CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp. 105–130, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. Cultural Anthropology is the journal of the Society of Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license. Reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. DOI: 10.14506/ca40.1.05 PAOLO HEYWOOD Durham University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2983-9240 “Duce, 100 years ago you started a glorious period. Today, we can finally remember it freely.” —Inscription in the visitors’ book at the tomb of Benito Mussolini, Predapppio, October 2022 The epigraph above was noted by a journalist visiting Predappio, the birth- place and burial site of Benito Mussolini, the week of the one hundredth anniver- sary of his seizure of power in 1922 (Giuffrida 2022). The reference to Fascism as a “glorious period” is characteristic of most of the inscriptions in the visitors’ book in Mussolini’s tomb I had occasion to read over the course of four years of fieldwork there. Predappio is Italy’s premier site of neofascist tourism: Mussolini was born there in 1883, and from almost the moment he took power in 1922, he began the process of transforming what had been a small and entirely incon- sequential settlement of a few hundred people into a new town of several thou- sand, built around key sites from his childhood and designed to celebrate both his life and the genius of Fascist urban engineering. Since 1957, when his body BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION: On the Ethics of Forgetting CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-2164 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 106 was returned to the family tomb after a series of postmortem misadventures that included being stolen and hidden in a convent by a successor to the Fascist Party (cf. Luzzatto 2014), Predappio and the Mussolini family crypt receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, many of whom dress in black, and many of whom will leave a celebratory or hagiographic comment in the visitors’ book. The upbeat tone of this one proves quite unusual, though; most of the in- scriptions in preceding years were more likely to bemoan contemporary Italian politics and wish wistfully for their Duce’s return. The reason for the upbeat tone is that, in a loose sense, that wish was fulfilled in October 2022. Almost ex- actly one hundred years to the day that Mussolini took power after the so-called March on Rome, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, be- came Italy’s prime minister. This was the first time that an Italian government had been led by a direct descendant of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party (PNF), itself banned since the end of World War II. Meloni named Ignazio La Russa, her party co-founder, whose father served as secretary of the PNF, and whose mid- dle name is Benito, as president of the Italian Senate, the second-highest-ranking office of state. All these developments help explain the anonymous visitor’s un- usually optimistic tone. Much less unusual is the author’s concern with memory, long a dominant focus for neofascist visitors to Predappio. Every year this very small comune is visited by “dark tourists” (Lennon and Foley 2000), many of whom come to pay tribute at Mussolini’s grave and to write their names and messages in the visi- tors’ book positioned in front of a large marble bust of his head and the Italian tricolor flag. Figure 1. Mussolini’s Tomb and Visitor’s Book. Photo by Sailko, source: Wikicommons. BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 107 On three anniversaries in particular—those of Mussolini’s birth, death, and seizure of power—thousands of neofascists in black shirts or military uni- forms descend on Predappio to march from the center of town to the Mussolini family mausoleum, where flowers are laid and speeches are given, arms upraised in the (illegal) Fascist salute. A typical banner carried at one such march read, “Those who do not remember the past are not fit to govern the present.” Figure 2. The beginning of an anniversary march in Predappio in 2018. Photo by Paolo Heywood. This sentiment also mirrors claims often heard from the opposite side of the political spectrum in Italy—and abroad—regarding what are held to be pre- dominantly “forgetful” Italian attitudes to their Fascist heritage. Indeed, some commentators lay the blame for Meloni’s election on precisely this forgetful- ness with regard to historical Fascism, with specific reference to Predappio (e.g., Corner 2022). Predappio captures an ambiguity often present in commentary on forget- ting Fascism in Italy: Is it an attitude or stance of forgetfulness? Or a simple absence of memory? As I have described elsewhere, people who live in the town often go to great lengths to ignore its Fascist heritage, despite the fact that— thanks to its unique urban fabric, the presence of Mussolini’s body, and the con- stant influx of tourists—the town is thoroughly suffused by it (see Heywood 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024a). I have described this avoidance as cultivated, and it CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 108 is an avoidance that extends, unsurprisingly, to a sometimes forgetful attitude toward the town’s unique history. But rather than dismiss such forgetful attitudes as merely instances of bad faith, here I want to ask how practices of remembering and forgetting work to- gether to situate the self in relation to wider political narratives, perhaps espe- cially in contexts of “difficult” heritage (Macdonald 2009). There is an extended Western tradition going back to the Stoics in which memory and technologies of remembrance are understood to play important roles in the cultivation of vir- tuous selves by emphasizing the stability and continuity of the self in the face of change. (The same holds true in some non-Western traditions; see Cassaniti 2022.) Echoes of this tradition seem to abound in contexts in which forgetting appears as an enforced duty, an obligation imposed on people by the state or other powers (e.g., Mookherjee 2006), and in which to remember means to cul- tivate a memorious self in opposition to such compelled discontinuity. Yet what of contexts in which some discontinuities of selfhood are actively pursued, rather than imposed? What of situations in which a stance of forget- fulness may serve to index a fact about oneself—that one is a different person than one was—rather than merely to reflect or feign to reflect the absence of memory? Here I want to explore forgetting as an ethical technology, rather than only as a form of public duty, imposition, or weakness of character. If memory and technologies of memorialization fit easily within Western and non-Western tra- ditions of self-examination and self-cultivation, what role might forgetting and forgetfulness play in ethics and in the ways in which people imagine their rela- tion to themselves? If memory, as Seneca argued, is thought to foster a sense of stability and continuity of self that lend coherence to one’s thought and action, what, if any, good might be thought to come from forgetting, and how do people go about it? MEMORY WARS AND PREDAPPIO Given its history and heritage, concerns about memory have unsurprisingly stood at the forefront of international debates about Predappio’s place in Italian public culture. A furore erupted in the international press in 2017, for example, over plans to install a museum of Fascism in the town’s imposing but derelict former Fascist Party headquarters (Casa del Fascio). BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 109 Figure 3. The former Casa del Fascio in Predappio. Photo by Paolo Heywood. For proponents of the project, such as Predappio’s former mayor Giorgio Frassineti, it was an opportunity to rescue his home from what he often called the damnatio memoriae into which he felt it had been cast by association with its most famous son. Turning that association into a strength instead of a weakness by creating the nation’s first museum to its totalitarian past in Predappio would offer a way to reclaim that past and the memories associated with it, as instru- ments for the education of a younger generation otherwise oblivious of the perils of Fascism (see Carrattieri 2018). For the project’s many opponents, on the other hand, a “museum of Fascism”—especially one sited in Italy’s most notorious site of Fascist heritage—would only encourage those who seek to memorialize Fas- cism. A number of alternative proposals with memory as their focus—such as a memorial to the Italian Resistance, or to victims of Fascist crimes—were