Book Review: Evicted from Eternity

Anthropological Quarterly

Michael Herzfeld, Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2009, 373 pp.

"Monti Moments: Men's Memories in the Heart of Rome." Produced by Michael Herzfeld. 39 min. Color. 2007, VHS and DVD Berkeley: Berkeley Media LLC.

"Nothing here is perfect, everything, even failure, is magnificent" (p.7), Michael Herzfeld wittingly remarks in the opening chapter of his new book, Evicted from Eternity, an illuminating immersion in the numerous intricacies compounded in the changing urban dynamics of Monti, Rome's oldest district. This is an important lesson the reader should keep in mind while following Herzfeld through his striking, sophisticated and detailed ethnographic account of the daily aporias encountered in the heart of "classic Rome."

We thus enter the Subura-the underground city-a " sunken" district caught between the dizzying shopping sprees of the via Nazionale and the touristy beaten paths leading up to famous ruins such as the Fori Imperiali and the Coliseum. In the last few decades, Monti gradually rose to fame by shedding its " red light" clandestine demeanor and mutating into an elegant trend-setting hotbed. Nowadays, politicians, upper-echelon bureaucrats, intellectuals, journalists and artists converge in close proximity with new voguish ethnic restaurants and high-end designer boutiques. These changes have had an enormous impact on the real estate market which has become not only one of the hottest commodities around (a new taste for old houses), but also reason for cultural debate as both history and memory are now being molded into important assets in the general quest for profit and cultural capital. By meticulously portraying the complex contrasts and juxtapositions between historical reinterpretations and re-appropriations, the impact of the new global civic consciousness, localized fragmented politics and ambient corruption, Herzfeld proposes an intriguing and novel venture in the processes of globalization and Europeanization at ground level.

Monti is surely the main stage here and while most of the work is based on robust ethnographic accounts of its everyday life and cultural intimacies, Herzfeld never steers very far from global discourses and practices. Neoliberalism, the boldest case in point here, creeps throughout the book and provides a salient coda for the ensemble. By that time, many facets of life in Monti have been carefully described and presented, not least of which is the submission of the traditional Left to neoliberal tenets, the Vatican's convergent interests with real estate speculators, the ambivalent impact of world cultural heritage values and criteria and the laborious local politics in a structurally segmented world of shifting and fragmented social rivalries.

The result is an impressionist mosaic built from the ground up that can be tightly woven by the reader, as the numerous ethnographic threads of quotidian and local experiences gradually interact with the emerging normative conformism-what Herzfeld designated as the "global hierarchy of value" in his previous book (The Body Impolitic, 2007). Here again, the author presents his data by refusing the generalizations of globalization theories and simplistic cultural determinism, favoring instead a much welcomed focus on the complex and uneven distribution of social practices and rhetorical ambiguities that partake in the constant making and re-making of Rome.

While still nostalgically presenting the district as a village in a city, and their dialect "a way of life," Monti's denizens have indeed witnessed massive changes in the last thirty years. The recent arrival of a wealthier, more educated class of residents, and high-end shopkeepers and tourists, coupled with a major housing crisis, have had considerable impact on some of the poorer and longtime dwellers, most notably artisans and small shopkeepers, who have simply been unable to keep up with the heightening prices of property and rents. As Herzfeld describes in careful detail, Monti traditionally harbored a distinctively individualist "mind-your-own-business" and "do-it-your-own-way" ethos of artisanship, which, although sympathetic to leftist working class ideals, also made it a little impervious to unionization and the conventional leftist politics of industrialized workers. Yet, this sturdy individualism did not preclude civic engagement (as the long history of guilds, credit associations, etc., demonstrates) or a social conservatism that helped maintain Monti's distinctiveness throughout the years. The Monticiani did not, as Herzfeld rightly argues, lack "social capital," although they did actually constitute a civil community that was quite aware of both the utility and ambiguity of civic virtue.

To clarify this point, Herzfeld suggests an original and perceptive analytical distinction between civic and civil, the latter of which he contrasts to the idealized civic order of the Nation-State-not only to consensual civic ideals of the new neoliberal governance (the great triumvirate of democracy, efficiency and transparency), but also to civic ideals of associational life (diverse groupings concerned with municipal issues). This, he contends, is not meant as a rigid separation of two different social spheres-neither old/new, local/foreign or vice/virtue-but an analytical one allowing a closer inspection of how engaging in the public sphere (the civic) consistently implies adapting to or clashing with established ways of socially getting along (civility, courteousness). While both imply inequalities and even the maintenance of such hierarchies, they can also offer means to alleviate some of its burdens. Throughout the book, Herzfeld gives us numerous accounts of this dynamic and ambivalent relation: citizens using civic values and dissent to undermine consensual roman civility, lawmakers taking into account existing civil reciprocities that might even subvert the actual technical application of the law or politicians caught between the virtues of anti-corruption posturing while having to subtly show their ability to partake in it to be recognized.

The distinction is therefore intended to underscore the inevitable interconnectedness one finds in the body politic itself rather then separate realms that would sometimes mesh. It also offers the advantage of grounding both elites and population in the same social world-constrained, we might say, on the same moral ground-while keeping the focus on how the civic is constantly and necessarily "refracted"1 through the civil and not simply homogeneously reproduced and diffused from the global level.

