AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN [PDF]

‘TRADIZIONE E CONTAMINAZIONE’: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN ITALIAN FOLK REVIVAL Stephen Francis William Bennetts BA (Hons), Australian National University, 1987 MA, Sydney University, 1993 Graduate Diploma (Communication), University of Technology, Sydney, 1999

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia, School of Social Sciences, Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology 2012

‘Pizzicarello’, Tessa Joy, 2010. 1

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I have acquired the taste For this astringent knowledge Distilled through the Stringent application of the scientific method, The dry martini of the Intellectual world, Shaken, not stirred. But does this mean I must eschew Other truths?

From ‘The Bats of Wombat State Forest’ in Wild Familiars (2006) by Liana Christensen

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ABSTRACT The revival since the early 1990s of Southern Italian folk traditions has seen the ‘rediscovery’ and active recuperation, especially by urban revivalist actors, of le tradizioni popolari, popular traditional practices originating in peasant society which are still practiced by some traditional local actors in remote rural areas of Southern Italy.

This thesis draws on interviews, participant observation and historical research carried out mainly during fieldwork in Rome and Southern Italy in 2002-3 to present an ethnography of the urban revivalist subculture which has been the main driving force behind the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival.

In the course of my enquiry into why the movement has emerged, I combine both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, as well as a phenomenological analysis of revivalist motivation and agency, to explore the question of why contemporary urban revivalists have begun to take an interest in the archaic and marginalised cultural practices of rural Southern Italy. I show how and why this current second revival has reemerged from its original historical roots in the post-war leftist-inspired ‘first revival’ (ca. 1960-1980) to serve new cultural and political needs today, including ethnoregionalism, resistance to what revivalists see as the homogenising tendencies of globalised capitalism (cf. Applbaum, 2000), and the recuperation of modes of experience increasingly marginalised within contemporary urban reality (Baudrillard, 2000; Augé, 1995).

On a geographical level, revivalism privileges the popular traditions of three regions of Southern Italy: Calabria, Puglia and Campania. This reflects a characteristic revivalist dualism between Southern Italy (sometimes represented within revivalist discourse as a ‘reservoir of popular tradition’), and Northern Italy (represented by revivalists as a substantially deracinated cultural wasteland now devoid of ‘tradition’).

Whereas previous ethnographic research on Southern Italian revivalism has largely focussed on revivalism in a single one of these three regions, this study provides a 5

strongly synoptic and comparative perspective on regional variations in Southern Italian revivalist activity, thus destabilising revivalists’ representations of ‘popular tradition’ in their own region of interest.

Both revivalist discourse and previous research have tended to focus on the agency of portatori della tradizione, elderly traditional local actors who are responsible for the transmission of popular traditional practices over time. By contrast, I foreground the agency of urban revivalist actors in the transformation of these traditional modes of cultural reproduction, through an account of the motivations and agency of urban revivalist actors from revivalist milieus in cities like Rome and Naples. Although some revivalists negatively gloss the contemporary transformation of these traditional practices as the ‘contamination’ of ‘tradition’ by globalised capitalist modernity, others view such processes in a more positive light, as a means for the creative hybridisation of traditional forms to serve new ends.

Using an emic typology proposed by one of my informants, I contrast the motivations of ‘philological’ (scholarly), ‘spontaneous’ (countercultural) and ‘commercial’ revivalist actors, as well as exploring revivalist agency in relation to two central revivalist genres: the festa popolare (the traditional patronal festival of the local Saint or Madonna) and the newly invented Southern Italian folk festival. Finally, I assess the impact of revivalism at the local rural level, contrasting the motivations and agency of a range of local actors with those of the urban actors with whom they are being drawn together through revivalist activity within the local milieu. Despite revivalism’s characteristic ideology of ‘anti-globalisation’, I interpret these new modes of intercultural encounter and exchange within the local as themselves characteristic of wider processes of globalisation.

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IN MEMORIAM

‘When one person dies, a library dies’

Michele Russo (Somma Vesuviana) 2003 Giorgio Di Lecce (Lecce) 2004 Wenten Rubuntja (Alice Springs) 2005 Andrea Sacco (Carpino) 2006 Francesco Tiano (Pagani) 2008 Pino Zimba (Salento) 2008 Pasquale Italiano (Perth) 2008 Uccio Aloisi (Cutrofiano) 21 October 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This doctoral research project was funded by research grants provided by the University of Western Australia, the UWA Department of Anthropology and the ACIS-Cassamarca Foundation.

Supervisors: Dr Loretta Baldassar Dr Nick Harney

Australia Chris Charles Liana Christensen Brendan Corrigan Sally Knowles Susann Lohse Beatrice Stotzer David Trigger Simon Watkinson Wynne Russell 7

Robert Graham, colleagues & traditional owners of the Northern Land Council

Salento Silvia Colonna and family Francesco Gaetano the late Bernard Hickey Enza Pagliara Biagio Panico, Ada Metafune & Associazione Novaracne Stefano & Patrizia Polimeno

Rome Giovanni Carelli Dafne Crocella Francesca Gabrini Anna Nacci Stefano Portelli i ragazzi di Casa Babylon di piazza Bologna Tamara Tagliacozzo Paola Vertechi

Campania Michele Accardo Lello D’Ajello Riccardo Esposito Abate Padre Giacomo Anna Minopoli Lucia Patalano Ester Preziosi Mario Strazzullo the late Francesco Tiano Giovanni Vacca i ragazzi di Casa de Martino, Vico della Neve 30 i ragazzi di Casa de Martino, via Salvatore Tommasi 8

Calabria Angelo Maggio Associazione ARPA Domenico & Pina Lucano Associazione Città Futura ‘gli stronzi di Riace’

Catalonia Eloisa Perez-Bennetts

Monument to Pablo Neruda by the Naples City Council and the Chilean Government, Parco Virgiliano, Posillipo, Naples. Photo: Bennetts.

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………...…………….…………………….……...5 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION…….....………………….……………………………...…………13 CHAPTER TWO: ‘IO SONO UNA FORZA DEL PASSATO’: THE CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN ITALIAN REVIVALISM………………………………………………………….…………..…67 CHAPTER THREE: THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT OF SOUTHERN ITALIAN REVIVALISM………………….……………………….……….…........111 CHAPTER FOUR: WHY REVIVALISM? A PRELIMINARY EXPLORATION OF REVIVALIST SUBJECTIVITY………………………..………………….……..…167 CHAPTER FIVE: REVIVALISM AND THE FESTA POPOLARE………………201 CHAPTER SIX: REINVENTING THE FESTA POPOLARE: THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN ITALIAN FOLK FESTIVAL……….…………243 CHAPTER SEVEN: REVIVALISM, ETHNOREGIONALISM AND THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF SALENTINITÀ…………..………….…………...293 CHAPTER EIGHT: ‘FRICCHETTONI E PORTATORI DELLA TRADIZIONE POPOLARE’: A TYPOLOGY OF LOCAL ACTORS……………………………...341 CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION…...………………………………………..…..405 EPILOGUE…………………………………………………………………………425 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..429 APPENDIX: ‘TRADIZIONE E CONTAMINAZIONE’: LIST OF SOUND RECORDINGS ON ENCLOSED CD………………………………………………459

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

The author records Mayor Piero Campisi’s version of events in ‘the Battle of Caulonia’ (see Chapter Six). Caulonia, Calabria, August 2005. Photo: Anna Minopoli.

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What is the Southern Italian folk revival?

Between July 2002 and July 2003, I carried out a year of ethnographic fieldwork on the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival, which re-emerged in the 1990s from the ashes of an earlier first revival in the 1960s and 1970s (Leydi, 1972; Bermani 1978; Chiriatti, 1998) after a long period of dormancy during the 1980s. This movement emphasises direct participation by urban actors in le tradizioni popolari (popular traditions), pre-modern cultural practices which are still practised in some corners of the Southern Italian rural periphery.

The tradizioni popolari which are the focus of the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival include regional dance forms like Calabrian tarantella, Campanian tammurriata and Salentine pizzica, which are accompanied by musical instruments like the tamburello/tammorra (tambourine) and organetto (squeezebox). The revival also focusses on other traditional practices such as crafts, religious and work songs, storytelling and oral traditions, and participation in religious observances like pilgrimages and feste popolari (traditional local patronal festivals of the Madonna and Saints), as well as other agrarian festivals and Carnival.

Tammorra player, Festa della Madonna dell’Avvocata, Maiori, Campania, July 2003. Photo: Anna Minopoli. 14

Contemporary Southern Italian revivalists engage mainly with regional popular traditions associated with rural Calabria, Southern Puglia and Campania (see Map One below). The movement has re-emerged since the mid 1990s in an idiosyncratic collaboration between two radically different sets of actors: on the one hand, a subculture of leftwing students and ‘fricchettoni’ (hippies), often from large cities to the north such as Rome, Naples or Milan, and on the other hand, portatori della tradizione (bearers of tradition), traditionally-oriented elderly locals from a Southern Italian rural peasant background who are the traditional exponents of these ‘rediscovered’ folk traditions.

Portatori della tradizione popolare (with zampogna bagpipes), Festa della Pita, Alessandria Del Carretto, Calabria, 1996. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] For Italian urban revivalist actors, engaging in revivalist activity typically involves learning to dance tarantella, tammurriata, or pizzica, and/or playing their associated musical instruments, travelling to rural locations in Southern Italy which are culturally and geographically remote from their home cities to participate in feste popolari, and documenting fast disappearing popular folk traditions through video, photography or sound recording. As will be explored in detail later, local cultural associations such as Calabria’s Associazione ARPA (Chapters Five and Six) and Associazione Città Futura (Chapter Eight) and Salento’s Associazione Novaracne (Chapters Five, Seven and 15

Eight) play an important role in promoting and facilitating these kinds of urban revivalist activities within the local.

Two young urban revivalists from Rome at the patronal Festa dei Santi Medici, Riace, Calabria, September 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

My research into this contemporary Italian revitalisation movement initially mirrored il viaggio nelle tradizioni popolari, the ‘journey into tradition’ initiated by many urban revivalists after first coming into contact with Salentine folk revivalism, the most highprofile of the three major contemporary Southern Italian regional folk revivals. I began to get a sense of the idiosyncratic features of revivalism in each of the three major revivalist regions as I worked my way around the boot of Southern Italy, from Carpino in Northern Puglia, to Salento in Southern Puglia, to the Calabrian Costa Jonica (the ball of the Italian foot), to the urban revivalist scene in Rome, and finally to the tammurriata scene in Naples and rural Campania. By carrying out research in Rome and Naples, I was also able to investigate how urban enthusiasts engage with popular traditions from these three main regions and then ‘repropose’ them within a modern urban context. My research thus extended out beyond an initial focus on Salento to include revivalist activity in four different field sites: Salento, Calabria, Naples/Campania and Rome. 16

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Why revivalism?

This study addresses three key research questions: why has the Southern Italian folk revival emerged, what have been its effects, and what is its wider significance?

Through participant observation in revivalist events and extensive interviews with revivalists and other informants, I sought during fieldwork to understand the cultural, historical, social, political and existential factors underlying the emergence of the contemporary Southern Italian revival. In this thesis, I synthesise this ethnographic data with a historical investigation of the current revival’s ideological and cultural roots in the Italian post-war period, to show how and why the notion of ‘popular tradition’ has emerged as a new cultural preoccupation for some Italian urban dwellers. Although I interpret revivalism as a countercultural response to ‘globalisation’, through my analysis of urban revivalist agency, I show how revivalism’s cultural impact on local space and culture can itself be interpreted as a classic manifestation of ‘globalisation’.

Traditional devil figure from the Carnival of San Demetrio Corone (with a modernist backdrop), Calabria, 2009. Photo: Angelo Maggio. 18

Why have some urban dwellers in a modern industrialised society such as Italy suddenly become so interested in archaic Southern Italian cultural forms associated with a previously stigmatised and rejected peasant past? Revivalist discourse is sometimes couched in the idiom of pastoral nostalgia, the urban vision of idealised rural existence which has a European pedigree stretching back even beyond the bucolic poetry of Theocritus in the 3rd century B.C. Greek metropolis of Alexandria (Williams, 1973): ‘and he lifted a stone which no man now living could lift’. This standard Homeric poetic formula perfectly encodes the classical notion of human history as a process of inevitable decline and degeneration.

The perennial idea of a Lost Paradise or Golden Age located in the rural past (Dodds, 1985; Del Giudice & Porter, 2001) was reflected in the seventh century Greek poet Hesiod’s notion of the Four Ages, the first being the Golden Age, followed successively by the Silver, Bronze and Iron (Works and Days, 106-201; cf. Herzfeld 2006, 206f.). During the Golden Age, war and strife were unknown, and human beings lived in rustic harmony and virtue on a simple diet of acorns, under the beneficent rule of the God Saturn (Saturnia Regna). As the vices of civilisation were introduced during successive ages of decline, war, theft and murder became commonplace:

Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted into this age of baser natures: truth, shame and honour vanished; in their place were fraud, deceit and trickery, violence and pernicious desires…Piety was dead, and virgin Astraea, last of all the immortals to depart, herself abandoned the blood-drenched earth (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 125-150).

Pastoral nostalgia is a characteristically modernist and urban ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1973). In his account of nineteenth and twentieth century Greek nationalist ideology, Herzfeld describes an ‘essentialised nativism’ which ‘exalted picturesque images of Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman cultural elements and their links to an idealised rusticity from which in fact the vast majority of urbanites were eager refugees’ (Herzfeld, 2006a, 146). In her account of the recent evolution of the El Rocío pilgrimage in Spain, Crain reports that ‘the abandonment of rural areas, rapid social change, growing urbanisation and the contamination of the environment have created a 19

nostalgia for rural roots and traditions’ (1992, 100). The emergence of forms of pastoral nostalgia in contemporary Italy seems to similarly reflect an increasing alienation from nature among urban Italians, as well as the growing degradation and reduction of available urban space through pollution, unchecked building speculation and the increasing presence of the motor car.

‘Pastoral nostalgia’: this couple from Naples chose the Museum of Peasant Civilisation in Campania’s Somma Vesuviana as a suitably bucolic backdrop for their 2003 wedding photos. Photo: Bennetts.

Revivalist informants state that these processes are disrupting traditional forms of urban social and cultural activities such as street life, street performance or even children playing in the street. Traditional Italian forms of social interaction are also being eroded, say revivalists, by increased interaction with television and technology, thus decreasing direct interaction with other human beings, and increasing social alienation and atomisation (cf. Kertzer, 1983, 67; Boissevain, 1992a, 8, 15; Berardi, 2004, 2005). In their accounts of contemporary urban Italy, revivalists also repeatedly highlight the overwhelming cultural hegemony of television in Italy, the dominant values of consumerism and materialism, and the Berlusconian model of culture as consumption (Ginsborg, 2004; 2005; cf. Klein, 2001). 20

Revivalists often represent themselves as presenting alternative ‘cultural models’ to those presented by the powerful media system dominated by Berlusconi. In 2003, for instance, Roman revivalist Anna Nacci was involved in organising the first ‘Spegni la TV’ (‘Turn off the TV’) national ‘TV strike’, during which participants presented their TV remote controls at nightclubs, cinemas, theatres and pubs and received a discount, to encourage the ‘restoration of social and cultural value to time subtracted by TV’ (Esterni, 2010).

‘Transmissions will recommence as late as possible’: First National Television Viewers’ Strike, December 2003. Source: Esterni (2010).

Revivalist informants also highlight processes of cultural homogenisation, and the marginalisation of non-dominant cultural forms by the market. Contemporary Italian revivalism seems to be driven by a dissatisfaction with these and other aspects of capitalist modernity, and a search for modes of being alternative to it. This revivalist quest for a utopian ‘authenticity’ is at times projected onto il mondo popolare, the 21

marginalised pre-modern world of peasant Southern Italy, which is experienced by revivalists as a vivid realm of half-forgotten pre-industrial tastes and smells, archaic dance, festival and music forms, and traditional patterns of hospitality and sociability.

‘Il mondo popolare’: a local man dances tammurriata at the Festa della Madonna a Castello, Somma Vesuviana, Campania, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The revivalist preoccupation with ‘simplicity’ seems to reflect a dissatisfaction with the needless sophistication of the dominant consumer culture, and a yearning for simpler things which it is felt have been lost within contemporary capitalist society. There is a strong emphasis in revivalist discourse on seeking out and interacting with la gente semplice: local people who are seen by revivalists as uncontaminated by globalised capitalist culture, and who seem to embody for many revivalists an older and more admirable system of moral and cultural values. This preoccupation at times recalls the Herder-inspired ‘discovery of the people’ within European Romantic folk revivals of the early nineteenth century (Hobsbawm, 1962, 313ff.; 1992, 103-5; Williams, 1986, 48-64; Burke, 1978, 3-22), when cultural primitivism was embraced in an aesthetic revolt against ‘art’: 22

‘Artificial’ (like ‘polished’) became a pejorative term, and ‘artless’ (like ‘wild’) a term of praise…[The] movement was also a reaction against the Enlightenment; against its elitism, against its rejection of tradition and against its stress on reason…The revolt against reason can be illustrated by the new respect for popular religion and attraction to folktales concerned with the supernatural (Burke, 1978, 9, 11).

The emotional release and spontaneity provided by rediscovered folk dances like tarantella are also seen by some revivalists as providing new means of communication, self-expression, self-exploration or even New Age therapy (Winspeare, 2002; Nacci, 2001a; Lüdtke, 2009).

In rural Campania, the Church has long attempted (with mixed success) to impose an appearance of doctrinal orthodoxy on a series of seasonal festivals in the Campanian Madonna cycle which seem once to have been associated with localised pre-Christian female divinities (Canzanella, 2002; De Simone, 1974). Apparently ‘Catholic’ religious festivals are typically reinterpreted within revivalist discourse as manifestations of ‘pagan survivals’: syncretic remnants of popular or pre-Christian religious practices. A smaller subsection of urban revivalists, influenced by New Age philosophies which are now current in Italy, are attracted to the revival by the religious dimensions inherent in il mondo popolare, just as the first hippies were attracted to India’s Hindu festivals and ancient spiritual traditions.

Enthusiasts from cities in Northern Italy typically explain their involvement in revivalism as a reaction to what they describe as the alienation, sterility and ‘lack of history’ of contemporary Italian industrial society, which they feel dominates large areas of Northern Italy. The South, by contrast, is typically represented by revivalists as a pre-modernist ‘reservoir of tradition’, with informants often commenting that in the industrialised North, ‘ormai non c’è più niente’: ‘there’s nothing left any more’. In their representations of the North-South cultural divide, many informants favourably contrast the traditional Southern values of the social collectivity embodied in the notion of la comitiva (the group) with what they feel is the atomised individualism more typical of the North. Although these revivalist distinctions are certainly grounded 23

in significant cultural variations between North and South, they also reflect the kind of neo-Orientalist view of Northern and Southern Italy which has been identified by Schneider and others (1998; cf. Lumley & Morris, 1997).

For Southern Italian revivalists (and especially first and second generation members of the Southern migrant diaspora now living in Northern Italy), revivalism is also providing a new means for the expression of an emergent Southern Italian regional consciousness. For second generation migrants to the North, revivalism proposes a framework within which to ‘rediscover your roots’ and constitute a positive Southern ethnic identity within the day–to-day life of a Northern Italian city.

Yet the Southern Italian revivalist phenomenon also speaks to global concerns which are far broader than these local Italian concerns: revivalists share a belief in the value of preserving and maintaining cultural practices and traditions from the past, in the conviction that they can still be of value to us in the present. Implicit in this view is a rejection of the dominant ideology of ‘modernisation’ which has played such a key role in the economic and socio-cultural transformation of Italy in the post-war period (see Chapter Two), and according to which, cultural practices such as Calabrian tarantella have sometimes been viewed as anachronistic throwbacks to a stigmatised peasant past which is best forgotten.

This revivalist revaluation of the past takes place within the global context of its escalating destruction in the present (Hobsbawm, 1995, 3, 584ff.). For many revivalists, it is axiomatic that the current destruction of the Earth’s biosphere through human economic activity (Cruetzen & Stoermer, 2000; Sachs, 2007) is also being paralleled by the unprecedented devastation of its cultural resources. For as Castells has argued, capitalist globalisation processes are highly selective, and proceed ‘by linking up all that, according to dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and discarding anything (people, firms, territories, resources) which has no value, or becomes devalued, in a variable geometry of creative destruction and destructive creation of value’ (2000, 10).

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For American ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Steven Feld, the breathtaking loss of global biological diversity over the last century has gone hand in hand with an equally troubling loss of cultural diversity. Although wary of the pitfall of ‘postmodern nostalgia’, he motivates his ethnomusicological project Voices in the Rainforest in the following terms:

In a world where fifteen to twenty thousand species of plants and animals are destroyed each year by the logging, ranching and mining that escalates rainforest destruction, Voices in the Rainforest was meant as an assertion that we must be equally mindful of the precarious ecology of songs, myths, words and ideas in these mega-diversity zones. Massive wisdom, variations on human imagination in the form of knowledge in and of place, these are co-casualties of the eco-catastrophe (Feld, 1995, 121; cf. Davis, 2009).

Language is a key constituent of human cultural identity, and UNESCO (2009) estimates that one of the world’s languages becomes extinct on average every two weeks. For linguists Nettle and Romaine, one of the key factors which has promoted this process of language extinction has been colonial and capitalist expansion, and its associated pattern of economic subordination: ‘members of an economically powerful metropolitan society seized the controlling heights of economic production and social influence in peripheral societies, and a shift of language followed this asymmetry’ (2000, 143).

At the culinary intersection between the biological and the cultural, the Slow Food movement estimates that 30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and 33 per cent of livestock varieties have disappeared or are on the brink of doing so:

In response to what the movement sees as increasing homogenisation of food and flavours, and an alarming decline in global biodiversity, Slow Food has established an ‘Ark of Taste’, a kind of catalogue or database of rare, endangered, or unique products from around the world (Craig & Parkins, 2006, 23; cf. Leitch, 2003). 25

Similar documentational practices within the ‘philological’ wing of Southern Italian revivalism such as ethnomusicology, ethnophotography and folklore studies recall those of zoology, linguistics and botany in their attempts to document a vanishing global cultural diversity which revivalists see as under threat from breakneck global capitalist expansion.

I interpret revivalism’s characteristic ‘nostalgia’ and preoccupation with ‘authenticity’ as a radical response to overwhelming transformations in the nature of human experience which have resulted from this capitalist reorganisation of the life world (Habermas, 1988; Benjamin, 1969; Harvey, 1990; Berardi, 2004, 2005). I argue that revivalism can be understood, like the Slow Food movement, as an active form of cultural politics which interrogates the practices, values and ideology of contemporary capitalism in a countercultural reflex to contemporary conditions dominated by speed, commodification and the abolition of the past (Hobsbawm, 1995), or else its virtualised, postmodern reappropriation as a marketing strategy (Klein, 2001).

‘Nostalgia’, ‘authenticity’, ‘tradition’, ‘heritage’ and related ‘essentialisms’ are central notions within the revivalist world view, and all have been the subject of intense critical scrutiny within recent social science (Davis, 1977; Robertson, 1990; cf. Tannock, 1995, 454). But scholars like Sahlins (1999) and Nash (2001, 2005, 2005a) have also highlighted the at times narrow focus on such theoretical concerns within recent postmodern anthropology. It is perhaps arguable, for instance, that less critical attention has been devoted to deconstructing a number of other key ideological notions which have played an important role in underwriting the narratives of capitalism, colonialism and neo-colonialism: the overvaluation of the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘new’ over the ‘old’ or ‘traditional’, and implicit in this, the uncritical acceptance of the notions of ‘progress’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ (Harvey, 1990, 17, 180; Huyssen, 1995, 88; quoted in Pickering & Keightley, 2006, 937).

Anthropologist June Nash has worked since the 1960s with the indigenous people of southern Mexico’s Chiapas region, the protagonists of the 1994 Zapatista revolution. She finds it deeply ironic that ‘the resurgence of ethnic identity in the struggle to retain ancestral lands and the recognition of their claims under UN covenants’ is coinciding 26

with an anti-essentialist postmodernist critique within anthropology of the ‘natural’ association between peoples and places:

In the postmodern vein of inquiry, the terms of discourse – deterritorialisation, creolization, hybridization, or fragmentation - often become reified as processes cut off from the political and economic context in which the contradictions between capital and human communities are affected…It is important for anthropologists to bring this awareness of macro trends into our perceptions of local resistance movements that reject the normativity of deterritorialisation and disintegration of cultural cohesiveness…Attempts to bring this conflict into focus are cast as naïve or even worse: essentialising. Responding to macroanalyses of globalization that stress the mobility of people and the homogenization of culture, some anthropologists deny the premises of [indigenous] peoples to validate the continued occupation of their ancestral lands as ‘essentialist’ and the anthropologists who quote them as romantic (2005a, 178 f.).

Revivalists and Slow Food activists articulate a similar sense of disquiet at the accelerating pace of cultural and social transformation promoted by powerful and unaccountable economic forces and actors, and the danger of uncritically accepting the principle which seems to be intrinsic to the capitalist productive cycle itself: the tearing down of the old to replace it with the new.

Appadurai has highlighted how capitalism, as an economic system, is structured around the constant production of the new, identifying the ‘valorization of ephemerality’ as a key feature of modern capitalist consumption:

the search for novelty is a symptom of a deeper discipline of consumption in which desire is organized around the aesthetic of ephemerality…The dominant force, spreading through the consuming classes of the world, appears to be the ethic, aesthetic and material practice of the ephemeral (1996, 84).

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If capitalism displays, on the temporal plane, an inbuilt structural bias towards the destruction of the past and the fetishisation of the new, then on the spatial plane, it has been argued that it also shows a bias towards what Jürgen Habermas has termed ‘the colonization of the lifeworld’ (1988). Berardi (2004, 2005), Hardt & Negri (2001, 2004), Harvey (2002), Castells (2000) and others have argued that the new frontier in the contemporary intensification of capitalist production has become human life and the human psyche itself. Given the geographical limits to its infinite expansion, capitalism now increasingly invests the remaining available areas of the life world, including culture, cyberspace and the human imaginary (Harvey, 1990, 344; Hardt & Negri, 2001, 221-37; Castells, 2000).

In a polemical tour de force which has been highly influential in Italy, Naomi Klein in No Logo (2001) describes a contemporary society in which identity and culture is coming to be constructed increasingly around market commodities. She argues that corporate branding and the market are now expanding to absorb all available public space within modern capitalist society, reflecting the continuous movement throughout the modern period to privatise public property and counter the movement in defence of ‘the global commons’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, 300). The revulsion experienced by revivalists like Michele (see Chapter Four) for the resulting società consumistica (consumer society) seems to lead many of them to embrace the marginal cultural world of the Southern Italian mondo popolare as a kind of imagined space ‘outside’ capitalism (Parkins, 2004, 258) where ‘Berlusconi has not yet arrived’.

Like No Logo, Augé’s monograph Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995) is highly suggestive of many of the ideological concerns of revivalism, and indeed is sometimes cited by scholarly revivalist actors themselves (see anthropologist Vito Teti’s comment in Chapter Five). Augé has argued that the most distinctive space of ‘supermodernity’ is the deterritorialised ‘non–place’, and that the proliferation of non-places like supermarkets, highways and airport lounges are being integrated into an ever-expanding worldwide ‘consumption space’. He contrasts such ‘non-places’ with the traditional anthropological notion of place, associated with the idea of ‘a culture localised in time and space’. For Augé, Appadurai and others, ‘the vertiginous deterritorialisation of telematic capitalism’ (Berardi, 2004, 86) has 28

produced a powerful need for ‘re-identification’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ (Appadurai, 1996; Kearney, 1995). This is strongly reflected in revivalism’s distinctive reconnection with cultural forms deeply rooted in ‘anthropological’ place, for example through participation in feste popolari which occur in specific locations, on specific days of the year, and are associated with distinctive traditional local cultural forms.

In the face of the industrial reorganisation of agricultural production and consumption along the lines of ‘market efficiency’, Slow Food similarly proposes the cultural revalorisation of traditional local gastronomic and agricultural practices, and the reembedding of food production within local communities. For Craig and Parkins, this project represents a ‘conscious negotiation of life in the present, rather than a nostalgic retreat to an imagined community or pastoral golden age’ (2006, 3). Slow Food’s notion of ‘authenticity’ is situated, not nostalgic or essentialised, and is ‘grounded in the material culture and history of everyday life’. I argue that revivalism, like Slow Food, aims through the deployment of strategic notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’, to reconstitute alternative cultural forms distinct from the ones more often promoted by the global capitalist market (cf. Ritzer, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2003a, 2004, 2005).

The emergence of the modern notion of ‘authenticity’ can be located at the moment in history when

with the appearance of mechanically produced clone-commodities, we began to distinguish between the social meaning of handicraft and that of mechanical production, as well as between uniqueness and easy replaceability. In the sixteenth century, the word meant sincerity. By the end of the nineteenth century it had taken on its more modern meaning (Spooner, 1986, 224; 226; cf. Appadurai, 1986a; Benjamin, 1969).

Though again, much attention has been focussed within recent social science on the deconstruction

of

‘essentialised

notions

of

authenticity’

(Kirtsoglou

&

Theodossopoulos, 2004; Handler, 1988; Cohen, 1988; Shannon, 2003), less attention has perhaps been focussed on the actual contemporary destabilisation of traditional 29

notions of ‘the real’ which have arguably provoked such cultural preoccupations. For as Baudrillard has argued:

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality - a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared (2000, 6).

Castells has described the emergence within contemporary capitalism of a pattern of culture organized primarily around an integrated system of electronic media, with ‘cultural expressions of all kinds increasingly enclosed in, or shaped by, and largely structured by, [a] flexibly inclusive hypertext’ (2000, 12). The unprecedented capacity of contemporary capitalism to shape human behaviour and the psyche via technology has privileged virtualised modes of experience, whilst marginalising many forms of embodied experience which are the focus of revivalist activity.

For Baudrillard, advances in communications technology have actually produced a ‘desert of the real’, a phenomenal world which is increasingly dominated by artificially-produced simulations and simulacra (2000, cf. Benjamin, 1969). In his classic Society of the Spectacle (1977) French Situationist Guy Debord anticipates a world in which the circulation of images has become in some ways more important than the accumulation of material commodities, and in which life is no longer something to be lived, but a spectacle to be watched passively from a distance. In Debord’s pessimistic analysis, ‘the spectacle’ is regarded as something fundamentally inauthentic, in fact, as ‘counterfeit life’ (1977, para 48).

By contrast, revivalists like Ester (Chapter Four) describe the mondo popolare with which they engage as a world of intense embodied taste, sound, and smell sensations which are not amenable to verbalisation, let alone digitalisation or virtualisation. Revivalism’s preoccupation with ‘authenticity’ seems to me to respond to a widely held sense by revivalists of its general absence, in a contemporary cultural and social world which they see as increasingly dominated by the plastic, the synthetic and the 30

‘hyperreal’. In a vitalist strategy for the recuperation of the ‘real’, revivalism thus proposes a radical embodied response to the alienation from direct experience which Baudrillard, Debord and Berardi identify as such key features of contemporary capitalist society.

Cover of 1973 edition of De Bord’s The Society of the Spectacle. Photo: J.R. Eyermann. Source: . [29 October 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

Southern Italian revivalism and previous scholarly literature

This thesis represents the first major ethnography of the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival, apart from Lüdtke (2009), whose study deals exclusively with the Salentine folk revival (other shorter studies of single regions include Santoro & Torsello, 2002; Del Giudice, 2005; Scaldaferri, 2005; Ferraiuolo, 2005; Blackstone, 2009). In contrast with these single regions studies, my investigation has instead taken the unique form of a wider pan-regional survey of Southern Italian revivalism, taking

31

in not only the three major constituent regional revivals, but also their interconnection with the urban revivalist milieu in Rome, and to a lesser extent in Naples.

My approach thus provides a wider synoptic perspective from which to explore the complex articulation of the revivalist phenomenon in Central-Southern Italy as a whole, within both its rural and urban settings. This research methodology is highly appropriate to the dispersed and multi-sited nature of contemporary revivalism itself. Through this pan-regional methodology, a powerful comparative perspective is possible, in which regional revivalist discourse can more easily be problematised (see for instance my analysis of the Salentine revival in Chapter Seven). By contrast, other studies of the Southern Italian folk revival have tended to focus exclusively on revivalist activity in single regions, thus making them hostage at times to the ideological representations of local tradition proposed by their regional/regionalist informants (Santoro & Torsello, 2002; Del Giudice, 2005; Lüdtke, 2009; Scaldaferri, 2005; Ferraiuolo, 2005). Comparative fieldwork on the contemporary articulation of popular tradition in Calabria and Campania as well as Salento has also made me far more attuned than is possible for Lüdtke to the processes of deculturation (‘contamination’) which are much further advanced in Salento than is the case in these other two regions (see Chapters Five, Six & Seven).

Previous scholarly literature has, I feel, largely failed to problematise the agency and ideology of urban actors within revivalism and the ongoing reproduction of Southern Italian popular traditional practices. With some notable exceptions (Gala, 2002; Pizza, 2002, 2002a; Portelli, 2002; Apolito, 2000), scholarly critique of the Salentine folk revival, especially in English, has at times been remarkably inhibited, a result perhaps of the touchiness of Salentine informants around the delicate theme of contemporary Salentine identity construction (see Chapter Seven).

Many non-Italian scholars of revivalism (Del Giudice, 2005; Lüdtke, 2009; Blackstone, 2009) have also in my view largely failed to adequately historicise Italian revivalism within post-war Italian left politics, and particularly the influential Gramscian tradition which I outline in the following chapter. While Italian scholars such as Bermani (1978), Leydi (1972), Vacca (1999) and Chiriatti (1998) have been 32

highly attuned to the Marxist ideological motivations of the first revival, my ethnography highlights continuities and discontinuities between the first and second revivals, and the way in which leftist political concerns have been remodulated into a different key in the second revival, especially within the milieus of the Italian Centro Sociale Occupato (CSO: Occupied Social Centre, Klein & Levy, 2002; Ginsborg, 1990, 382; Mudu, 2004, 2005; Wright, 2007; Balestrini, 1988, 509-518; Marincola, 2003; Centro Studi Airone, 1994) and ‘No Global’ (anti-globalisation) movements (Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, 2001, 2001a). Although some scholarly work has been carried out on the CSO scene (Wright, 2007; Mudu, 2004, 2005), none has specifically examined the agency of urban actors from this important revivalist constituency within the Southern Italian revivalist movement. Because of her exclusive fieldwork focus on Salento and lack of familiarity with the revivalist and CSO milieus in larger cities to the north, I feel Lüdtke (2009) has not been able to give adequate attention to this important group of countercultural actors within Salentine revivalism.

In Naples, I was particularly lucky to find myself at the core of a group of informants who had played a central role in the emergence in the 1990s of the second revival in Campania (Claudio Carriglia interview). This privileged access has, I believe, allowed me to present a unique account of this process in Chapters Two and Three.

According to Tak (2000, 17), a great number of Italian ‘village studies’ on the festa popolare have been carried out in a somewhat ‘ahistorical and traditionalistic’ mode which has failed to situate popular traditional practices historically. By contrast, I have sought to work in a more contemporary anthropological mode by problematising the contemporary reproduction of traditional practices by revivalist actors, in a manner consistent with two important anthropological collections which have focussed on contemporary

revitalisation

movements:

Boissevain’s

Revitalising

European

Traditions (1992: cf. also Cowan, 1988) and Otto and Pedersen’s Tradition Between Cultural Continuity and Invention (2000). By describing how revivalism facilitates the cultural networking of the local with the translocal, the rural periphery with the metropolis (Chapter Eight), I believe this ethnography may also make a contribution to contemporary scholarly research on globalisation.

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Although the revivalist notion of the contaminazione (contamination) of traditional popular forms by wider global processes is a central preoccupation for revivalist actors, this notion has not been systematically problematised in the existing literature on the Southern Italian folk revival. Instead, such processes have often been touched on in passing, (especially by Italian scholars working within an older quasi-folkloric framework), as a kind of unfortunate accretion or epiphenomenon on traditional popular forms.

Some important definitions

For Eric Hobsbawm, ‘the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this [i.e. twentieth] century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry’ (1995, 289).

In discussing revivalism, we must make a careful distinction between the term ‘peasant’ as a now extinct economic category, and the cultural forms derived from peasant society, many of which still endure within Southern Italian life and consciousness. When my Southern Italian informants refer to someone as a contadino, they refer either to a small scale contemporary agricultural producer, or to people who grew up within a cultural milieu associated with Southern Italian peasant society. I at times use the term ‘peasant’ in this broader Italian sense, without necessarily implying the continued existence of an Italian peasantry in the narrower economic sense.

Through his ethnographic exploration of worker/peasant modes in Northern Italy among a rural population in the Cividale del Friuli area in Friuli, Douglas Holmes (1989) has also illuminated the similar social, economic and cultural context in which contemporary Southern Italian worker/peasants such as my informants Riccardo, Cicetto, Sabatino and others are situated. Holmes also highlights the degree to which worker/peasants like them have been able to maintain ‘enchanted’ cultural modes associated with traditional peasant society, despite the cultural dislocations of contemporary modernity.

