by Mark Dyal
After leaving the bar, I witnessed these Ultras holler mild insults at African purse sellers packing away their sack of merchandise for the evening. If I witnessed, or more importantly, noted and described, only the insults — which asked the Africans to do something more substantial (significativo) with their lives (and to do so away from Rome) — or worse, chose to disconnect them from the evening’s discussion, it would be a lot easier to dismiss them as racists and xenophobes. While using terms and concepts that encapsulate a wide variety of behaviors, like mentalità and agonistic culture, I also tried to move away from terms like racism or xenophobia, because these tend to mask the motivation and even humanity of those so labeled.
Instead, as is apparent from this vignette, the subjects of this study forced me to understand the moral aspect of creating social science. Most of the respondents to my questionnaires consider themselves to be Fascists. Indeed, the ‘air one breathes’ amongst the Ultras is thick with the memory, examples, and folklore of the Fascist period. Recent scholarship on Fascism has rehabilitated the phenomenon as a valuable subject of study, but there are still consequences of the moral and political aversions to the phenomenon, including misleading accounts of policy and personalities. RJB Bosworth is praised for his biography of Mussolini and his history of Mussolini’s Italy, yet the latter text is littered with words like ‘wicked,’ ‘evil,’ ‘intrusive,’ ‘racist,’ ‘henchmen,’ ‘corrupt,’ ‘lies,’ ‘neurotic,’ and ‘gullible.’32
Carlo Ginzburg has shown that micro-histories, with a greatly reduced scale of observation, allow one to challenge the ‘polarizations between social and cultural history, [and] analysis and narrative.’ Micro-histories focus on individual cultural acts, events, or reproductions, thereby repositioning macro-historical studies and, in the case of Fascism, their moralizing tendencies. Though I do not resort to micro-history, the method does lend itself to understanding the relationship between words and grammar — or experience and its narrative structures.33
Like Ginzburg, I use the sources that my subjects use to describe and explain themselves. Alas, these sources, like Fascism, are all morally and politically tainted. Though Nietzsche, Sorel, Le Bon, and Evola are attacked for lacking a commitment to a liberal democratic or egalitarian social order, they are popular in Ultra circles. It is fitting, then, that Ultra ideas and vocabulary be used to explain aspects of Ultra behavior and thought.
Mentalità and Myth
Having presented the need for a ‘poetic’ usage of ideology, we may now turn to the reason for the previous diversion: the mentalità of the Ultras. Like ideology, mentalità connotes many things. Mentalità translates normally as mentality, but it can also denote a cultural worldview, so as to extend beyond the individual mind-set that it denotes in English. The Ultras — who use the word perhaps more consistently than any other when discussing the world and themselves — mean it in this broader sense. Hence, the way it is defined here is important. Before doing so, I want to briefly discuss how the Ultras use mentalità. I will then turn to the basis of my thinking of a definition. This comes not only from those who study Weltanschauung but also consciousness, narrative, and myth.
Mentalità is most commonly used by the Ultras as an explanation of what makes them different from others. Usually, the ‘others’ in question are the bourgeois fans glorified by the Italian media as ‘real’ or ‘true’ soccer fans, or the bourgeoisie in general. The distance between the Ultras and the bourgeoisie is guaranteed by behavior — violence, aggression, and extreme commitment to rivalry and hostility; but also, according to Pasquale, a longtime Ultra, honor, commitment, and ‘unfailing steadfastness’ (fermezza). However, the Ultras explain their own commitment to these behaviors as a product of mentalità. This is an important element of the Ultras phenomenon because the majority of Ultras could be classified economically as bourgeois; yet they speak of the bourgeoisie as living a life that is empty and fatuous. That they do not live such a life is, again, a product of their mentalità.
Figure 3. Curva Sud greets the world at large, 2007.