The contrast is crucial to the intended timely critique Herzfeld's formulates against some of the academic abstractions social, political and economic sciences tend to produce-neoliberalism, of course, should again spring to mind here. The author offers us a vivid reminder that abstraction itself is a social process and how small a role agency actually plays in such grandiloquent schemes that may simply amount to tentative social dispossession and enforced self-legitimacy. In Monti today, this is even more preoccupying, as both the Vatican and some traditional leftists cynically yield to neoliberal profiteering by being at the center of both gentrification and eviction processes. To make matters even worse, the leftist municipal administration of the district has also taken up the interests of both the Vatican and neoliberals alike. Few options remain accessible to denizens who are trying to resist the onslaught of the new economy and enriching elites as they enter the cascading spiral of debt and fall into the hands of extortionists (usurers). The long plight of the ten families who fought (and lost) to keep their homes in an eighteenth-century palazzo (see chapter 9) strikingly exemplifies this dramatic widespread tendency.

Herzfeld undertakes a highly profitable detour in the realm of older moral assumptions that offers not only an impressive contrast to emerging ideals of the new civic consciousness, but also an extremely original ethnographic perspective on how these variably intersect at ground level. Here, the inescapable "revered and hated presence" (p.53) of the Vatican-who, it should be mentioned, owns a large portion of real estate in Rome-but especially the Christian doctrine of original sin-which assumes that a world managed by God does not exclude imperfection-takes center stage. Original sin, Herzfeld suggests, is an implicit and generic framework that serves as moral background in the management of daily social relations as it also enables the disposition of blame and accountability. An "etiology," Herzfeld adds, that allows the persistent chronicling of the inevitability of sin and guilt at all social levels and, therefore, the necessity of socially facing up to such imperfections in different manners.

The most persuasive example, offered by the author, of the persistence of managerial techniques based on such a doctrine from the theological to the secular realm is the recuperation, by the Italian State, of the Catholic Church's practice of indulgences. Originally intended as a religious mechanism enabling the Church to reduce time in the purgatory or give partial absolution to the faithful through the recitation of certain prayers or the payment of fines to the Church, it became, at the State level, a way for citizens to reduce the amount of fines by simply paying a portion of it (thus recognizing their sins and obtaining partial redemption). Yet, proof of the pervasiveness of sin and the corruption inherent to life on earth is also literarily built into the Roman landscape as it is manifest in the many portraits of the Madonna, the comforter of sins, on many street corners, in the scattered ruins throughout the urban landscape and the numerous illegal architectural extensions accumulated over the centuries. The necessity for compromise, the inescapability of corruption and built-in ambiguities are, Herzfeld contends, basic features encountered in the social realm and serve as proof of the predominant realist pragmatism one finds in Roman day-to-day outlooks on politics, law and socializing.

The new civic order, as Herzfeld suggests, may be as incapable as the old one to assure virtuousness from all its flock, but it parts ways with the older doctrine of original sin by its undying confidence in the application of its abstract models. It also treats eternity in a different manner then the doctrine of original sin not seeing it in the numerous imperfections of social life itself, but in the abstract ideal itself, separating it from the lived social experience of the citizens.

In other words, as Herzfeld remarks, gentrification is a class-driven affair. The convergent interests of national government, Vatican and real estate speculators toward "monumentalization" of the buildings and landscape create a particular understanding of the past. It becomes an abstract appropriation, by some who proclaim themselves guardians of the patrimonio (heritage), that strips it away from some of the citizens and their day-to-day experience of the urban space.

As one of Herzfeld's informant aptly surmised: "No one sings anymore... we're all fakes now" (p.17), suggesting not only that a sense of belonging seems less and less and intricate part of living in Monti, but also that basic sociality somehow now eludes its residents more then it ever did. While some still find comfort in the fleeting neighborly civility, it has been the site of a gradual erosion brought upon by both patterns of eviction due the callous calculus of the new economy and politically correct forms of civil virtue issuing around nascent hierarchies. Herzfeld keenly demonstrates how some of the shielding local intimacies, like nostalgia itself-that can account for subtle and not so subtle exclusions-have been crucial in the social preservation of Monti's distinctiveness up until the 1980s. He also convincingly argues that the contemporary context informs us on how new ideals and norms, such as cosmopolitan principled elites, also distribute lines of civic and civil exclusion and self-legitimacy. In this, he does an impeccable job in not falling prey to simplistic and evolutionist models of good versus bad as he keeps vice and virtue flowing through lively social lines.

To complement the reading of Evicted from Eternity, the reader can also view Monti Moments. Men's Memories in the Heart of Rome (2007), a documentary filmed and produced by Herzfeld himself. It offers a vivid portrait of Monti's environment commented by some of its erudite denizens who share very rich and detailed accounts of Monti life. Again, historical "grandeur and garbage" are recalled through the memory of these men as they relate some of the key events punctuating the district's ancient and recent past intertwined with personal tales and general impressions of daily life in the Subura.

The film is, of course, a testament to the denizens of Monti, but in tandem with the book it also highlights the essential input of key informants in the elaboration of Herzfeld's work. Opting to keep aesthetics and commentary to a minimum, the raw ethnographic material is prioritized in such a way that the chosen interventions succinctly illustrate many of the important facets we have touched upon throughout this review.

Herzfeld begins and ends the documentary by focusing on the fitting metaphor of the water fountains-affectionately named "big noses"- that still draw their water from Rome's ancient aqueducts and, so we learn, might be on the verge of disappearing. Of course, the eternal city was certainly not built in a day, but "it was (and is) built and rebuilt at a tempo and according to rules that have rarely been those approved by officialdom-or, more accurately, by officialdom acting officially (p.129)." In the gentrified landscape of contemporary Monti, that rhythm is fading.

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