Abstract
Citroni and Navarini provide a summary of the relationship between order and liminality and show how this analytical framework facilitates a better understanding of the consolidation of “populist” political forces and their incorporation in Italy’s government. The authors focus on the campaigning prior to the Italian elections of 2018 and their immediate aftermath, a period when the frameworks of ritual order and liminality overlapped; they draw attention to the emergence of threshold zones of political discourse and practice that gradually moved from the periphery to the “symbolic centre”. This process involved subversion of the established rules and changes to the symbols of social ties, such as representations of national cohesion and “the other”, that normally affect the reproduction of community power.
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Notes
- 1.
Soeffner emphasizes the instability of our existence in modern societies and the importance and complex nature of the rituals that counter this; Goffman’s focus is not on our social existence but on the social order of interactions, which is based on a precarious equilibrium that is usually re-established by ritual.
- 2.
As many anthropologists, for example Holmberg (1989), have suggested, an order can be identified in various cultural phenomena, despite their apparently paradoxical nature.
- 3.
Providing a brief description of this order, Foucault says that ‘in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality’ (1981, p. 52).
- 4.
A very interesting recent study on China’s economic culture (Herrmann-Pillath, 2018) supports the thesis that state and market have a ritual order even in periods when there is no crisis.
- 5.
A similar analytical approach to threshold zones is used in Holtmann’s research (2012) on virtual leadership in “jihadist cyberspace”.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
‘Tangentopoli’ can be translated as ‘Bribesville’ or ‘Kickback City’.
- 9.
This expression has been used several times by Grillo in his blog www.ilblogdellestelle.it. See also the newspapers Il Fatto Quotidiano, 10/12/2014 (www.ilfattoquotidiano.it), and Il Giornale, 17/03/2018 (www.ilgiornale.it).
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Citroni, S., Navarini, G. (2020). Liminality and Ritual Order: Italy’s National Elections of 2018. In: Lamond, I., Moss, J. (eds) Liminality and Critical Event Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40256-3_11
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