put forward. Almost everybody, in other words, worries about how and what to remember in Predappio. Predappio crystallizes a wider problematic of remembering and forgetting in relation to Fascism in Italy, and debates over the museum project reveal “an obvious sense of anxiety regarding the history of Fascism” (Storchi 2019, 18). As a large body of scholarship has shown, while injunctions to remember Fas- cist crimes form some of the foundational components of the postwar Italian state and the basis of some its popular culture and social movements (see, e.g., Passerini 1987), public memories of Fascism in Italy are also “hazy, selective, CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 110 and unreliable” (Malone 2017, 445; see also Corner 2002, 2005; Fogu 2006; Foot 2009; Mammone 2006; Pavone 2000). While this lack of shared narra- tive in part results from a revisionist approach to Fascist historiography in Italy that emerged in the 1990s (see, e.g., De Felice 1995), as far back as 1983 Luisa Passerini (1983, 196) wrote of the ways in which “there is no ‘work of mem- ory’ without a corresponding ‘work of forgetting,’” and noted that working-class memories of the Fascist period tended to focus on the rhythms of everyday life, erasing difficult or traumatic moments (Passerini 1987; cf. also Heywood 2022, 2024c). The selectivity of memories of Fascism in Italy finds a parallel in the treat- ment of Fascist heritage, such as that which dominates Predappio (see Arthurs 2010; Carter and Martin 2017; Malone 2017; Storchi 2013, 2019). Lucy Maulsby (2014), for instance, highlights the way in which former Fascist Party head- quarters, like the one in Predappio, have often been only partially cleansed of their architectural associations with Fascism, yet many Italians remain ignorant of their history and original purpose. Comparing the country with those who drank from the River Lethe in Greek mythology, she notes that such forgetful- ness “can be . . . understood as a collective inability to completely engage with the moral and ethical problems posed by Fascism” (Maulsby 2014, 32). A note- worthy ambiguity obtains in this analogy, as those who drank from the River Le- the did so deliberately, in conscious pursuit of forgetfulness, and echoing a clas- sical tradition concerned with the importance and arts of forgetting (see below). This voluntaristic quality differs quite markedly from the “inability” gestured to in the subsequent analysis. Arguments and rhetoric around defects in memory when it comes to Fas- cism are often framed in moral terms, as in Maulsby’s claim that forgetfulness marks an ethical failing (and, for a very different set of reasons, that of neofascist marchers). More broadly, memory and remembrance are often framed as vir- tuous practices, duties to people or objects—as in invocations to remember to avoid the repetition of appalling crimes, or to pay tribute to the dead (see, e.g., Kwon 2010). This sort of perspective on the necessarily virtuous nature of memory is echoed in critical assessments of the Italian case beyond Maulsby’s specific points about Fascist heritage. As Rosario Forlenza (2012, 2018) brilliantly documents (see also Forlenza and Thomassen 2021), while it is certainly true that public memory in Italy surrounding World War II and the Fascist regime has often proved selective and generally oriented toward establishing the “myth” of the BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 111 anti-fascist resistance as a second Risorgimento or national rebirth (see, e.g., Cooke 2011, 2012), to see remembering and forgetting in purely presentist and instrumental terms means to reduce “memory, which is a fundamental concept of culture, to a by-product of politics, created from above and isolated from a broader understanding of the social, cultural, and historical context” (Forlenza 2018, 141). As Forlenza (2018, 173–74) goes on to describe, this perspective also fails to account for “the complex relationship between forgetting and remembering, which cannot be understood only in terms of the implementation of strategy by political parties and elites . . . memories of wartime experiences were threaten- ing and painful, and haunted individuals for years; some therefore strove to for- get. Silence and forgetting were ways of coping with the past; these mechanisms supported the attempt to build a new and different life . . . we are not only the past that we can remember, but we are also the past that we can forget.” The question of individual practices of forgetting and their relation to wider public narratives connects these issues to a larger historical tradition of understanding memory and forgetfulness not just as public practices but as eth- ical technologies and ways of instantiating particular kinds of subjectivity and selfhood. Connecting arguments about public forgetfulness to this tradition may offer a way of thinking about both why people forget and how they do so that goes beyond imposed silence and absence. Memory has an extended historical place as a virtuous technology in and of itself, one of the many means by which people from Seneca to Aquinas have practiced self-cultivation (see, e.g., Foucault 1986). Here, in the range of writ- ing devoted to ars memoriae or mnemotechnics, techniques of memorialization are thought to be good not merely for what they allow one to remember but for what they do to the soul and the subject, for their role in self-examination, and for their encouragement of piety and religious obedience. Such practices are not confined to the West: Julia Cassaniti (2022, 7) has described the ways in which Theravada mindfulness practices are rooted in an ethics of non-forgetfulness, in which memory—in the sense of connecting one’s past and present selves—is “good” and forgetting is “bad.” Here, in other words, memory functions as a technology of self-cultivation, good not only because it fulfils a wider social duty but also because of its effects on the person. Somewhat buried within the Western historical tradition of ars memoriae is an equivalent set of concerns in which memory constitutes not a virtue but a problem. Ovid prescribed remedies for forgetting a lost object of romantic CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 112 affection; Cicero tells of the wisdom of Themistocles, who wished to learn to forget rather than to remember; and Cornelius Agrippa thought mnemotechnics would lead to mental overload and madness from a surfeit of memory (cf. Za- hora 2015). Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued for the benefits of active and selective forgetting, and Jorge Luis Borges’s story titled “Funes the Memorious” fictionalizes Cornelius Agrippa’s fears coming true for a man who cannot forget, and so cannot think, because “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.” Some recent scholarship outside of anthropology has also returned to questions of forgetting in critique of the memory studies boom (Rieff 2016; Symons 2019), and there is an extensive psychoanalytic literature on pathologies of memory going back at least to Sigmund Freud (1917) on mourning and mel- ancholia. What unites this buried undercurrent of literature is Forlenza’s point about the Italian case: that despite a tendency sometimes to assume that memory has a necessarily positive ethical valence in relation to the construction of the self, “we are also the past that we can forget.” Anthropology has long recognized forgetting as a constituent part of mem- ory (e.g., Trouillot 1995), along with the fact that, as Paul Ricœur (2004, 452) puts it, “recounting one drama is forgetting another.” Ethnographic interest in social practices of forgetting has been relatively sporadic and unsystematized, however, a fact noted by a number of those who have written on the subject (e.g., Battaglia 1993, 430; Carsten 1995, 317; Vitebsky 2008, 244). While some work emerged during the memory studies boom of the nineties (Augé 1998; Battaglia 1992, 1993; Carsten 1995; Cole 1998; Forty and Küchler 1999; Taylor 1993), just as the ars oblivionalis emerged alongside the ars memoriae, relatively little has been said on the subject since then (though see Connerton 2008; Har- rison 2004; Vitebsky 2008). Paul Connerton notes that Euro-Americans are habituated to think of for- getting as a moral failure of sorts (Connerton 2008, 59), and much of that earlier anthropological work on forgetting set up an implicit or explicit contrast be- tween this Euro-American perspective on forgetting as failure and non-Western contexts in which more or less ritualized versions of forgetting lead not to disin- tegration and social anomie but to