1869, Ep. 156 with authors Paolo Heywood and Adam Reed

8:33PM Jan 8, 2025

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Adam Reed

Paolo Heywood

Keywords:

ordinary life

fascist heritage

animal protection

moral subjects

moderate activism

mainstream engagement

Neo-fascist tourism

animal welfare

moral renewal

populist ideology

ethical concerns

moderate activists

moral interest

animal flourishing

moral debates

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we bring together two Cornell University Press authors who have been following each other's work from the early manuscript stages all the way to their newly published books. We will be talking today with Paolo Heywood, author of Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism, and Adam Reed, author of Animal People: Moral Subjects in the Work of Animal Protection. Paolo Heywood is associate professor of anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After Difference, editor of New Anthropologies of Italy, and the co-editor of Beyond Description. Adam Reed is a reader in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research explores the intersections between moral and literary imagination and institutional life. He is the author of Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading and Papua New Guinea's Last Place. Paolo and Adam discuss the common theme in each of their books, centering around the power of ideas about ordinariness and normality in contemporary politics. We hope you enjoy their conversation. Hello, Adam and Paolo, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about both of your books. Paulo's is Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism, and Adam's book is Animal People: Moral Suubjects in the Work of Animal Protection. Tell us how and why did you come to these book projects and what questions drive them? Thanks,

Jonathan, yeah. I came to this project on animal activism in the UK out of an initial broader interest in the moral interests of moral subjects, or how moral subjects develop a moral interest in a certain cause or concern. And in a sense, at an early stage, it could have been any kind of concern in the public domain or moral debate, but it quickly became focused upon animal protection and the ethical concerns around animal welfare, in part because the organization I ended up working with welcomed me and were interested in having me join them, and I think also because when I joined that organization, they Were themselves at a very interesting stage or point in their focus on moral interest and their own moral interest in animal protection. So this was an animal protection organization that had been around for over 100 years, started off as an anti river section group, and then later had become a kind of generalist animal protection group that might campaign one day on against fox hunting, the next day against industrial farming, the next day against puppy farms, etc. But when I joined them in 2010 they were at a moment of relaunch, in which they conceived themselves about to enter a radically new future as an animal protection organization, and in which, and I'll talk about this a bit later as we go along, they want, they had the ambition to become a, quote, mainstream animal protection movement. Now this meant, of course, that they had a moral interest in the welfare protection of animals, as they've always had, but also a new kind of moral interest in themselves as animal people or activists or as more broadly, moral subjects, and a new kind of moral interest in the publics that they tended to collapse under the title The mainstream, but also, finally, a new kind of moral interest in those kinds of subjects that they identified as responsible for hurting or harming animals. So in a sense, it was a fortuitous moment in which their own concern with moral interest kind of conjoined with my own interest in the topic. And kind of we went from there,

nice, nice. And Paolo, yeah. So

in my case, I was working on this broader project on anthropologies of free speech, so different kinds of people's different ideas about what kinds of things that they should be able to talk about, what kinds of things they shouldn't be able to talk about. And was looking for somewhere to do fields work, and I knew of this village in Italy called pod up your which the book is about, in which Mussolini was born in 1883 and which he basically then, almost as soon as he came to power, he spent the next sort of 20 years turning it into this giant over. An air monumentalist homage to himself and his life and to the prowess of fascist urban engineering. And then later on, he was buried there after a series of slightly macabre post mortem misadventures with his body. And ever since then, it's been Italy's sort of premier site of Neo fascist tourism, and 1000s of people in weird fascist uniforms and black shirts go there every year to march up and down. So there's a lot of people saying a lot of quite extreme and extraordinary things there. And I knew of this place actually, because I have family from very nearby, and had been driving through it to get to them ever since I was a little kid. And I can vividly remember kind of gaping out of the window at this incredibly strange place like this in its context. This is the border between Emilio Romania and Tuscany. So every other village around it is your sort of picture, perfect postcard image of the Tuscan mountain village. You know, stone buildings, windy streets, cobbled lanes, nothing, sort of nothing laid out on a grid plan, or higgledy, piggledy. And then you hit this place, and you have this enormously wide Central Avenue, geographically, it's just as small as any of those other villages, which makes it even more striking. I once heard somebody call it. It's like a child wearing his dad's boots. So it's tiny. It's all concentrated just like a village, but everything in it is about five times the size, and it's all built to these monumentalist proportions. And again, it's all sort of built in in homage to its most famous product. So I went there interested in people's ideas about, you know, what these Neo fascist visitors should or should not be able to say, but also, having always been really interested in the question of, what on earth would it be like to actually live in this place? Because it is, in fact, a village. It's full of people who live there all the time. You know, how do they cope with life in this sort of disproportionate, strange setting, and surrounded by all of these people marching around in uniforms all the time? And swiftly, it became clear that one of the most striking things about life in this place is the fact that people carried it on, as if none of these things were actually significant or strange or out of the ordinary, as if you know it's actually perfectly normal to do your shopping in a supermarket next door to Mussolini's birth house, with streams of Neo fascist tourists going in and out, or to lay flowers at the graveside of your relatives, as more of these people march around and parade into Mussolini's tomb and out of it, or if, As if, sort of everybody lives in a 1920s monumentalist apartment block with bits of the fasci stuck around them. What was weirdest about it, in other words, was the fact that people acted as if it wasn't weird at all.

