Intangible Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Local Impact

The paper aims to approach the ambivalent relationship between intangible cultural heritage processes of conservation and valorization, communities of practices and super-local promotion of the territories, global visibility and marketing of local traditions. I start my considerations from a group of important ceremonies in three different small towns and villages of a south-central Italian region (Molise) that constitute the core of these local communities both economically and socio-culturally. We seek to show how, for small communities, ceremonies and rituals represent not only a socio-cultural frame for embedding local identity, but also one of the most important resources for local areas and their sustainability (Appadurai, 1986; Grasseni, 2003; Herzfeld, 2004; Krauss, 2008; Bendix, 2012; Broccolini, 2012). In this case, economic crisis intersected with local, national and international debates on animal rights, local community rights and sustainability, thus clearly revealing the key role played by rituals and traditional ceremonies not only as part of local culture, but also as a concrete resource for local areas when all the other productive activities break down. The ethnography is the occasion for rethinking central questions like the notion of ‘tourist attraction’, local sustainability, governance of the processes of valorization of intangible cultural heritage, economic impact of this kind of processes in the locality and tourism. In this particular ethnographic case we face, at least, three different problems of heritagizating processes in relation to tourism and sustainability. The first is the ‘desire of local communities’ for a stronger visibility at a national and supernational level and relative mediations that communities are putting on place for negotiating with different levels of governance of heritagizating processes (local authorities, national government rules, European protocols and UNESCO recognition). The second is the problematic relationship that these rituals are proposing for new global attitudes towards animal rights that in this case risks to put in serious danger the survival of these ceremonies. The third is represented by the difficulty to build a concrete network of cooperation at a local level among different economic activities, excellent products (typical food, handcrafts) and landscape valorization (particularly olive oil landscape). It is a way to see how localities try to build efficient networks of promotion, but also to observe problems of governance of these processes. Rituals and ceremonies represent the core of communities and their capacity of facing economic crisis and political disaffection, but they are also a powerful tourist attraction for their enhancement and media visibility. Then a critical analysis of these shared practices is an extremely interesting occasion for discussing notions like ‘cultural commodification’, spectacularization of cultural heritage, the impact of tourism in the local dimension and marketing of the territories. The ethnography of these ceremonials and their impact on communities started in 2013 and is still ongoing. We documented all the activities involved in organization of the feast by observing participation, filming all the different phases of ceremonials and of related events, collecting documents and archive stuff connected to the origins and transformations of the ceremonials. We work together the communities of practices involved in these ceremonials not only during the period of the feasts, but also during the other phases of the year that are continuously signed by events connected with the ceremonials. We realized also a photographic exposition collecting ancient and new images of the ceremonial documented by professional photographer and by the common people. In the spring 2014 we realized some conferences in the different small towns focusing on intangible cultural heritage and local development, specifically insisting on images of the feasts as one of the most important element of promotion and self-reflexivity of the community, but also centering on the specific debate aroused by the animal rights activists against this group of ceremonials and the controversy between locally embedded values and global ones. According to the most recent directions of UNESCO 365 (UNESCO ICH Convention, 2003) and European Council (EU Council Convention, 2005) conventions we started also a work on a participated inventory of the different elements of the ceremonials (self- documentation, focus groups, cooperative networks inside the communities of practice), considering this process one of the most important and efficient way for realizing a really community-based ethnography.