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There is a telling linguistic distinction between the Italian understanding of the term cultura popolare (the object of Italian revivalism) and the English term ‘popular culture’ popularised by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (Williams, 1983, 237). Cultura popolare, often glossed in English as ‘folk culture’, denotes cultural traditions linked to the past, including peasant culture, and is contrasted with cultura di massa (mass culture) - ‘popular culture’ of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer variety (Pianta, 1982, 13-15). Thus, ‘cultura popolare’ in Italian frequently denotes preindustrial culture, whereas in the English-speaking world, ‘popular culture’ has become synonymous with the mass culture of industrial society. This semantic contrast between English and Italian usage highlights the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1750s, whereas in some parts of Southern Italy, it seems to be only just arriving: Tak has argued for instance, that in the post-war period, the local economy of Calvello in Basilicata shifted directly from pre-industrialisation to postindustrialisation, with industrialisation amounting ‘mainly to the export of labour elsewhere…without the industrialisation of the local economy itself’ (2000, 241; cf. Hardt & Negri, 2001, 288-9).

Il mondo popolare (the world of the people) was conceived within the strongly Gramscian tradition in post-war Italian anthropology (Grottanelli et al., 1977; Saunders, 1984, 1993) as a marginalised subaltern cultural space on the fringes of Italian bourgeois society. The distinctive cultural values and world view of this social milieu were seen as being embodied in specific popular expressive forms, and contrasted with those of Gramsci’s cultura egemone: the ‘hegemonic culture’ of dominant bourgeois capitalist society (de Martino, 1949; Clemente et al., 1976). Reflecting the second revival’s specific new focus on the idea of ‘tradition’, some revivalists also use the alternative term ‘il mondo della tradizione’, a usage which highlights a characteristic ideological dichotomisation within revivalist discourse between a pre-capitalist ‘world of tradition’ and la società consumistica: the world of contemporary globalised capitalist modernity.

Revivalist informants sometimes use the English-derived term il revival or the Italian terms ‘la riscoperta delle tradizioni popolari’ (rediscovery of popular traditions) or ‘l’epoca della riscoperta’ (period of rediscovery) to refer to the current folk revival. I 35

use my own etic coinages ‘revivalism’ and ‘revivalist’ to refer to the movement and its protagonists, even though no such corresponding emic terms exist in Italian. Instead of objectifying themselves or their own activities, revivalist actors invariably frame revivalism discursively around the emic term le tradizioni popolari: the popular traditional practices of Southern Italian rural actors which are the object of revivalist attention. This revivalist usage highlights, firstly, a high level of objectification of specific cultural practices associated with traditional peasant culture, and secondly, a strongly vitalist emphasis on embodied activity and practice.

In Italian, there is also an important yet confusing distinction between the terms festa popolare and festival, made more complex by the fact that festa is usually translated into English as ‘festival’. Festa popolare refers to a local and traditional patronal festival such as Calabria’s Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte (Chapter Five). Such events take place at a particular time and place each year, are usually focussed symbolically around the local patron Saint or Madonna, and are deeply embedded within the history and popular traditional practices of a specific local community. As signalled by its importation from English, the term festival denotes a non-organic, secular, recently-invented ‘folk festival’, in which revivalists attempt to ‘repropose’ popular traditional forms in a modern setting, typically on a stage with modern lighting and sound systems (see Chapter Six).

What is the general profile of the urban revivalist community which is the subject of this ethnography? The typical urban revivalist is under the age of 35, often a current or recent University student, most frequently from the humanities. Revivalists’ typically leftist/‘alternative’ political perspective makes them receptive to cultural forms such as Southern Italian popular traditional practices, which they conceptualise as ‘alternative’ to the ‘homogenised’ cultural forms which they see as being dominant within contemporary capitalist society. Urban revivalism is strongly associated with both the radical Centro Sociale Occupato (Occupied Social Centre) and university milieus, especially in major cities such as Milan, Rome, Naples and Bologna. The revivalist scene in these northern cities shows an increasing representation of revivalists with second generation family connections to areas of Southern Italy such as Calabria and 36

Salento which have become the site for the revival of distinct popular cultural practices such as tarantella or pizzica. In contrast to rural exponents of popular tradition, urban revivalists tend to be from more educated middle class backgrounds. Despite their interest and participation in Southern Italian patronal festivals of the Saints and Madonna, their leftist ideological orientation typically tends to make them hostile to the Catholic Church. There is perhaps a slightly higher proportion of female to male participants in the urban revivalist scene.

Revivalist activity in cities may include participation in concerts and dance or folk instrumental courses. During the peak summer festival season from June to late August, many revivalists travel widely to specific feste popolari and folk festivals in various Southern rural locations to experience local popular tradition at first hand. At other times of the year, some revivalists may also make long trips from their cities in the North to attend individual events such as Carnival or local patronal festivals held outside the summer season. Some features of revivalist practice are paralleled in Sanguanini’s account In raduno. Giovani no limits (1999) of an alternative Italian youth subculture which comes together to assert its distinctive identity in periodic mass gatherings in remote rural locations. Within Sanguanini’s ‘raduno’ milieu, there is a tendency towards ‘“do it yourself tribalism”…and a valorisation of reciprocity, solidarity, and friendship links’ which recalls for me the 2002 Tarantellapower experience in Caulonia. As in Sanguanini’s target group, there is a strong emphasis within revivalist practice and ideology on the recuperation of traditional forms of collective sociality like ‘la comitiva’ (the group) felt to be under threat in an increasingly atomised wider society, and a search for new ways to ‘stare insieme’ (‘spend time together’).

Yet it would be a mistake to see urban revivalism as a unified and homogeneous cultural bloc. I argue instead that at least three major revivalist currents can be distinguished, corresponding to a tripartite model of ideal types proposed by Milanese informant Simone, who distinguishes between ‘philological’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘commercial’ tendencies within the Southern Italian revivalist scene.

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The ‘philological’ strand shows strongest historical continuities with the Marxistinspired first revival tradition of scholarly documentation of cultura subalterna (subaltern culture) explored in Chapter Two. Informants from this segment of revivalism generally have a closer and less naïve engagement with il mondo popolare. Typically, they also have a keen interest in the world view embodied in traditional expressive practices, and a deeper historical perspective on the cultural and social dynamics associated with the reproduction of these forms. This makes ‘philological’ revivalists highly attuned to the many contemporary transformations which are taking place within such traditional practices, in a process typically glossed negatively as ‘contamination’ - that is, cultural transformation through the ‘contaminating’ influence of capitalist modernity.

Leading Southern Italian dance scholar Pino Gala is one of the most emblematic figures within the ‘philological’ current of revivalism. Over more than thirty years of field research in remote corners of Southern Italy, he has built up a prodigious archive of sound and video field recordings, some of them documenting the last senior exponents of now moribund or extinct traditional expressive forms. Many of his sound recordings have been published in his Ethnica series; he also runs the La Taranta study centre for Southern Italian popular traditions in Florence, as well as publishing Choreola, a journal of Southern Italian folk dance studies. Gala funds his ongoing field research by running regular dance classes for revivalist enthusiasts on tammurriata, tarantella, pizzica and other popular traditional dance forms. Yet his highly purist approach to popular tradition lead one detractor to dismiss him as ‘the Taliban of popular tradition’.

The ‘spontaneous’ strand within revivalism is strongly countercultural in flavour, and is strongly associated with i giovani di sinistra, young leftists from the ‘No Global’ and Centro Sociale Occupato movements, as well as other fringe groups such as the Rainbow Movement, gli Elfi (‘the Elves’, who live in the woods of Tuscany) and the so-called punkabestie,

who constitute a kind of degree zero

of Italian

counterculturalism. Members of this revivalist tendency seem to be substantially

38

identical with ‘le tribù dello sballo’, 1 the Italian alternative youth subculture which is the ethnographic subject of Sanguanini’s In raduno. Giovani no limits (1999).

‘The Rainbow Girls’: Australian painter/musician Tessa Joy’s visual memoir of two young women folk musicians who enlivened a countercultural ‘Rainbow Gathering’ held in a remote mountain area of Piedmont, Northern Italy, in 2009.

Within this ‘spontaneous’ tendency, revivalism seems to operate partly as a form of countercultural identity construction, in which spontaneous activity is sometimes privileged over reflection. Popular traditional practice is represented ideologically (sometimes perhaps naïvely) as a form of counter-hegemonic resistance to ‘globalisation’ and la società omologata (the homologised society), held by ‘spontaneous’ revivalists to be an intrinsic feature of contemporary globalised capitalism. My informant Simone comments that this revivalist current is a far cry from ‘Pino Gala-style’ revivalism, and that unreliable or even distorted information

1

A difficult term to translate, but which can perhaps be conveyed by ‘tribes on the lookout for peak experiences’. Within Italian youth culture ‘lo sballo’ connotes a ‘high’, whether procured chemically, or by other means, such as by attending a rock concert.

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about popular tradition is sometimes circulated within this milieu. ‘Philological’ revivalists are also highly critical at times of the degree of disruption caused by members of this less reflective group of revivalists in the local setting of the festa popolare because of their general ignorance of local cultural and performance conventions.

The ‘commercial’ strand within revivalism at times lacks both the scholarly rigour of the ‘philological’ strand and the political engagement of the ‘spontaneous’ strand, but is instead strongly determined by market forces and the dynamic of ‘the latest fashion’. One figure whom I use to exemplify this tendency is the highly successful Neapolitan folk singer/musician Eugenio Bennato and his group Tarantapower [SFX13]. At a more local level, however, the ‘commercial’ current within revivalism is reflected in the emergence of a new group of ‘commercial’ actors who are now producing and selling folk instruments like the tamburello, running folk dance classes, or selling local ‘ethnic’ food at folk festivals.

For local politicians in economically moribund Southern Italian towns like Caulonia in Calabria, the ‘commercial’ strand within revivalism offers the opportunity for la valorizzazione del territorio (the valorisation of the territory). By showcasing the unique characteristics of local popular tradition in folk festivals and other events, urban revivalist actors can be attracted into the local community, thus stimulating local economic activity (cf Filippucci, 2002, 77 for an example from Northern Italy). In parts of Southern Italy, it is the general absence of significant industrial activity which has in fact variably determined the survival of local popular tradition relative to other parts of Italy (cf. de Martino, 1975, 354). Through the emergent post-Fordist revalorisation of rural economy and society (Roseman et al., 2008), the general absence of modern economic development in much of the South has thus made it possible for some Southern communities to exploit their rich local popular cultural resources.

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Neapolitan folk singer Eugenio Bennato, a key figure in the current Southern Italian folk revival. Photo: Dragan Tasic. Source:. [31 October 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] These three major currents within revivalism, I argue, may be interpreted as contrasting responses to contemporary globalised capitalism. For ‘philological’ revivalists, popular traditional practices represent a last bastion of unique popular cultural expressivity which is under assault from the forces of an homogenising globalised capitalism. For them, there is a clear cultural and political imperative to defend and/or document such forms, before they succumb under the weight of the dominant mass culture.

For the ‘spontaneous’ revivalist, ‘popular tradition’ is by its very nature ‘in opposition to’ contemporary capitalist society. Just like the retro-hippy clothing which many of them wear, pizzica and other revivalist dance forms provide ‘markers of difference’ by which they are able to construct alternative identities and distinguish themselves from the dominant ‘homogenised’ consumer society which they reject.

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As flagged in the title of this thesis, the Italian word contaminazione (contamination) is a key metaphor within revivalist discourse, though it is used by revivalists in at least three differing senses. At one level, contaminazione is used negatively, especially by ‘philological’ revivalists, to denote the deculturating effects upon popular traditional forms and practices of external cultural influences. ‘Philological’ revivalists typically conceive of contaminazione as a manifestation of ‘globalisation’, in which the ongoing reproduction of local cultural practices by their traditional local exponents is disrupted, especially by commercial influences, the interference of local politicians or the increasing penetration of translocal actors into the local milieu. A good example of this negative usage is the term ‘la festa contaminata’ (the contaminated festival), often used by philological revivalists in relation to a festa popolare like Salento’s Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli. As discussed in Chapter Five, this festa has undergone a rapid process of structural breakdown due to the mass influx of ‘spontaneous’ urban revivalists who are largely oblivious to the conventions of local customary performance practice.

In another, unmarked and purely technical sense, ‘contaminazione’ can be glossed in English simply as ‘fusion music’. When used in this narrower technical sense, the Italian term ‘contaminazione’ is usually devoid of the heavily negative connotations associated with the English term ‘contamination’. It instead refers to the experimental elaboration of traditional musical forms through the introduction of new musical instruments or styles which, like for instance the electric guitar, either are more modern than the instruments traditionally used to perform such music or else, like the Middle Eastern oud, are extraneous to the traditional local instrumental repertoire. ‘Fusion music’ or ‘contaminazione’ is thus a characteristic feature of the entire history of twentieth century popular music, as witnessed by the twentieth century evolution of rock, jazz and other popular musical forms. Indeed, as one Southern Italian folk musician commented to me, contaminazione is arguably intrinsic to the nature of human musical practice generally. While the Salentine group Sud Sound System has experimented with the introduction of Salentine pizzica rhythms into their reggae repertoire, ‘I Nidi d’Arac’, also from Salento, provides perhaps the most extreme version of contaminazione, in their experimental fusion of pizzica with techno music [SFX14]. 42

There is also a third distinctive use of the term ‘contaminazione’ which is especially associated with Anna Nacci, a Rome-based ideologist of ‘spontaneous’ revivalism. Contaminazione is conceived by Nacci in a strongly positive sense, as a musical practice which can be used to facilitate intercultural dialogue with the ‘other’, by opening up traditional popular Southern Italian music to new collaborations and connections with other parts of the Mediterranean, thus re-establishing historical links to Greek, Arabic, Turkish and other popular musical traditions throughout the Mediterranean basin which have influenced Southern Italian folk music. Nacci’s distinctive ideological influence through her notion of contaminazione as an active and positive musical practice is exemplified in the official titles of the Diso and Carpino folk festivals with which she has been associated: Festival della tradizione e delle sue contaminazioni (Festival of Tradition and its Contaminations (my emphasis).

The promotion of intercultural dialogue through the deliberate ‘contaminazione’ of local musical forms has been most strongly associated with Salento’s La Notte della Taranta (Chapter Six). Here and elsewhere, ‘contaminazione’ has proved highly functional to the political agendas of local politicians, as a way of opening up wider economic and cultural circuits linking the local with the translocal. Yet within the revivalist scene, there are at times bitter debates between those in the respective ‘tradition’ and ‘contamination’ camps, with proponents of ‘contaminazione’ such as Anna Nacci dismissing some traditionalists as ‘integralisti’ (fundamentalists) who for her at times border on racism. ‘Traditionalists’ by contrast, are quick to dismiss the highly contaminated ‘fusion’ music style of La Notte della Taranta as a shallow and vulgar sell-out of local musical tradition (Santoro, 1999).

Frankfurt School Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno once criticised the Hungarian composer Bartók for his allegedly ‘reactionary’ engagement with folklorism, implicated, according to Adorno, in the emergence of eastern and central European fascism (Kahn, 1995, 52). Elements of nineteenth century Romantic folklorism were indeed integrated into the Nazi model of a ‘pure’ German culture, as the German language itself was systematically purged of the ‘contaminating’ influence of foreign words, with the common French term for barber (Friseur) being replaced by the more Germanic Schneider (Ryback, 2010, 129). 43

Cultural hybridisation has sometimes been celebrated as ‘liberatory’ by postmodern scholars (Bhabha, 1994; cf. critique by Hardt & Negri 2001, 138, 142-6). It would be easy to similarly dismiss revivalist concerns over ‘contamination’ (perhaps on the analogy of, for instance, contemporary revitalisation movements like Wahabbist Islam: Ali, 2003) as a regressive and ‘essentialising’ response to the processes of cultural hybridisation which are so closely associated with globalisation (Appadurai, 1996).

Yet revivalists would probably highlight the fact that the ‘contamination’ of traditional popular cultural forms by capitalist modernity may in fact encompass their actual cultural extinction. For De Simone, the disappearance of Naples’ Festa della Madonna di Piedigrotta, once central within Neapolitan popular consciousness, was an emblematic example of this process. This festa popolare essentially disappeared from the cultural life of Naples in the post-war period, following the arrival in the surrounding Mergellina area of building speculation and the motor car, with the effect that members of the traditional local fishing community who had once provided the hard core of local devotees were displaced, in a scenario described by De Simone as the ‘final marginalisation of the people from their religion and their places’ (1974, 65; cf. Canzanella, 2002, 44-62).

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Devotees carry the statue of the Madonna di Piedigrotta in her annual patronal procession through Mergellina, Naples, during the early post-war period (?). Source: Canzanella (2002, 52). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] De Simone’s characteristic first revival preoccupation with the problematic of class in the transformation or destruction of traditional popular forms is also clearly reflected in the work of two British students of Gramsci: Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. For Hall, ‘cultural change’ is not some kind of unproblematic and neutral background process, but instead something which needs to be demystified by historicising it within the field of class hegemony:

Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes, because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of reeducation. In the broadest sense...time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. ‘Cultural change’ is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices 45

are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply ‘falling into disuse’ through the Long March toward modernisation, they are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place (1981, 227f.).

Williams similarly contextualises ‘tradition’ with notions of class hegemony, noting that

‘Traditional habits’ are isolated, by some current hegemonic development, as elements of the past which have now to be discarded….At the same time, those connections to the past which are in contradiction with particular hegemonic developments are dismissed as ‘out of date’ or ‘nostalgic’...It is for this reason that much of the most accessible and influential work of the counter-hegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations (1977, 116).

Morelli and Poppi’s photo sequence from the 1963, 1985 and 1997 Tratomarzo winter masquerade in Grumes in the Northern Italian Province of Trento dramatically illustrates the process of morphological transformation in the festa popolare which is such a central preoccupation of Southern Italian ‘philological’ revivalists. The central ritual role in this event of i coscrìti, (conscripts—a liminal band of local male youths who have recently reached marriageable age) is marked by their distinctive hats decorated with flowers and streamers. Although i coscrìti are clearly visible in the 1963 and 1985 photos, by 1997 they seem to have disappeared altogether, with their traditional costumes being replaced by more ‘practical’ forms of dress which seem to be associated more with the world of wage labour.

Instead of dismissing revivalism as ‘essentialist’ or ‘regressive’, I instead interpret the movement positively, as a critique of the ‘rationality’ of contemporary capitalism and the role of culture within it, which responds, like Slow Food, to a desire for the reintegration of modes of experience, knowledges and cultural practices which are increasingly marginalised within contemporary capitalist modernity. 46

Morphological transformation in a Northern Italian festa popolare over 34 years. Photos: A Canali, R Morelli & F Pojer, in Poppi & Morelli (1998, 116f). 47

[Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

Scope, caveats, limitations

The publication in 1983 of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition has stimulated the emergence of a ‘constructivist’ paradigm within anthropology which highlights the culturally constructed nature of ‘tradition’, often critiquing notions of tradition said to be ‘essentialised’ (Handler, 1986, 1988; Hanson, 1989; Handler & Linnekin, 1984; MacDonald, 1997). But in an important caveat perhaps missed at times by some constructivist enthusiasts, Hobsbawm and Ranger contrast the differing status of tradition in more ‘traditional’ societies, observing that ‘the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions is not to be confused with the “invention of tradition”…Where the old ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented’ (1983, 8). Since much of the invention of tradition debate has focussed on demonstrating the ‘inventionalist’ thesis in the context of unequivocally ‘modern’ cultural settings such as urban Quebec (Handler, 1988), it is perhaps not surprising that the key notion of orthopraxis (‘right practice’: Poppi 1998, 22f.), which is such an essential stabilising element in the cultural reproduction of tradition over time within pre-literate societies, has at times fallen out of the equation.

Revivalism brings together two contrasting sets of actors with differing orientations towards ‘tradition’: cosmopolitan urban revivalists and traditional local actors. The essentialising and objectifying tendencies of urban actors in relation to traditional practice critiqued by Handler thus need to be carefully differentiated from the orthopractic modes by which traditional local practitioners transmit such practices intergenerationally over time (a point conceded even by arch-constructivist Richard Handler in his description of the transition within Quebecois folk culture from ‘unconscious lifeways’ to ‘objectified “tradition”’: 1988, 55). This distinctive contrast in revivalist practice between the ‘unconscious lifeways’ of traditional actors and the ‘cultural objectification’ of urban revivalists is also reflected, according to Tonkinson (2000) in contemporary Aboriginal Australia. Aboriginal people in remote areas of Australia ‘live with continuities of tradition sufficiently strong that it is a largely taken for granted, internalised reality. They are thus able successfully to orient their lives largely in accordance with precepts and values derived from the traditional past’. By

48

contrast, Aboriginal people in less remote areas of Australia who have undergone a longer period of colonization

are engaged in cultural revival. They objectify their Aboriginality and associated traditions, and talk about them in ways that show a consciousness of their motivations and objectives, and in many cases engage in cultural borrowing from other areas. They are actively working to link ‘cultural revival is survival’ (a popular slogan) to issues of identity, pride, land rights, local solidarity and belonging-in-place (186).

The baby which seems sometimes to be been thrown out with the constructivist bathwater is the concept of cultural reproduction, the key mechanism by which traditional practices are reproduced over time (Williams, 1981, 187). This theoretical blind spot has also been highlighted by Otto and Pedersen, who note that

the issue of cultural continuity is greatly under-theorised in anthropology; it is generally not seen as a theoretical problem to the same extent as the explanation of cultural change…The problem that the continuity of habitus, custom and tradition may need as much explanation as cultural change, is rarely addressed (2000a, 6).

Similarly, Poppi sees his account of the Ladin Carnival as ‘an attempt to bring back the dialectical pole of custom to redress the balance of a one-sided consideration of the invention of tradition’ (1992, 132). For Hermann Tak, opposed to the ‘traditionalism’ of the Frazerian opening phrase ‘From time immemorial’ ‘is an equally fictitious, contemporary, sceptical “inventionalism” ’ (2000, 36).

Yet the Salentine revival certainly does fits the constructivist paradigm remarkably well, and in Chapter Seven, I use a constructivist framework to examine in detail how Salentine revivalism does indeed parallel Handler’s account of Quebecois nationalism (1988) through its recent construction of the notion of a bounded and essentialised ethnic group epitomised in a set of diacritical cultural traits selected from traditional Salentine peasant culture. 49

Revivalism as a whole though, responds to far wider concerns than these simple ethnoregionalist motivations. In seeking to answer my central research question of why revivalism has emerged, my approach has been informed by the phenomenological method, described by Jackson as:

above all one of direct understanding and in depth description - a way of according equal weight to all modalities of human experience, however they are named…It is an attempt to describe human consciousness in its lived immediacy, before it is subject to theoretical elaboration or conceptual systematizing…[It] involves ‘placing in brackets’ or ‘setting aside’ questions concerning the rational ontological or objective status of ideas and beliefs, in order to fully describe and do justice to the ways in which people actually live, experience and use them - the ways they appear to consciousness (1996, 10).

Herzfeld (2006) comments that some rituals (similar to ones in which revivalists participate) ‘may engage all the senses to an extent not usually realized in modern forms of spectacle’ (8). As will be highlighted later, sexual desire and its mediation through

dance practices

is

sometimes

a

significant

feature of

revivalist

intersubjectivity. Given the degree to which embodied aesthetic practice is central to revivalism, an overly intellectualist approach using ‘a referential view of meaning that reduces everything to pure text’ (13) would be inadequate to the ethnographic task at hand. In an observation which seems particularly germane to revivalism (see especially Ester’s account of her own revivalist subjectivity in Chapter Four), Herzfeld observes that ‘history can be danced, felt, smelled and yes, spoken, and every act and every sensory experience is a potential carrier of links with the recent and the more distant past’ (13). In order then to expand ‘our capacity to appreciate the practical theorization of social actors’, he argues, it is vital that we extend our ethnographic research into multisensory analysis, at the same time rejecting ‘an a priori commitment to the Cartesian separation of mind from body’ (7f.).

Although my analysis of the Southern Italian folk revival draws on both historical and ethnographic methodologies, it is inevitably limited by a lack of grounding in the discipline of ethnomusicology (which by contrast informs the 2001 study by musician, 50

ethnomusicologist and Associazione ARPA collaborator Sergio Schiavone of the recent evolution of the Calabrian folk revival).

On a geographical level, Sicily and Sardinia were omitted from consideration from this study on the grounds that unlike Calabria, Puglia and Campania, they are not a focus for substantial urban revivalist activity on a national level.

I now realise that my general lack of familiarity with Northern Italy, and complete absence of comparative fieldwork in the North, has been a serious limitation, especially given the neo-Orientalist view of North and South reproduced by revivalist informants, including especially those who are themselves from Northern Italy (although see my analysis in Chapter Nine, where I contrast the Northern Italian anthropological literature on revivalism with my findings for the South). My lack of familiarity with the North meant there was a danger at times of uncritically assimilating the revivalist view of Northern Italy as substantially a modernist wasteland today virtually devoid of any viable popular traditional practices.

Because of the rapidly evolving nature of the folk revival, and despite some irregular contact with some field sites and informants between 2005 and 2010, this study must be considered on a temporal level as very much an ethnographic snapshot of the 20023 period. Given my one year fieldwork period (July 2002-July 2003), I was only ever able to witness major annual events once (apart from Caulonia’s Tarantellapower, which I attended in both 2002 and 2005). Yet it was often clear that many of these events were in a process of rapid and dynamic transformation. In Lecce, centre of the Salentine revival, Australian street musician Tessa Joy reports that she received a flat response in 2009 when she and fellow buskers began playing local pizzica tunes, but a far more enthusiastic reception when they changed over to covers of Buena Vista Social Club. The Salentine folk revival seemed to Tessa to have well and truly peaked and then slumped since its boom period during my fieldwork in 2002-3.

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Tessa and Sandra busk in Lecce, Salento, 2009. Painting: Tessa Joy.

In terms of research methodology, the starting point for my investigation of the Southern Italian folk revival phenomenon during the summer of 2002 was my initial encounter with urban revivalists like Anna Nacci and Monica Neri in Rome, Angelo Maggio in Catanzaro and later Ester in Naples, who prescribed for me an itinerary of key ‘must see’ revivalist events in each of the three regions.

As in Sanguanini’s study of Italian countercultural youth (1999), an important element in the constitution and reproduction of the revivalist subculture is collective participation in specific cultural events held in remote rural locations, thus providing the researcher with ‘a moment and place in which the “tribe” becomes socially visible’ (1). In my first two months of fieldwork in July-August 2002, I thus attended the Festival of Carpino in Northern Puglia, la Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli, Festival of Diso and La Notte della Taranta in Salento and Tarantellapower in Calabria, establishing longer term contacts with both locals and urban revivalists at each of these 52

events. My research thus snowballed out of an initial urban environment into the rural peripheries of Puglia, Campania and Calabria, in which I established the foundations for subsequent more regionally-focussed research.

For Marcus, theoretical work on the global cultural economy by Appadurai (1986; 1995; 1996), and others has brought about a ‘rethinking of ideas of culture in the face of contemporary world system changes’ which provides ‘a complex multi-sited vision of research in this transnational domain that defies older practices of “locating” cultures in “places”’ (Marcus, 1995, 104). ‘Multi-sited ethnography’ is described by Marcus as:

designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions or juxtapositions of locations, in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal physical presence, with an explicit posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography…This mobile ethnography takes unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural formation across and within multiple sites of activity...Just as this mode investigates and ethnographically constructs the lifeworlds of variously situated subjects, it also ethnographically constructs aspects of the system itself through the associations and connections it suggests among sites. Empirically following the thread of cultural process itself impels the move toward multisited ethnography…De facto comparative dimensions develop as a function of the fractured, discontinuous plane of movement and discovery among sites, as one maps an object of study and needs to posit logics of relationship, translation and association among these sites…(1995, 96, 97, 102, 105)

Marcus outlines a number of possible modes in which multi-sited ethnography may trace a complex cultural phenomenon through different settings. Of these, the most pertinent to my ethnographic methodology include:

‘Follow the people’: ‘follow and stay with the movements of a particular group of initial subjects’ (106). Thus, in Chapter Three, I describe the circulation of revivalist subjects through Southern Italy on what I term the ‘revivalist itinerary’, as well as 53

tracing the movements of specific individuals such as Ester (Chapter Four) and Monica;

‘Follow the thing’ :‘tracing the circulation through different contexts of a manifestly material object of study such as commodities…works of art, and intellectual property’ (106f).

In this mode, I trace the diffusion of popular traditional practices such as pizzica from their origins in the rural periphery via revivalist networks to urban locations throughout Italy, while in Chapter Eight, I examine the emergence of another kind of new network for the exchange of folkloric goods between city and periphery. Through this methodology, I am able to highlight the way in which revivalism, far from being intrinsically ‘in opposition to’ globalisation, as many revivalists would have us believe, is in fact itself a manifestation of globalisation. Through this approach, ‘the global is collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel, related local situations, rather than something monolithic or external to them’ (102).

‘Follow the metaphor’: ‘when the thing traced is within the realm of discourse and modes of thought, then the circulation of signs, symbols and metaphors guides the design of ethnography. This mode involves trying to trace the social correlates and groundings of associations that are most clearly alive in language use and print or visual media’ (108).

The revivalist notion of ‘popular tradition’ is a key discursive element within revivalist ideology whose production and circulation I trace in Chapter Two through the cinema, literature and politics of the post-war period and into the current context of contemporary advertising, Italian youth culture, music and revivalist ideology and practice.

Perhaps one way to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the multi-sited as opposed to single sited ethnographic method would be to contrast Karen Lüdtke’s 2009 ethnography of the Salento revival Dances With Spiders with my own ethnography of the wider Southern Italian folk revival presented here. Through the 54

greater diachronic breadth and ethnographic depth of her engagement with a single field site, Salento, Ludtke speaks with greater ethnographic authority and detail about Salento than is possible for me in the current thesis. And yet in my multi-sited approach to the Southern Italian revival as a whole, I am able to trace the articulation of urban-rural revivalist networks, and thus integrate processes and elements (notably the important urban CSO milieu) about which her ethnography is silent. Through my engagement with Calabrian and Campanian revivalism, I am also able to add a comparative depth to my discussion of Salentine revivalism which is not available to her.

Yet in his account of research on transnational Lebanese families, Hage has questioned whether it is actually possible to carry out ‘multiple-sited’ research in a way which is truly ‘ethnographic’ in the conventional sense of implying deep engagement with a field site:

It was clear that one site, if it is to be done thoroughly, was already an exhausting enterprise. How can one study numerous sites in such an involved way? …I simply could not be involved in such an intimate way in more than two sites, at the most. (2005, 466).

Having attended a series of Carnival events in Campania and Molise in 2003 and a series of folk festivals scattered throughout Southern Italy in Summer 2002, I can certainly vouch for Hage’s view that ‘multi-sited ethnography’ can be far more exhausting than conventional single-sited ethnography. And yet there are also other and more significant methodological drawbacks as well.

Calabrian ‘philological’ revivalist Angelo Maggio comments that for a researcher to attend a festa popolare only once is inadequate, and that to have a clear understanding of the event’s dynamics requires returning three or four years in succession. The comprehensive documentation of a complex and multisited phenomenon such as Campanian Carnival, for instance, required the efforts of a large number of researchers working simultaneously at a large number of different sites every Carnival period between 1972 and 1977 (De Simone & Rossi, 1977), while Poppi and Morelli’s 55

detailed ethnographic documentation of winter Carnival masquerades in Trentino (1998) is the result of nearly twenty years’ field research. By contrast, I attended Carnival in only three Campanian communities in 2003.

Whether as revivalist or researcher, attending feste popolari necessitates not only being in the right part of Southern Italy on the right day of the year, but also at the right time of day, and in the right position to witness key events to optimum effect. I was bitterly disappointed, for example, to miss highlights of the ‘revivalist itinerary’ described in Chapter Three such as the Festa di Alessandria del Carretto, Festa della Madonna del Pollino, Festa della Madonna di Materdomini, and Festa della Candelora di Montevergine. On Good Friday 2003, I was confronted with a choice between four equally celebrated Good Friday processions in Campania alone, and was forced to make a choice about which one of the four I would attend on that day.

Rather than focussing my ethnographic research on one specific community or region, I chose a pan-regional research methodology, basing myself mainly in the three cities of Rome, Naples and Lecce. Because I did not have my own means of transport, I often relied on highly erratic public transport services in remote local areas such as Salento and the Calabrian Costa Jonica, or lifts with revivalist friends visiting major local events. Like the revivalist itineraries of my urban informants themselves, my fieldwork was thus highly mobile, city-based, multi-sited and at times tenuously linked to local communities, most of which I visited only for a day or so during the annual altered state of the local patronal festa popolare. This made it difficult to maintain continuity with local informants resident in remote and widely scattered communities, or to carry out substantial locally-focussed ethnographic or archival research. It did however have the advantage of allowing me to explore the ‘revivalist itinerary’ through the three major regions, and to focus on how revivalist activity is articulated between city and country.

Although the voices of local actors are underrepresented in this study, this bias in my research data was offset to some extent by a two week return visit to Salento in February 2003, when I carried out follow up research in Melpignano and Torre Paduli (sites of the Notte della Taranta and the Festa di San Rocco which I had attended the 56

previous summer), and by a two month stay in the small town of Riace in Calabria (see Chapter Eight). After relocating to Naples in March 2003, the Circumvesuviana tammurriata hinterland also proved to be far more accessible by public transport, thus allowing greater engagement with local informants.

Although the ‘pan-regional survey’ model I have adopted has given this ethnography a strongly synoptic and comparative dimension, my account of many of the local events described is inevitably impressionistic and lacking in depth. Tak (2000), for example, has set a high benchmark indeed for the study of the Southern Italian festa popolare through his in-depth synchronic account of the festival cycle of one small town in Basilicata, complemented by a detailed archival reconstruction of diachronic transformations in the local festival cycle dating back to the medieval period.

A moment of self-reflection

Edelman has warned that ‘ethnography [does not] necessarily inoculate researchers against the common pitfalls of overidentification with the movement they study, accepting activist claims at face value or representing “movements” as more cohesive than they really are’ (2001, 310). My own strong personal and professional engagement in the maintenance of past cultural forms within the present has indeed naturally predisposed me towards the worldview of my informants.

Through an early education focussed on the study of languages, history and literature, and an undergraduate degree in Classical Greek and Latin Language and Literature, I was indoctrinated at an early age into the values of the classical humanist tradition, which has conventionally looked to classical models from the past as a way of informing cultural action in the present. The cultural focus of my first stint in Italy in 1988-90 was not the ‘revivalist itinerary’ focussed around pre-modern subaltern cultural forms, but instead the ‘high culture’ itinerary of the Grand Tour exemplified in Goethe’s The Italian Journey (1970).

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Since 1994, I have spent much of my professional life working as an applied anthropologist for Aboriginal land councils in Northern Australia documenting local indigenous ‘popular tradition’ for a range of land claim and heritage protection projects. Some of this work has brought me into contact with Aboriginal people who were perhaps the last to leave traditional life behind in the desert (Myers, 1991; Tonkinson, 1991), thus perhaps exacerbating primordialist tendencies already present in me.

With Katakura, Eli Rubuntja & Peter Kanari during research for the Tempe Downs Land Claim, Central Australia, 1994. Photo: Lee Sackett.

Similarly perhaps to June Nash’s long engagement with indigenous Mayan communities in Chiapas, my personal and ethnographic subjectivity and practice has been strongly marked by research with traditionally-oriented indigenous people in Northern Australia, and so this study is inevitably filtered through these previous ethnographic experiences.

While writing this thesis, I also co-founded a cultural heritage advocacy group dedicated to protecting Aboriginal rock art in Western Australia from further 58

destruction by industry (Bennetts, 2007). It is also noteworthy that while completing this thesis, I was stimulated by my exposure to the revivalist methodologies of my informants and direct experience of Southern Italian Carnival to establish an annual Fremantle Carnival in Western Australia. In this sense, I effectively became a revivalist practitioner myself after returning from fieldwork.

2010 Fremantle Carnevale flyer. Photo: Angelo Maggio, Carnival of Schignano, Lombardy, Northern Italy, 2007.

My engagement with the world of Southern Italian popular tradition began on my first visit to Naples in 1988. Through my Italian folk singer partner, Paola Vertechi, I later became familiar with much of the Neapolitan folk repertoire popularised during the first revival by Roberto De Simone and his group la Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare (see Chapter Two). I first became aware of the existence of an area of Southern Italy called ‘Salento’ in early 1996, when I pulled off the shelf of the Feltrinelli bookshop in Rome a recently reissued edition of La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse), Ernesto de Martino’s classic 1961 ethnography investigating the 59

last remnants of the taranta spirit possession cult in Salento, in the stiletto heel of Southern Italy (Bennetts, 2006). Franco Pinna’s dramatic black and white photos depicted possessed female tarantate writhing on the ground in white dresses, and powerfully conveyed to me a vivid sense that pre-modern religious cults perhaps still persisted in remote parts of Southern Italy, just as they did in Central Australia where I was currently employed as an applied anthropologist for an Aboriginal land council.