what Connerton (2008, 63) calls “the forma- tion of a new identity,” or, in Debbora Battaglia’s (1993, 430) case, in an echo of Ernest Renan’s famous characterization of a nation as united by forgetting, even to “society” itself. While there is much that is ethnographically specific to these anthropo- logical accounts, the echo of Renan—and Western traditions of problematizing BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 113 memory, from Cornelius Agrippa to Borges, Nietzsche, and Freud—should lead us to pause before assuming a sharp distinction between forgetting as moral failure in Euro-American contexts and as productive elsewhere. Indeed, while Battaglia makes an argument about the way Melanesian views of partible social personhood allow them easily to incorporate the idea that some parts of the dead should be remembered with the thought that other parts should be forgotten, again the point returns us to the more general view that selves are always com- posites of what is forgotten and what is remembered. Keeping in mind the duality of memory and forgetting as ethical technol- ogies—the idea that any art of memory as a way of establishing continuity of selfhood will necessarily also involve the art of forgetting—points a way out of a classic problem for scholars (and practitioners) of forgetfulness: how to remem- ber to forget without remembering. In thinking about ways in which people might actively engage in processes of forgetting, Umberto Eco (1988, 258) famously described the impossibility of a true ars oblivionalis, a conscious technique of effacement comparable to the techniques of memorialization, since any such technique would be semiotic in form, and inherent to semiotics is the making present of something absent: a sign that stands for something will bring that thing to mind no matter what form the sign takes, so saying “there is no rose” nevertheless brings the picture of a rose to mind (see also Candea 2022). As Jon Elster (1993, 81) puts it, “the command- ment ‘forget him’ requires an effort that can only inscribe in memory the object that one is demanded to forget.” This point makes evident a problem with the assumption that ritual behav- ior around memory and forgetting is necessarily about inducing a certain sort of inner state (the presence of memories or their absence). While it might appear intuitive to imagine that practices of remembrance serve to accomplish some- thing like this in a simple sense by bringing to mind the object of memory, the same cannot easily be said of practices of forgetting—it is not straightforward to imagine a practice that could induce the absence of memory, as Eco and Elster make clear. The idea that forgetting is an imposed “commandment” intended to induce the inner state of forgetfulness but unable to do so successfully seems to sit be- hind the view that memory should be understood as virtuous “resistance” to such commandments, as in James Scott’s (1990) notion of the “hidden transcript.” A thought like this seems also to be at work in critiques of forgetful Italian attitudes to Fascism (just as it is more obviously at work in the neofascists’ invocation of CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 114 memory, as well as in wider antifascist injunctions to remember Fascist crimes). That is, the implication of such critiques is often that while the postwar Italian state has thoroughly failed to come to terms with the nation’s Fascist past, it re- mains open to Italians themselves to do so. There exists, then, a certain disjuncture between the collective and the in- dividual often built into our ideas about forgetting as an external imposition: be- cause such imposition is in fact impossible, societies may forget, but individuals (should) remember. The fact that many do not is what is hard to explain, as re- vealed by the ambiguity of the Lethe metaphor in the case of Italian Fascism: are Italians “unable” to remember because of some overarching contextual failure, or do they actively drink from the Lethe themselves, deliberately seeking oblivion? In juxtaposing classical literature on the ethics of remembering and for- getting and anthropological engagements with forgetting, what I want to draw attention to is that one way to answer the question of how people forget might be to shift focus from what socially imposed practices of forgetting do to inner states to what practices of forgetting as ethical technologies do to perceptions of self. In other words, instead of asking about the presence or absence of partic- ular memories, in certain contexts it might prove more productive to ask about what kinds of continuities and discontinuities of self are exhibited by such mem- ories or their absence. Eco (1988, 260) suggests one of the ways in which this process may func- tion when he describes the possibility of an art of oblivion that would succeed not by dint of effacement but of excess: “I can try to forget [something] by train- ing myself to pronounce [something else] repeatedly, day after day, until I be- come incapable of remembering which of the two versions is the right one.” This process resembles Connerton’s (2008, 63) description of forms of for- getting directed at the formation of new identities, insofar as the forgotten object is not so much destroyed as written over and replaced. It resembles Battaglia’s (1992, 9) descriptions of Melanesian understandings of “forgetting’s constructive role in the creation of . . . new memory.” And of course it reinforces Forlenza’s point about the Italian case that we are not only the past we can remember but also the past we can forget. It is also, in a sense, the equivalent of Ricœur’s point that remembering and forgetting go hand in hand. In other words, in an import- ant sense, Eco’s prescription for an art of forgetting is also an art of memory: the technology of forgetting is the same as the technology of remembering. To forget something, you must remember something else, just as, as we know from Ricœur and many others, to remember something is to forget something else. BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 115 In other words, it is not hard to think of comparable instances in which a process of “active remembering” produces a form of “active forgetting,” and the line between the two may be blurred, partial, or ambiguous. Indeed, absent special psychological insight or access, it may prove impossible to know which is more important: the thing remembered or the thing forgotten. In connecting such instances to the notion of an art or ethical technology, my point again is that the self that results from the process of remembering and forgetting may sometimes be just as important, if not more so, than exactly what it is that is re- membered and forgotten. In such situations, the relevant questions to ask would be not just what has been forgotten and how, but also what has been remembered in its place; against what wider background does it make sense to forget this, and remember that; and what kinds of continuities and discontinuities of self are effected by such practices? Furthermore, and just as Seneca sought to remember for its own sake (regardless of what in particular it was that he remembered) be- cause he prized continuity of subjectivity, so it may be that there are contexts in which exactly what it is that people forget, or whether or not in fact they really have forgotten it, matters less than the attitude of having forgotten, and the con- sequent demonstration of certain discontinuities of subjectivity. Below I examine a number of different attitudes to forgetfulness in an eth- nographic context in which memory constitutes a problem partly because the continuity of political subjectivity constitutes a problem. In a town built by a Fascist dictator to celebrate his life in the middle of the most left-wing region of Italy, a place where most families have a deeply complex history of affiliation with both the left and the right, forgetting—clearly separating yourself from your past—may sometimes be just as important a duty as remembering. THE RED AND THE BLACK Outsiders often assume an obvious sense in which people in Predappio ex- hibit discontinuity in their political subjectivity: because of its emblematic status in relation to Fascism, Italians who don’t know the town, from both the left and right, often think that all its inhabitants must themselves therefore be Fascist, and any protest to the contrary must be disingenuous. Thus people in Predappio tell stories of favorable treatment from right-leaning policemen as soon as they show their ID cards and residency, and Frassineti, while mayor of the town, used regularly