ordinary life to Fascism, which, as we have seen, has its own visions of ordinary life, too, and its own way of scaling them. Alternatively, one could imagine an argument that characterized people in Predappio’s pursuit of ordinariness as a sort of “anti-politics machine,” a way of depoliticizing their home and of neutralizing the really important questions of Italian attitudes to Fascist heritage that it poses (e.g., Ferguson 1990). Again, though, such an approach would not only assume that it is in “large” questions of Fascist heritage that politics really and properly resides—rather than in “small” and everyday questions such as what to do with one’s recycling—but would also miss the moralizing politics of such scaling practices themselves. These dichotomous alternatives, in which the everyday is either a sanctified respite from or a problematic facet of the broader context in which it is situated, mirror the ambiguities of the everyday in scholarly discourse, as I noted in chapter 1, which appears in both senses in our usage of it. I have sought to avoid both of these alternatives.

Predappiesi themselves, of course, do not all share the same position on the question of how to deal with their heritage. Giorgio, for instance, sought in many ways to overturn decades of orthodoxy on this question by actively confronting this heritage and by seeking to transform it from a weakness into a strength. In his public speeches in favor of the Casa del Fascio project, he would lament what he called the damnatio memoriae into which Predappio had fallen thanks to its association with Mussolini, urging instead that people speak openly about Fascism and thereby learn of its perils. We have seen that some on the left in Italy doubted the sincerity of his anti-Fascist motivations, but what is not in doubt is that his approach would have been a radical departure from the norm in Predappio.

But we also saw in that chapter that Giorgio failed in his endeavors, or at least so it seems for now. The public justification his successor provided for calling a halt to the Casa del Fascio project relied on arguably minor quibbles with the architectural plan for the documentation center, a justification that some call into question and that has, reportedly, been refuted by the structural assessors on whose judgment it claims to rely (Consiglio Direttivo di Progetto Predappio 2019). Some people suggest the project was shut down to spite Giorgio; others that it was because the new mayor is right-wing and resented what anti-Fascist elements there were in the documentation center plans; others still point to the pecuniary interests of the souvenir shop owners and the pressure they may have exerted on the new administration (though it is unclear why their interest would lie in resisting the opening of a new tourist attraction in town).

Whatever his motivations, the mayor’s decision led to no public outcry in town, no great lamentations at the loss of this unique opportunity, no protests, and no petitions, except from those involved in the Casa del Fascio project itself. From what I have observed since the decision was taken, most Predappiesi are quite happy to return to the status quo ante, to leave the Casa del Fascio to its pigeons and arguments about Fascism to their visitors in red or in black.

“Talking about such things [Fascism] is difficult, it’s complicated,” Antonio, an elderly vineyard owner, told me shortly before I left Predappio for the last time before the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s better to talk about other things. Like wine,” he added with a grin, “we all like wine.” Or, as Wittgenstein put it less prosaically, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

In this book, I have tried to narrate the gradual process, over the course of a century, by means of which the idea or form or category of ordinary life has come apart in Predappio from the actuality of ordinary life as it is lived there. The seeds of this process lie in the particular and somewhat contradictory moral valency ascribed to ordinariness in early Fascist thought and the ways in which that moral valency took on an especially heightened character in New Predappio, “the Land of Il Duce,” built to exemplify both Mussolini’s “ordinary” origins and his extraordinary character and feats. The fall of Fascism, the ongoing contestation of its legacy in postwar Italy, and the arrival and burial of Mussolini’s remains all added further twists, for in their wake it must have seemed hard to believe that Predappio could ever be ordinary again, condemned instead to its island status as a metonym for something seen by most as extraordinary and indeed as extraordinarily evil. In response to this, the form of ordinary life pursued in contemporary Predappio is now characterized precisely by its distinction from the man who built it and from his own particular vision of ordinariness, despite the fact that life in Predappio is saturated by specters of Mussolini and despite the fact that the roots of this concern for ordinariness lie precisely in the ways in which ordinariness emerged as important in the Fascist political project.

Ordinariness and Fascism in contemporary Predappio are, therefore, both historically interwoven with each other and yet crucially distinct in important ways, not least because ordinariness in contemporary Predappio means having as little to do with Fascism as possible. In other words, this is a particular vision of ordinary life as a form, one that is a product of a specific set of historical, social, and cultural circumstances. This, I suggest, is an example of what we can learn from taking an ethnographic perspective not just on ordinary life as it is lived, but on the ways in which such specific visions of ordinariness play into people’s understandings of how they should live.

In the social sciences, we sometimes fetishize the ordinary and the everyday, investing them as categories with special moral value. The fact that we are not the only ones to do so should cause us some hesitation. As I have sought to illustrate in closing here, Predappiesi, along with a great many other people, treat being ordinary as an important virtue, as the object of sustained work and attention. It matters to them and to many others like them to be perceived as ordinary, as if it were a more obviously laudable characteristic, such as being brave, kind, generous, or good.

Wittgenstein, whose ghost haunts this book as Mussolini’s does Predappio, gave us an enormously influential analytical language with which to describe the simple facts of the way things are. Yet usually there is nothing simple about the way things are. What is really ordinary about life in Predappio: day-to-day existence in the shadow of Mussolini’s grave and amid the sad remnants of his hateful regime, or the life many Predappiesi aspire to live, marked as ordinary precisely by its opposition to the way things are? What was really ordinary about Wittgenstein: the peculiar manners, temper, and philosophical genius that marked him out as far as others around him were concerned, or the times when he was a simple soldier, rural schoolteacher, or hospital porter? It is not reality but precisely the influence of language and practice—that of Wittgenstein and others—that endows a certain kind of answer to these questions with authority and credibility, that gives it life as “the ordinary,” and not just life but a quite extraordinary allure and power, as many who have read Wittgenstein have felt, and just as many Italians in the 1920s and ’30s no doubt felt looking at the straw bed in the unassuming house in Predappio in which young Mussolini was supposed to have slept. That power lived on beyond Mussolini’s death and burial in the family tomb; it is part of what draws tens of thousands to his grave every year, and it haunts the streets of his hometown today.