Franco Pinna’s iconic image of a possessed tarantata in front of Galatina’s Chapel of St Paul, from the cover of de Martino’s La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse) (1961). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] During a conference in Salento’s provincial capital Lecce in 2001, I discovered that a second wave of folk revivalism had recently re-emerged in Salento, and in 2002, I returned to Lecce to re-establish contacts I had made the previous year and begin fieldwork.

Chapter outline

In this study, I present an ethnography of the urban revivalist subculture which has been the main driving force behind the recent (re)emergence of the contemporary 60

Southern Italian folk revival. In the course of my enquiry into the central question of why this revivalist movement has emerged, I draw upon and combine both synchronic and diachronic methodologies. Rather than relying on the (currently more fashionable) postmodern and constructivist approaches to ‘tradition’ which have themselves been the object of critique by Nash (2001, 2005, 2005a), Sahlins (1999), Poppi (1992, 132: above) and Tak (2000, 36: above), I instead follow Jackson (1996), in using a phenomenological analysis of revivalist motivation and agency to explore the question of why contemporary urban revivalists have recently begun to take an interest in the marginalised cultural practices of rural Southern Italy. I show how and why this current second revival has reemerged from its original historical roots in the post-war leftist-inspired ‘first revival’ (ca. 1960-1980) to serve new cultural and political needs today, including ethnoregionalism (cf Poppi, 1992; Anderson, 1991; Hobsbawm, 1992; Levy, 1996), critique of and resistance to what revivalists see as the homogenising and hegemonic nature of globalised capitalist culture (cf. Applbaum, 2000; Klein, 2001; Berardi, 2004; 2005; Harvey, 1990; 2002; Castells, 2000), and the recuperation of modes of experience increasingly marginalised within contemporary urban reality (Baudrillard, 2000; Augé, 1995; De Bord, 1977; Benjamin, 1969). I frame my analysis of Southern Italian revivalism by reference to recent anthropological theories of globalisation (Appadurai, 1996; Tsing, 2000; Rosaldo & Inda, 2002; Kearney, 1995) and a comparative anthropological analysis of similar cultural revitalisation movements within contemporary modernity (Boissevain, 1992; Otto & Pedersen, 2000; Roseman, 2008; Craig & Parkins, 2006; Leitch, 2003; Tonkinson, 2000; Wodz & Wodz 2000; Ciubrinskas, 2000; Cruces & De Rada, 1992; George Oliven, 2000; Cowan, 1988; 1992; Crain 1992; Poppi, 1992).

In Chapter Two, I outline a historical genealogy of the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival, arguing that the roots of Italian folk revivalism are to be found in a distinctive Italian post-war leftist political and cultural milieu strongly associated with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the thought of its cofounder and leading ideologue, Antonio Gramsci. I trace the emergence from this ideological context of an earlier ‘first revival’ during the political turmoil of Italy’s so-called ‘long ‘68’ from the early 1960s through to the late 1970s. After the general collapse in Italy at the end of 61

the 1970s of the Marxist revolutionary paradigm with which the first revival had been closely associated, the movement went into decline during the so-called ‘anni del riflusso’ (ebbtide years) of the 1980s, before re-emerging in a new guise from the mid1990s as the ‘second revival’. Through an analysis of characteristic contrasts between first and second wave revivalist ideology and practice, I highlight specific factors which have favoured the emergence of the second revival.

In Chapter Three, I explore how revivalism is articulated in relation to space. At a primary level, there is a dichotomy between the urban milieu inhabited by urban revivalists and the rural locations to which revivalists travel to engage with local popular traditional practices and their traditional local exponents. Revivalism has also favoured the recent emergence of what I term ‘the revivalist itinerary’, essentially a semi-formalised series of specific regional feste popolari, folk festivals and associated traditional practices, which take place at specific times of the year and places in Southern Italy. This ‘revivalist itinerary’ mainly privileges events, locations and traditional practices in Calabria, Campania and Puglia, thus providing a geographical and temporal template for the circulation through Southern Italy of revivalist actors on their viaggio nelle tradizioni popolari: the revivalist ‘voyage of discovery into popular tradition’.

In Chapter Four, I introduce the subjective world views of four key revivalist informants, in order to exemplify some important characteristics of revivalist subjectivity, but also to highlight something of the range of concerns which motivate revivalist actors.

In Chapter Five, I explore the characteristic engagement of urban revivalists in the festa popolare, the traditional patronal festival of the Madonna and Saints held in small and remote towns in rural Southern Italy. I present a case study of one such event which is celebrated by ‘philological’ revivalists for its highly ‘traditional’ character: the Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte (Calabria). In a second case study, I describe a contrasting festa popolare, the Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli in Salento, which despite its great popularity among ‘spontaneous’ and Salentine revivalists, has a highly negative reputation among ‘philological’ revivalists, 62

due to its now highly ‘contaminated’ or deculturated state. I contrast the differing modes of revivalist engagement in these two events by ‘spontaneous’ and ‘philological’ revivalists.

In Chapter Six, I show how second wave revivalists have pioneered a new mode for the revalorisation of local popular traditional practices through the recent invention of the Southern Italian folk festival genre. Through two case studies (Salento’s La Notte della Taranta and Calabria’s Tarantellapower Festival in Caulonia) I assess the economic impact of such events on small and marginalised Southern Italian communities. I also show how recently invented folk festivals like Tarantellapower are increasingly proving to be functional to the political agendas of the local political actors who directly or indirectly control the public funding of such festivals. Although the ‘philological’ revivalist founders of such events often start out with the aspiration of foregrounding local popular traditions, I show how their commitment to this ‘philological’ and aesthetic objective is typically frustrated by the local governing elite, whose narrower political and economic objectives are better served by promoting a festival programme which is more mainstream, ‘internationalist’, and ‘World Music’ in character.

In Chapter Seven, I consider the influence of ethnoregionalist ideology on the Southern Italian folk revival through a case study of the Salentine revival, which most reflects such tendencies. I show how folk revivalism in Salento has played a key role in the recent emergence of Salento as a distinct region within Southern Italy, and how, as in the Northern League’s imagined ‘Padanian’ community, Salentine revivalist ideology produces and reproduces the notion of an imagined, bounded and essentialised ethnic community (Anderson, 1991). I also show how Salentine revivalism reflects a current general trend, both in Italy and at a global level, towards resurgent regional identity (Appadurai, 1996), as well as reflecting the emergence of a new and specifically Southern Italian ethnoregional consciousness.

Although the focus of this ethnography is the urban revivalist subculture which has been the main motor force behind the Southern Italian folk revival, in Chapter Eight I propose a typology of local actors, with a view to analysing the processes of 63

interaction and exchange which are taking place between urban revivalist and local actors within the local. Where once the festa popolare was frequented mainly by traditional peasant actors, revivalism has transformed this milieu into a zone of interclass and intercultural encounter. In Chapter Eight, I examine and contrast the agency within this local context of urban revivalist and local actors, exploring what is at stake for each of them in their contrasting understandings of ‘tradition’.

In a case study on Riace’s revivalist-inspired Associazione Città Futura initiative, I highlight a disjunction between romantic urban revivalist rhetoric and the reality of cosmopolitan/local encounter in small town Calabria. In a typology of local actors, I explore the role of ‘portatori della tradizione popolare’ (elderly traditionally-oriented local exponents of the traditions which are the object of revivalist interest); contrasting the often differing orientation of younger local actors towards tradition; .the agency of what I term ‘cosmopolitan local actors’ who play a key role in the mediation of revivalist activity within the local; and the influence of local ‘commercial’ actors and folk musicians within the revival. In a short case study of the ‘Uomo Cervo’ event in Molise, I highlight how in this contrasting mode of revitalisation, it is locals themselves and their representations of their own local traditions, rather than urban revivalists from outside, who are the agents of revivalist transformation. Finally, I consider various forms of resistance by locals to what at times may be considered the colonisation of local space and culture by revivalist cosmopolitan outsiders.

A note on translations, audio and photographic material

In rural Southern Italy, dialect remains a significant popular expressive cultural code, and discursive modulations between standard and dialectal Italian are significant indices within the revivalist milieu of the ‘regional’ and the ‘popular’ (cf. Herzfeld, 2009, xii). This key discriminant between standard Italian and dialect is of course impossible to reproduce in translation, and so I have at times represented dialectal elements in Italian using the Tempus Sans ITC type face. All translations from Italian are my own unless otherwise stated in the bibliography or text. 64

‘Writing about music’, it has been said, ‘is like dancing about architecture’.

2

Through

the extensive use of photographs in this ethnography, I also aim to highlight the contemporary revivalist phenomenon as a set of highly embodied physical practices (cf. Csordas, 1990; Jackson, 1996; Herzfeld, 2006, 7, 12, 35). I have drawn extensively on my own (amateur) photographic work carried out during fieldwork, but also on the vast archive of Calabrian ethnophotographer Angelo Maggio, who has been documenting the Southern Italian festa popolare since the mid 1990s. Although not all permissions for reproduction of images have been finalised to date, they have been retained here for the educational purposes of the exam process.

Music is clearly a central element to revivalism, and musical genres such as tammurriata, Calabrian tarantella, pizzica and the Carnival tarantella di Montemarano are deeply associated by revivalists with highly specific cultural and geographical settings, and may also evoke powerful emotional and even physiological responses, through their association with revivalist dance practice. As an aid to engaging more fully in the musical dimension of revivalist activity, a CD of representative musical recordings has been included as an appendix (omitted for copyright reasons from the present version). Sound tracks from this recording are listed at the end of the bibliography, and specific tracks are cross-referenced at relevant points in the text using the notation [SFX1] etc.

Folk music recordings play a central role in the cultural construction of the revivalist sonic imaginary and the diffusion of revivalist practice, while some key folk albums like Eugenio Bennato’s Lezioni di tarantella also mark historic moments in the evolution of contemporary revivalism. The artwork from many of these albums is often symbolically rich, thus providing a compelling means by which to foreground the semiotic codes by which contemporary revivalism represents itself.

A final motivation for my inclusion of this significant amount of graphic material is that it will assist the many people who do not actually read this thesis (including the

2

The saying is of disputed provenance, but has been variously attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis and others (O’Toole, 2010).

65

majority of informants who do not read English) to at least engage in some way with this study, and thus stimulate further discussion.

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CHAPTER TWO: ‘IO SONO UNA FORZA DEL PASSATO’: THE CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN ITALIAN REVIVALISM

Italian filmmaker and writer Pierpaolo Pasolini on location with Jesus Christ (the Spaniard Enrique Irazoqui) in 1964 for the shooting of Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to Matthew in I Sassi, Matera, Basilicata, where locals had notoriously been living in caves until recently. Whereas I Sassi appears in Levi’s 1945 Christ Stopped at Eboli as a symbol of the abjection of the Southern Italian rural population, in Pasolini’s film, the town is reappropriated as Jerusalem at the time of Christ, in a characteristically Pasolinian aestheticisation of Southern Italian peasant culture. Photo: Angelo Novi. Source: . [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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‘I will begin the project of seeing cultural otherness in the twentieth century, in the words of Edward Said, ‘not as ontologically given, but as historically constituted’.

J.S. Kahn, Culture, Postculture, Multiculture (1995, 50).

Introduction

Although anthropologists like Wolf (1982), Christian (1989), Holmes (1989), Tak (2000) and Silverman (1979) have made highly effective use of historical methodologies to illuminate their ethnographies, Silverman has argued that anthropologists generally could ‘do more with history than limit it to preliminary remarks upon background or to unanalyzed description’ (1979, 433; cf. Tak, 2000, 11). A flaw in Karen Lüdtke’s recent ethnography of the contemporary Salentine revival (2009) is, to my mind, its lack of substantial engagement with the history of post-war Italy, without which I feel contemporary revivalism cannot be adequately understood. In a remarkable longitudinal study of transformation in the ritual cycle of a Southern Italian town from the Middle Ages to the present day, Tak has also highlighted the shortcomings of a Durkheimian theory of ritual in which there is a ‘prevalence of synchrony over diachrony…associated with the remarkably static and bipolar theory of modernisation’ (2000, 13; cf. Poppi, 2008, 28; Herzfeld, 2006, 53f.).

Tradizione popolare is by definition the culture of il popolo (the people), whereas the culture of the aristocracy or the emergent bourgeoisie has come to be associated with the idea of high culture (Burke, 1978). In his major study of European popular tradition between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Peter Burke describes how popular traditional practices such as Carnival were originally a common set of shared practices in which all social classes participated, including even the younger clergy (1978, 270-81; cf. Orloff, 1981, 32f.; Le Roy Ladurie, 1981). But under the influence of the Reformation, Counterreformation and Enlightenment, the upper classes gradually withdrew from direct participation in these popular cultural forms, until they became almost exclusively associated with subaltern groups, such as peripheral 68

subcultures in contemporary Southern Italy like the Rom (gypsy) community, or even criminal milieus (cf. Lombardi-Satriani, 1978: see Chapter Five). The growing social ‘otherness’ of popular tradition is perhaps reflected in Goethe’s somewhat snobbish initial reaction to the Roman Carnival (Goethe, 1970, 446-68; Crapanzano, 1986), previously celebrated by earlier upper class Grand Tour travellers as a key event on their cultural itinerary (Burke, 1978). In de Martino’s classic 1961 study of tarantism, a phenomenon which had once affected members of all social classes had now been marginalised to a tiny peasant group in Southern Puglia (see also his similar account of the decline of superstitious ‘magico-religious’ practices within the Kingdom of Naples in Sud e magia, 1959).

Calabrian Rom (gypsies) are key protagonists in Riace’s patronal festival of Saints Cosimo & Damiano. Photo: Angelo Maggio, 2008. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] In many parts of Europe, however, nineteenth century Romantic nationalist movements later initiated an explosion of interest among middle class scholars in the popular culture of subaltern groups which they saw as embodying the emergent idea of 69

a ‘national’ culture (Hobsbawm, 1962, 313ff.; 1992, 103-5; Catalonia: Hughes, 1992, 253-323; Greece: Herzfeld, 1987, 2003; Cowan, 1988, 1992):

It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when traditional popular culture was just beginning to disappear, that the ‘people’ or the ‘folk’ became a subject of interest to European intellectuals. Craftsmen and peasants were no doubt surprised to find their homes invaded by men and women with middle class clothes and accents who insisted they sing traditional songs or tell traditional stories (Burke, 1978, 3).

Perhaps the most emblematic Italian example of the new nineteenth century Herderian interest in the ‘culture of the people’ was folklorist Giuseppe Pitré, a kind of Sicilian version of the Brothers Grimm who among many other publications, produced a twenty five volume Library of Sicilian Popular Traditions between 1871 and 1913. In 1911, a new position as Chair of ‘Demopsicologia’ (the study of popular tradition), was created for him at the University of Palermo. In the same year, the first Italian Congress of Ethnography was held at Rome, with the aim of giving direction to the new research on Italian folk customs (Massari, 2001, 8).

Yet this Romantic ‘cult of the popular’ had far less impact in Italy than in other European countries touched by nineteenth century nationalism, the problematic process of Italian nation building was largely promoted through the medium of a centralised national culture based on elite, rather than popular cultural forms:

Italy, France and England had long had national literatures and a literary language. Their intellectuals were becoming cut off from folk songs and folktales in a way that Russians, say, or Swedes were not. Italy, France and England had invested more in the Renaissance, in classicism and in the Enlightenment than other countries had, and so they were slower to abandon the values of these movements. Since a standard literary language already existed, the discovery of dialect was divisive (Burke, 1978, 3).

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Italy, of course, did not even become a nation until 1861, at a time when it has been estimated that only 2.5-10% of the Italian population could actually speak the national language (Levy, 1996a, 5). Regional popular traditions and the speaking of dialect have thus been seen more often as obstacles rather than accessories to Italian nation building (Hine, 1996; Lepschy et al., 1996; De Mauro, 1976), so that centralisation and ‘modernisation’ have been key elements in the entire Italian national project.

With the important exception of the Salentine revival, today’s renewed interest in Southern Italian folk tradition seems to me far less strongly related to the kinds of deliberate nation-building or ethnoregionalist projects familiar from Michael Herzfeld’s accounts of folklorism in modern Greece (1987, 2003), or state-sponsored models of nationalist folk culture promoted in the former Eastern bloc both before and after the collapse of Communism (Ciubrinskas, 2000; Wodz & Wodz, 2000). Indeed what seems to distinguish Southern Italian revivalism from many other forms of revivalism is its highly idiosyncratic origins within the field of post-war Gramscian Marxism. The Southern Italian folk revival has been constituted primarily through a valorisation of the notions of cultura subalterna (subaltern culture) during the first revival and tradizione popolare (popular tradition) in the second. Both of these terms have unique connotations within the highly distinctive ideological milieu of post-war Italian leftism. The emergence of these central revivalist notions as discursive categories in post-war Italian culture will be exemplified in a series of post-war Italian cinematic, literary, artistic and scholarly texts.

Political struggle in post-war Italy

In its contemporary construction of an imagined peasant utopia by which to transcend the existential travails of modernity, there is sometimes a tendency within contemporary revivalist discourse to elide some of the harsher realities of traditional peasant life, such as those depicted in the following account of a 1936 visit to the Lucanian village of Gaglianello in Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli). 71

Gaglianello is a group of houses, without even a street connecting them, on a low, barren hill near the malaria-ridden river. Four hundred people live there without a doctor, a mid-wife, a carabiniere, or any other representative of the State. Even so, the tax collector with the flaming initials on his cap passes time and again their way. To my astonishment, I saw that I was expected. The people knew that I had been to the Bog and hoped that I might stop by on my way back. The peasants and their women stood outside to welcome me and persons afflicted with the strangest kinds of diseases had themselves carried to the doorways so that I should see them as I went by. The scene was reminiscent of a medieval court of miracles. No doctor had set foot in the place for who knows how many years. Old afflictions which had received no treatment except incantation had piled up in the peasants’ bodies, spreading in strange forms like mushrooms on rotten timber. I spent most of the morning going from hut to hut among emaciated victims of malaria, ancient ulcers, and gangrene, giving what advice I could...and drinking the wine offered me as a token of hospitality. They wanted me to stay all day, but I had to go on, and so they walked with me for a piece of the road, imploring me to return. ‘Who knows?’ I said to them. ‘I'll come if I can.’

But I never did (1982, 215 f.).

Carlo Levi, author of ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’, returns after the Second World War to visit his peasant associates in the village of Aliano in Basilicata. Photo: Mario Carbone in Carbone et al (1980, 59). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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Instead of romanticising peasant society, leftist intellectuals of the post-war period like de Martino, Levi and documentary filmmaker Luigi di Gianni (Ferraro, 2002) seemed at times to represent it as a brutal dystopia which was in desperate need of enlightened modernising intervention.

Carlo Levi’s 1953 painting ‘Fatica Contadina’ (peasant toil) depicts a group of peasant immigrants on the point of embarkation from Sicily. Source: Galleria d'Arte Moderna

Ricci

Oddi

(Piacenza) . [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions] Italy emerged from the catastrophe of the Second World War with class and social tensions at boiling point, and with significant sections of the population radicalised by their experience of the Communist-dominated Italian Resistance movement (Ginsborg, 1990, 39-71; Fenoglio, 1968). In many parts of rural Southern Italy, there still prevailed a semi-feudal regime of the type depicted in Silone’s Fontamara (1988 [1934]) and Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1982 [1945]). Although the Resistance movement had been far stronger in Northern Italy, the South too was deeply affected by the re-emergence of political dissent after the collapse of Fascism. In Caulonia, a small Calabrian town which has hosted the Tarantellapower folk festival since 1999 73

(see Chapter Six), leftist rebels even established a short lived ‘Red Republic’ in 1945 (Gambino, 1981). During the 2002 Tarantellapower festival, ARPA’s Luigi Briglia (whose grandfather was a leader in this ‘Caulonia Soviet’) pointed out to me a caged structure (visible in the background of the photo at the beginning of Chapter Four) where members of the local pro-Fascist gentry were incarcerated before summary trial and punishment by a People’s Tribunal. Communist and Socialist inspired peasant militants in other parts of the South soon began challenging their age-old subjection to the galantuomini (the local landowning class) through the occupation of vacant agricultural land (Ginsborg, 1990, 121-140; Calabria: Ciconte, 1981; Campania: Speranza, 2001; Salento: Chiriatti 1998 40ff.). The State, the landowning classes and even the Sicilian Mafia at times responded with violent repression, as in the notorious 1947 massacre of 11 peasant protesters at Portella della Ginestra in Sicily (Ginsborg, 1990, 111f.). Revivalism’s origins in these kind of post-war political and class struggles are highlighted in Calabrian revivalist group ARPA’s musical drama La memoria di Melissa, which commemorates similar killings in Calabria in 1949 (Ginsborg, 1990, 124f.), and celebrates the cultural traditions of the peasant protesters through the performance of local music and dance forms like tarantella.

'The Peasant Revolution in Lucania’ by Carlo Levi. Source: . [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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The key political protagonist in many of these struggles was the Italian Communist Party (PCI), whose central role in the resistance to Nazism and Fascism had earned it enormous prestige. Yet the PCI now eschewed violent revolutionary struggle, and instead began pursuing a path to power by parliamentary means. Gramsci had theorised a ‘war of position’ in which the PCI, instead of organising a Leninist insurrection, would gradually establish its own counter-hegemony within key areas of civil society, especially through an appeal to intellectuals and other members of the middle class (Fiori, 1970; Joll, 1977; Urbinati, 1998; Gramsci el al., 1985; Gundle, 1995; Crehan, 2002).

The ensuing Manichaean struggle between the PCI and its arch rival, the conservative Catholic Democrazia Cristiana (DC), was to last until the early 1990s (Ginsborg, 1990, 2001). This long post-war cultural clash between opposing Catholic and Communist blocs is memorably captured in Giovanni Guareschi’s humorous portrayal of Catholic priest Don Camillo’s attempts to outwit Peppone, the Communist mayor of a small town in the Veneto region (Guareschi, 1952). It is important to note however, that the political origins of a number of key figures in the emergence of revivalism like Gianni Bosio, Roberto Leydi and even De Martino himself were in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), rather than the PCI.

A key element in Gramsci’s thought which has been central to Italian revivalism was his problematisation of the notion of ‘subaltern culture’. Rather than simply dismissing peasant folklore as ‘false consciousness’, Gramsci believed that popular cultural forms were typically an amalgam of both reactionary and progressive elements, and therefore deserved systematic attention. For Gramsci, the revolutionary mobilisation of the working classes (especially the Southern peasantry), would require a deeper understanding of their culture, if the disastrous fate of the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution was to be avoided (Ghirelli, 1973, 143 ff.). When a group of Jacobin aristocrats and progressive bourgeoisie imbued with the ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment seized power from the Bourbon monarchy with the support of French troops, they were soon overthrown by a populace so enraged by the Jacobins’ atheistic

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republicanism that they immediately rallied to the Sanfedista banner of King and Church.

Gramsci thus encouraged engagement with cultural issues, and specifically with subaltern culture, as key elements in the revolutionary struggle to establish the ideological hegemony of the Party. Left wing Italian revivalism’s sympathetic readings of popular culture, even popular religious culture, are indeed a far cry from the Voltairean disdain with which many non-Italian Communists have been accustomed to viewing popular religion. In Communist Lithuania for instance, folklore scholars were discouraged from studying traditional religious culture on the grounds that it was ‘regressive’ and ‘superstitious’ (Ciubrinskas, 2000). The attitude of Gramscianinspired Italian Communists towards popular religious practice has often been very different. Leonardo Sciascia, a celebrated Sicilian admirer of Voltaire, wittily mocked this apparent contradiction between Italian Communist practice and ideology as follows:

The Communists have always been amongst the most zealous supporters of religious festivals in small towns, thus following up in their own way the process of restoration of religious values and the elimination of ‘throwbacks to the Enlightenment’ (to use the exact phrase from one editorial in the [Communist daily] L’Unità) which has been taking place higher up in the Marxist parties (Sciascia & Scianna, 1965, 10).

As the PCI gradually published Gramsci’s writings after the war, he was deployed as a major ‘pole of attraction’ to engage Italian intellectuals (Gundle, 1995). Anthropologist Ernesto de Martino was emblematic of the Gramsci-influenced Italian leftist intellectuals of the period. His engagement with Gramsci’s proposal for an exploration of ‘progressive folklore’ (1949; 1951) sparked off a major intellectual debate in Italian leftist circles, the so-called ‘dibattito sul folklore’ (Clemente et al 1976). The work of two other writers who were also engaging sympathetically with Southern Italian peasant culture - Carlo Levi and his literary alumnus Rocco Scotellaro, a young Socialist Mayor from the town of Tricarico in Basilicata, - also became the subject of heated leftist intellectual controversy (Gribaudi, 1996, 82). The 76

PCI’s official Marxist doctrine of the time was deeply influenced by the social evolutionist notion of ‘modernisation’, meaning that for a leftist intellectual like Franco Fortini, ‘progressive folklore’ at first seemed like a contradiction in terms. In a 1950 article entitled ‘Il diavolo sa travestirsi da primitivo’ (‘The Devil Knows How to Disguise Himself as a Primitive’) he expressed the fear that ‘irrational forces and the myths of the irrational may not yet be exorcised, and could be turned towards reactionary ends’ (Fortini, 1950). As we shall see in Chapter Seven, The Land of Remorse, de Martino’s classic 1961 anthropological case study of remnants of the Southern Italian taranta spider spirit possession cult in Salento has played a key role in the recent Salentine folk revival. De Martino’s research team arrived in the Salentine town of Galatina in 1959 for the patronal festival of St Paul on June 29, during which possessed victims of the taranta spider would converge on the Chapel of St Paul to seek healing from the saint for their annually-recurring symptoms. His team documented the histrionic displays of the tarantati/e inside and outside the Chapel, as well as another healing practice closer to classical tarantism, in which a group of musicians would instead attempt to cure the sufferer in the privacy of their own home using music and dance therapy.

‘Taranta’ music therapy session with the tarantata Maria di Nardò during de Martino’s 1959 ethnographic expedition to Salento. Photo: Franco Pinna (Gallini & Faeta, 1999, 292) [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] 77

As de Martino was looking to folklore as a primary source from which to develop a new history of Southern subaltern consciousness (Gallini & Faeta, 1999), the new Gramscian preoccupation with ‘subaltern culture’ was also being reflected in Italian neorealist cinema (Gundle, 1995a). A shift took place after the war from the elite Hollywood-style settings of the mainstream telefoni bianchi genre under Fascism to a politically-inspired engagement with the gritty lived experience of the Italian working classes in films like Roma città aperta (1945), Paisà (1946), Sciuscià (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), Riso amaro (1949) and La strada (1954). Indeed La terra trema, Visconti’s 1948 neorealist exploration of the lives of Sicilian fishermen, was explicitly revolutionary in sentiment.

De Santis’ 1949 neorealist classic Riso amaro (starring Silvana Mangano, third right, and the young Vittorio Gassman) brought to national attention the lives of le mondine, the working class women who each year brought in the rice crop in Northern Italy’s Po Valley. They and their distinctive proletarian song tradition were to become an enduring

musical

and

political

motif

of

the

first

Italian

folk

revival.

Source:. [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] 78

Mass migration and the post-war economic boom

While these political and intellectual battles were being fought out, Italian society was at the same time being radically transformed by the post-war economic boom. Given Italy’s strategic importance in the Cold War ideological battle against Communism, the U.S. Government was determined that despite the PCI’s huge following, it must never be allowed to form government. One objective of the American anti-Communist strategy in Italy was to win over the Italian working class to ‘the American way’ and American ideas of liberal democracy through consumerism (Ellwood, 2001). Under the Marshall Plan, Italy’s economy was therefore restructured along the lines of the American model of industrialisation, mass production and mass consumption (Ginsborg, 1990, 239 f.; Ellwood, 2001).

In a few decades, the Italian economy had shifted from Fascist autarchy with its traditional Catholic values of thrift and frugality, to integration into a capitalist world system increasingly dominated by the new ethos of commodity fetishism. A popular perception that indigenous Italian values and material culture were giving way to a new mania for all things American was reflected in Alberto Sordi’s 1954 film Un americano a Roma (An American in Rome) and Neapolitan singer Renato Carosone’s celebrated 1956 song Tu vuo’ fa’ l'americano (So you want to be an American?).

Post-war reconstruction and the ensuing economic boom unleashed powerful forces of urbanisation, industrialisation and migration (Ginsborg, 1990). The massive migration of the Italian rural population to the industrial centres of Northern Italy and beyond depopulated many rural centres, leaving threadbare the cultural and demographic fabric which had sustained the cultural reproduction of popular traditions over centuries (cf. Padiglione, 1979, 207). Boissevain describes a ‘loss of festive manpower’ throughout southern Europe in this period, as former peasants migrated to the north to be integrated into the industrial labour force. Industrialisation now ‘imposed new time frames on rural Europe, as agriculture [became] mechanised or…obsolete. At the same time, many rituals lost their function of marking phases in the agricultural cycle’ (1992a, 8). Calvino’s Marcovaldo, a culturally confused Southern migrant to Milan who comically projects memories of village life onto his 79

new surroundings in Milan, is emblematic of the dislocation of rural cultural identity of the period (Calvino, 1963).

Post-war Italian migration depopulated agricultural towns like Riace in Calabria. Photo: Bennetts, 2002.

The speaking of dialect and other traditional practices associated with peasant society became heavily stigmatised within the dominant ideological discourse of ‘modernisation’. A Sicilian barber who had left his village in the 1970s to emigrate to Australia once bluntly summarised his views as follows:

I was a young man when I lived in my village. We didn’t give a shit about popular traditions then. But young people now are starting to get very interested in popular traditions. But I still don’t give a shit about them.

Like some of my older informants from peasant backgrounds in Calabria’s Riace (see Chapter Eight), there was for this man an unbridgeable gap between revivalist rhetoric and the harsh reality of peasant life which he remembered only too well.

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The vitality of traditional popular practices in Italy was further sapped by the spread of compulsory state education (Ginsborg, 1990, 227; Pasolini, 1976) with its strong social evolutionist tendencies (Lepschy & Lepschy, 1977, 27-38), and by the arrival of television in 1955. It has been suggested, for example, that by broadcasting in standard Italian, the RAI (the national TV and radio network) may have done more to unify Italy than Garibaldi (cf. Pasolini, 1995, 131).

In the Salentine town of Torchiarolo, the arrival of television in 1955 had a radically disruptive effect on established social and cultural patterns, as people began increasingly to stay at home to watch television, rather than socialise. The new medium shattered the communal framework within which peasant culture had long been orally produced, reproduced and transmitted between generations. One elderly woman informant from Torchiarolo recalled that whereas before, her mother would gather the children around the fire in the early evening to recount stories, songs and fables, children now looked forward instead to the five o’clock RAI children’s programme Carosello (Carousel, cf. Pasolini, 1995, 59; Ginsborg, 1990, 240 f.). ‘Adesso c’è più benessere, ma allora c’era più amore’, she recalled nostalgically: ‘Today there is more wealth, but back then there was more love’.

Television viewing in towns like Torchiarolo was initially a collective social experience shared in the circolo cittadino and bars where the first television sets had appeared:

The TV of the local bar transmitted images from the North, images of a consumer world, of Vespas, portable radios, football heroes, new fashion, nylon stockings, mass-produced dresses, houses full of electrical appliances, Sunday excursions in the family FIAT (Ginsborg, 1990, 221f.)

Later, as more people bought TV sets, there was a full scale retreat to the privatised world of domestic televisual consumption (Ginsborg, 2005, 107-111, 240ff.).

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The opulent new bourgeois lifestyle so memorably represented in Fellini’s 1960 classic La dolce vita was now projected via television into Torchiarolo and other small Southern towns, powerfully calling into question the cultural presuppositions of local culture and society. The advent of television also coincided with the disappearance of the local buttea or tavern, traditionally a focus for rural male proletarian culture in Salento (cf. Chiriatti, 1998, and Winspeare’s recreation of traditional tavern life in his 1996 film Pizzicata). Salentine folk singer Enza Pagliara describes how this milieu now became negatively associated with the less glamorous world of peasant culture and went into terminal decline, to be replaced by the modern-style Italian bar, where customers drank liqueurs and spirits, instead of tumblers of homemade local wine. These and other cultural transformations embodied the new bourgeois values of perbenismo (respectability) associated with the consumerist ethos of the post-war boom period, which is still reflected today in attempts to ‘clean up’ the festa popolare through the marginalisation of traditional ‘popular’ elements such as those described at the Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Chapter Five.

‘Io sono una forza del passato’: Pasolini and the anti-modernist critique of industrial capitalism

This period of political struggle and socio-economic upheaval was powerfully reflected in cultural work being produced by the many artists who were increasingly aligning themselves with the Italian Communist Party. Indeed, a consistent complaint by conservatives in post-war Italy has been that culture has been monopolised by the left: Forza Italia Senator and filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli has claimed (2008) that to be a conservative artist during the 1960s was to be locked out by the left wing Italian arts establishment. Conversely, Northern Italian informant Elisabetta, reflecting on her unsuccessful attempts to launch cultural initiatives in the atmosphere of conservative philistinism which she feels pervades her home town in the Northern League heartland of Treviso, claims that ‘if they see you trying to put a picture on the wall, then for them you’re already a Communist’.

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Italian poet, novelist, essayist and film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini had commemorated Gramsci in his long 1957 poem Le ceneri di Gramsci. Echoing the critique of capitalism articulated by Frankfurt School theorists like Reich, Fromm and Marcuse, Pasolini later became a major dissenting voice amid the generally uncritical headlong post-war rush towards ‘modernisation’, memorably describing the rapid post-war disappearance of Italian peasant culture in his lifetime as an ‘anthropological genocide’ (1995, 226-31). Gramsci’s ‘cultura popolare’ was now being supplanted by the new ‘cultura di massa’ projected by television, which Pasolini and many other left Italian intellectuals began to see as a powerful new form of emergent cultural hegemony (Pasolini, 1995, 1976; cf. Ginsborg, 2005, 107-111).

Pasolini at the grave of Gramsci in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, the setting for his long 1957 poem ‘Le ceneri di Gramsci’. Source: . [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] In his celebrated ‘Discourse on the Fireflies’ (1995, 128-34) Pasolini also found a powerful metaphor for the effects of post-war Italian industrialisation in the recent disappearance of fireflies, once numerous in the Italian countryside, but now driven to extinction by pollution. At the same time as industrialisation was irrevocably transforming the natural ecology of many areas of Italy, it was also dramatically changing its cultural ecology, as highlighted in Giovanni Vacca’s account of the cultural upheaval brought by industrialisation to the rural community of Pomigliano 83

d’Arco outside Naples. He describes the establishment in 1968 of the Alfasud car factory, where my informant Cicetto spent most of his working life, as:

a devastating blow to an archaic peasant culture which only a few decades before had been fully active, delivered by a hurried and in many respects alienating process of modernisation, by a civilisation which in the 1970s began a tenacious and wholesale work of erosion of the expressive forms, music, dances and folktales which constituted the structures of this culture. Despite this, some of these forms still survive to the present day, even if the cultural models on which they are based are ever more degraded and devoid of their original meaning…Until the 1970s, it was still possible to find, allowing for some exceptions, a mondo popolare still immersed in a reality which was still distant from modernity. The ‘semiotic code’ of tradition was legible through the whole range of collective languages in which the community identified itself, and this is demonstrated in the research carried out in that period: the musical recordings and documentaries of that epoch bear witness to the vitality of expressive models which had not yet been engulfed by mass culture in those years (Vacca 1999, 11).

Pasolini’s powerful, albeit highly idiosyncratic commentary on the Italian post-war rush to modernity provided a dramatic contrast with the optimism of earlier narratives of modernisation propounded within Marxist, Fascist and capitalist ideology, where science and technology had been seen as holding the key to human advancement:

Io sono una forza del passato. Solo nella tradizione è il mio amore. Vengo dai ruderi, dalle chiese, Dalle pale di altare, dai borghi Abbandonati sugli Appennini o le Prealpi, Dove sono vissuti i fratelli.

[I am a force from the past, Only in tradition is my love. 84

I come from the ruins, from the churches, From the altar pieces and abandoned villages Of the Apennines and the Alpine foothills Where my brothers once lived.] (Pasolini, 1970, 123).