It is also interesting that the Ultras use mentalità as an explanation of their difference from others, as the concept is common amongst Italians as a way to understand, not only individual personalities, but also social and political aggregates as well. For instance, while one may possess a mentalità infantile (childish outlook) or mentalità chiusa (closed-mind), there is also the possibility of a mentalità dei popoli latini (Latin worldview). It is commonly said, pejoratively, that a mentalità del Sud (Southern personality/form of life/culture/mentality) may explain the underdevelopment of the southern Italian regions.
When used to discuss social and political aggregates, it seems the larger the aggregate, the more negative becomes the mentalità said to be in use. For example, both Barzini (1996) and De Martino (2005) posit the existence of something peculiar to Italy, Italians, or certain Italians. Barzini’s text is, in essence, a list of features of the Italian mentalità — almost all of them negative and parochial. Moe (2002) studied the creation of the Southern Question — the idea that the south is somehow culturally and morally different from the rest of Italy — and, in the end, explains that foreign authors discerned a spiritual difference between Italians and other Europeans (of the north and west).
Conversely, the mentalità of townspeople, political parties, or phenomena like the Ultras, is usually discussed as the basis of extremely positive co-identification. In Rome, the Roman mentalità was given as rationale for a refusal to eat peanut butter. When presented with the decidedly American sandwich spread, a friend in Monteverde, the neighborhood in which I lived, declined a taste on the grounds that, ‘it is not part of our mentalità to eat something like that.’ Returning to the Ultras, mentalità was most commonly invoked during games away from Rome — or in discussing these games — when engaging with opposing Ultras. ‘The thirst for feelings of raw electricity,’ I was told by Stefano, a forty-one-year-old Ultra of the group Monteverde, ‘is something particular to the Ultras. You either have it or you do not; and those who do not would never do what we do. Our mentalità seeks these encounters.’
It is important to understand how diffused amongst AS Roma’s Ultras is this idea of mentalità as something that promotes aggression, violence, and a defensive posture toward a variety of foes. Every Ultra I encountered in Rome spoke of the Ultras as, if nothing else, completely and utterly different from others. On the occasions when mentalità was invoked, it was consistently presented as the basis of that difference. Often it seemed that what the Ultras meant was an earned credibility, or honor, in the sense of Campbell’s (1964) understanding of how threats confer manliness in honor-based societies. We might think of it thus as a spirit — as a common indicator of responsibility and expectation. However, mentalità was also given as an indescribable sensation of connectedness to other AS Roma Ultras created during important AS Roma games, as if one could sense mentalità in the air. In this way, the mentalità could incorporate the tension and hostility with the elation and camaraderie — sensations of the heart — felt during and after games.
One can see that their usage of the concept leaves us unable to codify it in any meaningful sense. To the American reader, it might seem that culture is a good translation and way towards understanding mentalità. However, it too becomes just a metaphor when faced with the wide range of usages of mentalità. This confusion is compounded by the fact that many of these same Ultras only use culture to connote physical/material goods and cuisines. Otherwise, mentalità was used. Therefore, I created my own definition of mentalità drawn from its usages and features. I will begin the discussion of that definition with myth.
Augustine described consciousness as a process of ‘expectation, attention, and memory:’ ‘the future, which [the mind] expects, passes through the present, to which it attends, into the past, which it remembers.’34 As Kirsten Hastrup explains, through memory of the p
ast and anticipation of the future we use cultural symbols and institutions to create a bridge between these two and the present. In the present, action and experience meet.35
This connection of past, present, and future is critical to the way the in which Ultras engage the life experience. Like others, they use narrative to weave a ‘conscious self,’ but they do so with great emphasis on myth, martyrs/heroes, brotherhood, and place.36 Therefore the construction of personal meaning is an especially conscious process amongst the Ultras, particularly given the collective and public nature of the ‘language,’ myths, or narratives used.37
Myth is central to the Ultras’ mentalità. How it is used lends itself to being studied from the perspectives of the anthropological pillars on myth: Durkheim, Malinowski, and Levi-Strauss. Myth, according to Durkheim, strengthens social cohesion and unity by inscribing norms of social order, via ritual and ritualized institutional behavior. Malinowski focused instead on the value of myth, especially as a tool in the legitimation of a particular social structure, thus connecting myth with power, morality, and social mores. Levi-Strauss searched for meaning not in the narratives of myth but in their subconscious structure, thus understanding myth as an objective, universal mode of thought. Together, these three approaches all offer insights into the purpose and functioning of myth in the Ultra mentalità.38 That it is cohesive and constructive of distinction between groups, that it is connected to morality and has value in justifying social structure, and that it operates as a self-standing phenomenon will all become clear in the chapters that follow.