That's amazing. That's amazing. And so I think it's amazing to hear Adam and Paulo, your books seem very different, okay, animal activists in the UK and then this fascist Mecca in Italy. But I was I when you contacted me a month ago or so, I was really interested to hear that you've read each other's books very closely, including all the way back to the draft manuscripts. So there's a there's a common theme in both of your books, there's a concern about the power of ideas, about ordinariness and normality. Tell us more about why many of the individuals in each of your books strive to embrace that which is either ordinary or perceived to be normal. Thanks.

Jonathan, yeah. So, I mean, in my case, that in the connection of ordinariness, to put it up here, which is the name of this, this village goes back to the to its to its rebirth under fascism, because ordinariness ideas about womanness are really a sort of basic part of fascist political ideology, as in the case of a lot of populist political movements, they build their brand sort of on the fact that they represent ordinary, normal Italians, you know, as opposed to the elite Bourgeois. While politicians that Italians have been used to they're that they're the real thing. Now, of course, this is a very ethnicized and racialized and exclusivist vision of what exactly an ordinary Italian is. And of course, it's also modeled to no small extent, on Mussolini himself, because he comes from this putatively completely ordinary a pen I'm village in, you know, the middle of the Italian countryside. His father is the local blacksmith, his mother is the local school teacher. So the biographical narrative, mostly upbringing becomes a sort of core component of the regime's propaganda. And so put it up here becomes a core component of of that story. Very swiftly, after the fascists come to power, they start bussing 1000s of tourists to put it up here precisely this so that they can go and ogle at the kind of ordinariness of Mussolini's upbringing, so his house gets preserved as a sort of perfect representation of ordinary rural life. He even insists that the straw in the recreation of his bed be replaced by, oh, I can't remember, something, something basically even more sort of ordinary and proletarian and rural than straw, so that people would really get picture of just how ordinary it was, and the town was rebuilt with sort of propagandizing that idea in mind. So ordinariness has always been really closely tied up with product. He was history. And it's also become a way in which people try to seek a kind of escape from that history and the heritage today. So in a way, the sort of explanation of the weirdness of that attitude that I was describing earlier, the sort of cultivated indifference to all these things that make outsiders absolutely sort of dumbstruck, is a way of trying to get out of the shadow of that difficult and discomforting heritage. So again, you know you don't pay attention to the guys marching around in fascist human forms. You do go and do what you would do every Sunday. You do put flowers on the grave of your relatives, because that is what people do in their ordinary lives, ordinary lives that ordinarily are not afflicted by Neo fascist marching around in their hometown.

