Debt, Hegemony and Heterochrony in a Sicilian City

Abstract

In the 2013 elections, the Sicilian city of Messina voted-in a mayor from the Cambiamo Messina dal Basso (CMDB) movement. Perceived as a Messiah sent to save the city from years of political and economic mismanagement, it soon became clear that it would not be easy for him to negotiate the bureaucracy of the traditional clientelist political establishment. This paper explores how the CMDB movement has come to terms with negotiating bureaucratic and structural time while attempting to maintain their Messianic ideals.

Keywords:

• Time-scapes
• Patronage
• Social Movements
• Bureaucracy
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Cf. Comaroff and Comaroff (2001) and Harvey (2014). For some anthropological analysis on the relationship between civil society, social and political movement in Italy during the past two decades, see Schneider and Schneider (2003), Zinn (2011), Koensler and Rossi (2012), Heatherington (2010), Osterweil (2013), and Zerilli and Pitzalis (2013).

[2] Both quotations are from the Press Conference respectively of Nina Lo Presti and Gino Sturniolo on 2 September 2014, and reported by various press organs: cf. the website http://www.messinaora.it of 2 September 2014, consulted on 12 November 2014.

[3] See Comaroff and Comaroff (2001, 24), Appadurai (2013, 400–402), Postill (2013, 3), Bear (2014a, 5–6), and Lazar (2014, 102).

[4] See Herzfeld (1997, 109–138) for a fundamental analysis of the relationships between nation-state and the pretention to an essential and transcendent temporality.