The Ultra mentalità operates as an ideal against modern liberal market-driven understandings and expectations of the human. The myths that the Ultras are the only bastion of purity left in Italian soccer, and that they are the ‘keepers of the faith,’ on guard against the victory of Calcio Moderno, motivate them to critique consumerism as a goal and, more importantly, to seek to establish or maintain structures, in the form of both Ultra groups and political organizations, that undermine the democratic and egalitarian foundations of the liberal State. Nietzsche urged the pursuit of a life in which myth acted to offset modernity’s ‘common-currency humans’ and absence of mystery.39 He attacked the modern life in which the utilitarian pursuit of money and career had defeated the heroic life spent in creative and dangerous pursuits of nobility and honor. Likewise, Sorel understood myth as a ‘supra-ordinate goal,’ the foundation of motivation and action.40 He explains that the collapse of myth (as motivator of behavior) in the modern world has contributed to the victory of a limited historical outlook (with no belief in glory) and atomistic individualism (with no understanding of or desire for collective greatness).41 The Ultras understand myth, as do Nietzsche and Sorel, as a goal and a motivating force to a very particular form of life that is aggressive, violent, and martial.
Mentalità Defined
Moving beyond an understanding of mentalità that is limited to an individual’s outlook, I stress its connections with consciousness or Weltanschauung. I do so because mentalità provides not only an impetus to behavior but also an orientation toward behavior. Geertz differentiates Weltanschauung from ethos in order to distinguish cognition from evaluation.42
Weltanschauung refers to the picture of the actual social conditions of a group — ‘their concept of nature, self, and society’ — while ethos is the group’s moral-ethical, aesthetic, and evaluative structures.43 This division occurs at the level of culture and it ensures cultural stability, assuming the Weltanschauung is an accurate representation of the culture’s ethos. If one takes the division of Weltanschauung and ethos as a given, then I am proposing, based on the strong ethical content in much Ultra behavior, that through mentalità they are rejoined.
The ethical component of mentalità must be stressed. As the Ultras construct what I call an agonistic form of life, in which all social relations reflect a will to opposition and rivalry, they also develop an emic personality that revels in the distance between themselves and others. Thus, their character clearly reflects the milieu in which it is formed. The tension between the Ultras and the larger social context with which they must interact in order to attend soccer games, and crucially, in which they are judged, impacts the ethical content of their mentalità. In other words, there is reciprocity between State and media power and the Ultras’ mentalità.44
Seeing themselves as largely outside the State, or as a pure critique of the Italian State, the Ultras often seem a contained universe where the discourse of strength and honor interact with a will to violence and rivalry. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the content of the mentalità is a response, or counter, to the power of the State to impact upon the freedoms of the Ultras. With the advent of new bureaucratic means of excluding the Ultras from soccer games, their feelings of repression have never been more pronounced. Thus, they possess a seething bitterness toward the State and the forces of law and order. Additionally, however, the State and media have the power to morally condemn the Ultras and, until the wide availability of Internet access and cell phones, to control information and public discourse about them.
When the State prohibits the Ultras from attending games they find other spaces to watch or participate, be they spaces of consumption or of protest. In some cases, Ultras would watch AS Roma play in bars or in homes. Following the prohibition against fans in certain stadiums enacted after the death of Raciti, Ultras traveled to these same stadiums to protest against the restriction of personal freedom in Italy, but from the outside. The tendency amongst the Ultras of AS Roma is to subvert State repression by restricting their in-stadium performances and at the same time aggregating in smaller numbers in alternative spaces.
