Passing As Italian: The Image of the Friendly Southener As a Crisis-Solution Strategy

People in a southern region of Austria (Carinthia), where over decades sharp conflicts between the German-speaking majority and the Slovenian-speaking minority reigned, some people claim an Italian family background in order to bypass discrimination as “Slovenian”. While relations with Slovenia are still tense, in several cities colourful “Italy festivals” have been held. In another regional context, Vienna, a similar phenomenon could be witnessed. In the 1970s and 1980s quite large number Palestinians came to live in Vienna – as a consequence of the political engagement of Bruno Kreisky in the Middle East. Some of them opted to open a business in gastronomy. But since the image of the Middle East was crisis driven, and food from this area (as well as a multiplicity of ethnic places) were still unknown to most Austrians, they opened “pizzerias” – in this way using the positive reputation such “Italian” establishments had built up at that time. And in a yet very different regional setting, in New York after 9/11, Iranians adopted a similar strategy. As one middle-aged man in a documentary showing the life of this community claimed: “Passing as Italian became a kind of survival strategy.”

All these examples have in common that the image of the friendly Italian is used and adopted by non-Italians in order to bypass ethnic, political, social and cultural conflict and to deal with ambiguous situations full of hatred and resentment against certain groups. The first goal of this paper is to explore the image of the friendly Italian constructed by way of such narrations and to highlight the persistence of stereotypes as well as milieu-specific alterations.  The second goal of the paper is to propose a methodological approach to images as a symbolic strategy to confront and defer conflicts and discomforts in everyday life.