Guild in step with the times in Switzerland
Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
In German-speaking Switzerland it is called Zunft, in French-speaking Guilde, it is the guild of arts and crafts, also called guild in Italian. Religious communities in the early Middle Ages, at the origin of universities, therefore corporations: a central element, albeit profoundly changed over the centuries, of the history of the medieval West.
Erased, at least in intentions, by the revolutionaries of 1789, they have survived, in the name, until today in some parts of Switzerland even if, obviously, they have lost all character of "self-defense" bodies of categories of artisans and merchants. They are a sort of highly selective club and as such constitutive elements, with other public but not state formations, of the plot that gives (how long, difficult to say) cohesion to Swiss society. They keep the ancient names, from the saffron guild to that of winemakers, bakers and so on, up to the "academics". They reflect a masculine imprint in language and customs, which honestly cannot surprise when we consider that they have survived until today, without interruption, from the Middle Ages.
These days, however, nothing that in any case involves distinctions or – as we prefer to say – "discrimination" based on gender can pretend to get away with it only in the name of its own history; after all, the ability to adapt to changes without haste is one of the secrets of the longevity of these peculiar institutions.
The executive body of the "bourgeois community" of Basel has just announced a reform of the organization regulations of the Zünfte of the Rhine city, which will come into force from 2022 which – at least this is the opinion of the Genevan Le Temps , always at the forefront on the politically correct front – it could "shake up" a "millenary sexist tradition". Although it consists only of a small lexical change, notes Le Temps : it is a question of replacing the appellative "brothers" of the members of the guild with the neutral "members". But it seems that to obtain this result it took three years of heated debates, supported by the legal opinions of authoritative constitutionalists, because what was at stake was none other than that of making the principle of human equality triumph even in these "male strongholds". woman. If Le Temps wastes adjectives to emphasize the disruptive scope of the announced reform (the shock wave of this "earthquake" will not spare even the 26 Zünfte in Zurich), Beatrice Isler, a Basel politician and one of the rare female members of a corporation calmly observes that it is not necessary to "force change: the old guard will leave the scene and things will change naturally."
In fact, it does not seem that equality between men and women represents a problem in the Swiss Confederation, much less an urgency. And if it still is, it is certainly not because of the rarity of female presences or the lexicon of these elite circles that give prestige to their members and fish in classes where parity is largely acquired. For “reforms” such as the one we are talking about, the issue of equality seems rather a pretext for fighting any tradition and, in essence, any collective memory with a buzzword today familiar.
By a curious coincidence, on the same day on which Le Temps celebrated this further stage of women's emancipation, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an in-depth report on Islam in the schools of Zurich, in which we read sentences like these: "The problems arise above all in the cases of adolescents from Muslim families of modest cultural level. Teachers must from the outset mark the balance of power and their hierarchical position to be taken seriously, which is often difficult for the younger ones. Once, according to an interviewee, a Muslim schoolboy told my colleague: "I don't let myself be commanded by women." An exception, however, happens ”. But on these aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, which consider equality between men and women a blasphemy, in public discourse, and even in school books, we prefer to overlook, as the NZZ documents. As if to say that even in the struggles against "sexism", people prefer to break open the doors: as long as the outcome of an epic struggle appears.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/gilda-al-passo-con-i-tempi-in-svizzera/ on Tue, 13 Apr 2021 06:06:49 +0000.