to receive a postcard addressing him as “Dear Fascist Dickhead” (see Heywood 2024a, 2024b). CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 116 In fact, Frassineti was only the latest in what was, until 2019, an unbroken line of left-wing and communist mayors of Predappio since the end of the war; the town sits in the historic heartland of the Italian left; and Mussolini him- self, along with his father, were well known locally as socialist activists—his father was a town councillor for the Socialist Party, and gave his son the names of famous left-wing heroes. None of these facts, however, deter many outsiders from assuming that, deep down, anyone from Predappio must share the political coloring of their most famous fellow citizen, and this has led many Predappiesi to spend their lives lying about or hiding their place of origin whenever they go abroad. To this view any attitude of forgetfulness toward Fascism may be dismissed as dissembling, an attempt to mask genuine historical loyalties beneath a veneer of pretense. Unsurprisingly, things prove much more complex than this in real- ity. Predappio is no more politically homogenous than any other town of compa- rable size in the region, and in fact, its long history of voting for the left reflects an extended local historical tradition of anticlerical, agrarian, and socialist activ- ism. And local attitudes toward discontinuous political loyalties and subjectivi- ties reflect an equally long-standing and complex set of circumstances, in which forgetting has a nuanced role to play. The roots of Predappiesi concerns with the problem of the continuity of political allegiance and conviction are to be found in the roots of Mussolini and Fascism themselves. “Historic turncoat number one in Predappio was Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Fascism, son of Alessandro Mussolini, anarchist socialist, and blacksmith of Dovia [as Predappio was then known],” notes one of the only histories of Predappio, written by three amateur historians and local residents (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 212). Mussolini and his family were well- known in the village when they lived there: his mother was the local school- teacher and his father the blacksmith, as well as a councillor for the Socialist Party, until his arrest and imprisonment for participation in a riot after the loss of an election. Many in the village would have followed Mussolini’s early politi- cal career in the same party as his father, first at the local level, when he ran un- successfully for the post of secretary to the village council after finishing school in 1901, and then much more successfully at the regional, and later national lev- els, as he rose to prominence as a firebrand speaker and the editor of Avanti!, the national organ of the Socialist Party. No doubt many would also have followed his expulsion from the party in 1914 over his decision to support and lobby for Italian intervention in World War I. BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 117 Questions were very quickly raised in Italian socialist circles as to the mo- tivation behind this volte-face on the part of Mussolini, who had previously toed the party line on neutrality, and one question in particular was asked often: “Chi paga? [Who is the paymaster?]” R. J. B. Bosworth (2002, 350–53) describes evi- dence that Mussolini was paid both personally and in the form of funding for the new newspaper he would go on to set up by the Italian and French governments, who hoped his change of position on the war would draw in support for it from other northern leftists. Whether or not such suspicions occurred to any of his fellow citizens in Predappio, the disparity between the socialism of Mussolini’s youth in the vil- lage and the Fascism he espoused by the time he returned home for his first visit as prime minister shortly after ascending to that position in 1922 will certainly have been obvious to his erstwhile compatriots. For at least two years by that point Fascist squads had been terrorizing the north of Italy—including the en- virons of Predappio—beating, kidnapping, and killing political opponents and destroying and burning any homes or buildings suspected of harboring socialists or communists. The disparity clearly did not escape Mussolini himself either: in an early instance of an active attempt to forget political disloyalty, he had several of his former socialist comrades from the village rounded up and imprisoned for the duration of his visit, so that their presence would not prompt the recollection of any inconvenient memories. The occasion of his 1922 visit home was the inauguration of a project that formed, in some sense, a large-scale version of Eco’s forgetting by remembering. This essentially involved the construction of an entirely new town in the place of the village in which socialist Mussolini grew up, a town built around the myth of Mussolini’s biography, but one in which his early politics had no place (Heywood 2022, 2024a). A number of local political friends-turned-opponents were sent into internal exile, and thousands of migrants were bussed in to take their place in the sparkling apartment buildings of the new settlement. Mussolini’s father became mythologized to some extent as part of this project thanks to his status as a man of the people and humble blacksmith, but his fervent anarchist socialism of course never found mention, and he largely took second place to Mussolini’s mother, the teacher after whose saint the nursery school in Predappio is still named. In Mussolini’s case, in other words, we meet what is very obviously a situa- tion in which a clear set of continuities between past and present are established: Mussolini’s proletarian origins, his mother’s career caring for and teaching CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 118 children, and, as I have described elsewhere (Heywood 2022), Predappio’s status as an “ordinary” Italian town were all heavily emphasized in regime propaganda and the wider “cult of the Duce” (Serenelli 2013) as clearly contributing to a hagiographic narrative in which Mussolini emerges from his humble roots to be- come the savior of the nation. By contrast, factors seen to fit this narrative less well, most obviously his father’s and his own socialism, were performatively for- gotten. I say performatively because had such things truly been forgotten, there would have been no need to arrest Mussolini’s erstwhile compatriots on the oc- casion of his visit. This example of the phenomenon I describe may seem almost too easy for us to recognize, as the narrative of the self at issue is that of a dictator, and his medium is nation-state propaganda. Mussolini is obviously far from the only ex- ample of a political leader who has sought to suppress some aspects of his own biography in service of producing a coherent hagiographic narrative. It is, though, worth remembering that for people in Predappio, Mussolini was both more and less than this: more in the sense that he was a concrete per- son, united by ties of kinship and affinity with many locals, and familiar from his youth; less in the sense that for precisely that reason, the performative for- getting his propaganda demanded was unlikely to succeed. Of course people no- ticed the temporary (or sometimes permanent) disappearance of Mussolini’s old friends, and locals tell a number of stories in which Predappiesi feel entitled to make their memory of Mussolini’s political past slyly clear: in one, a godson of Mussolini is baptized by the Duce himself, when he was a socialist, with the anticlerical name of “Rebel.” After the Lateran Pact between Fascist Italy and the Catholic Church, Mussolini tells the child’s father he must change his son’s name, and the father replies coldly that since, after all, Mussolini gave him the first name, he had better be the one to change it (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 214). In another, on a visit to the town, Mussolini stops a local character he recognizes from his days in the Socialist Party to ask him what he thinks of the political situation, and the man replies (in local dialect) that he has never liked the white poplar leaf (la fója de farfaraz) and turns pointedly away from him (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 203). The farfaraz, or pioppo bianco, in Italian, is a type of poplar tree famous for the contrast between the striking white underside of its leaves and their dark green upper side. Poplars are noted for their mobility in the wind, which can cause their leaves to flip rapidly back and forth even in a slight breeze, and for BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 119 this reason the white poplar’s leaf is locally symbolic of a voltagabbana, or turn- coat, someone who switches political colors for convenience. La fója de farfaraz is also the title of the local history book from which I have just quoted, and it is filled with other, similar stories. In fact, the reason it refers to Mussolini as “historic turncoat number one” is because he is but the first of a large number of turncoats who fill its pages and from whom the book takes its name. One favorite such story—that I have recounted elsewhere (Heywood 2024a, 2024b)—is of Angelo Ciaranfi, the last democratically elected mayor of Predappio in 1920, before the advent of Fascism forced his resignation in 1922. After a few years under the regime, however, Ciaranfi underwent a conversion, joining the Italian Fascist Party. To make the strength of his new convictions clear, he even rewrote his will to include a codicil requiring him to be buried in a Fascist blackshirt. Later still, “after the disaster and the tragedy of war, and the failures of Fascism,” runs the story in La fója de farfaraz, Ciaranfi, good old Ciaranfi, realized he’d made a serious mistake, and turned on his feet politically again, joining the Italian Communist Party. After the liberation of Predappio, he served in the administration of the first postwar democratic mayor, Giuseppe Ferlini. But those tumultuous years had no doubt radically transformed Ciaranfi’s existence, like those of many other Italians, and it’s probably for this reason that he forgot to rewrite his will. So, when he died in June 1948, and his testament obliged him to be buried in a blackshirt, there was much consternation and embar- rassment among his comrades, who were expecting to send him off draped in the red flag with the “Internationale” playing. In the end, and not with- out argument, it was decided that his body would lie in an open casket, and obligatory blackshirt, for a brief private ceremony with the family, before being buried with casket closed in a civil ceremony, complete with the PCI band and the red flag. (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 219; all transla- tions my own) In Ciaranfi’s case, as in Mussolini’s, we have a very clear case of remembering and forgetting both equally cultivated. The case literalizes Eco’s idea of induc- ing forgetfulness through synonymy, as Ciaranfi is buried with full communist CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 120 honors and trappings, with the approval of the local party apparatus, in an ob- vious attempt to memorialize a consistent political subject, loyal to the cause of the left, and to paper over the blackshirt in the coffin. Yet there is nothing in the story itself—or in the humor with which peo- ple relate it—to tell us which we should understand as primary: the funeral’s memorialization of Ciaranfi’s left-wing politics, or its papering over of his right- wing politics. Indeed, we may even suspect that Ciaranfi himself forgot the in- convenient will with the blackshirt codicil precisely because his transformation was genuine. Had it not been for the will, Ciaranfi’s Fascist service may very well have been forgotten, as has that of many others. The twin tales of Mussolini and Ciaranfi, from the beginning and the end of the Fascist period, both stand as examples of the uses of memory and forget- ting in the crafting of a narrative of self. In Mussolini’s case, the performative nature of the forgetting is made obvious by his arrest of his former socialist com- rades. But in Ciaranfi’s case, there is no such clarity about whether the point of the narrative of self is to forget or to remember. Both stories also evidence the fact that the kinds of narratives of selfhood produced by the cultivation of memory and forgetfulness belong not only to their subjects, even when those subjects possess the machinery of nation-state propaganda. The so-called cult of the Duce may have in many ways succeeded in erasing Mussolini’s socialism from the Italian public sphere, but it could not erase it from the memories of those who knew him as “turncoat number one.” In Ciaranfi’s case, one can imagine that those officiating at his Communist Party funeral may well have felt it worthwhile to collude in his forgetting, perhaps for the benefit of the postwar town settlement; it is Ciaranfi’s own failure to be con- sistent in remembering and forgetting that causes his discontinuous self to spill out beyond his narrative. FORGETTINGSCAPES The Fascist and post-Fascist period in Predappio was rife with discontin- uous political subjects, “white poplar leaves,” in local parlance. This no doubt held true in many places in Italy, but it was particularly true in Predappio, whose whole existence throbs with political contradiction: located in the heart of Italy’s “red belt” but built by its Fascist dictator (a man whose own political contra- dictions were intimately known to its inhabitants), subsequently governed by a nearly unbroken series of Communist and post-Communist mayors, and all the while a pilgrimage site for Italy’s neofascists. In the face of such contradictions, BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 121 then, sometimes what you forget is just as important as what you remember in its place. Contemporary attitudes to what to remember and what to forget about Predappio’s past in many ways exhibit a similar degree of cultivation. This be- comes particularly evident in relation to spaces of memory (and forgetting—see Diemberger 2016; Harrison 2004). For example, the Rocca delle Caminate is a medieval castle that sits atop one of the hills surrounding the town. It was al- ready a thousand years old when gifted to Mussolini by local authorities in 1923 for use as a summer residence. It played host to a number of famous domestic and foreign visiting dignitaries over the years of the dictatorship, as well hav- ing a spotlight installed in its highest tower that would project the fasces onto the night sky when Mussolini was in residence; the spotlight was so powerful it could be seen sixty kilometers away on the coast (Heywood 2024a, 2024c). During the war its history darkens, as it becomes a barracks and a prison to hold local partisans. Some locals claim the first meeting of the government of the Republic of Salò took place there in 1943, but undoubtedly, a number of prison- ers were tortured and murdered there over the subsequent two years, including one famous local hero called Antonio Carini. The only acknowledgment of this history today is a small plaque, almost hidden behind several outbuildings, hard to come upon except by accident. It denotes the place as the site of the deaths of “noble spirits who courageously resisted brutal torture and gave their lives for a free Italy.” This plaque was first erected in 2009—before, the site had no marker at all. Today, an expensive remodeling project has restored the Rocca, leaving al- most no trace of its Fascist past. Designed to host companies from the burgeon- ing tech sector of Emilia Romagna, the castle, at my last visit, was home to only one so far. Nevertheless, the interior now boasts a mass of offices, conference suites, reception rooms, and meeting halls, all decorated in the bland style of a modern aesthetic that sits uneasily within the much older walls of the build- ing. Some of the walls and ceilings have had renaissance frescoes and mosaics restored, but none of the many fasces Mussolini had added to the decor remain. On one visit to the Rocca, I traveled with Giorgio Frassineti, the then mayor of Predappio, and two visiting BBC journalists, who had come to cover the increasing international furor over the museum project. The mayor wanted to display the Rocca as an example of how Predappio could make successful use of its difficult past, but his praise of the costly remodeling rang somewhat hollow in the empty offices. After viewing the inside, we strolled through the castle’s CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 122 extensive grounds, moving past the old barracks and prison without comment, and out into a small forest. Frassineti began describing memories of how he used to play in the ruins of the castle as a boy, before its restoration. Like the “resto- ration” itself, which rendered the Rocca an odd concatenation of old (renaissance mosaics) and new (aluminum and leather furniture), made strange partly by the notable absence of anything from the period in between, the mayor’s cheerful stories of boyhood games offered a strikingly particular way of narrating the past of the place, feet away from the hidden plaque honoring Carini. As in the cases