Music as an Integrative Element in Immigrant Communities. The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, an Intercultural Community Initiative in Rome1 Karolina Golemo
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talian society is becoming increasingly multicultural. The presence of numerous immigrant groups from various parts of the world means that one of the main challenges facing Italy’s politicians is the development of effective means of integration on the socio-cultural, civic and economic planes. Integration programmes involving training, the jobs market and bringing immigrants into the country’s political life are all typical strategies employed by government agencies and third sector organisations alike, while effective integration into Italian society is also supported by undertakings promoting immigrants’ participation in the cultural life of the nation. This article sets out to demonstrate that a shared and active participation in culture can serve as an integrative element amongst various ethnic groups within an immigrant community.
IMMIGRATION. AN IMPORTANT DIMENSION OF ITALIAN MULTICULTURALISM
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owadays, immigrants are a highly important constituent part of Italian society and forecasts indicate that their numbers will continue to rise in forthcoming years. Their presence in Italy today should be treated as a new multiculturalism dimension, co-existing, in greater or lesser accord, with the other elements that make up the mosaic of Italian identity. Immigration is becoming an ever more enduring aspect of the country’s reality, contributing to her continuing transformation. Italians thus need to accept a situation whereby their society will be undergoing a growing ‘hybridity’, or ‘creolisation’2, to use Ulf Hannerz’s terminology3 [2006].
1 Work on this article was completed in May 2011. As such, all the comments made and information given in the text pertain to a period prior to that date. 2 The anthropologist Chiara Mellina writes of this phenomenom in Problemi di coabitazione in una società multiculturale, [in:] Stefano Petilli et al, (ed.) Mediatori interculturali. Un’esperienza formativa, Sinnos Editrice, Roma 2004, pp. 65-72; “Whether we want it or not, the world’s destiny, and this includes Europe, will be to accept the concept of ‘hybridity’, understood as a kind of cultural pluralism born of the multiple, intercontinental movement of women and men and thus of the proliferation of material, spiritual, linguistic, physiological and traditional cultural elements which must, with time, fuse and create a syncretic ‘cultural mix’, something that, after all, has always been a part of human existence.”, ibidem, p. 72 [all the quotations from Italian publications have been translated into Polish by the author. This quotation has been translated into English from the Polish]. 3 Hannerz defines Creole cultures as “those which draw in some way upon two or more historical sources, often originally widely different”. As he perceives it, a world in creolization is a “world of movement and mixture”. He also describes the process of creolisation and the “new syntheses capable of existence” emerging from it. (Polish source: ibidem, p. 291; English source: first quotation: cited in Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture, Rowman and Littlefield, Maryland 2009 http://tinyurl. com/3wfam4n, 15.08.2011; second quotation: cited in Charles Stuart (ed.), Creolization: history, ethnography, theory, Left Coast Press, USA 2007, http://tinyurl.com/3honfz9 15.08.2011; third quotation: translated from the Polish for the purposes of this article.
Culture Management 2012, Vol 5 (5)
Karolina Golemo PhD, assistant professor at the Jagiellonian University Institute of Regional Studies, Department of Ethnocultural Politics; graduate of Sociology and Journalism and Social Communication at Jagiellonian University. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholarship holder; the author of a monograph on the image of Poland and Poles in Italy. She cooperates with the research centre Immigrazione Dossier Statistico in Rome and the universities: La Sapienza, Roma Tre and Universidad Castilla-La Mancha. Research field: Italian and Spanish society and culture, migration, national stereotypes, media images of social and ethnic groups, political culture.