Interesting, interesting. Rena,

thank you. Yeah. I suppose the ordinary or ideas of ordinaryness, in the context of the Scottish animal protection organization I work with, really surface around the interconnection with ideas about the mainstream and ideas about the normative or normativity. So usually, as activists, one tends to figure oneself standing beyond or outside of the normative or the mainstream or the or the ordinary, at least, is often an object of suspicion. However these activists define themselves, and have done historically as well to the present as moderate animal activists. And this idea of being a moderate activist, which to some people, appears a bit of an oxymoron. How can you be, you know, active and moderate? What does it mean to act intensely in a moderate fashion? These kinds of questions and challenges do closely connect to this valorization of ordinariness, so that the moderate animal activist, in their terms, is someone who can engage with the moderate scientist or the moderate farmer or the moderate civil servant. And can do so because they are, in some sense, ordinary people invested in ordinary kinds of relationships, partnerships, marriages, ordinary families, etc. So very often, colleagues at the animal protection organization would make a virtue of the fact that they were, for example, married to married to someone who was an unapologetic meat eater or a scientist who had a fairly conventional kind of human dominion over animals, argument for why it was appropriate to, for example, use animals in animal experimentations, or likewise, a virtue, the fact that they may go and have a very nice dinner with a couple who like shooting pheasants. And this idea, or this ethos, was it, in a sense, central to this, this moderate activist claim and to this broader idea that as a moderate activist, an ordinary person, you were also somebody was always more than their activism, more more than the cause or moral interest that drove you, and that, in a sense, there was something inappropriate or wrong about claiming you. Claiming that everything should be connected up and integrated with your moral cause and values. Likewise, it went with another kind of common attribute of the moderate animal activist that I worked with, and this is an insistence that they didn't like preaching. They didn't like finger wagging or telling people off. They were very concerned about this, and in particular, they were worried about kind of the antagonistic stance towards the ordinary or the mainstream or the normative, which they often felt was a lot of them so that people expect them, journalists or members of government their lobbying, would expect that they had an antagonistic position, that they were the antis, which is, in fact, at least in the UK context, is what government stakeholders journalists call anal activist. They call them the anti so they were very concerned at the same time to escape this attribution, this antagonistic attribution. And again, it was in a move towards the ordinary and claims of orderness that their attention went in order to try and kind of locate a new position for themselves in this

politics that's fascinating. So in both examples, what I'm hearing is that they've taken the idea of ordinariness and normality as a virtue. They've raised, they've valorized it, as you've said, Tell us why they're doing this. Like, What? What? What's the benefits of this approach, and on the converse, what are some of the limits to this approach? Yeah,

that's exactly, exactly right. Jonathan, the ordinary is absolutely understood as a kind of virtue, as a thing to be pursued in preda CO and a thing that it takes work to pursue as well. And I think that's for a whole range of reasons. You know, partly that's wrapped up in the very particular historical narrative that I've described a bit. I think it's also wrapped up in ideas about how Fascism is anything but ordinary. You know, fascism is something extraordinary. Whatever people's views on it are, they are usually very strongly held. It's not something that you sort of go about your daily life around. And so by sort of acting as if one's daily life is, in fact, totally ordinary, then one in some one, somehow or another, sort of defangs, the extraordinariness of the fascist heritage that surrounds people there I often think of as the sort of epitome of the exemplar of this sort of attitude. While I was doing field work in, put it up here, there was this plan proposal to turn what is actually the biggest and most monumental building in put it up here, which is the former fascist party headquarters in the main square, that's been basically empty since the end of the war. So this giant, very striking building dominates the townscape, but has been left sort of completely untouched. More or less there was a proposal to put Italy's first museum of fascism in this building, and it's caused an enormous furore in a range of different quarters, both sort of local and national and even international. So the mayor of Perez up got interviewed by the New York Times, the BBC sent letters of journalists there the debate about whether it was appropriate to put a museum of any kind and exact of what kind exactly it should be if it had a focus on on the war, on the fascist regime. But the the idea of putting any kind of museum like that in, in a place that's sort of constantly visited by Neo fascists was obviously anathema to a lot of people. So tempers were rising in sort of international arguments about this. But as all this was going on, people have put it up in barely registering it as a topic of interest. I kept, I kept, sort of trying to get people to talk about what they thought about, you know, the New York Times article about the more this latest, prominent international historian had pronounced this thing about what they should do about the museum project, and they was not something that they wanted to talk about. At the same time, they were getting extraordinarily upset themselves about a local proposal to reorganize their recycling arrangements. So it wasn't that, you know, they had no interest in politics. It wasn't that they had no civic community or sense of engagement. They absolutely, absolutely. Did, but it was one focused around things that were ordinary, not focused on either resisting or endorsing the arguments around fascist heritage