Pasolini’s lament for the passing of peasant Italy was tinged with more than a touch of the kind of bourgeois pastoral romanticism so relentlessly deconstructed by Raymond Williams (1973). Yet his anti-modernist critique of industrial capitalism and preoccupation with pre-industrial cultural forms has undoubtedly had a powerful influence on contemporary revivalist ideology. During fieldwork, I discovered that Pasolini had in fact engaged closely with two folk milieus which are today celebrated as revivalist icons: the Festa della Madonna delle Galline at Pagani in Campania (Francesco Tiano, personal comment) and Salento’s Grecia Salentina (Chiriatti, 1998, 163f.). The current Italian ‘No Global’ slogan ‘omologazione culturale’ can perhaps be traced back to the Frankfurt School via his Scritti corsari (1995), while Il ritmo meridiano, an important 2002 collection of essays on the Salentine revival, seems to invoke Pasolini’s retrospective blessing on the current revival with the following epigram from Pasolini’s Scritti corsari on the opening page:

Humans will have to re-engage with their past, after having transcended and forgotten it in a type of fevered and frenetic recklessness (quoted in Santoro & Torsello 2002, 3).

‘Pasolini’s enduring significance within the cultural imagination of Italian left intellectuals is perhaps best reflected in the memorable final sequence of the 1993 film Caro diario, during which Nanni Moretti makes a pilgrimage on his Vespa to the site of Pasolini’s 1975 murder at Ostia. Given the degree to which middle-class left intellectual engagement with, and aestheticisation of, peasant culture is at the very heart of the post war Italian folk revival experience, I believe his work has had a major influence in the shaping of philological revivalist subjectivity.

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The First Revival

The great American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax had initiated a wave of post-war interest in Italian folk music through his groundbreaking 1953-4 field survey of Italian popular song with young ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella (Agamemnone & Di Mitri, 2003). Following the examples of their mentors Lomax and de Martino, a whole generation of leftist-inspired ethnomusicologists like Roberto Leydi, Gianni Bosio, Cesare Bermani and others now began an intense period of recording and documenting worker and peasant songs, especially those embodying notions of class conflict (Bosio, 1975; Bermani, 1978).

This first Italian folk revival was spearheaded by the group Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano with its provocative presentation at the 1964 Spoleto Festival of Le canzoni di Bella ciao, a collection of working class and partisan songs of struggle, many of them in regional dialects, later reprised in Dario Fo’s highly successful 1966 production Ci ragiono e canto. In the same year, the Istituto Ernesto de Martino was established in Milan as a sound archive and ‘laboratory for the analysis of social behaviour within an oppressed and antagonist social world’ (Istituto Ernesto de Martino, n.d.). The subsequent establishment of the record company I dischi del sole also did much to popularise the militant popular song tradition exemplified in Le canzoni di Bella ciao.

This first wave of the Italian folk revival thus combined serious ethnomusicological research with the same explicit commitment to left politics embodied in the British and U.S. folk revivals of the same period (Leydi, 1972; Vacca, 1991). What seems remarkable about many of these first revival groups today is the extent to which their musical research and performance were assimilated within the framework of militant political activity. Music was seen essentially as an adjunct to the political message conveyed in the content of song texts, in the characteristic comizio in musica: ‘the political speech in music’. A key feature of this phase of the first revival was l'approccio contenutistico, an emphasis on a song’s ideological content rather than attention to its musical or aesthetic form on its own terms. In the words of Salentine folk musician Daniele Durante, ‘for political reasons, songs were passed or failed on the basis of the content of their texts’ (Chiriatti, 1998, 98 ff.). 86

According to the Gramscian Marxist orthodoxy which established itself within Italian anthropology and ethnomusicology during the post-war period, ‘popular tradition’ was by definition a ‘culture of contestation’ (Lombardi-Satriani, 1974). But it was also a culture which was ‘in opposition to’ ‘bourgeois culture’, and also to television and pop songs (Poppi & Morelli, 1998, 9). The distinctive ideological orientation of Italian Marxist scholars of the period is captured in Poppi’s account of a field survey in which he introduced an ethnomusicologist colleague to his Trentino field site. After several days of research, Poppi’s colleague suddenly exclaimed in perplexity: ‘But why aren’t there are any canti di lotta (protest songs) in this area?’

As signalled by the establishment of the Istituto Ernesto de Martino in Milan in 1966, the main focus for first revival activity was Northern Italy, where the existence of strong industrial worker and anti-Fascist Resistance song traditions proved highly congenial to the instrumental objective of promoting the political mobilisation of the Italian working classes.

In the South, Salentine musician Daniele Durante and others were inspired by the example of Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano in Northern Italy and Roman ethnomusicologist Giovanna Marini’s pioneering research from the late 1960s in Salento to establish the revivalist group Il Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino in 1975. Unlike most of the group’s members, Luigi Chiriatti was actually from a local peasant background, and could also play the tamburello. He soon became the group’s leading fieldworker. Armed with a tape recorder, he began searching out and recording songs, many of which seemed to survive only amongst a dwindling group of elderly peasants:

We used to go out into the fields to record the women who picked olives, or the wine bars to record teamsters. They were the years when traditional songs were no longer integrated into the social fabric, and were starting to be forgotten…We found that the songs of our area had fled to the puttee [bars]. But with a glass of wine and a respectful attitude, we found we were able to draw out the elderly bearers of these traditions…We started to no longer feel ashamed that we were the children of peasants and of this land (Chiriatti, 1998, 85, 82). 87

The setting for the ‘reproposal’ of local popular songs was often the stage at the Festa dell’Unità, the PCI’s annual summer festivals held in towns throughout Italy (Hobsbawm, 2003, 351; cf. Kertzer, 1998, 38f.). But the first revival in Salento later extended out to initiatives like Il ragno del dio che danza (The Spider of the God Who Dances, an ambitious series of research workshops and performances all over Grecia Salentina organised by Copenhagen’s Odin Theatre under the direction of French anthropologist Georges Lapassade), Ritorno a San Rocco (Return to San Rocco, a rediscovery of the danza scherma tradition associated with the Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli - see Chapter Six), and Passione e resurrezione (Passion and Resurrection), an exploration of Salentine popular sacred music (Chiriatti, 1998, 56f.). As in most other parts of Italy, these kind of revivalist initiatives almost totally disappeared in the very different atmosphere of the 1980s. Yet they did leave their mark, later providing the foundations for new forms of revivalist activity during the second Salentine folk revival which emerged from the mid-1990s.

In Naples, a somewhat different rediscovery of Campanian popular tradition was taking place under the aegis of creative polymath Roberto De Simone and his group la Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare (NCCP) [SFX8]. An idiosyncratic element in the work of De Simone (later director of the Teatro San Carlo Opera in Naples) was his aestheticisation of popular traditional material, as in his 1977 creative tour de force La Gatta Cenerentola, a Neapolitan folk opera based on a local version of the Cinderella folktale [SFX9].

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This album cover from De Simone’s 1976 creative tour de force La Gatta Cenerentola draws on imagery from the Neapolitan popular traditional cult of the Souls in Purgatory.

In his detailed documentation of Campanian Carnival (De Simone & Rossi, 1977) and other elements in the local festival cycle (De Simone, 1974, 1979), De Simone depicted a milieu of subaltern cultural actors whose gestuality was radically ‘other’ to the dominant ‘bourgeois’ world which was threatening to destroy it:

these feste popolari may be seen as a mirror of a popular world [mondo popolare] which rescues itself, through the[se events] and their particular language of signs, from destruction by the dominant class and its culture: a separate civilization which brushes away everything which is other, every culture which is different (1974, 1).

By contrast, the sub-proletarian devotees of the highly dramatic and ‘extra-liturgical’ (i.e. not sanctioned by the church) Madonna dell’Arco possession cult had been able, according to De Simone, to maintain the integrity of their own cultural identity and practices in the face of ecclesiastical repression:

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It is in this manner that this provisional and autonomous community, in which everything is organic and functional, which expresses itself in a mode which is ‘other’ to the bourgeoisie and to the official liturgy, but also to the popular everyday, manages to represent itself, its own culture and its own existence (28).

For a time, the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare enjoyed cult status. One member with less political and more commercial instincts, Eugenio Bennato, later split off to form his own group Musicanova in 1976, later re-emerging during the current revival at the more commercial end of the revivalist spectrum.

Il sessantotto: Italy’s ‘long ‘68’

The first revival was closely associated with the turbulent period in Italian politics from the early 1960s through to the end of the 1970s which has been dubbed ‘Italy’s long ‘68’ (Virno & Hardt, 1996). Through the revolutionary impetus of il sessantotto, student occupazioni and student-run assemblee were now established as central institutions within Italian student life, not only in the university, but also at the Liceo or senior high school level. One informant described the annual ritual of occupazione at his Italian Liceo as follows: ‘at the age of about 15, you sleep over in the school with your class mates, you try your first joint. Any excuse is good enough for an occupation: maybe the heaters don’t get delivered on time and so you occupy the school in protest’. Nanni Moretti’s droll cult classics Io sono un autarchico (1976) and Ecce Bombo (1978) are the classic expressions of this Italian leftist countercultural milieu, but the traditions of occupazione and assemblea still remain as an important instrument for the ongoing cultural reproduction of left wing ideology and practices amongst the wide swathe of young Italians who pass through the Italian Liceo and university systems, many of whom now swell the ranks of the folk revival movement.

Salentine informant Silvia highlights two major contrasting social groups within the Italian Liceo: i fricchettoni (leftist ‘hippies’), who encode their contempt for bourgeois values by wearing distinctive ‘freak’ style clothing, and the more politically conservative fighetti (the ‘cool’ people), whose conformity to more mainstream values 90

is marked by their ostentatious attention to a more conventional and stylish Italian dress code. These key socio-political categories within Italian student life are also memorably reflected in Paolo Virzì‘s 2003 film Caterina va in città. The PCI’s domination of alternative cultural discourse in Italy was severely challenged by movements emerging from the 1968 ‘youth uprising’ and the subsequent ‘Movement of ‘77’, which produced a rival youth-dominated political bloc to the left of the PCI known as ‘the extra-parliamentary left’ or simply ‘il movimento’. This left countercultural milieu increasingly bifurcated into ‘spontaneous/creative’ and militant strands:

The one was ‘spontaneous’ and ‘creative’, sympathetic to feminist discourse, ironic and irreverent, seeking to create alternative structures rather than to challenge the powers-that-be. The ‘Metropolitan Indians’, with their war paint and rejection of industrial society, were the most vivid representative of this tendency. The other was autonomist and militarist. It aimed to build on the culture of violence of the previous years and to organise the ‘new social subjects’ for a battle against the state (Ginsborg 1990, 382).

In an image which has become a notorious icon of the 1970s ‘anni di piombo’ (years of lead), a radical leftist protester confronts police with Autonomia’s weapon of choice,

the

Walther

P-38,

during

a

1977

demonstration

in

Milan.

Source: . [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Revivalism is associated with this first ‘spontaneous’ strand within Italian leftist counterculturalism. The reception of ‘Third Worldist’ ideologies and the carnivalesque 91

exploration by the Metropolitan Indians in the 1970s of more ‘authentic’ forms of antiindustrial identity by walking around Italian cities dressed as Native Americans is reflected today in the ‘No Global’ scene associated with revivalism. In an Italian youth market notable for its saturation with mobile phones, brand labels and the other lifestyle accoutrements of late capitalism, today’s ‘No Globals’ are distinctive for the way their identity is constructed by rejecting brand label clothing for cast-offs and other retro-hippie clothing.

In 1978, the Red Brigades’ kidnapping and execution of Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro provoked a State crackdown on the far left throughout Italy and a generalised revulsion against the Marxist dogmatism of the preceding decade (Moretti, 1994; Galli, 1993). The so-called anni di piombo (years of lead) were now succeeded by gli anni del riflusso (the ebbtide years) of the 1980s, during which revivalist groups went into a decline as ‘popular tradition’ again fell out of fashion, in a decade marked by a retreat into the private sphere and the more ‘modernist’ values of consumerism and television (Ginsborg, 2001, 83 ff.). Folk musicians like Eugenio Bennato struggled to maintain an audience, and at one time was even reduced to performing at the Festival of San Remo, a kind of Italian version of the Eurovision song contest much derided by revivalists (Portelli, 2001). In Rome, the Circolo Gianni Bosio, a potent symbol of politically engaged first wave revivalism, was closed down due to a general lack of interest.

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‘No alla società omologata’: a young ‘No Global’ demonstrator paints up for the half million-strong European Social Forum rally, Florence, October 2002. Photo: Bennetts. The Second Revival

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 triggered off a shock wave within Italian politics, and ultimately a crisis in the Italian State during which the two parties which had dominated post-war Italian politics - the PCI and the DC - both dissolved themselves (Ginsborg, 2001; Hobsbawm, 2003, 358; Kertzer, 1998). In the wake of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal in the early 1990s, the values of cynicism, materialist greed and political quietism which had dominated the 1980s began to receive unprecedented scrutiny. It was out of this political and cultural ferment that the second Italian folk revival was to emerge.

Early in 1990, Italian alternative youth culture began to undergo one of its periodic moments of re-energisation in the form of the La Pantera (Panther) student movement, rekindling the cyclical process of student occupations and assemblee in schools and universities throughout Italy. In the wake of the La Pantera occupations, the Centro 93

Sociale Occupato (CSO, Occupied Social Centre) movement also took on a new lease of life, as young people in a country chronically short of affordable non-commercial recreational space began a new wave of occupations of abandoned city buildings. Throughout the 1990s, these spaces were transformed into powerhouses of alternative cultural and political activity.

Among left wing Italian youth, the CSO and ‘No Global’ (anti-globalisation) movements, and later revivalism, now began to provide a focus for alternative identity construction through new forms of oppositional subjectivity. With their cocktail of radical left politics and ostentatious opposition to Italy’s anti-marijuana laws, the CSOs also proved a congenial cultural laboratory in which to hatch a new and highly politicised brand of Southern Italian hip hop and reggae. In striking contrast to the dominance of Anglophone models within Italian youth music in the 1960s and 1970s (Portelli, 2001), however, these new musical forms were now received into 1990s Italian youth culture via the medium of regional dialects. The development of these new groups, known as posse, was epitomised by Southern groups like Almamegretta, Bisca and 99 Posse (all of whom performed in Neapolitan) and Sud Sound System (who performed in Salentine dialect) (Anselmi, 2002). Some of these groups also began expressing an emergent Southern regionalist sentiment—thus favouring the later emergence of folk groups who also sang in regional dialects, and who were soon to use the CSOs as an urban performance platform, especially in the new urban dance craze for Salentine pizzica and Campanian tammurriata.

As the new mania for the ethnic arrived in Italy with World Music in the 1990s, Italian CSOs had already begun a shift from an earlier and more narrowly political focus to a new emphasis on cultural activities like concerts, which could provide a means to generate much-needed funds. Until the 1990s, the anti-hegemonic ethos of the CSO movement had been associated musically with punk and ‘hardcore’. But since the folk revival of the mid-1990s, the new musical language of this cultura antagonista has become reggae, hip hop and Southern Italian folk.

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Centro Sociale Occupato ‘SKA’, piazza del Gesù, central Naples. Photo: Bennetts.

Salentine pizzica, for instance, first arrived in Rome in the mid 1990s via perhaps the largest CSO in Rome, Villagio Globale Centro Sociale Occupato, located at the exMattatoio, Rome’s former main abattoir in the traditional working class area of Testaccio. Visiting Villagio Globale for the first time in December 2002, I found its name apt: the large courtyard area which had once served as a stockyard had now been transformed into an encampment full of gypsy camper vans, while one corner of the yard was dominated by a large circus tent (donated by the gypsies), in which regular concerts were held. The kitchen was run by a group of African migrants, while the large number of Kurdish PKK posters hinted at the strong engagement with the local Kurdish population, many of them living in the Villagio Globale hostel. Entry to the CSO for events was kept down to the prezzo politico (political price) of 5 Euros, a token of the CSO movement’s political commitment to providing alternative noncommercial cultural spaces to young people at well below market rates.

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Each CSO has its own unique cultural and political focus. While in Rome, I attended a Salentine pizzica concert, and later a Salentine hip hop night at Villagio Globale; ‘Scirocco,’ an annual weekend of Salentine culture at the CSO Ex-SNIA Viscosa,

3

established in an abandoned factory on the via Prenestina; and a Calabrian tarantella night at Corto Circuito (a Rome CSO made famous in a 99 Posse song describing the death of a young black man in a firebomb attack on the premises by neo-Fascists). CSO Forte Prenestino, in the working class periphery of Centocelle, is celebrated for its Festa della Raccolta (harvest festival) marking the arrival of the annual cannabis crop.

Spring Festa della semina (Sowing Festival), CSO Villagio Globale, 2003: militant antiprohibitionist sentiment in opposition to Italy’s cannabis laws is strongly associated with the Centro Sociale milieu, as reflected in the annual spring ‘sowing’ and corresponding autumn ‘harvest’ festivals celebrated in many CSOs. Photo: Bennetts, 2003.

3

The name of the former factory.

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In Naples, the CSO movement only arrived in 1989, with the establishment by my Neapolitan flatmate Alessandro and his friends of the anarchist CSO ‘Tien’ a ment’’, a play on the Neapolitan dialect phrase meaning ‘remember’ which alluded to the recent Chinese repression of the Beijing student movement in Tiananmen Square. CSO SKA, located on piazza del Gesù in the centro storico, was the best known CSO in central Naples, while Officina 99 was celebrated as the place of origin of 99 Posse and other well known Neapolitan groups in the 1990s. Tammurriata was most closely associated with CSO TNT, often the venue for concerts by Cicetto’s group from the Circumvesuviana backblocks.

The use of Neapolitan dialect words in the top part of this 2003 poster advertising a ‘No Global’ event and tammurriata concert in Naples’ Terraterra CSO underscores political themes of popular resistance in the local community to ‘eviction, war, racism, privatisation, repression and unemployment’. Photo: Bennetts, 2003.

The Campanian tammurriata revival was incubated during the La Pantera occupation of Naples’ Università Orientale in the early 1990s, when, just as in Rome University’s

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Faculty of Letters milieu depicted in Moretti’s Ecce Bombo, the Orientale suddenly became a magnet for countercultural identities from all over the city.

De Simone and la Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare had always been strongly associated with the world of alta cultura (high culture), despite their Campanian roots themes. During the 1980s, the cultural tradition they inaugurated had effectively retreated to the bourgeois suburb of the Vomero, a kind of Neapolitan Acropolis which commands the plebeian urban landscape below, and where in 1799, Jacobin aristocrats had mounted their last ditch stand against the sanfedisti in Castell Sant’Elmo, the imposing fourteenth century fortress which has strategically dominated the city for centuries. Middle class vomeresi like Maurizio ‘Pulcinella’ had kept the NCCP flame alight through the 1980s before resurrecting it during the ‘La Pantera’ occupation, strumming old NCCP favourites during the endless student assemblee at the Orientale [SFX8].

Bassolino’s recent liberation of urban space in the Naples centro storico from cars and traffic acted as a further stimulus for cultural activity, as young musicians and performers, many associated with the Orientale, began to rediscover local Neapolitan street performance traditions (Teatro Regresso Girovago, 1996; Rossi, 2004a). The next stage in this process was the rediscovery by a number of these student folk performers of the tammurriata tradition unearthed by De Simone in the Campanian backblocks during the first revival, initially through contacts with portatori della tradizione in Marra near Scafati (see Map Four, Chapter Three). Some Neapolitan countercultural actors like ‘il Puffo’ [Smurf] and Maurizio ‘Pulcinella’ later moved to Scafati for substantial periods of time to immerse themselves more fully in the local tammurriata tradition. Eventually, elderly tammurriata exponents such as Riccardo Esposito Abate and Cicetto were invited to the Orientale to conduct workshops for the student occupiers. Another key intermediary between the peasant hinterland and Naples was the charismatic middle aged Scafati folk entrepreneur Antonio Matrone (o’ Lione: ‘the Lion’), who is credited with pioneering the idea of running tammurriata dance and percussion classes for payment.

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‘‘O Vesuvio’: legendary Campanian tammorra player o’ Lione (Antonio Matrone) features on this 1999 tammurriata album cover by the group Tammurriata di Scafati. Here, Mt Vesuvius, the rustic dialect of the Circumvesuviana tammurriata heartland, the tammorra and one of its most visually striking practitioners are condensed into a powerful sign of local popular tradition.

A key theme in the second revival has been the revitalisation and refunctionalisation of spaces: as the urban CSO movement was reoccupying the empty shells of Southern Italy’s abandoned industrial infrastructure, a rediscovery of the traditional festa was taking place at the same time (Vacca, 1999, 12). Although Chiriatti had described the 1980s as a period of ‘total abandonment’ of Salentine folk music, revivalists in Salento now began restoring the traditional structures of the rural and urban landscape to their former role as luoghi di festa (places for feste) (Chiriatti, 1998, 10). The traditional PCI Festa dell’Unità had already declined as a major annual festival (Kertzer, 1998, 161), but now the newly rediscovered festa popolare and later the newly invented ‘folk festival’ began to supplant it as the major focus for revivalist activity.

At the same time in Salento, filmmaker Edoardo Winspeare and some of his friends were initiating a project to relaunch pizzica:

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We wanted to bring Salentine pizzica back to life, in a very studied and precise manner…We needed pizzica, because pizzica gets people moving, shakes them, and we weren’t interested just in the musical element, but also the social element. Through this decision, we were making a political gesture, because we wanted to change the idea people had of Salento up until then. We wanted thousands of people to discover pizzica. We had a clear objective of making this a mass movement…So we began organising many feste – almost two hundred between ‘92 and ‘94…The idea was to get this whole territory moving from underground, to make a revolution (Winspeare, 2002, 172).

The rediscovery of local dialect pioneered by Sud Sound System in the late 1980s blended left counterculturalism with a re-engagement with the local (Lo Massaro, 2001). The group first burst onto the national scene at a concert at Milan’s historic Centro Sociale Occupato Leoncavallo in January 1989. Its powerful articulation of a new Southern Italian roots theme was exemplified in the 2003 song title Le radici ca

tieni (The Roots That You Have) and in the ironic reappropriation of the racist antiSouthern term terrone for the stage name of lead singer Terron Fabio. Their most celebrated album bore the prophetic title Tradizione (1996), and seemed to herald the emergence within progressive Italian counterculturalism of this new slogan, previously more familiar, perhaps, in the political context of conservative reaction. Associated for a time with Bologna, a key site of the Southern Italian student diaspora, Sud Sound System later relocated south to re-engage directly with its Salentine roots and to collaborate on pizzica- and tarantism-related themes with University of Lecce sociologist Piero Fumarola and French anthropologist of trance George Lapassade (2001, 2007).

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This 1996 album cover by Salentine roots reggae group Sud Sound System foregrounds ‘tradition’ as a new buzzword in 1990s Italian youth counterculture.

The political context of fieldwork, 2002-3

Revivalists often frame their concerns over ‘cultural homogenisation’ and the commodification of culture within contemporary Italian capitalist society around Berlusconi, who is seen by revivalists as a kind of symbolic antithesis to their own cultural and ideological project. My fieldwork in 2002-3 coincided with the second term of the Berlusconi government (2001-2006), which foregrounded concerns over a concentration of media power in the hands of Italy’s media magnate Prime Minister unprecedented within a Western democracy (Ginsborg, 2001, 2004, 2005).

I arrived in Italy in July 2002, in the wake of the July 2001 G-8 summit, during which an unprecedented range of anti-capitalist actors from Italy, Europe and beyond had converged on Genova to contest what they saw as a symbol of the global capitalist order. The ensuing violence was captured in sickening detail in Maledetto G8: le immagini shock dei due giorni di Genova (Accursed G8: the Shock Images of the Two Days of Genova; Torelli, 2002), a documentary distributed with the weekly news 101

magazine L’Espresso in 2002. The so-called area antagonista active in the 2001 Genova G8 protest brought together the overlapping CSO, ‘No Global’ and I disobbedienti (Disobedient Ones) movements (Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, 2001, 2001a), groups which are variously associated with the leftist ideologies of Italian Autonomist Marxism (Berardi, 1998; Wright, 2002), the Communist Refoundation party (Kertzer, 1998) and anarchism. Within this milieu, radical critics of contemporary capitalism such as Klein, Hardt and Negri have been enormously influential, with Klein a regular contributor to independent Italian print media. Their key texts No Logo (Klein, 2001) and Empire ( Hardt and Negri, 2001) are reflected in the ideology of the area antagonista, in which political and cultural praxis is conceived in terms of resistance to the forces of ‘globalised capitalism’ exemplified in Hardt and Negri’s monolithic vision of ‘Empire’.

‘A Robin Hood…ma va ffanculo!’: popular commentary on a Berlusconi election poster. Source: . [6 September 2011].

Throughout my 2002-3 fieldwork, Berlusconi and his government continued to act as a lightning rod for expressions of dissent and resistance by the Italian left, and many of my revivalist informants were caught up in these events. Urban revivalists who had met at the 2002 Tarantellapower Folk Festival in Caulonia the year before arranged, 102

for instance, to converge from all over Italy to meet at the massive two million-strong protest in Rome against the invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003.

Popular traditional dance as countercultural praxis: young urban revivalists who first met at Tarantellapower in Caulonia in August 2002 dance tammurriata at the 15 February 2003 global anti-war rally held in Rome. Photo: Sergio Saltori.

The date of this global anti-war protest had been determined in October 2002 in Florence by leaders of the emergent World Social Forum (WSF) movement at the first European Social Forum, which I attended with the same group of urban revivalists from Caulonia (see Chapter Six). Also in Florence, the so called movimento dei professori associated with academics like Paul Ginsborg was highlighting what they saw as a threat to Italian democracy posed by the Berlusconi Government. In 2002-3, Rome was also the focus for the girotondo movement inspired by Italian film maker Nanni Moretti (Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, 2002). Yet because of its perceived association with the more moderate centre-left DS party, the girotondi had far less impact within the CSO and ‘No Global’ milieus frequented by some of my revivalist informants (Federica Cannelli, personal comment). 103

‘Cashing in on the Zeitgeist’: despite the improbably clean-cut appearance of these ‘freaks’ in a 2002 ad for designer hippy clothing, they do reflect something of the mood amongst one segment of Italian youth at the beginning of my fieldwork in July 2002 in the wake of the Genova G8 summit. Source: L’Espresso. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

‘The war has started: disobey now! Rambo, stay at home’: a Communist Refoundation poster in Naples announces the beginning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Photo: Bennetts. 104

Theorists of New Social Movements (NSMs) such as Touraine (1988) have argued that the post-industrial transformation of society has changed the nature of social and political movements. Where previously, these were often organised around socialist notions of class, in the shift to a post-industrial society

labor-capital conflict subsides, other social cleavages become more salient and generate new identities, and the exercise of power is less in the realm of work and more in the ‘setting of a way of life, forms of behaviour and needs’ 4…Touraine thus posits ‘the way of life’ as the focus of contention…NSMs emerge out of the crisis of modernity and focus on struggles over symbolic, information and cultural resources and rights to specificity and difference. Participation in NSMs is itself a goal, apart from any instrumental objective, because everyday movement practices embody, in embryonic form, the changes the movements seek (Edelman, 2001, 288f.).

Touraine’s schema is highly suggestive of the current trajectory of Italian revivalism, and in particular, its shift in emphasis from class during the first revival to a broader focus in the second revival on what Hardt and Negri (2004) have defined as ‘struggles over the forms of life’.

‘New Freaks’: a group of revivalists prepares to bivouac overnight at the Festa della Madonna dell’Avvocata in the forest above Maiori, Campania, July 2003. Photo: Bennetts. 4

Touraine, 1988, 25.

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The legacy of il sessantotto: from first to second revival

Although the cyclical nature of Italian folk revivalism is apparent in the renewed interest in popular tradition in Italy from the 1990s on, there is a shift in tone in the second revival, which seems to serve new political and existential needs. Less earnest and less burdened by the Marxist dogma associated with much of the first revival, the second revival is also more subjectivist and vitalist in orientation, with a greater emphasis on direct mass participation through dance and festival forms. Particularly within the second revival ‘spontaneous’ tendency, there is less attention to scholarly research and ‘philological’ detail, and a greater interest in the recuperation of traditional expressive forms on their own aesthetic terms, rather than for the ideological ulterior motives of the first revival. As first revival veteran Luigi Chiriatti observes,

Now folk music is performed in a more emotionally charged way, people participate more. Today there are more spectacular mass events…People want to go out, be together, escape from the television. And the other thing is young people want to understand their roots (1998, 94f.).

University of Jamaica: a student revivalist at the 2003 Campus in Festa, University of Salerno at Fisciano, 2003. Photo: Bennetts. 106

Of course Chiriatti’s own account of the first revival in Salento shows that many revivalist events then were charged with emotion too (Chiriatti, 1998). Yet the narrower political concerns of the first revival do seem to have been refocussed in the second revival into a more generalised critique of dominant globalised and ‘homogenised’ cultural forms, with an emphasis at times on subaltern dance forms almost as a kind of countercultural praxis.

Although the classic first revival anthem Bella ciao has today taken on a new lease of life as a symbol of resistance to Silvio Berlusconi, an air of slight anachronism hangs at times around figures associated with the first revival such as Giovanna Marini and Alessandro Portelli. An awareness of the politico-historical roots of the Italian folk tradition is one thing, but there was a certain strangeness for me in a 2003 performance in Rome by folk singer Giovanna Marini and legendary cantautore Francesco De Gregori at the Concerto per il Primo Maggio (an annual Communist youth event organised by the trade unions and televised by RAI 3, the public TV channel traditionally controlled by the PCI). I could not help pondering the relevance to the average eighteen year-old concertgoer of Marini and De Gregori’s exhumation— sandwiched between numbers by pop star Jovanotti, Nick Cave, Italian rap artists and others—of the song L'attentato a Togliatti, a Communist protest song denouncing the attempted assassination of PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti in 1948. In Rome, the Circolo Gianni Bosio still guards the flame of this earlier revivalist tradition, incarnating (somewhat anachronistically at times) the values of the politicised sessantotto generation of which Portelli and Marini are so emblematic.

The intergenerational shift in the transmission of the Southern Italian folk tradition was epitomised for me by Campanian revivalists Michele Accardo and his sixteen year-old son Francesco. Michele, a long term PCI veteran and now Communist Refoundation activist, first became interested in local Campanian folk tradition in the 1970s, when folk groups were a regular fixture at the annual Festa dell’Unità. Michele has been collecting Southern Italian folk music recordings ever since, and articulates a strong link between folk culture and his own leftwing politics (see Chapter Three). He describes how at one Festa Dell’Unità in the 1970s, he bought a tammorra, then took it home and hung it up on the wall. The instrument remained there untouched until about 107

2000, when Francesco took it down and began playing it. The pony-tailed Francesco soon became a familiar sight at many Campanian feste della Madonna, playing the tammorra in his trademark Palestinian scarf and khaki Subcomandante Marcos cap emblazoned with a red star. This tammorraro zapatista seemed to me in many ways the perfect embodiment of the new revivalist generation. By hanging up the tammorra on his wall as an icon of peasant culture in the 1970s, Michele had made the classic first revival act of homage towards ‘subaltern culture’. By contrast, his son Francesco had liberated this frozen and objectified signifier of that culture from the wall, and redeployed it within the context of an active cultural, political and aesthetic practice. This symbolic transmission and transformation of his father’s first revival legacy highlights the greater emphasis on subjectivity, spontaneity and mass participation which distinguishes the second revival.

Conclusion

The catch cry of the first revival had been ‘cultura subalterna’, harking back to Gramsci’s contrast between cultura subalterna and cultura egemone, the dominant culture of bourgeois capitalist society. Yet this first revival emphasis on class is strikingly absent in the new second revival slogan ‘tradizione popolare’, which instead seems to suggest an implicit dichotomy between the world of contemporary globalised capitalist modernity (‘la società consumistica’) and that of popular tradition (il mondo popolare).

Class is today far less of a live issue in Italian left politics than it once was, as even the founder of the 1970s leftist Democrazia Proletaria party admitted in a 1988 memoir (Capanna, 1988). In the tradition/modernity dyad so characteristic of the current second revival, what is foregrounded is not class relations, but rather the notion of a cultural disjuncture between il mondo della tradizione and the now-dominant capitalist society. Although the rich northern folk tradition rooted in political and class struggle associated with northern industrialism and the Resistance movement had proved congenial to the Marxist-inspired scholars and musicians of the first revival, revivalism now turns away from the industrialised north towards the more archaic peasant 108

traditions of the South. Inspired by pioneering anthropological scholars of Southern folk tradition such as de Martino and De Simone, there is also a greater emphasis now on the religious dimensions of Southern folk culture.

Reworking the ‘popular culture as oppositional culture’ concept of the 1960s (Lombardi-Satriani, 1974), today’s left wing revivalists seem to be tapping into the subversive potential of popular tradition in new ways, with ‘tradizione popolare’ being redeployed as a means to critique the culture of contemporary consumer society. Within a new and younger group of leftists associated with the CSO and ‘No Global’ movements, dance and music practices such as pizzica that originate in peasant culture are used as a means of alternative identity construction, a means of marking participants as distinct from the dominant società omologata which they reject. The new cultural, social and political concerns of the second revival are thus suggestive of the shifts hypothesised by Touraine (1988), in which ‘struggles over the forms of life’ rather than class, become the focus of contention for New Social Movements in postindustrial society (Edelman, 2001, 289).

In the next chapter, I examine how contemporary Southern Italian revivalism is constituted in relation to space, by exploring the three regional folk traditions which are privileged in contemporary revivalist practice: Campania, Calabria and Salento. I also examine the nature and significance of the ‘revivalist itinerary’, an emergent canon of ‘must-see’ festivals and feste popolari frequented by urban revivalists in remote areas of Southern Italy. I also consider how Northern and Southern Italy are represented within revivalist discourse, and how traditional cultural practices associated with peasant culture are now being rearticulated by urban revivalists in cities like Rome, Naples and Milan.

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CHAPTER THREE: THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT OF SOUTHERN ITALIAN REVIVALISM

Roman revivalist Patrizia plays organetto in the small Roman apartment she shares with two friends. She first became interested in the instrument after learning to dance tarantella at Caulonia’s Tarantellapower festival in Calabria in 2002. Photo: Bennetts, 2003.

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Introduction

Revivalist activity is patterned geographically by the urban/rural divide, by a NorthSouth dichotomy, and by the foregrounding of three major Southern Italian regional folk traditions. Given the general decline in popular traditional practices in the contemporary Italian urban environment, the urban revivalist quest for more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ cultural forms is focussed outside the city, in the provincial backblocks of Southern Italy.

Revivalism privileges rural areas of Southern Italy where the cultural reproduction of popular traditional practices has been less disrupted by industrialisation and other processes associated with capitalist modernisation than has broadly speaking been the case in Northern Italy. Revivalist activity is articulated around a series of regionallyspecific cultural practices and events which have been informally integrated into what I here term the ‘revivalist itinerary’, focussed around the popular cultural traditions of rural Calabria, Campania and Puglia (principally Salento in Southern Puglia, but to a lesser extent also the town of Carpino in the Gargano region of northern Puglia). In each of these three key regions, revivalist activity is associated with a specific regional dance form (Calabrian tarantella,

5

Salentine pizzica and Campanian tammurriata),

one or more major annual folk festivals, and a number of key regional feste popolari. In an attempt to deconstruct revivalists’ naturalised representations of this emergent ‘revivalist itinerary’, I survey and contrast these three major regional folk traditions and the attendant urban revivalist scenes which have grown up around each of them.

The revivalist search for ‘authentic’ tradition outside the city

Before the twentieth century, Rome’s vibrant popular traditions had enjoyed a great reputation among upper class foreign travellers on the so-called ‘Grand Tour’, with the

5

Two other regional tarantella variants have a much smaller following among revivalists: la tarantella di Montemarano (practiced during the celebrated Carnival in this Campanian town) and the tarantella del Gargano (associated with Carpino in Northern Puglia).

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Roman Carnival celebrated as a major attraction from as early as the sixteenth century by Montaigne, Evelyn (Burke, 1978, 66), Goethe (1970, 446-469; Crapanzano, 1986) and others.

The Grand Tour: a young traveller (left) arrives in the Piazza di Spagna during the Roman Carnival. Source: David Allan (1775), reproduced in Hudson, 1993, 156). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] The general decay of popular traditional practices within today’s Italian urban setting is highlighted by the fact that Roman Carnival is no longer a tourist attraction. It survives as a public cultural form in one highly attenuated version of the tradition in which parents parade their small children around Rome’s central piazza Navona in exquisite designer Pulcinella and Arlecchina costumes on weekends during the Carnival period. The highly formalised collective rituals of disorder which are still articulated along traditional lines in Southern rural towns such as Montemarano in Campania (De Simone & Rossi, 1977) and Tufara in Molise (Padiglione, 1979) have thus largely decomposed in contemporary Rome and many other areas of urban Italy into the dominant idiom of individualised consumption. Masked Carnival parties are still held in Rome in private homes for children and adults, but the collective performance of Carnival in public spaces has largely disappeared. Instead, Carnival’s ritualised aggression is today more often expressed in a practice in which children throw confetti and spray each other with white foam from aerosol cans in the streets. 113

Significantly, these contemporary relics of the ancient Carnival tradition are acted out via the medium of the mass-produced industrial commodities which crowd the windows of toy and stationery shops during the Carnival period. Modern Italy’s annual capitalist consumption cycle is strongly periodised with reference to a series of seasonal events which progresses through Christmas, New Year, the Feast of the Epiphany (la Befana), Carnival, Easter and l'estate (summer). In the shop windows, Carnival costumes, foam aerosol cans and confetti eventually give way to Baci chocolates and mimosa sprays, heralding the (now highly depoliticised and commercialised) celebration of the Festa della Donna (International Women’s Day) on March 8.

