Abstract
The contribution focuses on the identity issue with reference to the European integration process. To this aim, the case of the Southern Adriatic area – covering the Italian South-East and South western Balkans (namely Apulia and Albania) – will be highlighted. This region shows many reasons of interest for the whole process of European integration, as it represents a kind of hinge between Western civilization and the East, Europe and the Mediterranean, North and South of the World. Our thesis is that, despite the different traditions, cultural heritage, histories, political dominion etc., the societies facing on the two sides of the lower Adriatic sea share common core attitudes. They were forged on the basis of a similar existential framework: the secular (or century-old?) condition of marginalisation in relation to the hubs of political power. So, the lower Adriatic inhabitants have acquired a particular skill to win the grace of the ruler in office, whoever he was, building, at the same time, a hidden orb in which to preserve their authenticity, their original cultural references. This framework has produced, in the long run, an anti-identitarian people’s constitution, i.e. an “anthropology of the absence,” consisting of two complementary dimensions: mimicry and the vernacular order. This ensures both the merger of dissimilarities and the preservation of an impregnable singularity. The anthropology of the absence still emerges strongly in relation to the new political focus with which this region relates nowadays: the European Union. The implemented policies aimed at cohesion and integration of the peripheral regions are here systematically diverted to reproduce life forms consolidated over the centuries, which escape the fundamental canons of the Western-European model of society. But, far from being included as a disease, the attitude developed in the lower Adriatic could represent a useful suggestion for Europe itself, always faced with the problem of its unresolved identity.
Highlights
The contribution focuses on the identity issue with reference to the European integration process.To this aim, the case of the Southern Adriatic area – covering the Italian South-East and South western Balkans – will be highlighted
For a long time we have been crushed between the anvil of "imaginary socialism" and the hammer of "real socialism"
Participation in the dominant system is not insured by the exploitation of tangible and intangible territory resources, but mainly by picking up the resources produced elsewhere, flowing in the globalization circuits. This abduction economy takes on different characters on the two sides: more hidden in Apulia and more visible in Albania
Summary
For a long time we have been crushed between the anvil of "imaginary socialism" and the hammer of "real socialism". Mimicry and the circular (a-historical) existence seriously undermine the logic of economic exploitation mirroring a twofold strategy for the resolution of the problem of livelihood: the practice of parasitic capture of resource flows from the ICES’09 colonizing powers (attached to mimicry) and the vernacular self-production (horticultural scale cultivation, harvesting of nature wild fruits, wild animal breeding, etc..) in accordance with the preservation logic of the social reproduction static circuit. These features are not outdated materials but rather stand out in full force during the end of the Fordist modernity. This abduction economy takes on different characters on the two sides: more hidden in Apulia and more visible in Albania
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