Kalabrien – Land zwischen Alltag und Apokalypse

Abstract

Calabria is the poorest region of Italy, a cultural melting-pot, and a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. Foreign rulership over centuries, natural disasters and massive waves of emigration characterize its history. The results were the dispersion of the Calabrian people all over the western world and a certain turn to inner life accompanied by darker ideas of decline and apocalypse. This essay tries to reconstruct the cultural contradictions of a European borderland, using the experimental form of an historical-anthropological travel account. It is inspired by the methodical question of how to transcend the ‘tourist view’ of a five-week journey for a more profound ethnographic experience. The main subject is the rebuilding of the Calabrian habitus from a synopsis of its very different elements ranging from natural history and the history of sovereignty to medieval philosophy (Joachim of Fiore), modern literature, and everyday survival practices. Comprehensive interviews with local residents trace the tensions between the Calabrian self-image and the perceptions of others. The article focuses on three key aspects: the antique Greek colonisation of ‘Magna Grecia’ (Sybaris), the Byzantine period (Rossano), and the persistance of the Mafia (Ndrangheta) in the present. There is a lot of unwritten history in-between, but it is precisely this erraticism that characterises the history of the Mezzogiorno, which, for centuries, experienced continuity only through the family, kinship, neighborhood, and their social rites.