described in the previous section, the forgetting at work here does not happen in isolation from remembering, and it would be a mistake to imagine that the large sums of money devoted to the Rocca’s restoration were spent simply in an attempt to erase aspects of an uncomfortable heritage. The restoration certainly does not highlight the Rocca’s dark history, nor do Frassine- ti’s memories of postwar happiness, but that past is also not completely erased— nor indeed could it be, given its local and national infamy. At the same time, the Rocca’s renaissance past and the mayor’s childhood games offer easy alternative memories, in Eco’s terms, ones that establish a certain history and continuity to Predappio’s existence while sidestepping the wider national narrative that inex- tricably connects Predappio to only one aspect of its history. A great many other spaces of memory (and forgetting) in Predappio exhibit similar qualities of having certain histories cultivated in them and others culti- vated out of them, as I describe at length elsewhere (Heywood 2024a). A com- parable example is the town’s cemetery, about a kilometer away, built during the Predappio’s reconstruction under the dictatorship. One enters the large walled structure through one of three imposing arches to the vista of a tree-lined path- way leading to the Romanesque crypt that houses the remains of the Mussolini family. The whole cemetery, in other words, like Predappio itself, is built around memories of Mussolini, but it is also filled with the kin of almost everyone cur- rently living in the town, no matter what they felt or feel about Fascism. This becomes painfully obvious during the days of the neofascist anniver- sary marches, which always take place on a Sunday, a day on which many locals choose to visit and tend the graves of their relatives. To reach the tombs of their loved ones, elderly townspeople step around blackshirted marchers giving the Roman salute, and I have written elsewhere of the marked quality of the way in which the visitors are studiously ignored (Heywood 2023). My point here is about the ways in which memories of their own kin and relatives in the cemetery BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 123 can serve to overwrite, or at least compete with, the memories of Mussolini that neofascist visitors keenly keep alive. In a brilliant discussion of the complexities of unearthing Republican civil war dead in Spain who were secretly buried in regular church cemeteries, some- times in the interstices between normal tombs, Layla Renshaw shows how Fran- coist executioners sought—for a long time successfully—to disguise the dead bodies that lent evidence to their crimes by hiding them amid other corpses (Ren- shaw 2023; see also Ferrandiz 2022). The Republican dead were forgotten not by being cast into oblivion, but precisely by being housed in a place of memory, the memory of others. There is a sense in which locals in Predappio seek—against the odds—to ef- fect the same sort of operation on Mussolini. In their insistent memorialization of their own loved ones, even in the face of Predappio’s neofascist tourists, they treat the cemetery like any other, a repository of all the dead, instead of a monument to only one of them. “They’re just visiting a dead person, like I am,” says Valentina, a nonagenarian with a plethora of relatives buried in the cemetery. She dislikes the visitors, precisely for the memories of the war they conjure up, a war in which she endured hardship and starvation, and that left her with injuries that persist today. Like Eco, though—and like anyone who has tried—she knows she cannot simply will herself to forget unpleasant memories. Instead, she tries to remember those she prefers and takes comfort in small successes: “The other day I got out some old pictures and I was looking at the photo of the school football team from before the war, the one my brother played for, and so did Bruno [Mussolini’s son]. Of course I knew which one my brother was, but then I realized I couldn’t remember which one was Bruno—lucky me, I thought. I wish I could forget them all.” What the case of the cemetery makes particularly clear is that to see at- titudes to Predappio’s Fascist past as “merely” forgetful, whether successfully so or in bad faith, is to see only half of the story. It is to miss the extent to which such attitudes are not only about avoiding a past that is “difficult” or “uncomfort- able,” but also about remembering other things in its place—about constructing a self not only discontinuous in some ways, as all selves are, but also continuous in others. Such operations of remembering and forgetting are necessary aspects of cultivating a narrative with which one can live more or less happily in Predappio because of the wider local context within which they occur, one in which injunc- tions to remember Fascism come most explicitly from the thousands of far-right visitors the town receives every year. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 124 CONCLUSION In a manner parallel to the ways in which Casey High, Ann Kelly, and Jonathan Mair (2012) note that anthropologists and others are wont to assume that knowledge is always good and ignorance always bad, here I have argued that we sometimes make similar assumptions about remembering and forgetting. Remembering, we may assume, must be ethical because of the duty it fulfils to those things and people remembered, and/or because of the beneficial effects it has on the self. Likewise we may assume that—like ignorance in respect of knowledge—forgetting is simply the absence or failure of memory, and perhaps even that it induces a fragmentation rather than coherence of subjecthood (as in the figure of the amnesiac in popular imaginaries). Understanding forgetting as a technology of the self yields a potential an- swer to the problem of how to forget that goes beyond forgetting as failure or imposition. That is, if the staple that “remembering one thing is forgetting an- other” is correct, the technologies of remembrance with which a number of eth- ical traditions are replete are necessarily also technologies of forgetting—and vice versa. We forget things by insistently remembering other things in their place, as Eco argues. I have argued that it is simplistic to frame forgetting as always a simple moral defect or passive process, one to be countered by active technologies of remembering. Insofar as they are necessarily selective, such technologies them- selves also constitute instruments of forgetting, and sometimes, as here, they may be employed as such, useful for what they paper over as much as for what they bring back to mind. In other words, not only may forgetting make for an active process, as Nietzsche and others have argued, but it may also constitute the same sort of process as active remembering. Seeing this mutual imbrication of technologies of memory and forgetting in the pursuit of narratives of subjectivity reveals a set of alternative questions to those that ask simply about what has been forgotten and how successfully. It makes clear that in some cases—particularly perhaps those that sit against a background of conflict and difficult heritage—it is the crafted narrative that remembering and forgetting aim to create that proves more important than what has been remembered or forgotten. This essay has showcased a number of different forms this can take. Mus- solini’s “forgetful” political discontinuity is most obviously self-serving and per- formative, as evidenced by the arrest of his former socialist colleagues. In Ci- aranfi’s case, on the other hand, we have a much clearer example of the point BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 125 made here: like the Sabarl funerary practices Battaglia (1992) describes, Ciaran- fi’s communist burial aims at forgetting parts of his self to remember others. The parts remembered are continuous only in the absence of the parts forgotten. But it is impossible to say which process is primary. And contemporary attitudes to the past in Predappio prove equally ambiguous: to narrate them as merely forget- ful of what seems most striking to outsiders about the town is to ignore the fact that they involve memory too. These issues tie into broader debates on memory in Italy, as Forlenza’s work, among others, makes clear. As he describes, there were many reasons why forgetting, as “a blessed act of oblivion,” in Winston Churchill’s words, might have seemed attractive in postwar Italy (Forlenza 2018, 173). What I have sought to make clear here is that such forgetting need not only work through silence and absence: rather, successful forgetting (of one thing) is often manifested precisely in the presence of memory (of something else). We can see comparable instances in other ethnographic cases, such as some of the literature on post-Soviet memory, for example. Bruce Grant (2001, 335) points to the ways in which many of the expensive new monuments built by the state in Moscow in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union generated an aesthetic of childlike innocence by depicting figures from fairy tales and folk stories, thus gesturing to what he calls “a return to an age of simpler pasts and new beginnings.” Part of his point is to indicate that forgetting takes remember- ing—forgetting the Soviet Union means remembering (anew) a pre-communist national narrative. But of course, as in the examples described here, the point and interest of such practices is not only the “negative” work of forgetting and erasing, which is in any case likely to be unsuccessful; the point is also what pos- itive story emerges, and the place in it for various historical elements. Framing conflicts over memory—such as those found in Italy around Fas- cism—as simple choices between remembering and forgetting is thus unlikely to prove helpful or explanatory. As suggested by the note in the visitors’ book at Mussolini’s tomb that opened this essay, neofascists are just as likely as anyone else to think that “remembering freely” is ethical, and that forgetfulness is a sin. Indeed, in a context in which memory (“nostalgia”) is actively demanded in the service of neofascist politics, forgetting may be a—complex and ambiguous— way of evading such demands, much as Passerini (1987, 65) described “popular and archaic cultural forms” as a “complex and contradictory” means of eluding political control under Fascism: it is as much a mistake to deduce the presence of consent from the absence of memory as it was under Fascism to deduce it from CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 126 the absence of political opposition. Understanding technologies of memorializa- tion—both public and, as I have tried to show here, individual—as necessarily also technologies of forgetting allows us to ask what is at stake in these twin processes, and what happens when they become blurred. ABSTRACT This essay explores the ethics of forgetting as a technology of the self. Forgetfulness is a feature of a range of contexts of political conflict and “difficult” heritage. Such forgetfulness is often imagined as an imposition (as when states deny the freedom to remember) or a weakness (as when people are thought to repress uncomfortable or difficult memories). Here, by contrast, I examine a context of difficult heritage and political conflict in which people forget some things by remembering others, and I highlight the ways in which it is often hard to disentangle the primary process. Rather than ask whether the point is what you remember or what you forget, alter- native and more interesting questions are revealed, I suggest, by asking what kind of subject constitutes the ideal end result. [forgetting; memory; Italy; Fascism; Predappio; ethics] RIASSUNTO Questo articolo esplora l’etica dell’oblio come tecnologia del sé. L’oblio è una carat- teristica di una serie di contesti di conflitto politico e di “eredità difficili”. Tale oblio è spesso immaginato come un’imposizione (come quando uno stato nega la libertà di ricordare) o come una debolezza (come quando si pensa che una persona reprima ricordi scomodi o difficili). Qui, al contrario, esamino un contesto di eredità difficile e di conflitto politico in cui le persone dimenticano alcune cose ricordandone altre, e sottolineo come spesso sia difficile districare quale processo sia primario. Piuttosto che chiedersi se il punto sia ciò che si ricorda o ciò che si dimentica, suggerisco che domande alternative e più interessanti si rivelano chiedendo quale tipo di soggetto sia il risultato ideale. [oblio; memoria; Italia; Fascismo; Predappio; etica] NOTES Acknowledgments Research on which this paper is based was carried out with gen- erous support from an ERC Consolidator Grant and by a Junior Research Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge. I am very grateful to Catherine Alexander, Joanna Cook, James Laidlaw, Adam Reed, and Thomas Yarrow for their comments on early drafts of this piece. Thanks also to Matei Candea for introducing me to Eco on forgetting so long ago that I have forgotten exactly when, and to the three anonymous reviewers and the editorial team and managing editor at Cultural Anthropology for their extremely thoughtful and generous guidance. BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 127 REFERENCES Arthurs, Joshua 2010 “Fascism as Heritage in Contemporary Italy.” In Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe, edited by Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri, 114–28. London: Routledge. Augé, Marc 1998 Les Formes de l’oubli [The Forms of Forgetting]. Paris: Payot et Rivages. Battaglia, Debbora 1992 “The Body in the Gift: Memory and Forgetting in Sabarl Mortuary Exchange.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 1: 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1992.19.1.02a00010 1993 “At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 4: 430–42. https://doi.org/10.1525/ can.1993.8.4.02a00020 Bosworth, Richard James Boon 2002 Mussolini. London: Bloomsbury. Candea, Matei 2022 “Epilogue: On the Topic of Location.” In Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time, edited by Carl Rommel and Joseph John Viscomi, 223–31. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Capacci, Palmiro, Rolando Pasini, and Virna Giunchi 2014 La Fója de Farfaraz: Predappio, Cronache di una Communitá Viva e Solidale [La Fója de Farfaraz: Predappio, Chronicles of a Living and Solidarity Community]. Cesena, Italy: Il Ponte Vecchio. Carrattieri, Mirco 2018 “Predappio Sì, Predappio No . . . il Dibattito sulla ex Casa del Fascio e dell’Ospitalità di Predappio dal 2014 al 2017” [Predappio, yes and Predappio, no…the debate on the former Fascist Party Headquarters]. E-Review 6. https:// dx.doi.org/10.12977/ereview148 Carsten, Janet 1995 “The Politics of Forgetting: Migration, Kinship, and Memory on the Periphery of the Southeast Asian State.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1, no. 2: 317–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034691 Carter, Nick, and Simon Martin 2017 “The Management and Memory of Fascist Monumental Art in Postwar Italy: The Case of Luigi Montanarini’s Apotheosis of Fascism.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 22, no. 3: 338–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2017.1321933 Cassaniti, Julia 2022 “Memory, Ghosts, and the Good Life: Sati in Theravada Cultural Contexts.” Anthropology Today 38, no. 2: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12706 Cole, Jennifer 1998 “The Work of Memory in Madagascar.” American Ethnologist 25, no. 4: 610–33. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1998.25.4.610 Connerton, Paul 2008 “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1, no. 1: 59–71. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750698007083889 Cooke, Phil 2011 The Legacy of the Italian Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012 “La resistenza come secondo Risorgimento” [The Resistance as Second Risorgimento]. Passato e Presente 86: 62–81. Corner, Paul 2002 “Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 2: 325–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/343410 2005 “La Percezione del Fascismo nell’Italia di Oggi” [The Perception of Fascism in Italy Today]. Giornale di Storia Contemporanea 8, no. 1: 176–83. 2022 “Italy Still Mourns Mussolini.” UnHerd, November 2. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1992.19.1.02a00010 https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1993.8.4.02a00020 https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1993.8.4.02a00020 https://dx.doi.org/10.12977/ereview148 https://dx.doi.org/10.12977/ereview148 https://doi.org/10.2307/3034691 https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2017.1321933 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12706 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1998.25.4.610 https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083889 https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083889 https://doi.org/10.1086/343410 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 128 De Felice, Renzo 1995 Rosso e Nero [Red and Black]. