Paper short abstract:

How can social movements cope with their eccentricity and eclectic composition? I argue that the creation of spaces without memory, that suppress the political past of new members, is instrumental to loosen the ever-present tension between expansion and mistrust of the outside.

Paper long abstract:

Social movements often struggle with internal coherence. There's a constant tension between the effort to convert individuals to the cause, and the perceived need to protect the community from (disruptive) outside influence. Moreover, the process of acculturation can clash with the previous political affiliation of new members, which tends to create suspicion and mistrust inside the movement itself.

In this paper, I want to suggest that an initial response to this problem is the creation of safe, "forgetful" spaces, which aim to suspend the pre-existing habitus-as-embedded-history of its inhabitants, and serve as the physical and symbolic foundation for the construction of a new social and political praxis. Drawing from my ethnographic research inside a section of the Five Stars Movement, in Italy, I will argue that these spaces define themselves as politically antagonistic, but "historically neutral" and accepting of any and all previous relations with the establishment. The crossing of their threshold acts as the signifier for the rejection of one's political past, and while inside these "forgetful places" there must be no conflict of opposing biographies.

However strong, borders remain inevitably porous, and individual histories can only be temporarily suppressed, never completely erased. So, parallel to the construction of a new habitus, these boundaries are constantly re-designed and re-negotiated, to allow the community to deal with a potentially disastrous "return of the repressed", and to keep dangerous political memories from affecting the non-historical space they are inhabiting.