"Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression"
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Tabucchi cuts against the convenient fiction that xenophobia is mainly about “difference.” He frames it as a power instinct: hostility flows downhill, toward people with the fewest buffers. The sentence is built like an indictment disguised as sociology. By tying prejudice to “economic resources, means of subsistence or land,” he drags xenophobia out of the realm of culture-war abstractions and plants it in material scarcity and possession. The target isn’t the foreigner as such; it’s the foreigner who can’t retaliate, lobby, sue, or leverage property into protection.
The subtext is mordant: civilizations love to congratulate themselves on tolerance right up until they meet someone whose very way of life exposes how conditional that tolerance is. Nomadic groups are singled out not because they are uniquely “other,” but because they confound the state’s preferred categories. They don’t map neatly onto borders, taxation, fixed addresses, or land titles. In a modern political imagination obsessed with ownership and legibility, mobility reads as threat. “Lack of land” is doing double duty here: it signals poverty, and it marks an absence of the one asset most societies treat as proof of belonging.
Tabucchi, writing from a European vantage point shaped by postwar memory and the continent’s recurring scapegoating cycles, is also hinting at a dirty continuity: the same mechanisms that once targeted Roma and other itinerant communities reappear whenever economic anxiety spikes. He’s not offering a neutral observation. He’s warning that the first victims are the ones a society has already decided don’t count as fully claimable human beings.
The subtext is mordant: civilizations love to congratulate themselves on tolerance right up until they meet someone whose very way of life exposes how conditional that tolerance is. Nomadic groups are singled out not because they are uniquely “other,” but because they confound the state’s preferred categories. They don’t map neatly onto borders, taxation, fixed addresses, or land titles. In a modern political imagination obsessed with ownership and legibility, mobility reads as threat. “Lack of land” is doing double duty here: it signals poverty, and it marks an absence of the one asset most societies treat as proof of belonging.
Tabucchi, writing from a European vantage point shaped by postwar memory and the continent’s recurring scapegoating cycles, is also hinting at a dirty continuity: the same mechanisms that once targeted Roma and other itinerant communities reappear whenever economic anxiety spikes. He’s not offering a neutral observation. He’s warning that the first victims are the ones a society has already decided don’t count as fully claimable human beings.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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