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. Diemberger, H. 2016 “Connected and Disconnected Memoryscapes of the Antigorio Valley: A Village under Water and a Second World War Massacre on a Cableway.” Modern Italy 21, no. 1: 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2015.16 Eco, Umberto 1988 “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!” PMLA 103, no. 3: 254–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/462374 Elster, Jon 1993 Political Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrandiz, Francisco 2022 “Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64, no. 1: 208–37. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S001041752100044X Fogu, Claudio 2006 “Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory.” In The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, edited by Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, 147–76. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Foot, John 2009 Italy’s Divided Memory. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Forlenza, Rosario 2012 “Sacrificial Memory and Political Legitimacy in Postwar Italy: Reliving and Remembering World War II.” History and Memory 24, no. 2: 73–116. https:// doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.24.2.73 2018 On the Edge of Democracy: Italy, 1943–1948. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forlenza, Rosario, and Bjorn Thomassen 2021 “Social Dramas and Memory Formation: Resistance and the Use of the Risorgimento in the Italian Politics of Memory, 1943–1948.” History and Anthropology 32, no. 5: 527–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2021.1881083 Forty, Adrian, and Susanne Küchler, eds. 1999 The Art of Forgetting. Oxford: Berg. Foucault, Michel 1986 The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. Freud, Sigmund 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916), edited by James Strachey, 237– 258. London: Hogarth Press. Giuffrida, Angela 2022 “Pilgrims to Mussolini’s Birthplace Pray That New PM Will Resurrect a Far- Right Italy.” Guardian, October 23. Grant, Bruce 2001 “New Moscow Monuments; or, States of Innocence.” American Ethnologist 28, no. 2: 332–62. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.2.332 Harrison, Simon 2004 “Forgetful and Memorious Landscapes.” Social Anthropology 12, no. 2: 135–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0964028204000436 Heywood, Paolo 2019 “Fascism, Uncensored: Legalism and Neofascist Pilgrimage in Predappio, Italy.” Terrain, Article 72: 86–103. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.47042 2022 “Ordinary Exemplars: Manifesting “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64, no. 1: 91–121. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0010417521000402 https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2015.16 https://doi.org/10.2307/462374 https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041752100044X https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041752100044X https://doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.24.2.73 https://doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.24.2.73 https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2021.1881083 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.2.332 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0964028204000436 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.47042 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417521000402 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417521000402 BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION 129 2023 “Out of the Ordinary: Everyday Life and the Carnival of Mussolini.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 3: 493–504. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13850 2024a Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2024b “Fascism: Real or Stuffed?” In Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power, edited by Matei Candea, Taras Fedirko, Paolo Heywood, and Fiona Wright, 131–147. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2024c “Making Fascism History in “The Land of the Duce.’” In New Anthropologies of Italy: Politics, History, and Culture, edited by Paolo Heywood, 105–20. Oxford: Berghahn. High, Casey, Ann Kelly, and Jonathan Mair 2012 The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kwon, Heonik 2010 “The Ghosts of War and the Ethics of Memory.” In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, edited by Michael Lambek, 400–415. New York: Fordham University Press. Lennon, John, and Malcolm Foley 2000 Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Continuum. Luzzatto, Sergio 2014 The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy. London: Henry Holt and Company. Macdonald, Sharon 2009 Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Malone, Hannah 2017 “Legacies of Fascism: Architecture, Heritage, and Memory in Contemporary Italy.” Modern Italy 22, no. 4: 445–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.51 Mammone, Andrea 2006 “A Daily Revision of the Past: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Memory in Contemporary Italy.” Modern Italy 11, no. 2: 211–26. https://doi. org/10.1080/13532940600709338 Maulsby, Lucy M. 2014 “Drinking from the River Lethe: Case del Fascio and the Legacy of Fascism in Postwar Italy.” Future Anterior 11, no. 2: 18–39. https://doi.org/10.5749/ futuante.11.2.0019 Mookherjee, Nayanika 2006 “‘Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 2: 433–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00299.x Passerini, Luisa 1983 “Memory.” History Workshop Journal 15, no. 1: 195–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/ hwi/15.1.195 1987 Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Translated by Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavone, Claudio 2000 “Negazionismi, Rimozioni, Revisionismi: Storia o Politica?” [Denials, Represstions, Revisionisms: History or Politics?]. In Fascismo e Antifascism: Rimozioni, Revisioni, Negazioni, edited by Enzo Collotti, 15–42. Rome: Laterza. Renshaw, Layla 2023 “Cemeteries as Violent Spaces in the Spanish Civil War.” Paper presented at St. John’s College, Cambridge, September 14. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13850 https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.51 https://doi.org/10.1080/13532940600709338 https://doi.org/10.1080/13532940600709338 https://doi.org/10.5749/futuante.11.2.0019 https://doi.org/10.5749/futuante.11.2.0019 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00299.x CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 130 Ricœur, Paul 2004 Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rieff, David 2016 In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Serenelli, Sofia 2013 “A Town for the Cult of the Duce: Predappio as a Site of Pilgrimage.” In The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, edited by Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and Giuliana Pieri, 93–110. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Storchi, Simona 2013 “Mussolini as Monument: The Equestrian Statue of the Duce at the Littoriale Stadium in Bologna.” In The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, edited by Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and Giuliana Pieri, 193–208. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2019 “The Ex-Casa del Fascio in Predappio and the Question of the “Difficult Heritage’ of Fascism in Contemporary Italy.” Modern Italy 24, no. 2: 139–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2019.8 Symons, Stéphane 2019 The Work of Forgetting; or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? London: Rowman and Littlefield. Taylor, Ann-Cristine 1993 “Remembering to Forget: Identity, Mourning, and Memory among the Jivaro.” Man 28, no. 4: 653–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/2803991 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Vitebsky, Piers 2008 “Loving and Forgetting: Moments of Inarticulacy in Tribal India.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 2: 243–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 9655.2008.00500.x Zahora, Tomas 2015 “The Art of Forgetting the Middle Ages: Cornelius Agrippa’s Rhetoric of Extinction.” Sixteenth Century Journal 46, no. 2: 359–80. https://doi. org/10.1086/SCJ4602005 https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2019.8 https://doi.org/10.2307/2803991 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00500.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00500.x https://doi.org/10.1086/SCJ4602005 https://doi.org/10.1086/SCJ4602005 BLESSED ACTS OF OBLIVION: On the Ethics of Forgetting MEMORY WARS AND PREDAPPIO THE RED AND THE BLACK FORGETTINGSCAPES CONCLUSION ABSTRACT RIASSUNTO NOTES REFERENCES