Draft First Chapter/Intro Thesis

What am I going to explain in the first part of the thesis?

In this text I want to outline a story on how identity is formed in communities. How we can consider our selves singular individuals and how is our existence as individuals interacting with a form of being in community with others. Starting with a simple assumption that those two forms of existence (being an individual and being in a community) are interlaced and indivisible concepts, my thesis and my project aims to look at two different forms of community living while using them as models for this inquire. I choosed to explore the Italian village where I was born, called “Cembra”, and a small community based in Rotterdam, place that I currently inhabit, called The Poortgebouw, and use the two contexts, with their histories of collaboration and self-organization, as starting point and contextualization for my thesis research. Both places are and were for me fundamental in terms of personal social formation, in developing ability for dealing with struggles and to attach on basic values of mutual respect and brotherhood, as well as offering examples and stories on organizational systems and on the centrality of collaboration.

Cembra

Going back to my hometown it always feel like a tour toward reality. The place where I was born and grew up is a small village on the border between Sudtirol and Trentino. Both provinces are part of the so-called Autonomous Regions in Italy, particularly to the Trentino Alto-Adige/Südtirol Region. This region, which is the place more up-north of Italy, is together with Friuli Venezia Giulia, the latest region that became Italian only after the 1st World War, in 1918. This region has a strong history in bilingualism and coexistence of different minorities. The two main languages spoken here are Italian and German, although another small portion of the population speaks Ladin, Mochén and Cimbrian, the first one a Rhaeto-Romance language, and the other two are Bavarian dialects. The geographical position of Cembra was historically strategical for the fluxes toward Germany: the Adige river (which is placed at the side of Trento, the main city of the region) was in the past often subject of overflows. During the period of the year where those overflows were quite often affecting the city, the traffic of people directed to the north had to reroute among the Valley of Cembra. Lots of emperors from the Holy Roman Empire and illustrious figures of the history sailed through this small village in the Alps. Cembra was part of the state of Tyrol from 1295 onwards, under the Hasburg Empire, until it became an Italian region in 1918.

As semi-outsider, as I consider my self now, I can say that my village doesn’t look at first such multicultural and pluralist community as I’m trying to describe it in the above text. The small amount of population and a consistent concentration of wealth in a little portion of territory always influenced my theories on the scarce inclusiveness and fairness of such system of co-existence. The economy of my village is founded on grape plantation, wine production, extraction of porphyry and partially on tourism. Living in a small place like Cembra (that has only a population of 1,776) means spending a lot of time with the same people, means growing up with multiple families and relatives, knowing all the family trees of the whole population, having an infinite list of necessary rituals and habits orally transmitted. I cannot imagine how it would be to grow up in a bigger town, but I’m imagining that those processes are slightly different and characterized by expanded networks of relationships. I think the life-form of a small center is a peculiar but not exclusive form of community: individuals tends to organize themselves in groups everywhere, in cities or small towns; although is important to notice how in a village the group of people you’ll collaborate with is eventually a given group, not really a chosen one. A community, as a totality of people united by a series of obligations and duties, is characterized by a sense of belonging which implies a sense of responsibility towards the others. The life of a community of people, marked by a fear of conflict and common danger, demands to develop series of regulations and laws that can ensure the survival for the people and the common resources. The rules that people establish in order to protect the survival of their community, usually reflects the habits, behaviors and necessities of a population. Was extremely interesting for me, on this point, to recently find a book in my house which analyzes and translates three different set of old regulations that governed the village of Cembra through the years. As the author Alfonso Lettieri reminds in the introduction, to understand reasons and patterns of the village’s habits it’s important to look back at the development of its rules, considering them as a mirror of the way generations of citizens organize themselves in a given space. The norms codification is an action of transcription of what was first only habit and tradition. In this book are published three different legislations from three different historical periods: the first one called “Regola Cimbrae” from 1508, century of the Council of Trento and the counter-reformation of Martin Luther, the second series of laws named “Capitoli Chomunalli”, written in the time Cembra was under the domination of the Hamburg Empire of Maria Theresa of Austria, and the last order from the year 1807, recorded right after the occupation of Trentino by the troops of Napoleone Bonaparte. Already in the first set of conventions from 1508, the rules, written demonstrations of the common sense of a population, were drafted through a democratic and self-organized process of law-making. The distribution of the political and administrative roles was operating by a rotation model, with consequent impossibility of perpetuating the command duties (and avoiding abuse of dynastic rights). The whole population was convened to elect (with a majority or consent vote system) eight people that will compile the statutes that regulates the public life of the fellow citizens. This system was dictated by the will of the people of Cembra, even though the policies of the Tyrol state influenced significantly its features. Since 1342 Tyrol enjoyed of a constitution that was guaranteeing individual freedom and property rights to citizens. It is exceptional that tradition of this village is the value of self-governance as fundamental principle for the affirmation of democracy.

I thought of spending quite some time in describing the history of the statutes of this small community to highlight a fundamental necessity: the importance of reevaluating systems that facilitates and promotes the active participation of citizens in the development of its structural foundations, like the law-making processes. Our neoliberal contemporary society seems to be characterized by a community of “perfect” individuals: individuals bordered, isolated and protected by immunization; that power executed by government and by super-imposed regulations that freed individuals from the “dept” of community existence. Contact and proximity, two of the main characteristics of community life are now seen as threats to identity formation because it expose people to possible conflicts. Our neo-liberalist policies and the logic of bio-politics (* here I need to unpack, explain the reference to Foucault ….) are all based on the assumption that the only way an individual can survive in a community is by breaking every communitarian bond. Ignoring the fundament on which the concept of community is based: that the thing that people have in “common” is the “obligation” of giving, not the right of property. “Communitas is the totality of persons united not by a “property” but precisely by an obligation or a debt; not by an addition but by a substraction” (Roberto Esposito, The Origin and Destiny of Community)

Poortgebouw

(……… )

here I will explain why and what I will talk about the Poortgebouw policies and histories

Why are those two places important for this research

1. Because they are my Heimat: a German word, impossible to translate in any language, that indicates the relation of a human with a specific portion of space. The term could be similar to the concept of "home" or "homeland" although it is more important for the fact that it express the descendance, the community and the traditions that forms a person identity. It is interesting to indicate that "heimatkunde" was a school subject in South Tyrol, before the 90's. The word can be translate with "local studies", "the subject explores every child's world starting with the individual, expanding to the family, friends, classroom, social structure and immediate geography up to the environment, animals and plants, and local history." (From: http://www.rorhof.com/books/heimatkunde a project showed in the exhibition Heimat and Patriae at Museion BZ by the artist Nicolò De Giorgis, http://www.museion.it/2017/09/haematli-patriae/?lang=en)

2. Because of the need for a pluralist society and democracy that can describe us as both individual and collective beings, while it legitimize and recognize the naturalness of conflict (that always generates by conditions of being collectively) : in this small communities their self-organized structures allows margins of improvisation and deals with conflict in a direct and immediate way (although Cembra is now very different from its past, politically speaking....) . I need to spend more time though on describing my village "now", with its new forms of cultural emergencies, jobs, migration and immigration fluxes....

3. Because of the importance of social movements / strikes / dissent as necessary counter-acts that form and informs the way our society works. Focus on the history of the appropriation of the space of the Poortgebouw, and describing a list of episodes that happened in the past in the valley of Cembra (an example is the "Grappa Revolt", here a small documentary made by a local movie-director: https://vimeo.com/223607729)