This 1790 Grand Tour genre painting depicts a scene common in Roman paintings until well into the nineteenth century: Roman plebeians dancing the saltarello, a dance form which is today virtually extinct outside a few remote corners of rural Abruzzo and Lazio. ‘Villa Borghese: il saltarello’, Charles Grignion, 1790. Source: Bignamini & Wilton (1996, 126). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] In Rome, as in most major Italian urban centres (apart from perhaps a few cities like Venice, Viareggio, Naples and Palermo), the popular cultural topsoil seems to have been too extensively eroded to be able to support revivalist projects based around the revitalisation of local traditional popular cultural forms. Here, there is a contrast with 114

the continuing maintenance of popular festive and folk traditions in a major city like Barcelona, where unlike Italy, such cultural forms have long been sustained by the nationalist ideology of catalanisme (Hughes, 1992).

One reason why central Naples has maintained its traditional popular character to a far greater extent than Rome is that the city’s traditional working class population has never been displaced from the centro storico into the suburbs to the same extent as in many other modern cities (De Simone & Vacca, 1991). In Rome, by contrast, iconic working class areas like Trastevere have long since been emptied of their Roman dialect-speaking inhabitants and bought up by well-heeled foreigners (cf. Herzfeld, 2009), as the traditional Roman working class and a stream of post-war migrants from Southern Italy have been herded into bleak urban planning disaster areas in the suburban periferia. Reflecting on the rapid disappearance of Roman dialect during the post-war boom period, Pasolini (1995, 54) commented in 1975 that ‘no boy from the Roman slums would still be capable of understanding the [Roman] slang in my books of ten or fifteen years ago, but instead would be forced to consult the glossary at the back like a good little bourgeois from Turin!’

On location in the Prenestina: Pasolini’s Roman subproletarian anti-hero ‘Accattone’ (Sergio Citti) in a scene from his 1961 film of the same name. Photo: Franco Pinna. Source:. [6 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] 115

Via del Boschetto in central Rome is my own personal ethnographic datum for gauging the rate of cultural and socio-economic change in the Italian urban environment, and is also the heartland of anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s field research on urban change in the Rione Monti district (Herzfeld, 2001, 2006a, 2009). Returning to visit friends there every year or so, it is easy to calibrate the rate of gentrification which has gone on in the intervening period by the number of new shops which have sprung up selling underwear, mobile phones and other consumer ephemera. In this old and attractive inner city area, once more popular in character, capital investment is now driving out local artisans and their traditional lifeways because they are no longer able to afford the rent (Herzfeld, 2009). For Herzfeld, ‘entrepreneurial speculation in real estate has produced a mode of “spatial cleansing” in which the local people have been treated, as they see it, as an “Indian reservation”, awaiting removal at the pleasure of the rich, in a classic pattern of the most destructive kind of gentrification’ (2006a, 136; for a critique of the effect on traditional urban culture of similar processes in contemporary Barcelona, see Harvey, 2002; Delgado, 2010; Repensar Bon Pastor, 2010; Portelli, 2009.)

This Neapolitan artist’s critique of the current transformation of traditional working class areas in Barcelona through urban speculation reflects similar concerns to those in Italian urban areas like Rione Monti in central Rome (Herzfeld, 2009). Artwork: Diego Miedo, from Portelli (2009, 106). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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Elisabetta, a young woman from the city of Treviso in Northern Italy, negatively contrasted the Carnival she attends each year in nearby Venice with the very different Carnival of Montemarano which we attended together in rural Campania in March 2003 [SFX4]:

I’m very fond of the Carnival of Venice, because it’s my local Carnival, it’s obvious. But you can’t compare it [to Montemarano]: the Carnival of Venice is a globalised Carnival. The actual traditional and authentic elements…there’s not very much, it’s debatable…Some people dance...but in terms of tradition…you really have to look for it. I’m one of the few local people who actually likes to dress up in Carnival costume…[There are always] the spray cans of Carnival foam…But people have lost the sense of what Carnival is really all about.

But at the Carnival of Montemarano, it’s the opposite: most of the festival is in the air, in the people waiting, preparing, and feeling it and giving a meaning to it: it’s not just any kind of festival.

In Venice, there are costumes and masks for the tourists, and they are fantastic. But it’s mostly foreigners who pay the local tailors to make them a nice costume and then get their photo taken. The Venetians themselves don’t take part very much; if you want to take part you do, but it’s not a ‘spontaneous’ Carnival like Montemarano. There you see people of all ages taking part, it’s more…real. What else can I say?

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The Pulcinella leadership team heads up the procession during the Carnival of Montemarano, Campania, March 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Significantly, the Carnival of Venice was only reestablished in 1979 after a hiatus of nearly two hundred years since Napoleon’s conquest of the city in 1797 (Feil, 1998). Elisabetta’s critique of the contemporary Carnival is also echoed by anthropologist Alessandro Falassi, who notes that:

Venetians from all walks of life criticize [the Venetian] Carnival for its artificiality and superficiality, for its ever more televised ‘kitsch’, for its exhibition of virtual images, for its rampant commercialism and for its distressing refusal to offer some alterity with respect to the daily world…With its medieval roots lost and those of the Commedia dell’Arte forgotten, the Carnival of Venice in the early twenty-first century appears to have adopted two reference models. On the one hand, there is the Carnival devoted, through its elitist and costly events, to imitation of the eighteenth century Carnival of Goldoni, Casanova and Vivaldi. On the other there is the depersonalized individualism of the ‘fantasy masks’ or the ‘masks à la Roiter’, given birth for photography, and christened with the name of their most famous

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photographer….[m]ade of synthetic material and as ephemeral as they are photogenic…(2004, 87, 81; cf. Feil, 1998).

Venetian Carnival mask ‘à la Roiter’. Photo: Anita Martinz, Creative Commons. Source: . [21 September 2011].

In her home town of Treviso, Elisabetta describes il rogo della Vecchia (the bonfire of the Old Woman: Touring Club Italiano, 2001, 114) held during Lent, as the only major festa popolare which seems to have survived the local transition from a peasant economy to advanced industrialisation:

But you can’t compare it with Southern Italy. In the South, there are people of all ages, all of them having fun, dancing and drinking. I mean, ninety year olds who dance! My grandmother dancing at a festa popolare? I can’t even imagine it; I’ve never even seen her dancing. [In Treviso] young people are ashamed to do those kind of folk dances.

In Elisabetta’s account of the Venice Carnival, the festival seems to be moving away from its original nature as the collective ritualised expression of an organic community still visible at Montemarano (De Simone, 1974, 17-19; De Simone & Rossi, 1977; 119

Burke, 1978, 178-204). Although foreigners have always been a feature of the Venice Carnival, their contemporary role seems to signal an intensification of the process of objectification and commodification of tradition within an expanding globalised market. The prominence of special concerts and shows on the programme also seems to underscore the new role of the regional Italian polis as cultural entrepreneur, providing new organised forms of entertainment to plug the gaps caused by the decline or disappearance of more traditional and organic forms of popular spectacle.

The Revivalist Itinerary

For urban revivalists from Northern Italy such as Elisabetta, events such as the Carnival of Montemarano represent more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ cultural forms than the ones available to them within Italian cities. In their search for ‘authenticity’ within alternative pre-modern cultural forms, they thus look to peasant music and dance forms and events which have survived in remote corners of rural Southern Italy.

Some revivalists even seem to posit a kind of regionally differentiated league table of ‘traditional authenticity’, in which Calabria is at the top, Salento at the bottom and Campania somewhere in the middle. Arriving to start my fieldwork in Salento in July 2003, I had been fortunate enough to meet folk dancer and musician Monica on my second day in Rome. She soon began outlining for me her own personal ‘revivalist itinerary’. Discovering revivalism in the mid 1990s through a chance meeting with legendary Campanian tammorra player Antonio Matrone (o’ Lione: ‘the Lion’), she went to live in the Circumvesuviana backblocks for a year, quickly immersing herself in the local tammurriata tradition.

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Monica’s intense engagement from the late 1990s in the Circumvesuviana tammurriata scene is reflected in this image of her in the revivalist ‘Tammurriata in Campania’ calendar of major tammurriata events during the annual cycle of Campanian feste popolari. Source: Grafica Cirillo (n.d.).

[Image removed due to copyright

restrictions.] Later, she discovered another rural world in Calabria which seemed to her even more archaic and unspoiled than Campania, and abandoned the Circumvesuviana circuit as already hopelessly ‘contaminated’ by modernity. When I sought her advice on how I could best carry out my research on the folk revival, she questioned my initial focus on Salento, expressing the view that Calabria and the Circumvesuviana region were areas where le tradizioni popolari had remained strong, still integrated organically within a local community framework. In Salento, she said, this had long ceased to be the case. Monica was the first of many non-Salentine revivalists to suggest that I drop Salento, and instead focus on the Calabrian and Campanian folk milieu which, they advised, would be far more rewarding.

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TABLE ONE: COMPARATIVE OVERVIEW OF THREE MAJOR REGIONAL FOLK TRADITIONS

Calabria

Campania

Salento

Major feste

Madonna di Polsi;

Carnival of

San Rocco di Torre

popolari

Madonna del

Montemarano,

Paduli; SS Paolo &

Pollino

cycle of six

Pietro di Galatina

Campanian Madonna festivals Tarantella

Tammurriata

Pizzica

Tarantellapower;

Campus in Festa,

La Notte della

Festival di

University of

Taranta

Cataforio; Sila in

Salerno at Fisciano;

Festa; Festival di

Festival della

Paleariza

Zampogna, Scapoli

Regionalist

Some

Little

Strongly

sentiment

ethnoregionalist

ethnoregionalist

ethnoregionalist

sentiment

sentiment

Major dance form Major festivals

Other features

Persistence of

Very strong

sentiment

Association with

Association with

Campanian

tarantism and

Madonna cycle

taranta

Strong

Weak

popular traditional cultural forms

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THE REGIONS Puglia: Salento

Being closer to provincia than regione size, Salento (the stiletto heel of the Southern Italian boot) is of course smaller, not only geographically but also in terms of its population and diversity of folkloric resources, than the regions of Campania and Calabria. However, Salento plays a role within revivalism which is wholly disproportionate to this diminutive size, and in fact has the highest profile of any of the three major regional traditions foregrounded within the Southern Italian folk revival.

Since the emergence of the second revival in the mid 1990s, Salento has become synonymous with two elements of local folk culture: the pizzica dance and the powerful mythos of tarantism, the taranta spider possession cult famously documented by de Martino in his 1961 ethnographic study The Land of Remorse, which has now become a cult text among Salentine revivalists.

Salentine revivalist ‘Pizzicarello’ (left: note yellow taranta spider), dances pizzica with a female partner to the accompaniment of tamburello and organetto, Salento 2009. Photo: Tessa Joy.

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La Notte della Taranta, the key folk festival on the Salentine revivalist calendar, has been held since 1998 in the 11 towns of Grecia Salentina (the traditionally Greekspeaking area of the Salentine Peninsula), and is described in detail in Chapter Six. The premier Salentine festa popolare, the Festa di San Rocco, is held at midsummer on the night of August 16 in the village of Torre Paduli, and is examined in a detailed case study in Chapter Five. The iconic status of ‘the Night of San Rocco’ within Salentine revivalism derives partly from its association with both the pizzica dance of courtship and the far less common danza scherma or knife dance (Tarantino, 2001), which are traditionally danced during this patronal festival [SFX2].

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Tarantismo

A third related dance form, the so-called pizzica tarantata, was once associated with the music therapy sessions traditionally used to cure possessed tarantati. Victims of this disorder (mostly peasant women) would suffer annually recurring psychotic symptoms during the summer harvest season in June and July which were explained in mythological terms as caused by il morso della taranta (the bite of the tarantula: de Martino, 2005; Lewis, 2003; Bennetts, 2006). Private sufferings caused by unhappy love, bereavement, sexual frustration, or subaltern social status were played out by possessed victims (tarantati) in grotesque and dramatic public displays. In the ‘classical’ form of tarantism, victims were cured through a form of music and dance therapy provided by a group of musicians hired to perform in the victim’s home. Since the eighteenth century, the shrine of St Paul, patron saint of the tarantati, in Galatina, had also become the focus of cult activity by the tarantati. Following the seasonal recurrence of the taranta possession state, victims would travel to Galatina around the time of the June 29 patronal festival to seek relief (la grazia) from the Saint for their affliction in his Chapel at Galatina.

As with some other elements of Southern Italian folk tradition such as Calabrian tarantella, the survival of this archaic spider possession cult in Salento had become synonymous in the twentieth century with the abjection and ignorance of Southern Italian peasant society. Today, however, Salentine revivalism has reversed the original negative value of this sign, turning tarantism into a positive marker of unique cultural identity and the vitality of local popular cultural tradition (Gallini, 2002, 166). In one recent postmodern transformation of ‘tarantism’ for instance, Salentine revivalists, photographers and camera crews today flock to the church of Galatina early on the morning of 29 June in the increasingly vain hope of catching a glimpse of ‘the last of the tarantati’ (Lüdtke, 2009).

Popular tradition is more attenuated in Salento than in Calabria and Campania, because Salento’s flat and open expanses have made it more permeable to outside influences than is the case in the mountainous and more geographically and culturally remote revivalist hinterlands of rural Calabria and Campania. Within the popular dance repertoire for example, pizzica was supplanted early in the post-war period in Salento 125

by more mainstream dance forms like mazurka, il liscio (ballroom) and waltz forms. The number of surviving senior portatori della tradizione popolare in Salento is also smaller than is the case in Calabria or Campania. Whereas in many parts of Campania and Calabria, popular traditional practices continue to be performed in their traditional settings by traditional subaltern actors, by the time I arrived to commence fieldwork in July 2002, the number of senior surviving portatori della tradizione in Salento had effectively shrunk to two: Pino Zimba (deceased 2008) and the bad-tempered yet charismatic eighty year-old peasant Uccio Aloisi (deceased 2010). Three other senior Salentine portatori della tradizione had recently died: Luigi Stifani (the legendary Galatina barber/violinist of the tarantati who had collaborated with de Martino: Chiriatti, 2005; Stifani, 2000), Uccio Bandello, and Torre Paduli’s Amadeo Puttano (deceased 1999).

To find out how pizzica was danced traditionally, many urban revivalists might need to consult videos of elderly Salentine peasants in their 80s made in 1980 by dance scholar Pino Gala. This ‘old people’s pizzica’ however, would be likely to have little appeal for an active twenty year old, who would probably prefer the more energetic, though more stylised (‘contaminated’) version of the dance currently propagated in dozens of urban Centri Sociali across the country. Of the three major dance forms I attempted to learn during fieldwork (Salentine pizzica, Calabrian tarantella and Campanian tammurriata), I found pizzica by far the easiest. Its less technically challenging nature may explain to some extent why it is by far the most widely diffused of these three major revivalist dance forms.

As late as the 1980s, the traditional formal properties of the pizzica dance were still strongly maintained at the Festa di San Rocco (Lüdtke, 2009, 163), with only one man and one woman dancing together in the ronda (dance circle) at a time, and a strong emphasis on the kind of orthopractic performance conventions typical of traditional ritual dance forms. However, the subsequent wide diffusion of pizzica throughout Italy has led to its widespread hybridisation, with traditional dance conventions devolving into a modernised, simplified and individualised dance style more typical of the contemporary disco (Gala, 2002).

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With her observation that the traditional festa popolare ‘doesn’t really exist anymore in Salento’, Salentine singer Enza Pagliara enters the realms of cultural heresy. In contrast to the rich calendar of feste popolari in Calabria and Campania, only the Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli and the Festa di San Paolo at Galatina associated with tarantism have any real resonance within the national revivalist scene,

6

yet for many

non-Salentine revivalists, both of these events are emblematic of the festa contaminata, the traditional festa popolare disrupted by the mass intrusion of outsiders. In an even more pessimistic vein, musician Roberto Raheli wrote of the dying world of Salentine popular tradition in 2002 that

the stimuli arriving from all over the world….have completely submerged the Salentine body, leaving only a skeleton without flesh, or perhaps only a corpse without life, which still moves only through the voodoo magic of the folk music scene, like a zombie. The rupture with the past is terrible, the internal horizon of the Salentine community has been shattered, and has been substituted by a different horizon, that of globalisation (2002, 101).

Popular traditional practices in Salento have followed a trajectory from their origins in peasant society, through leftist political deployment in the first revival (Chiriatti, 1998), through fringe counterculturalism from the 1990s onwards (Winspeare, 2002, 174), to subsequent incorporation into more mainstream political and commercial agendas associated with La Notte della Taranta and the Salentine tourist industry. In the process, Salentine revivalism has become the most commercialised of the three regional traditions, to the point where one Salentine musician even suggested that ‘soon you’ll be hearing pizzica even in McDonalds’.

Compared to Campania and Calabria, Salentine revivalism is striking for the degree to which notions of local tradition are ‘imagined’, or ‘reinvented’, rather than embodied

6

Although note also the tradition of singing Easter hymns in griko during Holy Week at Calimera, the celebrated Holy Week rituals in nearby Taranto, the 6 August Festa di San Donato at Montesano Salentino, the bonfires associated with the Festa di Sant’Antonio at Novoli and Zollino and the Festa de lu mieru, the traditional wine festival associated with the feast of San Martino in November (cf. Touring Club Italiano, 2001, 331-9).

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in the contemporary practices of actual rural subaltern actors. Partly through the strongly ethnoregionalist element in Salentine revivalism, a reified notion of tradition is valorised structurally and ideologically, but rendered epistemologically problematic by the fact that few real life exemplars of popular traditional practice are available for imitation (Raheli, 2002, 103). Instead of being performed in situ by traditional actors within their traditional context, popular traditional practices are increasingly the subject of a spectacularised second order representation of Salentine ‘popular tradition’ at events such as La Notte della Taranta.

Puglia: Carpino

The town of Carpino represents a kind of ‘cultural isolate’ within a tiny area of the Gargano Peninsula in Northern Puglia, a remote community in which by some freak, the unique local song tradition has managed to survive until ‘rediscovered’ and revived by outsiders. Pino Gala states that Carpino became ‘a kind of folk music temple for ethnomusicologists’ after the discovery in the 1950s by Carpitella and Lomax of the unique sonority of the local song tradition, which included quarter tones and other unusual features (Gala, personal comment). The town has now become synonymous for revivalists with the highly prized local singing tradition, exemplified by a group of elderly singers known as ‘i Cantori di Carpino’, most of whom were over eighty at the time of my fieldwork. This tradition was popularised in the 1990s largely through the efforts of Eugenio Bennato and local musician the late Enzo Draicchio. In a kind of Southern Italian version of the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, Bennato began taking the elderly Carpino singers on tour with his group Tarantapower, and later produced them on his album La tarantella del Gargano, thus bringing traditional local music to a wider audience. But Carpino is also memorable for its repertoire of serenades, ninne nanne (lullabies), highly inventive sung invective and the retention of the archaic chitarra battente (supplanted in most areas of Southern Italy after the arrival of the modern and more convenient guitar).

Although the local tarantella del Gargano was documented by Gala with a small number of elderly male informants in the early 1980s, none of the locals in Carpino 128

were confident enough to teach this local dance form at the 2002 Festival, and so it was necessary to bring in a dance scholar like Gala from outside to run the dance workshop. Since then however, there have been signs that this highly localised dance form is being diffused more widely by folk enthusiasts.

7

By 2008, it also seemed to

be catching on in Rome, judging by a folk music evening I attended where some urban revivalists demonstrated their new found facility with the dance.

Festival of Carpino, Northern Puglia, 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

The town of Carpino has been the site of its eponymous Festival since 1997, and now attracts folk enthusiasts from all over Italy. Even though the Carpino tradition as yet lacks the dynamic possibilities for mass expressive mobilisation offered by a widely popularised dance form like pizzica, the striking image of a 92 year-old cantore di Carpino Andrea Sacco singing in the unmistakable modalities of the Carpino song tradition still remains a central visual and sound icon of the entire Southern Italian folk revival [SFX5].

7

Cf. email to SB of 3 February 2004 from the ‘Centro Studi Tradizioni Popolari del Gargano e della Capitanata’ advertising a workshop on the dance in April 2004.

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Andrea Sacco plays the chitarra battente. Like Ry Cooder’s ‘Buena Vista Social Club’, Bennato’s 2001 album ‘La tarantella del Gargano’ elevated the elderly Cantori di Carpino to cult status within the Italian folk scene.

Calabria

In contrast with Salento, many parts of rural Calabria still retain a kind of archaic frontier quality which is attractive to enthusiasts like Ester or her friend Monica in their search for ‘traditional authenticity’. In such areas, popular traditional practices still seem largely embedded within their original peasant cultural milieu, with the dancing of tarantella, the playing of tamburello, organetto and even the zampogna (bagpipes) persisting as part of the everyday life of some traditional rural actors. The chitarra battente tradition too, is still maintained in some parts of Calabria (Santagati, nd.). In this region, there is not the same need for revivalist ideology and practice to breathe new life into moribund peasant cultural forms, and the local folk scene thus shows fewer signs of the kind of postmodern cultural reinvention or re-elaboration of tradition so typical of Salento.

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The Calabrian revivalist group Associazione ARPA holds regular weekend tarantella workshops in Rome, where there is a growing interest in Calabrian tarantella and associated musical traditions. These practices are now being diffused throughout the major cities of Central and Northern Italy, even though with nothing like the intensity of Salentine pizzica. In contrast to the hybridising tendencies evident within contemporary urban pizzica practice, urban tarantella enthusiasts strongly maintain the traditional conventions of the rota (dance circle) and mastu i ballu (dance master), with no more than two persons dancing in the circle at one time. These conventions are transmitted by Calabrian revivalist groups like ARPA with an attention to ‘philological’ detail which comes largely from the fact that tarantella is still widely practised by non-revivalist locals within its traditional popular milieu (Plastino, 2003), 131

where the local cultural balance of power has not yet been lost to outsiders, as it has been in many other parts of Southern Italy [SFX3].

Tarantella rota at the Festa di San Rocco, Gioiosa Jonica, Calabria, 1997. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] For all the picturesque primitivist vitality of the Calabrian revivalist scene, the region has the lowest profile amongst revivalists of any of the three major regional traditions which are the focus of revivalist interest. Compared with pizzica, the ability to dance Calabrian tarantella is a far more esoteric accomplishment, giving Calabrian revivalist activity something of an avant garde quality, the province of hardened folk aficionados like Ester and Monica. For reasons which will be apparent from my later account of the Polsi milieu in Aspromonte, Calabrian folk musician Valentino Santagati states that ‘in contrast to Salento, city people are uncomfortable with the world of rural Calabria’. In a region like Calabria where an entire history of resistance to outside interference is embodied in local bandit traditions (Hobsbawm, 2001; Dickie, 2011, 196-209), and where il controllo del territorio is a watchword, rural Calabrians still often seem to negotiate their relationship with the outside world very much on their 132

own terms. Whereas inhabitants of Torre Paduli in Salento seem reluctantly to tolerate the increasing disruption of their patronal festival of San Rocco by a massive influx of urban hippies, young local males at the Festival of Caulonia in August 2002 violently expelled a group of disruptive punkabestia ‘ferals’ from the town who were deemed too lacking in respect towards the local community. Although spectacular Calabrian popular festivals like Polsi are increasingly a target for large numbers of photographers and video operators, there is still little of the disruption by the growing influx of outsiders typical of the Torre Paduli festival. Calabrian festa popolare venues are typically inaccessible for inhabitants of the larger cities, and even from Reggio Calabria, the journey to Polsi takes four hours, much of it over a bone-jarring unsealed road.

A Sunday afternoon in Aspromonte with young organetto maestro Massimo Diano (centre), his maestro, Cosimo Lo Monaco (third right) and Calabrian tamburello maker Romeo ‘il professore’ (second right) and his extended family. Photo: Bennetts, 2002.

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Despite the propaganda efforts of groups like ARPA, for some Calabrians I met in Riace the world of popular tradition in Calabria remains too close for comfort historically to be readily integrated it into the kind of folklorised pastoral vision of peasant culture increasingly promoted within contemporary Salentine revivalism. This characteristic Calabrian ambivalence towards popular tradition is captured well in an anecdote by ethnographic film maker Luigi di Gianni, who once asked a Calabrian student whether she knew anything about tarantella. Her response would today be echoed by many young Calabrians for whom popular tradition is still associated with a stigmatised peasant past which they wish to forget, or even with the local Mafia: ‘we don’t know about that kind of thing, nor do we do it: we go to the disco’.

Key drawcards for revivalists interested in Calabrian popular tradition are the series of major patronal feste popolari mostly held over the summer months between June and September (Elia el al., 2000; Arbitrio, 2002), including the mass mountain pilgrimage for the Festa della Madonna del Pollino (Douglas, 1955, 155-163; Rossi, 1971; Scaldaferri, 2005), the Festa di San Rocco di Gioiosa Jonica (Plastino, 1989; 2003), the Festa della Madonna del Pettoruto di San Sosti, and the archaic arborial cult associated with the Festa della Pita di Alessandria del Carretto. For revivalists, the Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte (Rossi, 1971; Gemelli, 1992; Plastino, 2003) which I attended in early September 2002, is in many senses the most iconic of these Calabrian feste popolari, and is described in detail in Chapter Five.

Despite their austerity, Calabria’s grimly spectacular Good Friday processions and their sung traditional popular liturgies are also popular with young revivalists. Caulonia’s Good Friday procession was the focus of an ARPA residential study course in 2002, while ARPA collaborators have also published a detailed documentation of San Luca’s Good Friday procession (Buttitta, 2007). Other key Holy Week events include those of Palmi and Verbicaro, the latter celebrated for its spectacular rite of penitential self-flagellation carried out by local confraternity members (who interestingly, are all members of the local branch of Rifondazione Comunista!).

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The summer months also draw revivalists to a number of Calabrian folk festivals, including the Festival of Cataforio in the Province of Reggio Calabria, the Festival of Paleariza in the Greek-speaking area of Southern Aspromonte and the more mainstream Sila in Festa supported by the leftwing Roman daily Il Manifesto. I attended Caulonia’s Tarantellapower in 2002 and 2005, and provide a full account of this event in Chapter Six.

Campania

Naples, the cultural powerhouse of Southern Italy, inevitably dominates the Campanian revivalist scene, despite the urban revivalist focus on traditions associated with the city’s rural hinterland. Popular traditional practices have survived to a remarkable degree even in the contemporary urban environment (Vacca, 2004), and have long been integrated into a folkloric discourse of napoletaneità popularised in the Grand Tour literature (De Simone, 1974, 2; Goethe, 1970), with writers like Pasolini, Lewis (1978) and Malaparte (1988) often highlighting the ‘pre-modern’ cultural characteristics of Naples and its lower classes.

View of Naples towards Vesuvius and the port along the main ‘Spaccanapoli’ thoroughfare. Photo: Bennetts. 135

In an area of Italy in which survivals of the ancient Greco-Roman world are still strikingly visible (John, 1970), there is at times an inevitably neo-Frazerian tone to the exposition of popular tradition provided by De Simone, Canzanella, Vacca and others. They highlight syncretic or ‘pagan’ elements and the characteristically Campanian emphasis on a female supernatural being in these cults, a legacy, according to De Simone, of the large number of female divinities worshipped in the area during the Greco-Roman period (De Simone, 1974, Canzanella, 2002).

Neapolitan song has long enjoyed a privileged place within the national musical repertoire. The home town of Caruso, Carosone, Pino Daniele, Eugenio Bennato and his brother Edoardo, Naples still functions as a kind of factory of Southern Italian popular music. The city is associated with the current tammurriata revival, the bel canto tradition, contemporary leftist groups from the CSO scene like Bisca, 99 Posse and Almamegretta, first revival folk groups la Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare (NCCP), ‘E Zezi (Vacca, 1999) and Bennato’s Musicanova, and now the second revival group Spaccanapoli. Naples’ mondo dello spettacolo has also been highly influential in Campanian revivalism through such key figures as De Simone, Concetta Barra, Peppe Barra, Eugenio Bennato and Marcello Colasurdo.

‘The true popular music of Naples’: the Neapolitan proletarian musical genre ‘il neomelodico’ is characterised by sentimental themes and shadowy connections to the local Camorra. 136

With its amalgam of sentimental themes and stories of young Neapolitan men on the wrong side of the law, the syrupy neomelodico genre is strongly intertwined both artistically and financially with the Neapolitan Camorra. This local musical form represents the true popular music of proletarian Naples in a way which tammurriata (an archaic peasant musical form recently disinterred by middle class leftists) will never be able to.

Despite these powerful Neapolitan musical traditions, urban revivalists turn instead to marginalised

rural

musical

subcultures

outside

the

city,

especially

the

Circumvesuviana tammurriata circuit and the wider province of Avellino investigated 137

by De Simone during the first revival (De Simone, 1974, 1979, De Simone & Rossi, 1977). Campanian revivalism is dominated by a cycle of peasant festivals associated with Le sei sorelle (the Six Sisters): the six Madonnas of Campania (Canzanella, 2002, 23), whose cults are closely linked to fertility and the peasant agricultural cycle, and whose patronal festivals feature traditional votive dancing of tammurriata (or more properly, il ballo sulla tammorra: D’Ajello, 1997; cf. Gorgoni & Rollin, 1997). The dance is accompanied by castanets played by the two dancers, the tammorra (Campanian tamburello), le tricchebballacche (an eccentric hinged percussion instrument) and the putipù, a stick inserted in the aperture of a drum which emits a rhythmic farting sound [SFX1].

The cover of this revivalist ‘Tammurriata in Campania’ calendar conveys something of the intense vitality of the Campanian tammurriata scene (Grafica Cirillo, 138 n.d.). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

The tightly structured Campanian revivalist calendar is rich with activity. At the Festa di Sant'Antonio Abate (patron saint of farm animals) on January 17, peasant farmers traditionally mark the end of the old agricultural year by dancing tammurriata at night around purificatory bonfires (De Simone & Rossi, 1977, 61-79). This marks both the opening of the revivalist tammurriata season and the beginning of Carnival, which continues until the start of Lent, forty days before Easter.

Santino [holy picture] of Sant’Antonio Abate, patron saint of farm animals, whose feast day on January 17 marks the end of the Campanian peasant agricultural year, and is celebrated with the slaughter of the pig (with which he is closely associated) and nighttime tammurriata dancing around o’ cipp’ e Sant’Antuon’ (the bonfire of Sant’Antonio).

Soon after Sant’Antonio, the Circumvesuviana Madonna cycle opens at the sanctuary of the Madonna di Montevergine on February 2 for the Festa della Candelora commemorating the Virgin Mary’s ritual purification in the Temple forty days after the birth of Christ on 24 December. Here tammurriata enthusiasts dance in the snow 139

outside the Abbey of Montevergine on a mountain near Avellino alongside

femminielli, traditional Neapolitan transvestites who are an ancient and integral element in the fabric of Neapolitan popular tradition (Vacca, 2004), and who traditionally make the pilgrimage to Montevergine for Candelora as an act of purification.

A group of local women on a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Madonna of Montevergine, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Carnival heralds an even more profane note in the ritual calendar, no better exemplified than at Montemarano, a small town in the mountains outside Avellino which is justly celebrated for the vigour and traditional character of its peasant Carnival. Over four days of revelry, the local tarantella melody works its way hypnotically into one’s head as striking Pulcinella figures lead the local band and two files of costumed dancers in an endless dance through the streets [SFX4].

140

Local musicians provide the live tarantella soundtrack to the 2003 Carnival of Montemarano. Photo: Bennetts.

Ritualised transvestitism is another key element in the Campanian Carnival tradition. In Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo, Rossi and De Simone’s remarkable 1977 multidisciplinary, multisited, collaborative documentation of Campanian Carnival, Rossi describes

stories of young men who wanted to tell us, wearing lipstick, suspender belts under their miniskirts and acrylic furs, that it was only on these days that they were women, but that the rest of the year they were real macho men. And they would immediately hold hands with us women and talk to us in a fantastic delirium about their underwear, periods, and even abortions, with a richness of particulars which seemed to approach firsthand personal experience (219).

141

Cross dressing at the Carnival of Tufara, Molise, 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Like Calabria, Campania features a wide range of spectacular Good Friday processions. On the island of Procida in the Gulf of Naples, a shrouded seventeenth century wooden image of Christ is carried in silence at dawn through the streets by hooded members of the local religious confraternity, attended by a heart-rending Baroque image of Christ’s grieving mother, the Madonna Addolorata.

142

The Madonna Addolorata is carried by members of the local confraternity in the Good Friday procession, Procida, Campania, March 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The emotional drama of this traditional popular re-enactment of Christ’s death seems to completely upstage the official Church celebrations to mark his resurrection two days later on Easter Sunday. Certainly for many members of the Neapolitan subproletariat, the official Easter celebrations marking the high point of the Church year are utterly overshadowed by their own competing activities associated with the ‘extraliturgical’ cult of the Festa della Madonna dell'Arco, whose feast day is celebrated at Pomigliano outside Naples the Monday after Easter (De Simone, 1974, 25-31; Vacca, 2004; D’Agostino & Vespasiano, 2000). If anything continues to represents Southern Italian popular traditional practice in its full and antique power, then it is the cult of this fierce Vesuvian goddess, probably the last functioning possession cult in Europe outside Pentecostalism.

143

‘The most authentically popular festival in Campania’ (De Simone, 1974, 25): fujenti from all over the greater Naples area converge on foot in squadre on the shrine of the Madonna dell’Arco in Pomigliano on Easter Monday, 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The radical social otherness of her devotees and the grotesque drama of their crisis in the sanctuary before the Madonna dell’Arco renders this cult irreducible to any revivalist schema; it is both inaccessible to participation by middle class urban actors and impossible to assimilate within the revivalist mythos of peasant utopia. Instead of actively participating in this event, revivalists are relegated to the sidelines as consumers of this distinctly ‘other’ proletarian spectacle.

144

During the annual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, where devotees bring their existential travails before the Madonna, many collapse in the sanctuary Source:

in

a

state

of

hysteria.

Photo:

Mimmo

Jodice

1972.

. [21 September 2011]. [Image

removed due to copyright restrictions.] To better observe the squadre (teams) of fujenti (‘runners’) arriving nearby, members of Naples’ folk elite gather for lunch at the bar just across the road from the sanctuary. For just like the climax of the traditional El Rocío pilgrimage in Andalusia, this setting offers cosmopolitan outsiders a useful opportunity ‘to be seen’ (Crain, 1992, 100).

145

The Neapolitan cult of the Souls in Purgatory, Cimitero delle Fontanelle, Naples. Photo: Massimo Siragusa, from Mari (2010, 84). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Two other important popular Campanian cults also seem to highlight and unmask Campanian revivalism’s differential reappropriation of popular tradition. In the cult of Le anime del Purgatorio (Souls in Purgatory), still practised by members of the marginalised Neapolitan sub-proletariat, devotees pray to human skulls kept in subterranean church crypts in Naples (Giordano, 2001; Vacca, 2004). The cult was officially banned by the Church in 1969, and popular devotees’ continued maintenance of the cult remains a source of ecclesiastical embarrassment. Through various artifices, the Church has now managed to close access to all but one of the crypts where devotees in Naples go to seek contact with the human skulls which embody the ‘Anime del Purgatorio’.

146

Wall niche on a street in Naples with traditional shrine to the Souls in Purgatory. Note skull, ‘soul’ figures licked by flame (one of them a priest), and the figure of the Madonna del Carmelo (centre), a key divine intermediary between the liminal space of Purgatory and the divine realm. Photo: Bennetts.

This cult is yet another area of traditional popular culture which seems inaccessible and unattractive to revivalist ideology and practice. Similarly, the much celebrated twice yearly ritual of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, although a key preoccupation for local popular actors (De Simone, 1974; Vacca, 2004), is not a substantial focus of revivalist activity. As in other regions, Campanian folk revivalism has thus focussed selectively on a number of specific elements within the local folk repertoire while neglecting others.

147

A Campanian driver invokes the protection of the Madonna di Montevergine and Naples’ patron saint, San Gennaro, Naples, 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

After the spectacular opening to the Campanian Madonna cycle at the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco in Pomigliano, the series of Madonna festivals with their associated tammurriata performances continues throughout the spring and summer months of the traditional agricultural cycle (Canzanella, 2002). During Sabato dei Fuochi and the weeklong festivities associated with the Madonna a Castello, devotees make mountain pilgrimages to the lip of Somma Vesuviana overlooking the volcano. In the picturesque Festa della Madonna delle Galline (Madonna of the Chickens), the statue of the local Madonna is processed for twelve hours through the streets of Pagani in a bizarre Felliniesque contraption attended by live doves roosting in her hair and chickens and ducks nestling at her feet.