that's super fascinating. Adam, yeah,

I guess building off that in a different direction, so in terms of embracing the ordinary and how this connected to the relaunch of the animal protection organization. It began with their initial idea was that they were going to and again, it's important to emphasize this is a really quite radical, shocking thing to do as an animal protection organization. It began with a decision that they would take down from their office walls and all their campaign literature, any image of animal suffering, and indeed, more than that, they they went through their the language of their their website and their literature, and removed any words that appeared to relate to or connect to animal suffering. So there was an idea that if you moved away from an emphasis on what happened to animals and towards an emphasis upon the ordinary relationships that ordinary people have to animals, then you could perhaps find a way to do animal protection or to achieve moral renewal without leaving the mainstream. And this was a kind of embodied in a kind of further couple of moves, further aspiration, that instead of the animal activist being a figure, again, you know who stood outside the mainstream and was against it, instead you could collapse the distance between the animal activist and the ordinary person in the mainstream and in their mind. You did this by envisaging that everybody could could be in this mainstream animal protection movement. You could be a somebody with a long history of campaigning against vivisection and a long history of commitment to veganism. But you could also be somebody who, just this week, has decided to eat less meat each week, or to switch from eating low grade meat to higher welfare meat, and that, in a sense, these two subjects were part of the same movement suddenly. And there's this idea that everyone was on their own journey moving towards an animal friendly future. So this was kind of, this was the overall ambition they had for, in a sense, achieving moral renewal without leaving the mainstream or the ordinary. And then at the same time, there was this idea that instead of kind of appealing to critique or exposure, or again, preaching or campaigning or appealing to moral reason, we would be better off as a mainstream animal protection organization in engaging the ordinary person by again, appealing to their ordinary relationships with animals and their ordinary interests in animals, so that again, instead of these images of animals suffering, What they put up instead were images of animal flourishing, images, I don't know, which emphasized the sentient superpowers of particular species, the strength of the foot of the elephant, or the scenting ability of the snake. And again, this idea that it was ordinary emotions which was the root for kind of moral renewal through the mainstream, so that it was in the ordinary person's capacity to be amazed or inspired by animals that one would more, as it were, naturally find a basis for renewing the mainstream as a whole. So I guess in answer, Jonathan to your first question, that this is, in essence, for the colleagues I was working with in the animal protection organization, where this idea of embracing the mainstream as as as a route, as a route towards a new future, towards for Animal Protection emerged, I suppose, in terms of limit points or strain points. Interestingly, they often came at points at which the ordinary again, appeared to create a problem. So, for example, it in the relaunch, they expanded their staff and started to employ some people who had no history of a moral interest or commitment to animal protection, partly out of out of that idea of an ethos that the organization itself should express the mainstream as well, or the ordinary person, I couldn't just express the person who was an animal activist. This created a kind of a number of tension points, but also kind of some some intriguing ones. So they employed, for example, a new communications officer. And this individual had no history or background in animal activism, but they were a vegetarian from birth. But as the individual kept telling colleagues they were vegetarian from birth, but in no way motivated by a moral interest in animals. And this was really awkward for quite a long time for colleagues to have this person here who was a vegetarian. And and at the same time, was not motivated by a concern with animals in their vegetarianism, and they didn't know what to do with it. And in a sense, it kind of rendered vegetarianism ordinary in an uncomfortable or unwarranted way. That perhaps is one kind of example where the ordinary can resurface in a manner that suddenly appears jarring or problematic in the context of the animal activist again, often this was in their relationship to what they would define as, quote, unquote, extreme animal animal activists, who would be, for example, very resistant to the idea that activists were ordinary people and that activists could treat other people as ordinary people as well, you know, so that they the the quote, the quote, unquote, extreme animal activists would often resist the invitation of the moderate activists to greet each other as ordinary people, and instead demand that that the moderate activist be more consistent in their behavior, ensure that all aspects of their behavior added up to their moral interest in animals, and indeed, would often charge them or accuse them of being colluding or collaborating in their engagements with moderate scientists or moderate civil servants, etc. So there are moments in which this was kind of thrown back at more resistant, this invitation to connect on the basis of the ordinary,

interesting, interesting. I was curious to know what, what do you think your books tell us about the state of play in your two locations in Italy, what are the current responses to the resurgence of the far right and in the UK and Scotland? What are the moral debates and actions taking place now in the animal activist community? And then, what are some of the lessons that we can take from these locations and apply to the world at large.

