"Questo non è uno spettacolo!" : Poetics and Practices of Authenticity, Ritualization, and Tradition in Revitalized European Festivals
Abstrakt
The quotation that introduces the title of this piece is drawn from a record taken during my ethnographic fieldwork in south-central Italy. It is the answer that a local gave when asked about the "nature" of a performance taking place during the carnival festival which at the time constituted the main object of my ethnographic fieldwork (2010-2011).
The quoted answer - and the facial expression that accompanied it - revealed the sense of "endangerment" felt, during the ethnographic interaction, by the local, who manifestly considered my nosy, analytic curiosity and my possible scholarly opinions about the festival as a potential "polluter" of a tradition considered authentic, typical, old, unchanged, etc. In this contribution, I intend to present and discuss this as well as another example, taken from another recent ethnographic fieldwork in the Czech Republic (2013-2014), and problematise the ways in which, in some European contexts, sentiments and poetics of authenticity and the past are constructed, experienced and expressed in contemporary ritual performances - especially those labelled as "folkloric" and/or "traditional".
I also address the issue of the role and the relevance that ritualisation, in synergy with recent interconnected processes of re-vitalisation, (re-)invention, and reconfiguration of traditions, bears in shaping social dynamics related to cultural heritage, local identities, sentiments of authenticity, and religious (or pseudo-religious) experiences.