148

La Madonna delle Galline, accompanied by chickens, geese, ducks, peacocks and doves, during her patronal festival in Pagani, March 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

This event is followed soon afterwards by the Festa della Madonna dei Bagni at Scafati, while the Festa della Madonna dell'Avvocata at Maiori takes place at a wooded mountain top sanctuary reached after a strenuous three hour pilgrimage on foot from the Amalfi Coast below. Attending this festa allowed me to reconstruct imaginatively what a traditional festa like the one at Polsi must have been like before it was linked to the outside world by road (see Chapter Five).

149

Pilgrims to the Festa Madonna dell’Avvocata arrive on foot and then camp overnight in the forest. Campania, July 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The cycle of Madonna festivals associated with the summer agricultural cycle which had opened at the spring equinox with the Festa della Madonna dell’Arco then closes at the autumn equinox with the Festa della Madonna di Montevergine in September (Canzanella, 2002, 37).

The cultural infrastructure of popular tradition in Campania is far less threadbare than Salento, yet under increasing pressure from the forces of modernity than is the case in many parts of rural Calabria. Campanian revivalism and the traditional peasant milieu with which it lives in symbiotic relationship thus seems to stand midway between the primordialist tendencies of Monica’s Calabrian revivalism and the postmodern reworking of traditions which have all but disappeared in Salento.

As in Calabria, the social milieu of Campanian rural tradition is culturally ‘other’ for urban revivalists, yet the nearby Campanian hinterland is far more easily accessible by public transport or car. The proximity of a large urban centre like Naples has thus facilitated a huge influx of urban revivalist actors within the fragile cultural spaces of local feste popolari. Despite the festival’s still largely ‘traditional’ character, disruption 150

by outsiders visible at the 2003 Festa della Madonna delle Galline in Pagani recalled similar phenomena associated with the Festa di San Rocco in Salento. As witnessed in my later account of Ester’s revivalist circle (Chapter Four), there seems to be a closer level of interaction and integration between urban and local traditional actors in the Campanian revivalist scene than in the Calabrian one, due perhaps to the greater geographical proximity of their respective milieus.

As recounted above, the countercultural student milieu which emerged at the Orientale in the wake of the 1990 ‘La Pantera’ student movement was a critical site for the incubation of second wave Campanian revivalism in the mid-1990s. The University of Salerno at Fisciano has been another key node for the development of Campanian revivalism, although this has taken place in a more mainstream institutional mode than at the Orientale, especially through the activities of anthropologist Professor Paolo Apolito of the University’s Department of Heritage Studies. At the annual Campus in Festa event held each July, the 1970s modernist University of Salerno campus at Fisciano becomes the setting for an extraordinary smorgasbord of Southern Italian popular spectacle, presented on stage and compered by Apolito, to the adulation of his youthful student audience.

The scholar as revivalist: anthropologist Paolo Apolito comperes the 2003 ‘Campus in Festa’, a smorgasboard of Southern Italian popular spectacle held each year at the University of Salerno at Fisciano. Photo: Bennetts. 151

The 2003 programme featured the Salentine danza della scherma (performed with real knives by two of the local gypsies I had encountered at the Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli the year before), part of the Good Friday liturgy presented by the Confraternity of the Madonna del Carmine di San Marco dei Cavoti (Benevento) in full kit, a delirious half hour recreation of the Carnival of Montemarano, the ballo ad intreccio (Carnival dance around the Maypole) and more. Revivalists were disappointed by the cancellation from the programme of yet another spectacular event – o’ ciuccio ‘e

fuoco – in which replicas of a donkey and a pig are traditionally blown to pieces with fireworks to celebrate the feast of Sant’Antonio, the patron saint of farm animals. In 2003, a slight air of academic sobriety was conferred on this carnivalesque atmosphere by ethnographic films, a seminar and the launch of a book and exhibition of ethnographic photos by celebrated anthropologist of Southern Italy, the late Annabella Rossi.

The Campanian folk scene is particularly emblematic of the sometimes odd collaboration in Southern Italian revivalism between ‘fricchettoni e portatori della tradizione’: urban hippies or leftwing students and elderly locals from a peasant background who are exponents of the ‘rediscovered’ local folk traditions. Within the Naples CSO milieu, hip hop and tammurriata coexist in a vertiginous form of postmodern hybridity, as Campanian Madonna festivals meet the dreadlocked ‘No Global’ movement. These contradictions are perfectly captured in the cover photo of 99 Posse’s most celebrated album, ‘Curre, curre guaglió’(1996), in which a tricornhatted Carabiniere in nineteenth century ceremonial garb accompanies a gold-plated image of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, in a procession past the disreputable exterior of the Officina 99 Centro Sociale daubed with leftist slogans.

152

. ‘No Eviction, No Repression Will Ever Stop Our Struggle’: Naples’ patron saint, San Gennaro, processes past the disreputable exterior of the Officina 99 Occupied Social Centre on the cover of Neapolitan hip hop group 99 Posse’s celebrated 1993 album ‘Curre Curre Guaglió’.

In 2002, Neapolitan folk legend Marcello Colasurdo, flanked by a phalanx of dreadlocked ‘No Globals’, staged a controversial protest at Montevergine against the Abbot’s decision to ban femminielli (traditional Neapolitan transvestites) from the Sanctuary courtyard during the pilgrimage to Montevergine held for the Festa della Candelora (Canzanella, 2002, 140n72). This incident seemed to embody perfectly the cultural contradictions in the Campanian revivalist scene between local peasant Catholicism and a left wing revivalist youth culture, in which gay rights coexisted uneasily with a revivalist notion of the virtues of a somewhat nebulously defined ‘popular tradition’.

153

The variable survival of popular traditional practices

Revivalist subjectivity is deeply structured by the strong dichotomy which still persists in contemporary Italy between a metropolitan core and the culturally ‘other’ milieu associated with the rural periphery. Relative geographical or cultural isolation may determine the very survival of traditional cultural practices or languages within the contemporary world, and the rate at which they are subject to cultural transformation, hybridisation or even extinction through exposure to outside influences (cf. Nettle & Romaine, 2000). In a 1958 study of the ancient tradition of funeral lamentation in Southern Italy, de Martino noted for instance that:

If in fact we try to build a diachronic map of the progressive disappearance of laments among European peasants, we would see how the first to lose them were the countries and the regions that entered earlier within the orbit of the industrial revolution and the development of an entrepreneurial urban bourgeoisie, whereas the last were those countries and regions that persisted longer in their social structure of pre-capitalist and semi-feudal relations (1975, 354, quoted and translated in Di Nola, 1998, 159).

Variations in the survival of the pre-modern cultural forms which are the focus of revivalist interest similarly reflect the differential penetration of industrialisation, modernisation and related processes within Southern Italy. It can thus be argued that Monica’s regionally differentiated league table of ‘traditional authenticity’ is grounded in clearly observable regional cultural variations which directly correlate with the unevenness of post-war Italian industrial development.

For Hardt and Negri (2001), Italy was transformed after the Second World War from a ‘predominantly peasant based society’ through two successive Italian ‘economic miracles’: the ‘furious if incomplete modernisation and industrialisation’ of the 1950s and 1960s, followed in the 1970s and 1980s by a second ‘economic miracle’ of postmodernisation: 154

The Italian economy did not complete one stage (industrialization) before moving on to another (informatization). Various regions will evolve to have peasant

elements

mixed

with

partial

industrialization

and

partial

informatization. The economic stages are thus all present at once, merging into a hybrid, composite economy that varies not in kind, but in degree (2001, 2889; cf. Kertzer, 1983, 55; Tak, 2000, 241).

In rural Calabria, there is often a strong contrast between the more archaic value system still prevailing in the hinterland and the more contemporary values found in coastal towns where tourism, commerce and access to wider communications networks have a stronger influence. On the Ionian coast, towns like Riace Marina are typically paired with their homonymous twins situated on higher ground further inland like Riace Superiore. In one expression of localist campanilismo, Riace resident Piero contrasted what he saw as the strong maintenance in his home town of Riace Superiore of i valori (the positive moral and cultural values which for him were embodied in local ‘tradition’) with what he saw as the deculturation and greater commoditisation of social relations in the coastal twin of Riace Marina:

Riace Superiore has maintained its identity, but those [people down in Riace Marina] have no identity: all the scum, the most stupid of all, we sent down there. They think we are backward compared to them, but there you could never organise a traditional food festival; it would be outside its proper habitat. They no longer have any contact with their traditions; all they’re interested in is mobile phones and motor scooters.

155

View from Riace Superiore towards Riace Marina and the sea. Photo: Bennetts.

As noted previously, the traditional reproduction of local popular tradition in Salento has been more dramatically disrupted by outside influences than either Calabria or Campania. Salento’s flat and open topography, with its short distances between towns, has probably made the area more permeable to external influences than is the case in the often remote and mountainous regions which are the focus of Campanian and Calabrian revivalism. Vacca in fact (2002) describes Puglia as one of the most modernised regions in the whole of Southern Italy, while Vercellone has argued that the characteristic Italian dualism between industrially developed zones and industrially backward zones has more recently been

…displaced so as to be internal to the South itself. This explains in large part the division that emerged in the period from 1975 to 1990 between the dynamism of the Adriatic South (the eastern provinces of Abruzzo, Puglia, and Molise) and the downward slide of the ‘deep South’ along a Mafia mode, which during the 1960s [had] developed only in Sicily (1996, 83).

156

The revivalist itinerary in practice

In the ‘revivalist itinerary’ I have outlined, the axes of time and place intersect at a number of major feste popolari held on specific dates and at specific places in Calabria, Campania and Puglia, each featuring particular sets of localised cultural practices. I have reproduced below an example of one such ‘revivalist itinerary’ from Naples. Here, there is an obvious Neapolitan bias towards tammurriata events held in surrounding Campania, with only three feste popolari from Calabria and neighbouring Basilicata (Pollino, Polsi, Alessandria del Carretto) and three from Salento (Galatina, San Vito and San Rocco) being featured.

TABLE TWO: A CALENDAR OF FESTE POPOLARI

Source: . [6 September 2011]. *=events attended during fieldwork. DANCE FORM

Tammurriata

Tammurriata

DATE

FESTA POPOLARE

LOCATION & PROVINCE

17 January

*Fuochi di Sant’

San Antonio Abate

(evening)

Antonio

(Napoli)

2 February (morning) Carnival Sunday,

Tarantella

Carnival and Sunday after

Candelora

*Carnival of Montemarano

Montevergine (Avellino)

Montemarano (Avellino)

Carnival Tammurriata

Tammurriata

Easter Monday

*Madonna

Sant'Anastasia

(morning)

dell'Arco

(Napoli)

Easter Monday (afternoon)

Tammurriata

Easter Tuesday

Tammurriata

Saturday after

Madonna dell'Arco

Pineta Fabbroncini – Terzigno (Napoli)

Santa Maria a

Nocera Inferiore

Monte

(Salerno)

*Sabato dei Fuochi

Somma Vesuviana

157

Easter Tammurriata

Sunday after Easter

Tammurriata

Sunday after Easter

Tarantella

Tammurriata

Tammurriata

Tammurriata

Tammurriata

Pizzica Tarantata

Tarantella

Tammurriata

Last Sunday of April

Festa delle paranze *Madonna delle Galline

(Napoli) Pagani (Salerno)

Tammurriata

Villa di Briano

giuglianese

(Caserta)

Festa della Pita

Alessandria del Carretto (Cosenza)

*Madonna a

Somma Vesuviana

Castello

(Napoli)

Wednesday before

*Madonna dei

Fosso dei Bagni -

Ascension

Bagni

Scafati (Salerno)

3 May

Ascension Sunday (afternoon-night)

Madonna dei Bagni

Monday after

*Madonna

Pentecost

dell'Avvocata

29 June

San Paolo – le tarantate

Fosso dei Bagni Scafati (Salerno) Maiori (Salerno) Chapel of San Paolo, Galatina (Lecce)

First Friday and

Madonna del

Terranova del

Saturday in July

Pollino

Pollino (Potenza)

Sant'Anna a Lettere

Lettere (Napoli) Tricase (Lecce)

Saturday after 26 July

Pizzica

8 August

San Vito

Tammurriata

14 August

Materdomini

Pizziche

15 August

Tarantella

31 August

Tarantella

1 & 2 September

*San Rocco - danza delle spade

*San Rocco

Nocera Superiore (Salerno) Torre Paduli (Lecce)

Roccella Jonica (RC)

*Madonna della

Polsi (Reggio

Montagna

Calabria)

158

Tammurriata

12 September

Tarantella

24 September

Tammurriata

16 October

Tammurriata

22 October

Tammurriata

31 December (afternoon-dawn)

*Madonna di

Montevergine

Montevergine

(Avellino)

San Michele

Sala Consilina

Arcangelo

(Salerno)

an. Gerardo a Maiella

Contursi (Salerno)

Madonna della

Torre Annunziata

Neve

(Napoli)

La frasca

Poggiomarino (Napoli)

What differentiates ‘philological’ revivalists like Monica and Ester from the ‘spontaneous’ ‘No Global’ revivalists later described at the Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli in Salento is their fuller immersion in the revivalist itinerary outlined above. With its emphasis on engagement with the culturally ‘other’ as a means for the cultivation of sensibility, the contemporary Southern Italian revivalist itinerary seems to me to parallel the Grand Tour itinerary popular among young upper-class northern Europeans from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Bignamini & Wilton, 1996; Hibbert, 1969; Hudson, 1993; Chaney 1998a; Burke, 1978).

The apparently self-evident nature of the ‘revivalist itinerary’ masks interesting questions about its culturally-constructed nature. As we have seen, there is a selective focus on some popular traditions and a neglect of others, in the same way that the Grand Tour canon privileged classical art, while dismissing Gothic, early Renaissance and Baroque art as barbarous: on a visit to Assisi in 1786, Goethe stopped to admire a Roman temple of Minerva, but did not even bother entering the ‘dreary Duomo of St Francis’ containing Giotto’s now celebrated late Gothic frescoes of the life of St Francis (Goethe, 1970, 120ff.; cf. Hughes, 2011, 327-71).

159

‘…whether or not he brought back a classical landscape of the “holy ground” he had trod…the Grand Tourist was almost bound to have his portrait made there. It would be set in a vista of the Eternal City with the Colosseum or Castel S. Angelo…in the background, pointing with a pink and didactic hand at some exemplary work from the glorious Roman past…See! This is what I have seen, and in some sense appropriated! And just as I have returned with this painting, so I have come back with the knowledge of the cultural setting that it implies!’ (Hughes, 2011, 340). ‘British Connoisseurs in Rome’ [in front of the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine], by James Russell c. 1750. Source: Bignamini & Wilton, 1996, 88).

[Image removed due to copyright

restrictions.] The most obvious criterion for the selection of events in the revivalist calendar reproduced above is the association of a specific local dance form with each of the feste popolari listed. With its strongly vitalist tendencies, second wave revivalism tends to privilege popular forms which allow revivalists the possibility of active participation as protagonists, such as dance. At a primary level, ‘the revivalist itinerary’ also seems to be patterned by revivalist desire focussed around the notion of ‘traditional authenticity’, and by the regional variability in the survival of popular traditions which are held to embody this quality: on this basis, revivalists typically 160

exclude Northern Italy. Despite the reputation of Sicily and Sardinian for vibrant feste popolari and traditional popular music forms (for Sicily, see Sciascia & Scianna, 1965; Perricone, 2007; Bonanzinga, 2011; Garigliano, 2011) they are both entirely absent from this canonical itinerary. This can perhaps be explained by their relatively greater inaccessibility from the mainland, the frightening and criminal reputation of their hinterlands (cf Clark, 1996; Heatherington, 2001 for Sardinia), and the absence of a major regional dance form which commands revivalist attention at a national level in the way pizzica, tarantella or tammurriata do. Although there are certainly Sicilian and Sardinian versions of tarantella, and one can certainly speak of localised Sicilian and Sardinian folk revivals (cf Bonanzinga, 2011, 196 for Sicily), these regional folk scenes have had no major resonance on a national level outside these two regions, in contrast to the Campanian, Calabrian and Salentine revivals, which have drawn in urban revivalists from all over Italy.

Within Southern Italian revivalist discourse, Basilicata seems to be implicitly bracketed with Calabria, perhaps because of its shared tarantella tradition and weak sense of regional identity (Levy, 1996a, 15). There is also some revivalist interest in minor regional dance forms such as the saltarello of rural Abruzzo and Lazio, the tarantella of the Gargano region in Northern Puglia, and the tarantella of Montemarano associated with the town’s celebrated Carnival. However, this last dance form is traditionally performed only during Carnival, rather than all year round like pizzica, tammurriata and tarantella, thus reducing its potential as a revivalist mode of expressivity.

It will be obvious from the previous survey of key revivalist events like the Festa della Madonna delle Galline, Festa della Madonna di Polsi and Festa della Candelora that the spectacular or bizarre nature of some of these feste popolari makes them more likely to be elevated into the revivalist canon. Typically, however, this tends to be the case only if such events provide urban cosmopolitan actors with the opportunity for embodied expression as protagonists through dance. As highlighted earlier in relation to the Campanian cults of the Souls in Purgatory and Madonna dell’Arco, some spectacular feste popolari or folk traditions cannot be readily assimilated into 161

revivalism’s optimistic pastoral vision, whilst the radical social otherness of the popular milieu in which these practices are embedded at times renders them impermeable to revivalist actors, who tend overwhelmingly to be from middle class backgrounds.

Although revivalist activity is frequently focussed around the remote provincial backblocks, these obscure festa popolare venues are now increasingly accessible via sealed roads, private cars, funicular railways and even helicopters, thus facilitating the burgeoning presence and cultural impact on such events of cosmopolitan urban actors (including Australian anthropologists).

‘Ormai al nord non c’è più niente’: North and South in the revivalist imaginary

Although the first revival did manifest itself in Calabria, Campania and Salento, it was more strongly focussed, as we have seen, around Northern Italy, where a strong local tradition of worker and protest songs and a class conscious industrial proletariat provided circumstances which were congenial to the first revival political aspiration of deploying ‘subaltern culture’ as an instrument for revolutionary political struggle.

By contrast, second wave revivalists frequently describe the North as an area of Italy where ‘ormai non c’è più niente’ [‘there’s nothing left’]; a place in which popular traditional practices have been more or less erased by industrialisation and capitalist modernity. It is Southern Italy, sometimes represented as ‘un serbatoio delle tradizioni popolari’ (reservoir of popular tradition), which has now become the focus of second wave revivalists’ desire to experience ‘authentic’ peasant traditions at first hand.

I initially took such revivalist representations of Northern Italy at face value, but now realise that I was greatly limited in my ability to critique them through my own lack of familiarity with and fieldwork in Northern Italy. The conventional Southern Italian revivalist notion that ‘ormai al nord non c’è più niente’ was only finally destabilised for me when I curated Angelo Maggio’s photographic exhibition on Carnival in the small towns of Calabria/Basilicata and the Northern Italian Alps for the 2010 162

Fremantle Carnevale (Bennetts, 2010). Angelo’s exhibition clearly highlighted the extraordinary vigour and traditional character of Carnival practices still strongly maintained in some remote Northern Italian towns. To my surprise, Angelo also observed that despite Calabria and Basilicata’s reputation for spectacular feste popolari, the Carnival tradition was in fact far stronger in Northern Italy than the South. He also found it deeply ironic that so many countercultural folk enthusiasts in Milan were fixated upon the Salentine pizzica in distant Southern Puglia, and yet apparently oblivious of the vibrant Carnival dance traditions still being maintained virtually on their doorstep in the nearby Lombard town of Bagolino. (He also added that far from experiencing the emotional ‘coldness’ some revivalist informants associated with Northern Italy, he as a Calabrian had been welcomed in each of these Northern Italian towns with the same degree of warmth and hospitality to which he was accustomed in rural Calabria!).

‘Ormai al nord non c’è più niente’?: a scene from the vibrant Carnival of Schignano in Northern Italy, 2007. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] This stock Southern Italian revivalist representation of Northern Italy is also challenged by Holmes’ account (1989) of the persistence of popular tradition in Friuli, 163

and by the revitalisation of or ongoing vitality of Northern popular traditional practices in areas like Trento (Poppi, 1992; Poppi & Morelli, 1998; Carnival King of Europe, 2009), Venice (Falassi, 2004; Feil, 1998), Siena (Silverman, 1979), Piedmonte (Bravo, 2001, 187-205; 2005), Veneto (Filippucci, 1992; 2002; Baldassar, 2001) and South Tyrol (Ridler, 2002). The contemporary revivalist focus on Southern Italy cannot then be entirely explained by the apparently commonsense thesis of ‘regionally uneven industrial development’ outlined above. As suggested in Schneider’s ‘neo-Orientalist’ thesis (1998a), there are clearly ideological ramifications to the contemporary revivalist focus on Southern Italy. Despite the vibrant festive traditions of the Italian Alps (and many other areas of the North: see for instance the Italian Touring Club’s guide to popular traditional events throughout Italy: 2001), the South seems to lend itself better to Orientalist exoticisation. Because of its more recent emergence from a predominantly peasant economy, Southern Italy also seems to provide a more suitable imaginative backdrop to the revivalist search for a utopian space ‘outside’ globalised capitalist modernity (Parkins, 2004; cf. Kahn, 1995, 48-75).

Deterritorialisation/Reterritorialisation

For a hardline ‘philological’ revivalist like Pino Gala, learning tango, salsa or Italian popular dance forms from outside one’s own region, instead of trying to keep alive rare local popular dance forms, is seen as a perverse act of cultural bad faith. One of his students summarised Gala’s position as follows:

[For Pino,] getting involved in other types of dance is like being a sellout, doing something consumerist, like going to a supermarket instead of doing something closer to the grass roots…And from one point of view, he’s right: if you live in a place where 10 kilometres away there are dances on the verge of disappearing, maybe it’s wrong to be studying Irish folk dance.

Through its valorisation of the local, revivalist ideology at times appears to act as a reterritorialising counterforce to the processes of deterritorialisation which are such a fundamental feature of contemporary capitalist globalisation (Gupta & Ferguson, 164

1992; Tsing, 2000). At other times however, revivalist practice embodies these same deterritorialising processes, as traditional popular practices are staged in new locales far from their place of origin. At the Scirocco Festival of Salentine culture held each year in Rome, Salento’s Festa di San Martino celebrating the arrival of the new wine is transplanted to the decaying Fordist husk of the ex-SNIA-Viscosa Centro Sociale Occupato. One ARPA weekend tarantella course took place at the DAMS dance school in the plush Prati area, much frequented by the quintessentially cosmopolitan habitués of Rome’s modelling scene. There, tarantella took its place on the global dance menu alongside tango, salsa and other dance forms from all over the world. Despite its celebration of the local, the replication of spectacular and geographicallyspecific events like the Carnival of Montemarano at the University of Salerno’s Campus in Festa epitomises the postmodern disembedding of cultural practices from place (the traditional festa location at Montemarano) and time (the specific annual Carnival period), and their virtualised representation on stage within a modernist cultural smorgasbord format which recalls the delocalising practices of World Music (Feld 1995, 2000).

The

deterritorialisation

of

popular

tradition:

the

Confraternity

of

the

Madonna del Carmine di San Marco dei Cavoti (Benevento) performs part of the Good Friday liturgy before students at the 2003 Campus in Festa. Photo: Bennetts. 165

Even in more traditional settings such as the Carnival of Montemarano, ‘spontaneous’ revivalists invariably perform dances from outside the region like pizzica and tammurriata, much to the horror of more ‘philologically’ minded revivalists, who see this as an insult to the local tarantella of Montemarano, considered the only dance form appropriate for that place and occasion. Pizzica is by far the most mobile of these dance forms, and was even danced (undoubtedly for the first time ever) on Rottnest Island off the coast of Western Australia at the wedding of one Salentine informant in March 2005.

In 2003, the Festival della Zampogna at Maranola, heartland of the Ciociarian bagpipe, also attracted a French musician playing an equivalent instrument from Alsace Lorraine, and a member of a multinational Scottish bagpipe band based in Rome. Inevitably, there were also some ‘spontaneous’ revivalists who insisted on dancing pizzica, provoking a disgusted response from Calabrian musician Danilo Gatto: ‘Anche qua! Ma la pizzica non c’entra un cazzo colla zampogna!’ (‘Even here! But pizzica has fuck all to do with the zampogna!’).

Conclusion

My focus in this chapter has been on the construction by revivalists who live in major cities of a ‘revivalist itinerary’ out of the three major Southern Italian folk traditions which are foregrounded within revivalist practice. In Chapter Seven, I provide a more detailed case study of Salentine revivalism as a way of assessing the significance of ethnoregionalist ideology within contemporary Southern Italian revivalism generally. In the following chapter, my accounts of four different revivalist informants are used to exemplify revivalists’ distinctive subjectivity and their contrasting orientations towards il mondo popolare.

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CHAPTER FOUR: WHY REVIVALISM? A PRELIMINARY EXPLORATION OF REVIVALIST SUBJECTIVITY

ARPA’s Francesca Trenta, Monica Neri and Andrea Delle Monache, Tarantellapower (Festival di Caulonia), August 2002. During the revolutionary ‘repubblica rossa’ briefly established in Caulonia in 1945, Communist rebels imprisoned members of the local Fascist gentry in the caged structure across the road. Photo: Angelo Maggio.

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Introduction

Why have some contemporary city dwellers in a modern society like Italy suddenly become so interested in a set of cultural practices originating in the marginalised world of Southern Italian peasant society? In order to put flesh to this phenomenon, I commence the following preliminary investigation of revivalist sensibility with an account of Campanian informant Ester and the popular cultural milieu within which she has embedded herself. Her attempts to wholeheartedly engage with the actors, culture and values of the Campanian mondo popolare seem to me to clearly embody many of the specific values of contemporary revivalism, and to go to the heart of revivalism’s distinctive subjectivity.

I subsequently compare and contrast Ester’s revivalist motivations and orientation towards il mondo popolare with those of three other revivalists. For Michele, an older Communist Refoundation activist from the city of Torre del Greco south of Naples, the distinctive subaltern world of the festa popolare is experienced as a utopian space where globalised capitalism (symbolised for him by Berlusconi), has not yet arrived. Left politics is also a strong constituent element in the brand of revivalism promoted by Anna Nacci, a well known Rome-based ideologue of ‘spontaneous’ urban revivalism. Yet her engagement with il mondo popolare seems superficial compared to that of Michele. Finally, Gianfranco, a young tammurriata musician from the Campanian backblocks, articulates a distinctively localist critique of what he sees as the negative impact of urban revivalists on local cultural space within his own rural community.

Ester: ‘the revivalist’s revivalist’

I first met Ester, an ebullient strawberry blonde anthropology student from Naples in her late twenties during the patronal festival of Saints Cosimo and Damiano (‘la Festa dei Santi Medici’) held each September in the Calabrian hill town of Riace on the Ionian coast (Plastino, 2003). With a dozen others, mostly university students of a 168

similar age from Rome, we were taking part in a stage [study visit] organised around the festival by the Calabrian revivalist Associazione ARPA, and were billeted in houses renovated in the town’s picturesque centro storico by the local revivalistinspired co-operative Associazione Città Futura. My path had thus intersected with Ester’s at one of the many staging posts in the great revivalist summer calendar of feste popolari held in small towns across Campania, Calabria and Puglia.

Festa dei Santi Medici, Saints Cosimo & Damiano, Riace, Calabria, September 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

With her colourful Neapolitan accent and vivid accounts of le carovane, convoys of gypsy, musician and street performer friends with whom she would spend her summers roving Southern Italy in a campervan, Ester cut a romantic figure. As recounted in the previous chapter, the Campanian folk revival of the early 1990s had been intertwined with the reappearance of a traditional Neapolitan subculture of travelling girovaghi and saltimbanchi (wandering street performers: Teatro Regresso Girovago, 1996) and stimulated by the reclamation of public space in Naples through Bassolino’s urban regeneration programme (Ginsborg, 2001, 316; Rossi, 2004a). 169

Ester’s brother, a sociology student in Naples, had begun his own discovery of popular tradition as a saltimbanco. A shared interest in Campanian folk music had provided Ester and her brother with an introduction to the otherwise culturally inaccessible world of the Campanian Rom community, a powerful demonstration of folk music’s capacity to provide common ground for intercultural dialogue. After gaining acceptance, Ester had even learned some of the Rom language, and she and I compared notes on our respective experiences of the marginalised and exotic ‘other’ in Aboriginal Australia and the Southern Italian Rom community.

Ester joins in the singing at the Festa dei Santi Medici, Riace, Calabria, September 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Ester lived in the historic heart of Naples in the auspiciously named ‘Casa de Martino’, a household of studenti fuori sede

8

from the Southern Italian provinces. This

household was to become the base for my initial explorations of the tammurriata scene in the Circumvesuviana region of the Neapolitan hinterland, an area where the dance is

8

Students from the provinces who come to the city to study and live in student residential accommodation.

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still practiced by locals and which has become the main focus of Campanian revivalist activity. ‘Casa de Martino’ conformed to the traditional Neapolitan model, with a series of interconnecting rooms around a central courtyard. Entering via the front door, one passed directly through Ester’s bedroom, which provided a fitting introduction to her personal revivalist imaginary: the room was festooned with no less than five Campanian tammorre, one Salentine tamburello, a zampogna (Calabrian bagpipes), pictures of her Rom friends and her brother playing a zampogna, an illustrated calendar of tammurriata festivals, santini (small printed images of local saints), and other souvenirs from Southern Italian religious festivals, as well as a large Southern Italian folk music collection, including a complete set of Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare albums and many of ethnomusicologist Pino Gala’s superb field recordings, and a library of the classic texts on popular tradition, including, of course, de Martino’s La terra del rimorso (1961). To provide some measure of privacy, Ester had designed and built herself a strange hanging timber bedchamber suspended from the rafters. When some years later I saw Neapolitan comic Totò’s film version of the classic Scarpetta comedy Miseria e nobiltà set in proletarian nineteenth century Naples, I immediately recognised the original model, as Totò emerged from his popular traditional Neapolitan bed chamber in the opening scene of the film.

Ester’s engagement with the world of popular tradition was conceived as a holistic enterprise: she rolled her own cigarettes from a pouch of tobacco (never smoking Marlboro tailor-mades), drank only homemade wine produced by elderly peasant friends in the Campanian back blocks, and never ate meat or eggs bought in a shop in Naples, only those which had come from the countryside.

In a place like Southern Italy where food, eating and cooking are such key cultural signifiers, the provincial heartland is highly valued as the source of all that is best in Southern Italian agricultural produce. At Casa de Martino, there was never much spare cash to go around, and yet flatmates Elena and Luca would return from weekends visiting their parents in Campobasso in Molise laden with bottles of home-made wine and olive oil and lashings of fresh meat, fruit, eggs, cakes and verdure sott’olio [bottled vegetables]. What household members ate and drank at Casa de Martino was 171

thus partly determined by a discourse of ‘authenticity’, in which revivalist values overlapped with longstanding Southern Italian culinary practice.

In contrast to Rome, I began to get a sense that many people living in Naples still maintained strong cultural and social networks reaching beyond the city into the provinces. These networks were articulated around notions of relationship to family, agricultural plenty and a rural retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city. In all of this, there was a strong parallel with the urban-rural exchange networks through which Campanian revivalism had also been constituted.

Although Ester’s family was well off, she made it a point of honour to support herself through her studies by performing as a tammurriata dancer and musician with a group of local musicians. I joined Ester for a number of musical expeditions with her tammurriata group, which was referred to as ’a paranza ‘ro Cicetto. The vivid collective noun paranza denotes an ensemble of popular musicians, and comes from the term used to describe the mixture of different types of fish pulled up in a fishing net, close perhaps, to the less colourful English term ‘fisherman’s basket’. Thus, a musical paranza might embrace any of the following elements, depending on which musicians were available on the day: tammorra, organetto, fischietto (whistle), ciaramella (folk oboe), putipù (described above) or tricchebballacche (a hinged percussion instrument). The group comprised Cicetto and Sabatino, two male musicians in their fifties from peasant backgrounds from the town of Pomigliano on the rural fringe of Naples, and a floating group of other male musicians who, though younger, came from a similarly popular and provincial milieu. Ester expertly bridged the cultural gap between the provinces and the wider urban revivalist network of the city, as well as providing the line-up with the additional bonus of an attractive young woman performer from the metropolis. I met Cicetto’s paranza for the first time one evening when they had been engaged to participate in a revivalist-inspired venture sponsored by the local council of Cicciano, a small town in the Circumvesuviana region outside Naples. The Festa di Sant'Antonio

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Abate had long disappeared from the town, but was now being reintroduced from other parts of Campania where the ritual still survived by a local revivalist scholar.

Our rendezvous point at Cicetto’s home in Pomigliano was a semi-rural oasis now being encroached on by urbanisation, a halfway house between city and country, with its grapevines, garden, and a nearby horse stable. Cicetto was a short stocky workerpeasant who had worked till his recent retirement in the former Alfasud factory in Pomigliano (Vacca, 1999; Holmes, 1989). Inside the house, I found a scene which was already familiar to me from rural Calabria, including pictures of Padre Pio on the wall and a convivial group of family and friends gathered around the dining room table drinking and eating homemade wine and sweets.

Wall niche with offerings to Padre Pio, whose image is ubiquitous throughout Southern Italy. Photo: Angelo Maggio, Taurianova, 2009 (‘L’incompiuto calabrese’ series). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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Cicetto and Ester immediately struck up a conversation in rapid Neapolitan, catching up on all the latest about mutual friends and upcoming music gigs. Ester described her relationship to these vecchietti (old people) as being almost like that of a member of the family: several of them, for instance, had expressed their consternation on learning that she had recently broken up with her folk musician boyfriend.

Ester had grown up in a middle class provincial family in Mercogliano, a small town outside the provincial capital of Avellino which lies on the pilgrimage route to the sanctuary of the most important Madonna within Campanian popular tradition, the black Madonna of Montevergine (Canzanella, 2002; De Simone, 1974). I later walked this pilgrimage route myself with Ester’s revivalist sister-in-law and a friend.

The mountaintop sanctuary of the Black Madonna of Montevergine, the central Madonna figure within Campanian popular rural cosmology, and a strong focus of revivalist interest. Source: cover of music cassette.

[Image removed due to

copyright restrictions.] The wild and mountainous area where Ester had grown up around Mercogliano was a teenager’s paradise; she described spending weekends up in the old mountain huts, 174

where far from the scrutiny of parents and townsfolk, she and her friends shared their first experiences of alcohol, sex and the cultivation of home-grown marijuana.

Despite an early acculturation into this somewhat modernised version of backwoods Campanian life, popular traditions such as tammurriata and the pilgrimage to Montevergine were not part of her family’s middle class cultural baggage: I don’t come from a family of tradition: my family is a very middle class one which has never taken part in these things. Instead, they tried to make us associate with people who were like them.

Although she was vaguely aware of the Festa della Madonna di Montevergine and had seen pilgrims climbing the path to her sanctuary, Ester had no idea what went on there, and for the time being pursued the same interests as any other mainstream young Italian. She did not become fully conscious of the world of Campanian popular tradition until 1994, when her brother took her for the first time to see tammurriata at a festa popolare in Somma Vesuviana. For Ester, it was to be a life-changing experience:

I was shocked. I don’t know how to explain it. I was swept away immediately: people were dancing with movements I’d never seen before; they were singing in a way I’d never heard. I felt I was in paradise, in another dimension which didn’t belong to this dimension here, but to something completely different. I can’t explain it.

In this classic narrative of the revivalist conversion experience, Ester seems to imagine herself slipping by chance into a vivid and archaic parallel universe on the fringes of modernity. As in similar accounts by many urban revivalists, the event had a dramatic emotional impact which was to reshape her life:

After this, I visited all the festivals: Puglia, Abruzzo, Calabria. As a woman on my own in this situation, in this rather chauvinistic environment, I had to earn the respect of the people who were part of this situation...I discovered my own 175

identity as a woman through the tammurriata: I discovered myself as a woman. Before this, I had no real idea of what it meant to be a woman. Through dancing and the tammorra, I really discovered myself: after all, what is more feminine than a woman dancing?

She started to learn to play tammorra, the large, deep-toned Campanian tambourine used to beat out the relentless tammurriata dance rhythm. Her first contacts with the Rom community came through music, with gypsy women who frequented the various Campanian festivals of the Madonna: ‘the women approached me first, because it’s unusual to see a woman who can play the tammorra’. Later i vecchietti began to invite her to dance or play in feste popolari and concerts: per i concerti, i vecchietti mi chiamano, mi dicono ‘uè Ester, tieniti libera per il

giorno tot, mettilo sul calendario, per fa’ ‘na suonata’. Mi vengono a piglia’, non ci stanno problemi; la macchina carica di soppressati, di vino, di formaggi paesani, e si parte, e si arriva là tutti brilleti e si sale direttamente sul palco!

[For concerts, the old people call me, saying ‘hey Ester, keep such-and-such a day free, write it in your diary, we’re playing.’ Then they come and pick me up…the car full of home-made wine, sausages and cheese, and off we go…then we all arrive a bit tipsy and go straight up onto the stage!]

