Political Rituals and Discourses: The Case of Carinthia

Abstract

This article discusses selected ritual practices in Klagenfurt (Sln. Celovec), the capital of the southernmost Austrian state of Carinthia (Germ. Karnten). The first ritual is connected with October 10, when the 1920 plebiscite is commemorated on the streets of Klagenfurt. In this plebiscite, the majority of people voted for remaining a part of Austria, the successor state to Austria-Hun- gary. The second ritual is a more recent one, known as the Memorial Walk (Germ. Gedenkgehen, Sln. Spominska hoja). Various cultural practices are analysed, as well as the use of symbols and space, media, state, and national discourses. Political rituals are practices set in concrete chronotopes. They express and materialise a sense of belonging, the formation of identities, and the establishment of local, regional, ethnic, national, or state entities. They also represent an area of social cohesion, self-identification, the marking of social affiliation and the exclusion of the Other. Political rituals are unavoidable in social integration (Lukes 1975), socialisation of hierarchies, relations, and the use of power. They are used repeatedly, year after year, to define, embody, and materialise ethnic, language, and other barriers which do not allow a single person, socialised in any community, to remain unaffected or undecided. As Steven Lukes has put it, political rituals mobilise bias, but they also raise questions about the relationships between different discourses, for example, between the official political discourse of the ruling parties, media discourses, the so-called common sense discourse, and the subcultural discourse present mainly among various extremist groups. Rituals speak to and about society and its institutions, and enable and recreate their extractive or inclusive characters (North 1991). The dynamics of cognitive bias can be seen and indeed was seen on February 10, during the Memorial Day (Il Giorno del ricordo) in the Trieste region (cf. Fikfak 2009), where, in 2007, an intense interplay of political views was brought to