4. Tomb Robbers and Cultural Power from Below

Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

“…Where Italian cultural power resides in buried archaeological artifacts, their abundance a "proof of imperial destiny" (Greenland 2021), NS cultural power resides in the unentombed faces of Christian Germans. In its dependence on the text and the explicit nationalistic project of the photobook series -that of unifying a phenotypically diverse nation -Lendvai-Dircksen's work can be read against some art historical works on things that formally resemble one another, things divergent educational, labor market and health outcomes within ethno-racial categories (Monk 2022b).…”

“…Libya and personally returns it to Qaddafi, referring to the artifact as "his girlfriend," thereby minimizing, narrowing and dismissing its cultural value. The grave robbers' recollections in turn rarely mention the historical value of the artifacts and instead conjure up the dig's sensory elements: Memories of young boys squeezing through thin tunnels, the feeling of immersing one's hands in soil fatty from human bodies decomposing in it (Greenland 2021).…”

The Love Trap. Romanticization practices of the Italian generations of the 90s

“…To describe the strong similarities between the rhetoric of the initial contact with archaeological artifacts and that of human encounters, in this section, I will refer to a series of interlocutors whose stories I have chosen due to the significant amount of time spent together, their "middle" socio-cultural position expressed by tastes, habits, and consumption skills (Bourdieu 1979;La Wita 1988;Liechty 2003), their references to Italian cultural superpower (Greenland 2021), and because the accounts articulated by them -albeit with gender-constructions differences (Pompili, Amendola 2018)constantly referred to romanticism and the idea of being chosen.…”

“…Archivio antropologico mediterraneo, Anno XXVI, n. 25 (2) | 2023 (Cozza 2021). It's a kind of Italian identity construction that conceives the Italian nation as the world's cultural "superpower" (una superpotenza della cultura), thanks to the superiority of its classical past, the refinement of its archaeological and monumental heritage, and the authenticity of its traditions, which deems noteworthy only those elements perceived as the product of an archaic and ancestral past (Greenland 2021). As I will show later, in the field of love relationships, this past-oriented vision compels individuals to reconsider traditional relationships with a strongly idealized perspective, which, therefore, never entirely breaks free from those models of romantic love characterized by a patriarchal structure.…”

“…However, central questions arise to which, as an anthropologist, I aim to respond using the case studies from my fieldwork: why does this fluctuation tend towards a romanticized direction in an environment that paradoxically seems to label contemporary love as "fiction"? Why does love become a significant element in a context like Italian archaeology, traditionally associated with an objectivist, and even a scientistic, framework (Barbanera 2015;Cozza 2021;Greenland 2021)? Why do these young people, who identify as "modern", implicitly rely on the realm of magic and in the existence of love?…”