Aime
The Stain of Race.
Stories of ordinary discrimination
Foreword by Marc Augé - Afterword by Guido Barbujani
«Loneliness feeds fear, Dragan. This is the reason why we design a common enemy; to bolster our collective identity. In doing so, all that we manage to accomplish is a sort of collective individualism. The greater our sense of loneliness is, the more we cling to abstract terms such as "identity", a notion vague enough to accommodate all our greed and egoism. A truncheon we can beat other people with».
An open letter to Dragan, a Romani kid just like any other, trying to make him understand what we too struggle to understand.
In this letter, Marco Aime invites us to reflect, without any fear, on what is currently happening to us, to our culture. If in the past, as any other culture, it used to be penciled with an eraser always able to modify its contour, nowadays it is becoming more and more close, rigid, like a weapon ready to hit. Or, even worst, our culture is trasforming itself into an iron cage, which is imprisoning more than protecting us. From this cage, we observe, powerless, events that appear to us every time more unavoidable and less dangerous, at the point that they start to appear as normal. Just like dipping the finger of a kid into ink to affix the stain of race. Today, we are like those football fans who go to the stadium not to cheer their team but to insult the supporters of the other team. People who have made the color of a t-shirt the emblem of a homeland worth fighting, maiming or even killing for. An instrument of discrimination rather than solidarity.
Marco Aime (Torino 1956) teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of Genoa, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Benin, Burkina Faso and Mali, and Italy. He is the author of various anthropology books, some of which – Cultura and La macchia della razza – have been translated into Spanish language by the Spanish publishing house Cambalache.
Spanish edition not available
Stories of ordinary discrimination
Foreword by Marc Augé - Afterword by Guido Barbujani
«Loneliness feeds fear, Dragan. This is the reason why we design a common enemy; to bolster our collective identity. In doing so, all that we manage to accomplish is a sort of collective individualism. The greater our sense of loneliness is, the more we cling to abstract terms such as "identity", a notion vague enough to accommodate all our greed and egoism. A truncheon we can beat other people with».
An open letter to Dragan, a Romani kid just like any other, trying to make him understand what we too struggle to understand.
In this letter, Marco Aime invites us to reflect, without any fear, on what is currently happening to us, to our culture. If in the past, as any other culture, it used to be penciled with an eraser always able to modify its contour, nowadays it is becoming more and more close, rigid, like a weapon ready to hit. Or, even worst, our culture is trasforming itself into an iron cage, which is imprisoning more than protecting us. From this cage, we observe, powerless, events that appear to us every time more unavoidable and less dangerous, at the point that they start to appear as normal. Just like dipping the finger of a kid into ink to affix the stain of race. Today, we are like those football fans who go to the stadium not to cheer their team but to insult the supporters of the other team. People who have made the color of a t-shirt the emblem of a homeland worth fighting, maiming or even killing for. An instrument of discrimination rather than solidarity.
Marco Aime (Torino 1956) teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of Genoa, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Benin, Burkina Faso and Mali, and Italy. He is the author of various anthropology books, some of which – Cultura and La macchia della razza – have been translated into Spanish language by the Spanish publishing house Cambalache.
Spanish edition not available