Thanks, Jonathan. I don't know about you, Adam, but I guess one sort of initial step in both our arguments that's important is just recognizing that ideas about ordinary life have, as it were, their own sort of ordinary life that they are out there in the world, I don't know. I think it's certainly true in anthropology, and I think it's true in a wider range of disciplines, that sometimes we take these ideas about sort of ordinary life or everyday life rather for granted, in the sense that we think that they are our basic subject matter. What do we do? For instance, as anthropologists, we go off and spend time with people in their ordinary lives. So we occasionally have a tendency to naturalize ideas about what ordinary life means and forget that again, those ideas have a sort of life in the wild of their own, that they can be instrumentalized, that they get mobilized, that they get invested with different sorts of value and virtue. I don't think it's hard to think of examples of the instrumentalization of ideas about the ordinary in various different manifestations of populism around the world, certainly in Italy, one of the slogans that Giorgia melonni Made famous was sono Giorgia. Sono add on. Sonora, Madre, I am Giorgia. I'm a woman. I'm a mother. The idea being that she's just a regular, normal, ordinary Italian, that was exactly the sort of pitch of that kind of a call. And I just finished a really interesting book by two LSE sociologists called Born to rule about the status of elites in contemporary British society. And one of the really nice points that they make is how so many of the people that they interview for their research who, by any normal stretch of the imagination will be considered, you know, extraordinarily wealthy or powerful or privileged or whatever, go to all of this trouble to present themselves as completely normal and ordinary. And I think in both our cases, one of the ways in which we're complimenting contributing to but also expanding on that, that sort of a point about the instrumentalization of ordinariness is showing that actually, it's not just a elite to instrumentalize the ordinary, but ordinary people do so too, it's it can be important in a whole range of different contexts, and can be instrumentalized to a whole range of different ends.

Yeah, and I think so at least in the context of it's worth saying in the context the animal protection organization I worked with that this. Relaunch his desire to embrace the mainstream failed in the sense that it failed to work as as either on a financial or or a kind of supporter base. The model didn't really lead to a growth in the organization in the way they'd hoped. So they they fairly soon, after a few years, dropped it, but of course, kept the central idea of being moderate animal activists. And so although they wanted to move away from an idea that, you know, moral renewal could occur exclusively through an engagement with the ordinary or the mainstream, they did want to. They wanted to retain a sense of being subjects on the sense, on the on the edge of things, but at the same time subjects willing to work across those boundaries. And I think that position is an interesting one nowadays. It's a position that's hard for people to appreciate. Very often they look it looks suspect or it looks compromised, but I think it requires a lot of work, and there's a kind of arts, of existence involved in maintaining that kind of moderate activist stance. Often, you know, so moderate activists tend to get rolled in with broader critiques of kind of reform, Animal Protection reformism, which is regarded again as compromised or a result of professionalism, or again compromised values or principles, and I think that isn't necessarily the case, that there's more to see here and appreciate. Another thing that I kind of thought a bit about towards the end of my book and its project is the kind of the esthetic dimensions of orderliness, and in particular, thinking about the moral interest we have elsewhere, for example, in in literary characters. So that I was reading this book by George Saunders, the American short story writer. It was a book about his his teaching creative writing in Syracuse, and he was going through talking about how he taught his students how to think about characterization and how to how to build a story. And a lot of it was again focused upon the point at which we become, as readers, morally interested in the characters on the page. Saunders point, which is not kind of surprising in many ways, but perhaps interesting also for our discussion, is that we only really become interested in the character at the point at which specifications happen, and in particular inconsistencies or contradictions in that character begin to surface. And I think there is a way, at least, and I don't know if this true also in Paulo's context in pada PIO, but there's certainly a way in which, I think almost the chief complaint of these moderate animal activists about some of their activist colleagues who weren't moderate animal activists was that they were kind of esthetically displeasing in some fashion, simply, again, because they they failed to open themselves up to that kind of inconsistent, contradictory character. So there's a sense in which they fail to be morally interesting characters, from the perspective of of the moderate animal activist. Wow,

there's so many nuances in this it's it's really interesting. Both of your books are even though they're talking about the ordinary, they are extraordinary. And we do encourage everyone listening to this to read both Paulo's book, Mary and Mussolini, ordinary life in the shadows of fascism, and Adam's book, animal people, moral subjects in the work of animal protection. We strongly encourage you to read both of these books, and it was a pleasure talking with both of

you. Thank you. Thank you. Jonathan.

That was Paolo Heywood, author of Burying Mussolini:Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism and Adam Reed, author of Animal People: Moral Subjects in the Work of Animal Protection. If you'd like to read either of their new books, use the promo code 09POD to save 30% on our website at Cornell press.cornell.edu, if you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk, thank you for listening to 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast,