Narratives from North and South Europe

Narratives from North and South Europe
Helsinki-Florence

Thursday 5 September 2019

14th Conference of the European Sociological Association “Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging”. RN 15 “Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology”, Session: "Cosmopolitan Experiences". Manchester, UK, 2023.08.




Academic Experience abroad: Autonomy and Sociability, Southern and Northern Style 
Pierluca Birindelli 
(Gonzaga University / International Studies Institute)

Globalization studies underline the transnational standardization of education, in terms of both methods and curricular content. Comparative analysis of autoethnographical essays written by international master students at the University of Helsinki (North Europe) and the University of Florence (South Europe) permits detailed reconstruction of their academic experience. The two institutions share three crucial structural features: public, no tuition fees (at the time of the field work), non-English speaking countries. They also share the cultural emphasis on fostering students’ autonomy. However, within a similar Bologna-type institutional organization, students’ narrative accounts reveal sharp differences in their academic experiences precisely vis-à-vis the cultural value of autonomy. In Helsinki, it is up to the students to find all the relevant information and construct an autonomous learning itinerary; however, administrative staff and professors are ready to respond to students’ queries. In Florence, autonomy is accompanied by chaotic academic organization. International students rely on peers and professors to find their way in the academic bureaucratic jungle. Here the lack of English proficiency is a key factor; the apparent linguistic glue of global academe is differently declined locally.  Another marked difference is the organisation of students’ sociability. The University of Helsinki fosters academic and social engagement through international students’ associations, which act as an important bridge with city life and highly ritualistic Finnish society. Students’ associations are totally absent in Florence. The thought/unthought interpenetration between university and social life produces a profoundly diverse academic experience that transcends obvious social and cultural differences between the two cities. 

Key words: International students, academic life, autonomy, sociability, English language.

Thursday 30 May 2019

Culture, politics and the de-centred self (by Ricca Edmondson)


Sociologists have struggled since the nineteenth century to express the shared, relational, joint features of social thought and behaviour, and to resist the image of the individual self as encapsulated, largely self-contained. Not only Marx, then Durkheim, with his exploration of ‘social facts’, but writers in the twentieth-century tradition of the sociology of knowledge have emphasised this key facet of sociality. Their efforts include Mannheim’s attempts, however flawed, to encompass the ways we think in terms that are afforded to us by our cultural circumstances and marked by patterns of power. Also in the 1930s, the scholars of the city studies in America were brought, among other places, to Ireland: Lloyd Warner’s students, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, had been taught that ‘the unit of analysis is the relation’, not the individual. This goes along with recognising that individual people are not generally self-contained and rational, but in many ways incoherent and often inconsistent, as Schütz pointed out in ‘The Stranger’ in 1944. It ought also to be accompanied by an appropriately holistic grasp of thought that eschews the artificially cognitive, and accepts emotions as part of thinking and reasoning rather than contrasting them with ‘rationality’. This part of appreciating sociality remains in some ways the hardest: the rhetorical force of contrasting emotion with reason, misguided as the dichotomy is, continues to present itself as irresistibly sensible through much of the sociological world.
This idea of the decentred self needs perpetually to be reinvented in sociological theory, as it was, not least, by Foucault, but it can be hard to reconcile with telling stories. Foucault was not alone in pointing out that through most of human history the notion of the individual was experienced in ways that were less encapsulated than those that may seem natural to us now. Nonetheless, old stories still concentrate on heroes and dragons rather than the social settings within which their actions could be located. However adeptly we feel we are conceptualising and evoking this shared realm, when it comes to describing concrete actions, like the ancients we find it hard to write and read empirical work in its terms.
The articles in this issue can all be read as contributions to understanding both this joint realm and the tensions inherent in discussing it. (137)
The concluding article of the issue takes a very different approach to self-representation: Italians’ interpretations of their own collective identity. The attribution of familism and particularism to Italians may be partly imaginary, but it has real consequences nonetheless – as do the other forms of imagining dealt with in this issue. Edward Banfield’s much-criticised, but highly persistent, account of ‘amoral familism’ has been argued (not least in these pages, by Antonella Coco (2016)) to be a simplification. But Pierluca Birindelli takes a different approach, examining literary sources for the ‘familism-particularism’ pairing, going back to the fifteenth century and the work of the Florentine humanist Alberti – who attributed this feature to central Italy, with no sign of the North–South cleavage that later became notorious in the literature. Francesco Guicciardini was then the first to use the term ‘particulare’, in the sixteenth century. Italians, Birindelli argues, adopted this self-image very early, and it later became embedded in outsiders’ perceptions during the eighteenth century, the age of the Grand Tour, where Italians became the beloved and despised ‘others’ of Northern Europeans. It is this long literary acceptance that made ‘familism-particularism’ – whether or not in those exact terms – such a persistent topos. It became to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy: Italians themselves expect it to be true and act as if it were true.
Birindelli reconstructs the image of ‘passionate, rebellious and decadent Italy’ in the novels of Stendhal and de Staël, together with the import of the notion of ‘national character’ from the same literary milieu. Soon after, Leopardi wrote on the supposedly exteriorising impacts of climate (apparently, living so much outside makes people more conscious of their appearances). Also, Birindelli notes, ‘Leopardi also anticipated the crucial key to the sociological interpretation of Italian society: the absence of a ruling class conscious of its own historical role.’ However, it was the notion of ‘a structural lack of civic sense’, Biridelli argues, that Italians ‘pinned on themselves.’ Of course, commentators such as Alessandro Pizzorno have pointed out rightly that in conditions of long-term poverty and marginality, it is perfectly reasonable to seek certain and immediate advantages rather than an ideal of public good postulated for the future; it was the overall political structure of the national setting that shaped the cultures of small, impoverished communities. But the idea of amoral familism became so rhetorically convincing that its power remained. Birindelli develops this hermeneutic exploration of the impact of a stereotype in connection with older and newer theories of how Italy is thought to work – and how hard Banfield’s ghost is to banish. (141-142)


Edmondson, R. (2019) Culture, politics and the de-centred self, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 6:2, 137-142. Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2019.1609769

Birindelli, P. (2018). Collective identity inside and out: Particularism through the looking glass, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 6:2, 237-270.