Bureaucratic Circus

For the best part of the last two weeks, I have spent every weekday morning at one bureaucratic office or other on the infamous quest for the Italian ‘permesso di soggiorno’ - a permit to stay in Italy required of every foreigner who wants to stay for more than 3 months.

Queue of immigrants outside a Questura office (image from here)

I won’t go into all the gory details in this post - the process is still ongoing! When I finally have the permesso in my hot little hand I hope to write something that may be of use to other people like me - Australians married to European citizens who want or need to live in Florence for more than three months.

The relevance of my experience to anyone beyond that narrow designation is questionable at best, because I have heard that every city has a slightly different process you have to go through. It also makes a difference being married to a European citizen (I’m not yet convinced it makes the process much easier) and which non-European country you come from (the kinds of documents you get there and what the system is like).

Inside a Questura office- the one I went to in Florence looks more dingy than this, though! (Image from here)

I have been reading in Genesis where God spoke to Abraham (then Abram) and told him to leave his country, his people and his father’s household and go to the land that God would show him. That land happened to be the ancient land of Canaan.

The other day my husband and I were discussing this complicated process and the seemingly ridiculous documents we have been asked to produce. We reflected on how in days gone by people didn’t have to go through this kind of process, and we thought of Abraham and others in the Bible who had to go to a different country to live. It made me imagine what might have happened if Abraham had had to deal with Italy’s (or probably most countries’) immigration system, assuming Abraham had identification documents...

Canaan Immigration Officer: Signore, Signora, can I see your passports?
Abraham: Here they are.
CIO: Your passports only give your names as ‘Abraham’ and ‘Sarah’. Do you have a marriage certificate to show that you are married.
Abraham: Certainly. Here-
CIO: Hmmm... This says your names are ‘Abram’ and ‘Sarai’. Do you have a document that certifies your name change? I need to verify that you are the same people as on the marriage certificate?
Abraham: Um, no...
CIO: Under what circumstances did you change your names?
Abraham: God gave us new names.
CIO: Hmmm.... Well, that doest appear to be on this list of valid reasons for name change. I’m afraid I can’t process your request. You will have to go back to your home country and get all the necessary documentation, and then come back and try again.
Abraham: But I’m 75 years old and we’ve walked all the way here from Haran with everything we own.
CIO: I’m sorry, sir. There’s nothing I can do. You have to supply the appropriate paperwork.

Now of course, God himself could have come down with the name change certificates and waved them in the officer’s face, but he sometimes chooses not to act immediately in order to teach us perseverance and patience (James 1:2-4). This is what we have been learning.

A linguistic approach to history

To the historian equipped with the proper tools, it is suggested, any text or artefact can figure forth the thought-world and possibly even the world of emotional investment and praxis of its time and place of production. Not that any given text can alone call up the whole world of its origin or that any given set of texts can reveal its world completely. But in principle, it seems to hold that we today possess the tools to probe texts in ways only dimly perceived or, if perceived, not fully utilized by earlier intellectual or other historians. And these tools, it is suggested, are generally linguistic in nature. (White, 1987:187)

The above quotation is taken from the work of a scholar not of linguistics, but of historiography and intellectual history. It is from Hayden White's The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. The potential of a text or artefact to 'figure forth the thought-world... of its time and place of production' (White, 1987:187) is a point of departure that is common to both historians and linguists. White is sympathetic to the ideas of linguistics and discourse analysis, advocating a 'semiological' approach to text as the most productive approach to questions concerned with meaning production and the meaning systems by which the meanings in a text are produced.

'Semiological', in White's sense, means 'the tradition of cultural analysis that builds upon the theory of language as a sign (rather than a word) system, after the manner of Saussure, Jakobsson, and Benveniste' (White, 1987:191). One of the schools of linguistics that has developed out of the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, among others, is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It provides considerable explanatory power for the whole range of linguistic phenomena, from intonation in speech (at the level of phonology) to syndromes of meaning (at the level of semantics) and beyond to the patterns of cultural tendencies. What I have argued in my recent work from my PhD research is that indeed we do have 'the tools to probe texts' to reveal how they 'figure forth the thought-world' of their time and place of production, and that the tools and concepts offered by SFL are ideal for this kind of job.

I'm hoping to post here, over the next little while, some of my thoughts on how linguistic tools can be used in historical enquiry, and particularly the study of media history.

References:

White, H. (1987). The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 185--213. Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Media Discussions

I've been observing with interest the kind of discussion that is generated by the 'comment' function on smh online. In the ones I have observed, the comments tell us a lot about what Herald readers (at least, the ones who post comments on articles online) see as the function of the Herald in the Sydney community, and also how the issues being discussed are seen to fit into the life of the nation. On Friday, the SMH published an opinion piece by Ross Cameron (described simply as 'the former federal member for Parramatta'), entitled 'Christmas message holds true'. In it, Cameron argues that "Jesus is easily the most influential person in history, and the most universally loved", and concludes that "From whatever perspective we come, thinking people ought to be able to agree, the birth of Jesus was a good day for mankind." A bit presumptuous, perhaps, but this is an opinion piece! He doesn't explicitly state his own position on the gospel of Jesus, but says at the end that he suspects he "may never quite shake the childlike hunch that there is some uniquely divine imprint on the central individual [i.e. Jesus] of the human story." This suggests to me that he does not yet have a relationship with God through Jesus, but is open to the gospel. Interestingly, some of the commenters assume that Cameron is a Christian, with one reader commenting that "It really is unfortunate that religious figures automatically assume that 'From whatever perspective we come, thinking people ought to be able to agree, the birth of Jesus was a good day for mankind'", and another numbering Cameron with Christian apologists!

The discussion generated by this article seems to follow the pattern of most discussions on smh online around articles that mention Jesus. Non-believers and atheists tend to start the ball rolling by condemning the Herald for publishing something that mentions religion in any kind of supportive light, and issuing a challenge to any 'thinking people' to reject the 'propaganda' put out by the organised church. Believers then respond by defending Jesus against the criticisms and sometimes turning the charges of hypocrisy back on the atheists. There is a strong underlying current in the posts from unbelievers that the topic of religion should be kept out of the mainstream media and left to the private sphere, e.g. John C's comment that "Religion in Australia is probably best considered as a matter for consenting adults in private" – a view that, at one time, would have held for the topic of sex instead of religion.

Once upon a time the Herald did put forth an overtly 'Christian' (in the nominal sense, at least) worldview – some of the earliest editors (e.g. in the 1830s) were clergymen, who took the opportunity to publish sermon-like editorials. In the early 1900s (and probably before - I would have to check) the churches of Sydney had regular spots in the newspaper to publicise service times and announcements. When the end of the Boer War was reported on 3^rd June, 1902, there were very unselfconscious, matter-of-fact reports that 'the congregations in the churches in Durban sang the National Anthem', '"Now Thank we all our God" was sung at the close of the service at St Paul's and the Chapel Royal' and 'there were thanksgivings in most of the churches yesterday'. It appears that in that context it was assumed that the readers of the Herald would share this worldview that it was natural and normal to give thanks to God for the end of war and entrust the peace time to Him. That was in another time, and Sydney is now a more diverse, heterogeneous community. So it is inevitable that not every topic in the newspaper will be relevant or interesting to every member of the community, and newspapers should continue to publish articles and opinion pieces on a range of topics that are relevant to the whole cross-section of the community. But I have to disagree with a number of the unbelievers who claimed that the 'religious right' control Fairfax. A Christian worldview is not the prevailing one in the Herald, although it may be Eurocentric as some of the readers in the discussion noted.