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From the Pulse of Social Routine to the Subversion of Normality: The Multiple Use of Bell Tolling in Two Colonial Sites: The Ionian Islands and Malta 1800–1870s

Abstract: This paper investigates campanelist—bell ringing—culture as a complex of indigenous traditions, social customs and practices integral to the daily life of the people, against a colonial background, in the British-controlled Ionian islands and Malta. Set to examine the ways in which bell tolling mediated or otherwise colonial relations with indigenous Mediterranean cultures, this study commences with a discussion of the multifaceted, even conflicting, British colonial perceptions, definitions and usage of this practice: the incorporation of regulated bell tolling from officially sanctioned Cathedrals as part of the colonial state’s rhetoric of power and, on the other hand, the various other colonial ‘Orientalist’ readings of indigenous ‘bell clanging’ as a manifestation of the colonized subjects’ inferior culture and primitiveness. Taking this practice—in its multiple, shifting modes—as part of the complex, multifaceted and conflict-ridden hegemonic processes experienced in these island societies, this work delves into the intimacy which local parishioners had with bell ringing, as an integral part of their daily life, as well as the use they made of varying bell tolling modes as means of negotiation with the colonial authorities, the local power elites and institutions as well as to voice their collective anxieties and desires or, in other circumstances, as social resistance and protest or to foment social unrest. The manifold ways in which bell ringing was employed by the village and town people assumed that they had direct access to, and a measure of physical control over, the bells and the campanile, based on their shared conviction that these artefacts were their ‘common property’.