Ester’s attraction to this milieu is deeply rooted in the range of synaesthetic experiences which are available to her in il mondo popolare, but which are increasingly marginalised from contemporary Italian urban life. In the following passage, the written transcript of the interview fails at times to capture the intense emotional timbre of her voice, or the pungent rustic flavour of the Campanian dialect she draws on in an attempt to represent her experience:

I like certain odours, a certain type of language, I like the colours, the tastes...You dance and sing, but what I like is the lifestyle...the houses made in a certain way. Pasta e faggioli [pasta and beans] made on a wood stove, not a gas one...the smell, the taste...it’s a style. I like how people speak. Instead of 176

saying ‘all’improvviso’ [suddenly] they say ‘’ndraste’ or ‘verrietti’...Waoh!... for me it’s like adrenaline - vrrrr! - in the blood...a whirlpool in my veins…

When I go to Zio Giannino’s house, which is made in the old fashioned way...I like it just like that. Those are the kind of things I look for...Today I went to Cicetto’s house. I was breathing in [sniffs], smelling...I don’t know how to explain: the pasta sauce was cooking on the stove, the smell of real pasta sauce, made with fresh basil from the garden which has grown in the ground...with the dog...the chicken. I like folk music, not because of the dancing and the singing - yes, that’s all part of it - but what I like is the lifestyle: folk music is a lifestyle.

It’s about sensations...I don’t know how to explain it...it’s like...when you’re with your boyfriend...no one can take it away from you. How can you explain sensations? There are no words for it...When I’m reaching orgasm...How on earth can you explain it? I can’t explain it in an interview, it’s a very personal thing [laughs] so there aren’t really the words to explain it: you just get goose bumps and that’s it…

Here, Ester expresses a typical revivalist scepticism about what an anthropologist such as myself could possibly discover of any value about ‘popular tradition’ using the ‘scientific’ methodology of an ethnographic interview. She is impatient with my attempts to intellectualise her experience of il mondo popolare, which for her is focussed on sensations and feelings which are scarcely amenable to verbalisation, let alone to digitisation or virtualisation.

In attempting to put into words her subjective emotional response to the festa popolare, Ester’s narrative recalls not only the language of religious conversion, but also draws on the imagery of sexual orgasm. I found a striking parallel in a later conversation with our mutual friend Gianfranco about the Carnival of Montemarano, the premier revivalist event of the Southern Italian Carnival season described earlier. I had seen Gianfranco earlier in the week at Montemarano, but later back in Naples asked him whether he had returned for the final day of celebrations. No, he had 177

answered; the previous day had left him so entirely satiated that he had not been able to face another day of it. In his characteristically earthy Campanian backwoods style, he posed me the following rhetorical question: ‘Ma tu quando hai già fatto l’orgasmo, la donna nuda ti fa ancora effetto?’ (After you have had an orgasm, does a naked woman continue to have any effect on you?).

Scholarly discourse is a major component in the constitution of revivalism, and one which Ester herself was attempting to master in her university studies. Yet its contradiction with the revivalist ethos of vitalism and subjectivism is at times glaringly apparent. Not perhaps by nature a scholar, Ester at times expressed her difficulty in reconciling her intense emotional response to the world of popular tradition with the requirements of a more intellectual and emotionally detached engagement with the anthropology of popular tradition. However, when she came to give her oral exam for her History of Popular Traditions course, she bridged the gap between theory and practice in magnificent style: arriving at the exam room armed with a Campanian tammorra and Salentine tamburello, she gave a virtuoso exposition on Salentine tarantism which gained her a 30 e lode, the highest possible mark.

Ester’s revivalist practice was conceived as a holistic lifestyle involving an almost spiritual cultivation of sensibility, in which authenticity of experience, the local, the artisanal and the homespun were privileged over the mass produced and the artificial. Her quest speaks powerfully to the revivalist recuperation of lost forms of experience increasingly marginalised within contemporary urban life, and her uncompromising attempts to fully embed herself in the world of il mondo popolare make her in many senses the ‘revivalist’s revivalist’. Yet at the same time, Ester distinguished herself culturally from le ragazze locali, local young women of her own age in the rural milieu she frequents. What makes her typical of many other urban revivalists is that she lives in a city, comes from a non-proletarian middle class background, and is studying at university. What distinguishes her from most of her urban revivalist peers however, is her upbringing in the rural provinces and her knowledge of the local dialect and distinctive social conventions of rural Campania, which have allowed her to penetrate and become a part of this milieu more fully than is possible for most other urban revivalists. 178

‘Berlusconi hasn’t arrived here yet’: il mondo popolare as utopian space outside globalised capitalism

During the weeklong Festa della Madonna a Castello in the Vesuvius region outside Naples, I took part in the traditional morning pilgrimage to the brow of Somma Vesuviana. Halting to catch our breath after the strenuous climb and take in the spectacular view of the nearby volcano, we settled down to a breakfast of homemade local wine, sausage, olives and bread. When one of the participants began passing around a bottle of Coca-Cola, another revivalist declined with the words ‘No thanks, today I want to drink something from Somma, not something American’.

For revivalists in a contemporary era of mass consumption and production for whom everything seems increasingly to be made of plastic or mass-produced, the notion of cultural authenticity becomes an increasing preoccupation, for as Baudrillard has remarked:

People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga (2000, 13).

Italian revivalists see dominant modes of cultural production within contemporary Italian capitalist society as alienating and ‘inauthentic’, direct expressions of the negative cultural and political values which for them are embodied in contemporary capitalism. Consequently, the notion of ‘authenticity’ and the search for where it is located is a key theme within revivalist discourse. As in the analogous Slow Food movement (Craig & Parkins, 2006; Leitch, 2003), this search often involves the resurrection of a notion of the local, and its re-embedding within local topography, as the ubiquitous globalised product (Coke) is rejected in favour of the ‘authentic’ and uniquely local one (the locally produced bottle of homemade wine). Whereas the ‘collapsing of time and space’ has been described as a characteristic feature of globalised postmodernity (Harvey, 1990; Rosaldo & Inda, 2002a), revivalist practice 179

seems to run in the opposite direction, by emphasising direct participation in traditional events rooted in specific localities, whose specific occurrences are determined not by modern cycles of capitalist production and consumption, but rather by pre-industrial agrarian rhythms.

Michele (l) and Enzo (r) en route to the Grotta di San Michele, Olevano sul Tusciano, Campania, May 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The revivalist conceptualisation of the festa popolare as an ideal space outside capitalist modernity became strikingly apparent to me during a pilgrimage to the Grotta di San Michele (Cave of St Michael) in the mountains of rural Campania which I attended with my urban revivalist friend Michele and his workmate Enzo in April 2003. After a picturesque climb through the forest, we arrived at the spectacular mountain cave where, according to local oral tradition, San Michele is said to have overcome Satan in single combat.

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We are warmly welcomed by a group of elderly locals who ply us with wine, sandwiches and cheese. One elderly man, whose dialect even Michele from nearby Torre del Greco cannot understand, had brought up all of these provisions on the back of a mule, which is tethered nearby.

‘Gente semplice’: traditionally-oriented locals at the Festa della Grotta di San Michele, Olevano sul Tusciano, Campania, May 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Later, the religious procession comes snaking up the steep mountain path preceded by drummers, trumpeters and a man playing a curious rustic fife. The image of San Michele is carried up the stairs into the cave by young local men, who then perform nine circuits around the sanctuary, accompanied by the musicians, before installing San Michele on a pedestal in the chapel. The devoti line up to touch the image of the saint, make the sign of the cross and mutter a quick prayer. Soon the priest will begin saying Mass.

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Young locals carry the statue of San Michele up to the Cave, Festa della Grotta di San Michele, Olevano sul Tusciano, Campania, May 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Although my friend Michele is an atheist member of the Communist Refoundation Party, he is having a whale of a time: as highlighted in the earlier quotation from Sciascia, Italian Communists often see no ideological contradiction in attending these kind of popular religious events. As we leave for home in a state of elation, he comments: ‘Berlusconi hasn’t arrived here yet.’

For Michele, this apparently uncontaminated slice of il mondo popolare and its charming traditional actors seemed to be a place in which capitalist modernity had not yet arrived. Within this milieu, the peasant idiom of generalised reciprocity still prevailed, giving a sense that we were still somehow outside the sphere of market relations. Crain has observed that many of her urban informants motivate their annual participation in the El Rocío pilgrimage in Andalusia by explaining that it offers them 182

‘the chance to be part of a community in which hospitality extends even to strangers…The emotional bonds which form during the pilgrimage, and the intensity of this experience for pilgrims is summarised by the term convivencia’, a traditional form of sociality characteristic of the festa popolare, which Crain describes as an example of Turner’s ‘spontaneous communitas’

9

(1992, 104).

Michele’s comment captures a key aspect of how many revivalists situate themselves and their revivalist activities in relation to globalised capitalism. Michele’s personification of Berlusconi seems to convey a powerfully spatial image of a kind of octopus reaching out to penetrate even the most remote nook and cranny of Southern Italy, in a bid to bring all under its sway. The key spatial metaphor associated with revivalism seems to be that of a search for the last corner of Italy where human beings and their culture remain untarnished by globalised capitalism, in an image recalling the Classical notion of Saturnia Regna, the pre-lapsarian Golden Age when humans once lived in virtue and harmony (Dodds, 1985). Southern Italian revivalism is thus conceived as a continuing quest for an authenticity which lies on the other side of a fast receding cultural frontier.

Yet capitalist modernity was waiting in ambush for us further down the mountain. Descending from the sacred grotto, we passed a group of local young people walking up to the sanctuary, one of them listening to a Walkman, as if it were inconceivable to enter the spectacular surrounding forest scenery without the cultural mediation of some kind of technological gadgetry. As usual during major rural social events, there were numerous young men burning up and down astride motorini [motor scooters] in a display of noisy vitality. Arriving at a picturesque stream in the valley, we found a young man with a video camera filming a couple embracing on a nearby rock, half oblivious and half hamming it up. The stylised quality of the scene recalled for me a RAI soap opera episode en plein air.

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Turner (1974, 169).

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‘RAI Fiction in the woods’: young locals’ modernist take on the Festa della Grotta di San Michele, Olevano sul Tusciano, Campania, May 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Motorino, Walkman, video camera, mobile phone: unlike the older locals and the urban revivalist Michele, these young locals had a highly technologised way of being in nature which involved taking your consumer goods with you into the wilderness, rather than leaving them ascetically behind like Michele and Enzo.

Generational cultural secession: young locals chill out in a distinctively modernist mode at the Festa della Grotta di San Michele, Olevano sul Tusciano, Campania, May 2003. Photo: Bennetts. 184

Further on, a large group of local young people had decided to chill out in the picnic ground, rather than participate in the strenuous climb up to the cave. Large amounts of litter were scattered on the ground, three young men were perched astride the everpresent motorini, and guitar and tambourine lay untouched on one of the tables while others played the African djembe drum, whose use in feste popolari is regularly denounced by revivalists as extraneous to, and disruptive of, local traditional practice. This countercultural instrument first arrived in Naples via techno music with the late 1990s fad for African drumming and ‘jungle’ rhythms, and since then has managed to filter through even into this remote corner of the Campanian hinterland. Further along the path, we discovered another picnic area covered with even more outrageous piles of recently-deposited litter.

Although the djembe has recently become a recognised feature of Italian alternative youth culture, its performance at feste popolari is regularly denounced by ‘philological’ revivalists as disruptive and incompatible with traditional performance modes associated with the festa popolare. Campus in Festa, University of Salerno, July 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

After the lyrical scene at the sanctuary, Michele was distinctly embarrassed about straying into this area with a foreign guest. For this Campanian Communist, going to 185

the Grotta di San Michele was about finding a milieu uncontaminated by Berlusconian hypercapitalism, enjoying nature, and being in contact with ‘authentic’ people still untouched by the negative aspects of modernity. Yet the young people here seemed to have difficulty entering into this world of popular tradition except via the imagery and language of television. The kind of physical exertion needed to make the pilgrimage to the sanctuary seemed no longer part of their lifestyle, and the cultural mindset within which such exertion might be explicable seemed increasingly alien. A split seemed to have opened up in the local youth population between a minority of young men, who still provided the essential motor force needed to get the saint up the hill, and those who had opted for this more ‘modern’ type of day out. This second group had decided to remain down in the picnic ground, spatially, culturally and generationally separate from the older members of their community up in the cave sanctuary, and engage in activities deemed more consonant with their own ‘modern’ sense of identity. In this sense, they stood at a different end of the cultural spectrum to the two student revivalists from Naples we had encountered earlier up in the cave.

‘From the country to the metropolis’: Anna Nacci and ‘spontaneous’ revivalism

Those urban revivalists who are unable to navigate the city/country divide with the local knowledge and bicultural virtuosity of an Ester often seem to occupy a position within the festa popolare similar to that of the cosmopolitan tourist in relation to the spectacularised and exotic ‘other’ (Cohen, 1988; Kirtsoglou & Theodossopoulos, 2004).

In the cities, far from the traditional popular milieu of the festa popolare, revivalist engagement with il mondo popolare is often mediated through a largely imagined peasant world, even sometimes through a virtualised peasant imaginary constructed through books, video, music recordings, email discussion groups and internet sites. Although recognisably part of an urban cosmopolitan culture, a revivalist like Ester actually inhabits, embodies, engages with and negotiates with the traditional popular world which is the focus of this revivalist imaginary. Ester’s ‘insider’ sensibility and deeper engagement with the values of il mondo popolare makes her critical of the 186

behaviour of revivalists from the more chaotic ‘spontaneous’ wing of urban revivalism associated with the Centri Sociali, whom she represents as first causing disruption to local feste popolari, then adjourning to ‘go to McDonalds to smoke Marlboro’.

Salentine-born broadcaster Anna Nacci is an emblematic figure within the ‘spontaneous’ segment of the Rome revivalist milieu closely associated with the CSO and ‘No Global’ movements which are the object of Ester’s trenchant critique. Through her weekly radio programme ‘Tarantula Rubra’ [‘The Red Tarantula’], ostensibly a Southern Italian folk music show, Nacci propagates a highly politicised and urbanised version of revivalism from Radio Onda Rossa, a well known leftist radio station first established by Autonomia Operaia in 1977 on via dei Volsci in Rome’s San Lorenzo student quarter. ‘The more space there is for cultural expansion, the more space there will be for political struggle’, she tells her listeners on one programme; as in the Italian Gramscian leftist project generally, the coincidence between cultural and political struggles is for her axiomatic.

On the ‘Tarantula Rubra’ programme, the core themes of tarantism, pizzica, tarantella, and other popular traditions of Southern Italy provide the somewhat tenuous pretext for a freewheeling ramble through the politics of Southern Italy and the Mediterranean to the accompaniment of a World Music sound track. In addition to interviews with Southern Italian folk singers and scholars, book reviews and folk music from the entire Mediterranean basin, ‘Tarantula Rubra’ features a regular Palestinian slot in which Anna reads a poem by a Palestinian poet, advertises the latest pro-Palestinian rally, or interviews the latest eyewitness to Israeli state repression. Presenting me on the show as ‘an Australian anthropologist who is doing research on our popular traditions’, she even apologises for the fact that she has not been able to locate a suitable Aboriginal music track to play. Although this all seems curiously unrelated to the ostensible Southern Italian folk theme of the programme, for Anna there is a self-evident homology between the ‘voice of the people’ as expressed in Southern Italian popular traditional music and the cultural expressions of other oppressed peoples in other parts of the global South. As with musician Eugenio Bennato (2000), tarantella is thus assimilated to other forms of Mediterranean popular traditional music to produce a pan-Mediterranean cultural space, in which tarantism meets Moroccan Gnawa 187

possession cults, and where Southern Italian folk music is reconnected once again with its historic roots in Arabic and Greek music, thus opening up a space for collective cultural and political struggle on behalf of North African emigrants to Italy, the Palestinians and others.

Nacci’s promotion of the term ‘neotarantismo’ to describe the current Southern Italian folk revival is explicitly informed by French anthropologist Lapassade’s notion of the alleged ‘need for trance’ within contemporary urban youth culture (2001, 2007). In Anna’s highly instrumental approach to revivalism, she represents the contemporary rediscovery of Southern Italian popular tradition as ‘a weapon against globalisation’, and a response to ‘the avalanche of non-values’ propagated by the Berlusconian media system. She describes ‘neotarantismo’ as

a movement which expresses the need for a ‘different’ music, for new communicative and social relationships, a demand for a cathartic form of dance which can be used outside its historical connotations linked to suffering and shame…against globalisation, cultural levelling and the attempt by the mass media to cancel out diversity. We can see the rise of a strong grass roots response: dense masses of young and not so young people who fill town squares, social centres, pubs, theatres and many other structures which put on concerts of ethnic, folk and World Music…Young people (but not only they) will be able more and more to homeopathically heal the ills created by a system which is ‘globalised’ and gravely ill with ‘manifold United States pathologies’ (Nacci, 2001a).

Nacci sometimes refers to ‘neotarantismo’ as il movimento, suggesting perhaps an unconscious aspiration to assimilate the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival movement into a quasi-political formation. Her notion of folk music as a direct expression of and tool of political struggle is embodied in her jokey pastiches of Che Guevara—‘Hasta la tarantula siempre’ (‘Onwards to the tarantula forever’!)—and the Communist Manifesto: ‘Tarantula sufferers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your poison!’

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Her engagement with Southern Italian popular tradition manifests itself on multiple fronts: as broadcaster, cultural organiser, lead singer in the folk group Tarantula Rubra Ensemble and as essayist and would-be intellectual. A graduate in sociology from the University of Bologna, she has also organised two conferences in Rome on ‘Tarantism and Neotarantism’ (2001, 2003) and published the ensuing proceedings (Nacci 2001, 2004). Her choice of Rome University’s Aula Magna as the 2003 conference venue had considerable political resonance, given that it has been the target of so many student occupations since the 1960s, and was thus a virtual sacred site within the local tradition of leftist student politics.

Within the Southern Italian folk scene, Nacci is a leading proponent of ‘contaminazione’. In contrast to some ‘philological’ revivalists, she sees this as a positive creative mode, likening it to ‘grafting new branches onto a tree in order to produce new types of fruit’. Rejecting the ‘commercial’ end of revivalism embodied for her by Neapolitan musician Eugenio Bennato, Nacci’s ‘Tarantula Rubra’ programme instead attempts to bridge the gap between the first two of my informant Simone’s three revivalist categories: ‘philological’ and ‘spontaneous’. Anna’s regular reviews of the latest books on Southern Italian popular traditions and interviews with prominent writers and intellectuals in the field pay homage to de Martino’s tradition of leftist intellectual engagement with popular tradition. By providing an intellectual framework within which to validate and assign meaning to practices derived from traditional peasant society, this scholarly tradition has played a central role in establishing le tradizioni popolari as an intellectual category, and thus in constituting Southern Italian revivalism as a whole.

Yet the most important segment of Nacci’s constituency is not the first ‘philological’ group identified by Milanese informant Simone, but the second ‘spontaneous’ group composed of ‘giovani di sinistra’, youthful leftists associated with the Centri Sociali Occupati and other groups in the ‘area antagonista’. For my informant Simone, this segment of the revivalist scene is ‘more “spontaneous” and instinctive...but of a lower cultural level’. There is an emphasis in this milieu, he feels, on the ‘exterior aspect, without research at the actual grass roots level’. This revivalist tendency, he observes, also uses ‘tradition’ for directly political ends ‘in their struggle against a society they 189

do not agree with’. Pizzica is thus deployed as ‘a sign of difference from the prevailing homologised society’, but their version of pizzica is not the ‘Pino Gala-style “philological” pizzica…but modern pizzica, as a way of being alternative, so as not to become “homologised”‘.

Within this ‘spontaneous’ wing of urban revivalism, popular traditions are transplanted, experienced and practiced within the urban CSO environment in a way which involves a partial disarticulation from their original cultural meanings associated with peasant society, and their redeployment to serve new meanings within an urban context. In a quintessentially postmodern form of identity construction, pizzica is redeployed outside its original context to serve as a new sign connoting la diversità dall'omologazione (distinctiveness from the dominant homologised society). We might perhaps usefully compare similar processes of postmodern identity construction in which white middle class American youth disembed African American rap music from the circumstances of its original production and redeploy it as a generalised sign of ‘rebelliousness’. In the case of both pizzica and Italian hip hop, young urban subjects integrate into their personal imaginary a powerful musical and dance form produced by the ‘other’ as a way of generating a sense of difference within their own identity. Disembedded from their original rural context, dance forms like pizzica and tammurriata are thus freed up to take on a new morphological and ideological life of their own within the modern city. Morphologically, these dance practices begin to mutate at the level of form (Gala, 2002; D’Ajello, 1997), and ideologically, they are integrated into a distinctive ensemble of anti-hegemonic cultural practices associated with the ‘area antagonista’.

Compared to those who are part of the more ‘philological’ revivalist tendency, there is often a greater distance between ‘spontaneous’ revivalists and the local actors who are the primary exponents of these local popular traditions. The emphasis within ‘spontaneous’ revivalism on direct participatory experience means there is less attention to ‘philological’ detail in the reproduction of traditional dance forms, and that the unbridled chaotic energy of the mass rock concert is sometimes introduced into the delicate dynamics of small scale feste popolari.

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Anna Nacci’s ‘Tarantula Rubra’ initiative and her deployment of the notion of ‘neotarantismo’ convey a sense of dynamic new cultural energies at play, and also of the opening up through these emerging cultural forms of new political possibilities. Yet unlike Ester and Michele, her engagement with le tradizioni popolari does not seem to be grounded in any specific interest in il mondo popolare on its own terms, but instead, seems oriented towards more essentially urban concerns. One informant commented that ‘Anna ha girato poco le feste’ (she hasn’t been to many feste popolari), claiming half jokingly that what little she knew about popular tradition had been ‘learned from off the back of CD covers’. Nacci’s somewhat simplistic representation of popular tradition plays well enough to a young urban left audience with little direct experience of the rural milieu of Southern Italian popular tradition, but some ‘philological’ revivalists find her brand of leftist populism irritatingly superficial. As Calabrian revivalist Angelo Maggio commented: ‘In Calabria, we do completely different things from Anna. It’s like comparing the mozzarella you buy in the supermarket with the one you buy straight from the shepherd who makes it out in the country’.

Cafone consciousness: Gianfranco and ‘localist’ revivalism

Gianfranco, an accomplished 32 year-old tammorra player and singer, grew up in a small rural village outside Avellino in Campania, and left school after Year Nine to work as a travelling salesman. He now makes a living playing tammurriata at regular weekly gigs in restaurants in Naples, or even on luxury yachts on the Bay of Naples.

Although he grew up in a popular rural milieu hearing popular traditional music, like many other young locals, Gianfranco turned his back on his parents’ peasant cultural traditions and was drawn to more contemporary forms of music. But after attending the key revivalist event of the Festa della Madonna delle Galline at Pagani in the late 1990s, Gianfranco went through the kind of conversion experience so familiar from urban revivalist narratives like Ester’s.

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Gianfranco’s brand of revivalism, however, shows a highly distinctive and selfconsciously ‘localist’ inflection, and could well be described as intolerantly hypertraditionalist and nativist. In January 2003, he had been engaged to play at the Festa di Sant'Antonio in Cicciano, where a local revivalist scholar had attempted to re-establish this well known Campanian festival after it had become locally extinct. Driving home with Gianfranco, I was disturbed and perplexed by Gianfranco’s vehement attack on this revivalist event, which I had found charming: ‘It was bullshit; those people don’t understand anything!’

Gianfranco was familiar with the Festa di Sant’Antonio from other more traditional ritual contexts, and was irritated at how the musicians had been forced to fit into a situation at Cicciano which he had found totally contrived. For Gianfranco, the event had proved to be a naïve and badly organised attempt to transplant a traditional practice from one area to another, in which the sacred dynamics of the tammurriata had been entirely lost. It was only later, after participating in other traditional tammurriata events like Sabato dei Fuochi, that I began to appreciate the acuteness of his critique. I began to wonder whether contemporary revivalism was increasingly being pitched more towards easily gulled cosmopolitan outsiders such as myself than to local people with Gianfranco’s intimate knowledge of and personal commitment to maintaining the integrity of local traditional practice.

When he finally agreed to an interview, Gianfranco insisted that rather than meeting in Naples, I should come out to visit him on his own turf, in the family home where he had grown up in the village of Forino. Picking me up from the provincial capital of Avellino, Gianfranco drove me through a mountainous forest area to the village. It became immediately obvious that he had a local’s intimate knowledge of the mountains and its peasant economy, as he pointed out to me the cull of local nut trees taking place nearby and a fox trail by the side of the road, describing how his father used to set traps for these animals. In one picturesque story, he recounted how his parents had first met while his father was cutting wood and his mother was gathering grass for the flocks on a hillside halfway between their two villages. Gianfranco later sang a canto alla carrettiere (teamster’s song) which he had learned from his father, 192

describing how his grandfather had actually worked as a carrettiere, and how teamsters would often pass along a track through a nearby block of land in the hills owned by his family. Gianfranco and his siblings still rented a block from an exfeudatario (a former member of the local gentry), where they cultivated nut trees and carried out the harvest each year.

Gianfranco’s folk credentials were impressive by dint of the very fact that his family history was so deeply embedded in the local peasant culture. It was by reference to these subaltern origins that he constituted his own ‘authentic’ status within the framework of revivalist discourse. His self-representation thus inverted the dominant social hierarchy of class, by foregrounding his own cultural capital and status as ‘authentically’ linked to local peasant culture. In a characteristic revivalist trope, the negative sign of subaltern social origins was thus reversed into a positive sign of ‘authenticity’, in a process which also echoed the Salentine conversion of tarantism from a negative marker of the abject into a positive contemporary sign of ‘tradition’ and primitive vitality.

As with some older local actors, anticlericalism and popular religious devotion went hand in hand for Gianfranco. Although he always carried a rosary, he couldn’t stand priests, never went to church, and was anything but mealy-mouthed. His devotion to the Madonna was a key feature of his engagement in local feste popolari, and later, in Pagani, I witnessed him offering a virtuoso performance before the image of the Madonna of the Chickens of o’ canto a figliola, the stunning Campanian peasant dialect hymn to the Virgin. He also described his particular emotional attachment to the Madonna dell’Avvocata at Maiori, describing how every year in the lead up to her festival in early July, he would enter into a strangely ‘broody’ emotional state which he likened to that of a premenstrual woman.

Gianfranco’s account parallels other examples of seasonally recurring altered states of consciousness associated with Southern Italian popular ritual, including the annual recurrence of taranta symptoms associated with the Festa di San Paolo at Galatina in Salento (which according to Lüdtke, are still experienced to some extent by a few older traditional actors: 2009, 3f.), the possession cult associated with the annual Festa della 193

Madonna dell’Arco, or the shamanic journeys made four times a year by members of the medieval benandanti Friulian peasant sect (Ginzburg, 1992). Padiglione also describes an elderly man renowned for his vigorous performance of the Devil character in the Shrove Tuesday Carnival of Tufara who, after being confined to bed with a long illness, would go into a frenzy every Shrove Tuesday at the same time as the Devil performance (1979, 207). Luigi Stifani, the legendary Salentine barber/violinist of the tarantati, died on the same day as the 29 June Festa di San Paolo with which he was so closely linked (Lüdtke, 2009, 33), thus highlighting the connection between places and recurring events of cultural and spiritual significance and the bodies and psyches of the human actors with which they are culturally associated.

Younger provincial revivalists like Gianfranco and his friend Vincenzo from Giugliano (another small town provincial powerhouse of popular tradition) articulated a selfconsciously ‘localist’ sense of identity which drew strongly on notions of local popular tradition. They highlighted their superior knowledge of and experience of local tradition to define themselves as more culturally ‘authentic’ than the young urban revivalist interlopers, whom they saw as ignorant of and lacking in respect for local traditional practice. Gianfranco’s construction of a localist counter-identity defined in opposition to cosmopolitan outsiders is paralleled in the following account recorded by Poppi of a man from Penia, the most traditional and remote of the Ladin villages in Northern Italy:

‘[Before the Ladin folk revival] we were looked upon as the primitive savages of the valley…Those patins [snobs, Italianized sissies] from Canazei down to Moena [in the lower valley] gave us the reputation of backward peasants. Now that every dog barks “Ladin! Ladin!”, they are forced to come to us to see how it’s done – to be Ladin!’ ‘To be Ladin’, for villagers in Penia, is first and foremost ‘to be local’, proud of the newly-attained prestige of the village and chauvinistic about it. Now that the wheel of modernisation has turned full circle, they are being ‘rediscovered’ as the bearers of the unbroken tradition: the last has become the first, and has in addition become aware of being a rare and prized breed (1992, 124). 194

Although Gianfranco shares many of the same values as urban revivalists of his own age, his engagement with local popular tradition is charged with an intense sense of personal identification with the cultural values of the local rural hinterland. His relationship to local tradition is thus proprietorial, and linked to an idea of his own identity defined in terms of emphatically rural working class values, rather than urban ones. The revivalist valorisation of the local, the peasant and the traditional has given Gianfranco a sense of pride about being a ‘cafone’: a rough and ready guy from the sticks.

A strong element of class consciousness pervades his discourse, as in his half-joking evocation of an earlier rural Campanian Golden Age: ‘quel tempo quando uno stava sempre duro; quelli della metropoli non ce’l’hanno duro, ma noi sì!’ (back when men always stayed hard; men from the city don’t stay hard, but us folks from the country do!). He dismisses one urban musician friend from a middle class background as ‘a bourgeois who doesn’t understand anything about popular tradition’ but says of another musician from a similar middle class background: ‘He’s not from a popular background, but he understands a lot and has a respectful attitude’.

Gianfranco is outspoken in his condemnation of the ‘contamination’ of local tradition which is taking place through the intrusion of urban revivalist actors into the Campanian festa popolare, a critique which is strongly echoed by scholars like Gala (personal comment & cf. 2002), D’Ajello (1997) and Vacca (1999, 12; 2002; cf. Crain, 1992). Despite the anti-globalisation rhetoric espoused by many revivalists, some locals like Gianfranco experience the disruptive influx of urban enthusiasts as itself a negative manifestation of globalisation, and his localist critique is in fact strikingly framed in the imagery of globalised modernity: C’è chillo che tiene o’ problema del

virus nel computer, ma io invece tengo o’ problema del virus del fricchettone nella mia tammurriata! (Some people have problems with a virus in their computer, but my problem is the hippie virus in my tammurriata!).

Like the urban revivalist Michele, one of Gianfranco’s main motivations for pursuing revivalist activity seems to be seeking out the company of gente originale (genuine people), like the older rural folk who welcomed us so warmly at the Grotta di San 195

Michele, human embodiments of a moral and social code they see as being driven to the verge of extinction by modernity. Gianfranco contrasts the social and moral values of these people from his own traditional rural milieu with what he sees as the deracination and ignorance of urban hippie enthusiasts who ‘don’t understand shit’ as they intrude on this traditional world from a completely alien cultural context. He describes young hippy urban revivalists as ‘gente maleducata, scostumata, figli di papà’ (rude, ill-mannered, upper class brats) who show scant respect for local traditional practice during the festa popolare by ‘getting drunk and smoking joints’.

On another occasion, Gianfranco is cast yet again in the role of the intolerant hypertraditionalist local critic of urban revivalism. This time, the setting is the conference on Southern Italian popular traditions organised at the University of Rome in early 2005 by Anna Nacci. Very much out of his element in this setting of both the Roman metropolis and a university, Gianfranco is appalled by the entire proceedings. As Anna’s band Tarantula Rubra Ensemble strikes up, the stage is thronged with Roman students dancing their highly ‘contaminated’ urban Centro Sociale Occupato versions of pizzica. When Gianfranco’s partner, dance instructor Francesca Trenta, tries unsuccessfully to persuade him to join in, he comments acidly: ‘This is disco pizzica; look how they’re moving – those are disco movements, not steps from a traditional rural dance: once these people from Bologna get sick of the discotheque and taking [Ecstasy] tablets, they turn to pizzica!’ Ester too is shocked, and comments with a play on the title of the de Martino work La terra del rimorso: ‘Questo è il rimorso della globalizzazione; e che stiamo a San Remo Folk?’ [they’ve been bitten by globalisation [not the taranta]; what is this, San Remo

10

Folk?]. Later, in the evening, when I

unwisely allude to the term ‘neotarantismo’, the newly coined urban revivalist term popularised by Anna Nacci (Lüdtke, 2009, 23f.), Gianfranco becomes almost apoplectic: ‘go and tell Anna Nacci to shove the word neotarantismo up her arse, her mouth and her ----!’

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The highly commercialised television contest, much derided by revivalists (Portelli, 2001), to choose the most popular Italian pop song of the year.

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The persistence of popular festive traditions deemed to be ‘authentic’ and uncontaminated is seen by revivalists as an important indicator of generalised cultural vitality in Southern Italy, whilst the festa itself seems to serve as a kind of cultural miner’s canary for the detection of globalisation. But in the central irony of revivalism, the search for authenticity becomes itself a product of and manifestation of globalisation. Revivalism thus seems to contain within itself the seeds of its own ‘contamination’ and destruction, as one person’s search for ‘authentic’ experience becomes another person’s ‘globalised contamination’. As more and more obscure and remote rural festivals are ‘discovered’ by urban enthusiasts and integrated into the new and expanding revivalist itinerary, the frontier of modernity seems to shift further and further into the virgin cultural hinterland, making it increasingly difficult for people like Gianfranco to find the kind of hypertraditionalist milieu uncontaminated by the transforming presence of urban outsiders which they seek.

When I ran into Vincenzo at the Festa della Madonna dell'Avvocata in July 2003, he commented that my presence there signified ‘the beginning of the end’ for this remote mountain festival. What had once been a small and intimate rural festival, frequented only by locals and a few trusted urban enthusiasts in the know, now seemed to be known even as far away as Australia. I was thus a harbinger of globalisation and of the inevitable transformation of local cultural space through the intrusion of the outside world. For Gianfranco and his localist friends, revivalism seemed to have produced a power imbalance between local and cosmopolitan actors, in which the locals had lost control over their own cultural space and practices via a process of colonisation by the cosmopolitan other.

At the end of my interview with Gianfranco in Forino, I felt immensely honoured when he confided to me that he and his friends had discovered un posto originale (an authentic place) where the festa was still traditional, but that he was keeping it all a closely guarded secret. He then told me the name of the town, the name of the Madonna and the day her festival was held, and that it took place in a remote mountain town in the province of Salerno where, unusually for this part of Campania, the locals still play the zampogna during the festival. 197

Above a door in the main room of his house, Gianfranco has installed his large collection of santini gathered at the many festivals he has attended. Some of them already feature in my own rapidly growing santino collection. In a gesture of revelation, he takes down the santino of the Madonna for this particular festa, places the image in my hand, and makes me vow never to reveal the location of the festival to anyone else. Apparently, my peripheral status as an Australian anthropologist within the revivalist network had allowed him to risk this disclosure to me.

There was a certain irony about Gianfranco’s fierce critique of urban revivalism, for if the urban ‘freaks’ had never turned up to ‘discover’ tammurriata, Gianfranco might never have become interested in the revival in the first place, and still be working as a travelling salesman. By boosting his stocks as an ‘authentic’ folk musician from the backwoods, the revival has also made it possible for him to tap into the emerging rural/metropolitan folk network, and cash in on the growing demand for tammurriata by urban actors. The ability of younger local actors like Gianfranco or o’ Lione to bridge this cultural gap between the two worlds has thus opened a door to greater social mobility and entrepreneurial exploitation of local popular tradition.

In stark contrast with Gianfranco’s concerns about the appropriation or disruption of local tradition by cosmopolitan actors such as anthropologists, many urban revivalists expressed a sense of pride in the fact that non-Italians like myself were showing an interest in these local traditional practices. The presence of an Australian anthropologist on the Southern Italian folk scene was often welcomed by them as a positive validation of the significance of such traditions. As ARPA’s Luigi Briglia commented in relation to Calabrian tarantella: ‘We used to be ashamed of it. Then we saw that outsiders liked it, and then we were able to give it back to people’

Conclusion

The contrasting subjectivities of Ester, Michele, Anna and Gianfranco give some idea of the range of variation present within Southern Italian revivalism, embracing the localist orientation of a young rural working class revivalist like Gianfranco through to 198

Anna’s reappropriation and reworking of popular tradition to serve a distinctively urban ideological agenda.

Ester’s background is simultaneously middle class and provincial, thus assisting her to effectively bridge the class and cross cultural divide which is intrinsic to the revivalist encounter. Michele’s leftist ideology makes him receptive to the cultural practices of traditional locals, yet as a revivalist from the city, the world of Campanian rural popular tradition is essentially alien to him. While Ester is deeply embedded within this world (and Gianfranco even more so), Michele is less connected to it, and Anna least of all. Although both Michele and Anna’s revivalisms are strongly informed by left politics, Anna’s approach to revivalism reveals an instrumental and explicitly ideological agenda which seems at times only tenuously connected to the distinctive values of the Southern Italian mondo popolare.