When the hegemony of the State is displayed through the creation and dissemination of a moralist discourse of Ultra criminality, the Ultras incorporate such discourses into the content of their mentalità.45 This makes the relationship between the Ultras and the media complex and dynamic. Although the Ultras embrace an agonistic form of life, the terms of their ‘agon’ — conceptual and violent oppositions and a sense of worth correlated to how deeply one is aggressive and oppositional — are brought home only by how thoroughly they are condemned by the media. Thus, as the media attacks the Ultras for being too violent and focused on rivalry, the Ultras respond with even higher levels of hostility. Similarly, the media uses a highly moralistic language to condemn the Ultras. This language in turn is central to the Ultra mentalità. Because of this fluidity, the media’s discourse often matches that of the Ultras week-to-week. Further, this keeps the mentalità relevant and active for the Ultras because the world condemns them on the same terms in which they condemn the world.
Thus, I define mentalità as a systemic narrative of beliefs, attitudes, and values that motivates behavior and provides a particular moral-ethical orientation to behavior. It links the present to past and future through myths and cultural symbols that enable groups to cohere and construct distinctions between them and others.
Much of what constitutes the mentalità of today’s Ultras comes from Italian political history: namely, Fascism, and the other counter-modern movements that either contributed to, or coexisted with, Fascism. Thus, it has taken as its own the intellectual components of these prior movements. Like the Fascists, the Ultras maintain a desire toward strength, honor, discipline, order, valor, heroism, memory, and tradition. Like Fascism and Futurism, they also celebrate war and a militarism that consists of warrior attributes. At the level of their mentalità and political motivations, the Ultras harbor a vision of the future and a strong critique of modernity. At the level of their culture there is a desire to embrace the mythic and spiritual dimension of life — a life built on communal and spiritual principles: a life with a clear nonos.
Like mentalità, which is used by all strata of Italian society, the Ultras’ use of honor connects them to other Italian and Mediterranean forms of life. Despite the fact that honor is as varied in its uses
throughout the Mediterranean as is mentalità in Italy, anthropology made it the basis of the creation of the Mediterranean cultural area. Peristiany identified an ideal of honor operating in the majority of Mediterranean cultures that is pursued at the expense of material advantage. At a civilizational level, this contributed to economic underdevelopment and material backwardness. On a personal level, honor is a virtue — the virtue even — but one that is functional only within an environment of competition and competitiveness. Individuals assert themselves against others, co-identified as equal protagonists, in a system of honor and dishonor. Peristiany understands honor as a moral sentiment but also as a ‘fact of repute and precedence,’ attesting to its systemic nature.46
Although I assert below that the Ultras possess an agonistic form of life, which also connects them with a concept central to the creation of a southern or Mediterranean anthropology, I do so only as a metaphor for a life defined by rivalry and hostility, which puts them at odds with the prevailing form of modern life in contemporary Italy. I have taken the concept from Friedrich Nietzsche and intend it to be used as a point of distinction from what Gianni Vattimo calls the contemporary ‘neutralization of culture and politics.’47
Likewise, here, I discuss honor not as a characteristic given the Ultras by a metaphysical Mediterraneanism, but as part of a set of behaviors they have taken from Fascism and Counter-Enlightenment philosophy. Indeed, while honor as I have just presented it fits perfectly within the Ultras’ rejection of capitalism and Calcio Moderno (the business of soccer) for the sake of something more primordial, it is possible that the Fascists were also influenced by honor in a Mediterranean context. However, if, as Herzfeld explains, poetics must be locally contextual, I have relied upon the Ultras’ own discussions of honor (within a system of other traits discussed at length below) in placing it so prominently in this study. In other words, while it may be demonstrable as a Mediterranean character trait, it is unquestionably central to Fascism and its critique of modernity.