To what extent do these four revivalists correspond to the tripartite schema of ‘philological’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘commercial’ ideal types proposed by my informant Simone in Chapter One? Although Anna Nacci’s approach clearly embodies many of the ideological features of ‘spontaneous’ revivalism, Gianfranco’s ‘localist’ mode of revivalism is entirely missing from Simone’s model. In Michele’s connection to the leftist political traditions of the first revival and Ester’s university studies on popular tradition, both share clear affiliations to ‘philological’ revivalism. And yet this second major revivalist tendency is exemplified far better by Angelo Maggio, President of the Calabrian revivalist Associazione ARPA, whose mode of revivalist practice is examined in detail in Chapters Five and Six.

What then of the third of Simone’s categories, ‘commercial’ revivalism? For all their passionate advocacy of a ‘non-commercial’ and ‘traditional’ approach to revivalist practice, both Ester and Gianfranco, like many other folk musicians, earn their living by performing, and are thus implicated, at least at one level, in ‘commercial’ revivalism. Yet as I hope to show through my analysis in Chapter Six of commercial and political pressures which led to the transformation of Caulonia’s Tarantellapower folk festival, it is perhaps Neapolitan folk musician Eugenio Bennato who functions better as a convenient ideal type for this ‘commercial’ strand within revivalism. 199

The four revivalists I have selected for discussion in this chapter do not necessarily fit snugly into the tripartite typology I have adopted in my analysis of revivalism. And yet, the ideal types in this tripartite schema still in my view provide a generally robust and useful model for urban revivalist activity in the Italian urban sphere, as well as in the local spheres discussed in detail in Chapters Five and Six, even when some of the data does not fit these ideal categories perfectly.

In the next chapter, I present two case studies which highlight the significance of the festa popolare within revivalist practice, and contrast the differing ideologies and practices of ‘philological’ and ‘spontaneous’ revivalists within both events.

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CHAPTER FIVE: REVIVALISM AND THE FESTA POPOLARE

Votive tarantella dancing, Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte, Calabria, September 2000. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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‘Many people, mostly women, come to Church on Sundays and holidays not to attend the Mass, but to dance, sing broad [coarse] songs, and do other such pagan things’. Synod of Rome, 826 AD (quoted in Russell & Alexander, 2007, 53).

‘I began to frequent the sanctuaries of Southern Italy on festival days, looking for this kind of person which I sensed in a confused way belonged to a different culture from my own, a culture which was “other”’. Annabella Rossi, Le Feste dei Poveri, (1971, 8)

Introduction

Travelling to small and remote towns in rural Southern Italy to participate directly in feste popolari is a central element within contemporary revivalist practice, especially within the more ‘philological’ tendency of revivalism epitomised by the Calabrian Associazione ARPA and its President and eminence grise, Angelo Maggio. Attendance at these events allows urban revivalists to experience traditional popular cultural practices at source and in situ, in a cultural and social environment which is radically other to the one urban revivalists are accustomed to in their daily lives in the city. Through an account of the activities of revivalists in two very different feste popolari I attended in 2002, I highlight in this chapter the significance for urban revivalists of

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participation in such events, as well as contrasting the differing modes of engagement in such events by ‘philological’ and ‘spontaneous’ revivalists. 11

The Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte takes place in early September at a remote mountain sanctuary high in Central Calabria founded, according to legend, in 1144 (Rossi, 1971, 85; Gemelli, 1992). From the moment I first arrived to commence fieldwork, this event was billed by many revivalist informants as the ‘most traditional’ festa popolare of them all. Two elements of this festa seemed to receive special emphasis: the spectacular butchery of goats beside the river near the sanctuary, which each year would run red with blood, and its longstanding association with the local ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia (Lombardi Satriani, 1978; Ciconte, 1992, 1996; Arlacchi, 1983; Ciconte & Macri, 2009; Dickie 2011). I was told, for instance, that until a few years previously, it was highly inadvisable to take any photographs during this festa popolare, due to the frequent presence at the event of latitanti (mafiosi on the run).

For ‘philological’ revivalists, Polsi represents a kind of revivalist heaven, perhaps the most ‘authentically traditional’ Calabrian folk event still in existence. By contrast, ‘spontaneous’ revivalists were conspicuous by their absence at Polsi, for in contrast to many other feste popolari transformed in the wake of the folk revival, local space in this festa is still fairly tightly controlled by empowered local actors (at least some whom, according to speculation, are associated with local organized crime). Polsi, then, was not at all congenial to the kind of ‘spontaneous’ revivalist agenda of freewheeling expressive abandon embodied so well in the other subject of this chapter:

11

For the festa popolare in Southern Italy, and relevant comparative material from Spain and Greece,

see: Boissevain, 1992; Burke, 1978; 1983; Carroll, 1992; Christian, 1989; Cowan, 1988, 1992; Crain, 1992; Cruces & De Rada, 1992; De Martino, 2005; De Simone, 1974; De Simone & Rossi, 1977; Ferraiuolo, 2005; Mazzacane, 1983; Padiglione, 1979; Plastino, 2003; 1989; Rossi, 1971; Scaldaferri, 2005; Tarantino, 2001; Vacca 2004. For the festa popolare in Northern Italy see: Poppi, 1992; Poppi & Morelli, 1998; Carnival King of Europe, 2009; Ridler, 2002, Falassi, 2004; Feil, 1998, Silverman, 1979, Bravo, 2001, 187-205; 2005, Filippucci, 1992; 2002; Baldassar, 2001.

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the Festa di San Rocco which takes place in Salento’s Torre Paduli on the night of 16 August. Although the ‘Night of San Rocco’ is constructed within the Salentine revivalist imaginary as the purest expression of Salentine popular tradition, for many non-Salentine revivalists (particularly those of a ‘philological’ disposition), this festa is instead emblematic of the festa contaminata: the festa popolare whose traditional character has been completely compromised by the influence of ‘globalisation’.

CASE STUDY ONE: ‘THE MOST TRADITIONAL FESTA OF THEM ALL’: LA FESTA DELLA MADONNA DELLA MONTAGNA DI POLSI IN ASPROMONTE

In early September 2002, I joined Angelo Maggio, the President of the Calabrian revivalist Associazione ARPA, and two photographer friends on a bus trip with a group of elderly Calabrian pilgrims to the Festa della Madonna della Montagna.

Polsi enjoys an almost mythic status within Calabrian folk consciousness, and has been celebrated in Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro’s Gente in Aspromonte (1930) and documented by de Martino collaborator Annabella Rossi in her Le feste dei poveri (1971). I also discovered later in conversations with members of the Calabrian community in Perth that the festa at Polsi is in a sense the true pan-Calabrian festa popolare: the sanctuary’s central location in the mountains of Calabria has traditionally made it accessible from many parts of the region, so that pilgrims would travel on foot to Polsi through the forest and mountains from all over Calabria, camping out along the way and subsisting on the meat of goats slaughtered near the sanctuary.

The Madonna of the Mountain also has a great reputation for miraculous healing, and many devotees still make the pilgrimage each year to seek healing or some other form of miraculous intervention from their divine patron. The highly personalised relationship between the devotee and their supernatural patron (Carroll, 1992, 38f.; Schneider, 1991, Rossi, 1971) and the instrumental and magico-religious nature of this relationship is exemplified in the instrumental voto, the

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prototypical prayer of Mediterranean Roman Catholicism, a conditional pledge that specifies what reciprocal action the pledger will take in the event of a favorable outcome…‘if you cure my son, I will walk to X barefoot’ (Christian, 1989, 119).

This image of a young Sicilian man kissing the statue of the local patron saint dramatises the intensely personal, even carnal, nature of popular religious devotion to the saints in Southern Italy. Photo: Angelo Maggio, Festa di San Vincenzo Ferreri, Calamonaci, Sicily, 2004 (Perricone, 2007, 47). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] In the richiesta di grazia, devotees make a personal request to their divine patron for specific intervention such as healing from an affliction, especially in the context of a special visit to the saint’s shrine on the relevant feast day. The instrumental exchange relationship between devotee and divine patron is also manifest in the common Southern Italian practice of offering an ex voto gift to a saint in thanks for grazia ricevuta, the granting of a specific request. Ex votos in the shape of lungs, legs, eyes, breasts, hearts and other organs commemorate miraculous healing bestowed by the divine patron, and are a common and arresting sight in many Southern Italian shrines to the saints.

In his L’incompiuto calabrese series, Angelo Maggio ironically juxtaposes scenes of Calabrian religious devotion with the ubiquitous and eternally half-finished dwellings 205

which are such a striking feature of the degraded Calabrian landscape. This bleak backdrop to the passage of the saints during Calabrian feste popolari highlights for Angelo a long history of Calabrian migration, social marginalisation and poverty: given the complete failure of the Italian State to address the wellbeing of its citizens, devotees are instead forced to entrust their destiny to the miraculous agency of the local saints and Madonna (Maggio, 2008; Viscone, 2011; cf. Rossi, 1971).

A selection of wax ex voto body parts for hire at the Festa dei Santi Medici, Riace, Calabria, October 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

The reappearance of the Risen Christ, Easter Sunday religious drama, San Luca, Calabria, 2008. Photo: Angelo Maggio (‘L’incompiuto calabrese’ series). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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Aspromonte is well off the tourist track, for the simple reason that most nonCalabrians are too terrified to go there. The nearest town, San Luca, forms with Roccella Jonica and Platì one of the three points of the so-called ‘‘Ndrangheta Triangle’. During the 1970s and 80s, John Paul Getty III and many other wealthy kidnap victims were held in captivity here in Aspromonte for months or years. Initially reluctant to hand over the ransom demanded by Getty’s captors, his family eventually decided to pay up after one of his ears arrived by mail (Ciconte, 1996, 148). A kind of Calabrian Mafia AGM has long been held each year on the fringes of the festa at Polsi (Ciconte,

1996,

145-6,

148;

Commissione

Antimafia,

2000,

94-7)

and

ethnomusicologist Pino Gala later described to me his own visit to the festa in the 1980s as follows:

At a certain point, everyone disappeared, and there was a group of men in double-breasted suits who gathered to talk amidst a deathly silence. The day after, two of the stalls had been burnt to the ground.

Leaving the coastal town of Palmi, our pilgrims’ bus ascends the steep Aspromonte escarpment. The intensity of agricultural cultivation soon becomes striking, as povertystricken old women who seem to come from an earlier age line the road selling pathetic baskets of beans, apples, pumpkins and stone fruit. Stopping at a jerry-built shack beside the road in the middle of the vast Aspromonte forest, we get off the bus to stretch our legs in the cold mountain air. Aspromonte is goat country par excellence: a carcass dangles from a tree in the nearby goat pen while an ancient female figure sits listlessly in front of another rude wooden hut.

One of the pilgrims, a charming old folk singer from Palmi called Gianni, is a regular at all the major Calabrian feste popolari. Back in Aspromonte again, the mountains start to work their magic on him, and he breaks into a stirring canto di brigantaggio, a ballad about Musolino (Hobsbawm, 2001, Dickie, 2011, 196-209), the legendary Calabrian bandit who epitomises within popular imagination the archaic local values of honour and resistance to centralised authority. Aspromonte’s reputation for banditry extends back to the Napoleonic and Risorgimento periods, when locals fought bitter insurgencies against French and then Piedmontese invaders from the North (Caligiuri, 207

1996; Hobsbawm, 2001). Local youths gather around the elderly balladeer, transfixed by Gianni’s perfect incarnation of the portatore della tradizione. His song earns him a rounding ovation and a drink before we continue on our way.

After another interminable two hours travelling along an execrable final stretch of track full of potholes, we suddenly glimpse the sanctuary nestled in a valley below us. Arriving in the muddy car park below the sanctuary, I am struck by the large number of young officers from each of the three branches of the Italian police (Carabinieri, Guardia di Finanza and Polizia), all turned out in impeccable designer camouflage gear. In the face of Polsi’s criminal reputation, the State is clearly making a very public show of force.

The very visible police presence at Polsi in 2002 highlighted the long association between this festa and local criminal actors. Photo: Bennetts.

The elderly pilgrims invite Angelo and me to squeeze into their small room in the Casa del Pellegrino before treating us to lashings of homemade Calabrian bread, ham,

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cheese and wine. The group’s procuratore then collects a money offering for the Madonna from each of us and delivers it to the sanctuary.

Angelo travels to Polsi with a different group of pilgrims each year to carry out photographic documentation of the spectacular votive tarantella dancing which takes place all day and night throughout the festa (Plastino, 2003), and to gauge the extent to which the traditional character of this iconic Calabrian festa popolare continues to be maintained. Already he has pointed out to me a number of changes since the year before: although the courtyard area around the church is traditionally crowded with baracche (market stalls), the Church authorities have for the first time displaced these humble festive structures to the car park below. The votive tarantella dancing for which Polsi is celebrated traditionally takes place in the courtyard area around the Church, yet this year for the first time has been banished to the car park as well. On one side of the Church, the baracche have now given way to the construction of a large new outdoor amphitheatre.

Rossi’s photo (1971, 244) of the Festa della Madonna di Polsi in September 1967 showing the baracche (stalls). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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The same courtyard at Polsi in 2002, cleared of the baracche. Photo: Bennetts.

The official religious festivities are presided over by Monsignor Bregantini, Bishop of Locri, a former worker priest from the North and former chaplain to the Crotone prison, whose uncompromising and highly public anti-Mafia stance has won him the respect even of hardened anticlerical elements like ARPA’s Angelo Maggio and Luigi Briglia. In 2006 for instance, Bregantini publicly announced his intention of excommunicating anyone in his diocese involved in Mafia-related violence (Giovani e Missione, 2006). But to the chagrin of Angelo and other ‘philological’ revivalists at Polsi, Bregantini seems to strive throughout the event to impose ecclesiastical cultural hegemony on the festa, and to marginalise many of its traditional popular elements. The problem, as Luigi comments wryly, is precisely the fact that Bregantini is un prete combattente: a fighting priest. It soon becomes clear that Polsi is an arena for symbolic contestation not only between rival Mafia and State hegemonies, but also between the Church and local exponents of traditional religious practices seen by the Church as being less than doctrinally orthodox.

Bregantini’s project for subordinating traditional popular practice to centralised ecclesiastical control had already been foreshadowed in an earlier pastoral decree (Diocesi di Locri-Gerace, 2002; cf. Conferenza Episcopale Campania, 1973; 210

Conferenza Episcopale Pugliese, 1998). The eradication of localised popular religious practices, or else their subordination to centralised ecclesiastical control is hardly unusual in the history of the Church, and has indeed been a persistent theme from the late Classical period (Lane Fox, 1988), through the Middle Ages (Ginzburg, 1992; Le Roy Ladurie, 1990) the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (Burke, 1978) and the modern period (Schneider, 1991; Tak, 2000; Christian, 1989; Holmes, 1989) even through to the more recent Vatican II reforms (Vanzan, 1985; Christian, 1989).

‘Notice: show respect in your games; keep the piazza clean; respect the Church by not making a baccano (racket): The Management’: In this peremptory pre-Vatican II-era sign at the Shrine of the Madonna a Castello at Somma Vesuviana, ecclesiastical authorities seek to regulate tammurriata dance, song and music practices which are integral to locals’ traditional popular cult of the Madonna. Photo: Bennetts.

At twilight, a group of local men get the first tarantella rota (dance circle) under way down in the new marginalised setting of the car park. But by nightfall, in open defiance of Bishop Bregantini, they have succeeded in slowly infiltrating the traditional site for tarantella dancing up in the courtyard around the church. The tarantella rota is driven 211

musically by the organetto (concertina) and tamburello, with only three people ever in the circle at any one time: two dancers and the mastu i ballu [dance master], who exercises absolute authority over the situation, indicating with a tap on the shoulder or the peremptory command in dialect ‘Fore!’ (Out!) when each dancer is to leave the circle, before introducing the successive dancer. Everyone else in the rota is either a spectator or musician, and many of the spectators, including myself, stand there hypnotised by the spectacle for hours at a time. In this highly ritualised setting, any dancer who does not cut the mustard is eliminated from the circle immediately, and any tamburellista who cannot keep the beat is politely but firmly told to stop playing [SFX3]. The mastu was an important symbolic figure in Calabrian peasant culture: a ‘boss’. Within the closed world of traditional peasant life, with its highly constrained gender relations, this male figure could play an important role as social mediator through his knowledge of the interpersonal dynamics of the local community, whether as a matchmaker or by avoiding matching up dancers known to be in conflict with each other. The key symbolic position of the mastu i ballu within the structure of Calabrian tarantella has rendered this dance form amenable to the kind of manipulation of popular tradition by criminal actors which is such a familiar element in the Mafia’s strategy of imposing local cultural hegemony (Lombardi Satriani, 1978; cf. Falcone & Padovani, 1992, 92, 101, 52). This has led at times to tarantella being unfairly stigmatised as il ballo dei mafiosi [the Mafia dance]: one Perth informant from Aspromonte recalls that her parents decided not to allow tarantella at her wedding in the early 1960s, because it used to lead to too many fights.

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Tarantella rota (dance circle), Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte, Calabria, September 2002. Note mastu i ballu (‘dance master’, above centre in white shirt). Photo: Bennetts.

All night long, and well into the following afternoon, the tarantella continues its hypnotic melody [SFX3]. The rota is dominated by tough-looking young local men who look like they could have stepped off a Pasolini movie set. Inside the Church, however, Bishop Bregantini is presiding over a very different form of spectacle: the vigil with the Madonna on the eve of her patronal festival, attended mostly by women, many of them elderly. At around midnight, at the apex of the religious celebration, Bregantini ceremonially crowns the wooden statue of the Madonna in her niche above the main altar. This rite of incoronazione can only be performed by a bishop, and reflects the Counter-Reformation agenda of re-establishing ecclesiastical hierarchy within popular religious practice (Carroll, 1992, 104f; Tak, 2000, 202). The ecclesiastical proceedings are relayed through loudspeakers into the courtyard outside, producing a bizarre acoustic clash between tarantella and the ecclesiastical homilies being delivered to the faithful by the Bishop inside the Church.

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Late in the evening, Bregantini decides to up the ante in his project of reasserting ecclesiastical supremacy over local traditional popular practice. Unexpectedly, the Bishop leads his congregation out of the church in a candlelit procession into the courtyard, directly challenging the young tarantella hoods to join him in a collective prayer session. Wordlessly, the tarantella continues unabated. At last, Bregantini throws down the gauntlet: ‘Silenzio! Pregate anche voi con noi!’ (Silence! You too come and pray with us!), he demands over his mobile public address system. Still the tamburello, organetto and dancers maintain their wordless, defiant and obsessive rhythm. ‘Fermate la tarantella!’ (Stop the tarantella!) he shouts. Finally, slowly, reluctantly, the tarantella dies away, and Bregantini leads his sheepish flock in prayer, not forgetting to concede, half-apologetically, that he does of course recognise that tarantella is their form of worship to the Madonna.

Angelo spends much of the night documenting the nocturnal tarantella spectacle using very fast black and white film. In our attempts to keep abreast of all the disparate elements in the festa as they unfold, we alternate between the Church, the tarantella rota in the courtyard, and the hyper-demotic, all-male milieu in the baracche in the car park below, where you can buy a beer and a sausage sandwich. Whenever exhaustion overtakes us, we return to the Casa del Pellegrino to snatch half an hour’s sleep on the hard wooden floor.

At 2 am, in one of the dingy improvised shacks set up below the church, I come across a group of young men who look to me like they could have been released from Crotone jail earlier that day: one of them even sports a Johnny Stecchino-style toothpick between his teeth. They are locked in a marathon bout of morra, an aggressively stylised and animated game somewhat reminiscent of the game ‘Scissors, Stone, Paper’. At lightning tempo, one player holds up a number of fingers on both hands, while his opponent at the same instant shouts out a number from one to ten, in an attempt to trump his opponent by matching the number. ‘Un’...quattr’... sett’!’ they scream at each other across the table, eyes bulging out of their heads, apparently on the verge of coming to blows at any moment. Just as in a knife fight, it is important to look your opponent in the eye, to read the number he is about to throw down in the next move. None of the photographers is game to take any pictures. A young policeman 214

detailed to maintain a police presence amid this classic expression of the local subculture hovers nervously on the periphery, his features lit up by the gas lantern, as transfixed by this spectacle of primeval masculine vitality as we are.

The morning after the night before: A jaded Angelo Maggio and Luigi Briglia take a break after spending the whole of the previous night documenting all night tarantella dancing at Polsi in September 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

Morning finds Angelo and Luigi tired but exhilarated after the night’s events. To their horror, though, it is not long before Church hegemony reasserts itself again, as Bregantini presides over the extravagant ecclesiastical spectacle of outdoor Mass in his newly-constructed outdoor amphitheatre. But in the background, the pagan rhythm of the tarantella continues unabated, for as Angelo comments acidly, ‘Here in Calabria, we have a very particular relationship with the divine, in which the activity of a priest is completely superfluous’.

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Ecclesiastical spectacle: Bishop Bregantini celebrates Mass in his new purpose-built amphitheatre at Polsi, September 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

Later in the morning, the true popular emotional apex of the festa is reached as the Madonna is brought out from her sanctuary and processed around the Polsi settlement, accompanied by shepherd zampognaro (bagpiper) Sebastiano Battaglia, who walks barefoot as a voto to the Madonna. This time, even the ceaseless rhythm of the tarantella falls silent, as all gaze in reverence upon the miraculous Madonna of the Mountain, and the sound of celebratory fireworks rings out across the valley.

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La Madonna della Montagna processes below Polsi’s Casa del Pellegrino. Photo: Bennetts, 2002.

We look on as Venerdina, an elderly portatrice della tradizione, offers a traditional dialect hymn to the Madonna in the courtyard outside the Church. Although popular traditional musical forms like this (Femia & Furfaro, 1999) were once a regular feature of worship inside the Church during the night time vigil, Church authorities have now slowly displaced these practices into the courtyard outside by introducing mainstream hymn sheets in standard Italian (rather than Calabrian dialect) and a folksy choir of Chinese nuns accompanied on an electric organ.

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Portatrice della tradizione popolare: Venerdina’s vocal offering to the Madonna della Montagna, Polsi, 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

Another traditional element in the festa has also been eliminated for the first time this year: the traditional butchery of goats in the sheds beside the river, and the sale of their meat to the pilgrims. Shortly before the commencement of the festa, all of the animals had been impounded by the Carabinieri on the public health grounds that none of the animals had been officially declared, and therefore had not gone through the necessary veterinary health checks. The State, it seemed, had finally decided to mount a challenge to the prevailing culture of illegality in the Aspromonte badlands in the symbolically charged setting of Polsi.

Polsi 2002: the post-match analysis

In Southern Italy, the passionately-committed analysis of the cultural dynamics of the annual festa popolare seems to serve a similar emotional and cultural function for 218

many left wing revivalist intellectuals as the blow-by-blow analysis of a football match does for more mainstream Italians in the Bar dello Sport [Sportsman’s Bar]. As Angelo drives me back to Catanzaro after the festa, we begin mulling over the events we have witnessed at Polsi, especially the controversy provoked by the police ban on the traditional slaughter of the goats.

The festa had provided access to a peasant ‘other’ in its most extreme and sensational form, delivering to revivalists in spades the emotional frisson of contact with the ‘authentically popular’ character of backwoods Aspromonte. Polsi seemed to play a central role within Angelo’s revivalist hierarchy of ‘traditional authenticity’, in much the same way that the Ladin Carnival in the remote Northern Italian alpine town of Penia is conceived by locals as ‘the Ultima Thule of Ladin culture…the last repository of a pre-touristic “authentic” and unbroken Ladin cultural tradition’ (1992, 125).

Luigi and Angelo were irritated by the sensationalist media reporting of the police intervention against the goats, which had predictably foregrounded the widespread association in public consciousness between Polsi and the local ‘Ndrangheta. In Angelo’s parody of the media line on Polsi:

Whatever happens at Polsi has to be connected to the Mafia, whether positive or negative; the presence of the maestro di ballo is because there is a Mafia system behind it; the presence of people who slaughter goats is because there is a Mafia system behind it; the fact that people don’t like you taking photos while they are playing morra is because there is a Mafia system behind it. So whatever happens there is because there is a Mafia system behind it. But often what is really happening is that there is a protective attitude by the local group.

In their discussions with me, they both sought to play down the alleged role of local criminal actors in the festa, in order to represent the event positively, as an icon of Calabrian folk culture in which the Mafia no longer played the same role it once had. They dismissed the idea that Polsi continued to be the site for a kind of Mafia AGM as by now a complete anachronism:

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Today’s Mafia has no need to go to Polsi; it’s much more convenient to use a telephone, fax or internet. Today’s mafioso is someone who is intelligent and professional; it’s difficult to know whether he is a mafioso or not.

However, despite Luigi and Angelo’s critique of the politics of representation in relation to Polsi’s alleged Mafia connections, their views were later spectacularly undermined by the release of videos secretly recorded by Italian police at the Festa della Madonna di Polsi in September 2009, which depicted an open air meeting in broad daylight in front of the sanctuary between the newly appointed boss of the ‘Ndrangheta and other senior figures in the organisation (TG24, 2010).

Angelo and Luigi Briglia’s photographic activities during the festa had conformed to the first revival ‘philological’ model of ‘documentation of popular tradition’. Despite the growing number of photographers and video operators at Polsi in 2002, there was a tacit understanding that there were some circumstances (such as the nocturnal morra game in the baracche) where photos could not be taken. In contrast to other feste popolari which have recently taken on a more inter-class character, at Polsi il controllo del territorio had remained substantially in the hands of traditional local actors, with revivalist actors remaining very much in a minority and constrained to behave in accordance with the cultural norms of local customary practice. ‘Philological’ revivalists at Polsi had thus adopted an almost anthropological mode of participant observation, with many of them displaying a culturally relativist willingness to accept controversial traditional practices like the goat slaughter on their own terms as unproblematic manifestations of ‘popular tradition’.

‘Spontaneous’ revivalists, however, had been conspicuous by their absence at Polsi, for the highly constrained behavioural code of the Calabrian backwoods was such that this event did not lend itself to ‘spontaneous’ revivalism’s characteristic ‘mania for protagonism’. The archaic nature of local gender relations and the well-known association between the festa and the local criminal subculture would also have made it difficult to assimilate Polsi into the somewhat simplistic ‘spontaneous’ revivalist model of popular tradition as contemporary counter-cultural praxis.

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A key ideological element within ‘philological’ revivalism is its critique of the morphological transformations taking place within traditional popular cultural forms, especially through the influence of the Church or State, ‘globalisation’ or ‘la società consumistica’. Angelo’s analysis of events at Polsi conformed to ‘philological’ revivalism’s characteristic Gramscian interpretive schema, in which ‘hegemonic’ ecclesiastical actors were negatively represented as subverting the ‘traditional’ and ‘popular’ character of the festa (cf. De Simone, 1974). In his post-match analysis of Polsi in 2002, Angelo highlighted how the Church had deployed various technologies of ecclesiastical control (auditory, spatial, architectural and liturgical) to transform the sanctuary from a popular into an ecclesiastical space, as popular traditional liturgical practices were supplanted or marginalised by official Church-sanctioned ones. Although he had documented devotees dancing barefoot before the statue of the Madonna as a voto in previous years, in 2002 these practices had not taken place because the statue had been shifted to a different position, under closer ecclesiastical surveillance.

‘Ecclesiastical hegemony’: a Caulonia local kisses a silver reliquary said to contain the arm bone of Sant’Ilarione, the town’s patron saint, under the watchful gaze of the elderly local clergy, Festa di Sant’Ilarione, Caulonia, October 2003. Photo: Bennetts

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Angelo had at times even sought to intervene directly as a revivalist actor in defence of popular cultural forms practiced by local actors, both by maintaining a respectful yet critical dialogue with Bregantini, whom he considered one of the best-educated and enlightened of the clergy in the diocese, or else by directly contesting the actions of some of his more narrow-minded subordinates. On one occasion, for instance, Angelo had challenged ecclesiastical interference in popular practices associated with the Festa della Madonna del Pettoruto, and got into an argument with the priest, who then called the Carabinieri and closed up the Church. Yet as anthropologist Vito Teti highlighted in a later public address, these kind of revivalist interventions within the religious milieu were problematic:

The people who want to maintain rituals are often secular non-believers, while the people who want to change them are often believers. We need to ask ourselves a question about this: what right have I, with my secular belief system, to get involved?

As Tak has demonstrated for Calvello (2000), cultural transformation in the festa popolare over time is a normal part of its historical evolution, yet at Polsi, revivalists were concerned that the festa was losing its ‘authentically popular’ character almost before their eyes, in a way which recalled De Simone’s denunciation of ‘the final marginalisation of the people from their religion and places’ (1974, 65). To the horror of revivalists like Angelo and Luigi, Bregantini clearly aspired to transform Polsi from a ramshackle festa popolare venue in the heart of Aspromonte into a major regional pilgrimage centre, thus marginalising its ‘authentically popular’ features. The tarting up of the public area around the church and plans to construct a sealed road to Polsi seemed to foreshadow Bregantini’s ambition of putting Polsi onto the map as an ecclesiastical cash cow like Loreto or the Padre Pio site in Foggia. By linking this remote mountain sanctuary to the outside world by a sealed road, ARPA members felt, the backwoods character of this spectacular icon of Calabrian popular tradition would be lost forever.

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Il dibattito sulle capre: the forum on the goats

‘No! Il dibattito no!’

A line from Nanni Moretti’s film Io sono un autarchico (1976) Most revivalist actors at Polsi had been dismayed by the police decision to impound the goats, which they felt had disrupted an important traditional element in the festa. This intervention had taken place unannounced the day before the festa, without any attempt at mediation with the locals; it had been publicly denounced during the event by Don Pino (the parish priest from nearby San Luca), and later in the press by both Bregantini and University of Calabria Professor of Anthropology Vito Teti, a noted scholar of Calabrian popular tradition. Revivalist discontent over this allegedly heavyhanded police intervention into ‘tradition’ led to the convening of a public forum (dibattito) on the goat incident in a pub in Lamezia Terme one evening several weeks later.

The dibattito sulle tradizioni popolari (public forum on popular tradition) is a classic genre within Southern Italian ‘philological’ revivalism which testifies to the huge prestige accorded in Italy to intellectuals, and to revivalists’ characteristic efforts to underpin revivalist ideology by recourse to scholarly discourse. In the dibattito, academics hold the floor in a sometimes showy and somewhat rarified set piece on popular tradition, often in the ‘alternative’ milieu of a Centro Sociale Occupato, sometimes in the classic tono aulico: the ponderous and self-important cadence of the aula, or Italian lecture theatre. After these interventions, the intellectual celebrities then respond to questions from members of the audience, often from the more ‘spontaneous’ wing of revivalism.

The Lamezia Terme forum on the goats drew a crowd of mostly leftwing revivalists (including several associates of ARPA) and one local Catholic priest who seemed more sympathetic to traditional popular religious practices than some others in the Church. Keynote speaker Vito Teti began by restating his dismay at the way the police had disrupted the traditional practice of goat slaughter. Angelo, however, rose to his feet soon afterwards to challenge this prevailing revivalist view. In Angelo’s opinion, 223

far too much emphasis had been placed on the action by the police, whereas the incursions of the Church into popular traditional practice at Polsi that year had been far more serious, yet had largely escaped public criticism. Far from defending the goat slaughter at Polsi as a manifestation of ‘popular tradition’ which needed to be defended at all costs, Angelo stated provocatively that he in fact agreed with the police intervention: his consultations with a veterinary surgeon friend had confirmed his belief that in the era of mad cow disease, it was simply too risky to continue dumping blood and offal into rivers. Highlighting the fact that the entire local meat industry in the Polsi area was in any case under the control of the local Mafia, Angelo felt the goat slaughter was not so much an embodiment of ‘popular tradition’ as yet another example of menefreghismo all’italiana: the kind of self-centred irresponsibility which was unfortunately all too commonplace throughout Southern Italy. The butchery of goats at Polsi in any case no longer served any practical function, and was thus completely anachronistic, since pilgrims were now driving to Polsi for the day in cars, rather than walking to the sanctuary on foot and camping out for several days. From his own consultations with local people both during and after the festa, Angelo had also concluded that (apart from a few families who had lost income from the sale of meat), none of the locals he had spoken with were in the least concerned by the banning of the goat slaughter. The only people who had been at all worried, according to Angelo, were us: anthropologists, photographers, camera operators and other translocal consumers of the ‘authentic’.

Angelo’s differential support for traditional practices seemed to me to exemplify a ‘critical revivalism’ informed by an intense understanding of the local grass roots reality and close engagement with its individual human actors. By accepting that the goat slaughter at Polsi had become an anachronism, and was in any case not the most significant element in the festival, Angelo also seemed to show a greater capacity to reflect on his own ethnographic practice as a photographer, a greater acceptance of the essential dynamism of popular traditional forms within modernity, and a more nuanced and less sentimental approach to popular tradition than many other revivalists. Citing the spectacular arboreal cult associated with the patronal festival of Alessandria del Carretto (probably Angelo’s favourite festa popolare, and one which he had been returning to photograph each year since the mid-1990s), he later commented: 224

It’s stupid saying to someone from Alessandria del Carretto who busts his arse every year to bring in the [ceremonial fir] tree every year: ‘you must continue this ritual’. The only people at Polsi who were disappointed at the end were us: the photographers and anthropologists.

Raising the pita [fir tree] during the Festa della Pita, Alessandria del Carretto, Calabria, 2006. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Summary

Although transformations in the traditional festival structure were clearly visible at Polsi in 2002, this and other highly ‘traditional’ Calabrian feste popolari I witnessed gave me a sense of imaginative historical depth with which I was able to reconstruct what a festa contaminata such as the Salentine Festa di San Rocco must have looked like in Torre Paduli twenty years before the No Globals arrived. 225

The festa popolare is central to the ‘philological’ revivalist problematic of the survival and ongoing vitality of traditional popular cultural forms within the homogenising or hybridising field of contemporary globalised capitalism. For Angelo and other Calabrian enthusiasts, Polsi’s traditional character provides a kind of touchstone against which other feste popolari, especially in Salento, are negatively judged as feste contaminate: feste which are ‘contaminated’ by such processes. Angelo’s annual visits to Polsi serve as a kind of thermometer with which he gauges the vitality and continuing viability of traditional Calabrian popular cultural forms, and Polsi is a constant frame of reference within his discourse. Polsi’s highly traditional tarantella rota has also provided the blueprint for ARPA’s reintroduction of traditional dance modes to Caulonia at Tarantellapower (see Chapter Six). During ARPA’s battle to retain control of the Tarantellapower Festival of Caulonia in 2005, Angelo dismissed his rivals for lacking ARPA’s strong engagement with il territorio (i.e. the local mondo popolare), describing them as ‘people who come from Naples or the NORTH generally, are associated with Europe, and have never been to a festa like Polsi’.

I have tried here to present the distinctive orientation, practice and ideology of Angelo and his ARPA associates as an ideal type of ‘philological’ revivalism, even though, as we saw at the dibattito, Angelo’s version of ‘philological’ revivalism diverged in important respects from that of other actors within the same ‘philological’ branch of revivalism. In the following case study, I will use my account of the Festa di San Rocco to exemplify a very different type of festa, the so-called ‘festa contaminata’, and the very different ‘spontaneous’ tendency within revivalism, in the vastly different context of contemporary Salento.

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CASE STUDY TWO: ‘LA FESTA CONTAMINATA’: SALENTO’S FESTA DI SAN ROCCO DI TORRE PADULI

‘Ritorno a San Rocco’: this initiative by revivalists and scholars in the early 1980s eventually led to the contemporary pizzica ‘boom’ which is now closely associated with this festa popolare. Source: Pellegrino (2004, 28). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] 227

The Festa di San Rocco at Torre Paduli embodies many of the totemic themes of Salentine revivalism. It is held every year on the night of August 16 in Torre Paduli, a village in Southern Salento situated in flat marshy agricultural land at the foot of the larger town of Ruffano.

Torre Paduli, the venue for Salento’s celebrated patronal Festa di San Rocco, is situated on marshy ground below the nearby town of Ruffano. Photo: Bennetts, 2003.

San Rocco is a popular saint in many parts of Spain and Italy due to his reputation during the Middle Ages as a liberator from the plague, and as at Polsi, his sanctuary at Torre Paduli is still a major regional pilgrimage site for those seeking divine intervention. The sanctuary’s collection of 1500 ex voto dating up to the present day bear witness to San Rocco’s alleged curative powers, while comments in the sanctuary visitors book seem to underline the persistence of Southern Italian popular religious consciousness within contemporary secular modernity: •

San Rocco, fa’ risuscitare il mio bisnonno (‘San Rocco, make my great grandfather regain consciousness’);

228

•

Proteggi la nostra famiglia (‘Protect our family’: very common);

•

San Rocco, ti prego, fa che paghi anche lui! Con tutto il cuore lo chiedo (‘San Rocco, I implore you, make him pay too! With all my heart I beseech you’— apparently from a mother requesting help in a difficult family situation);

•

San Rocco, fa stare bene quelli di San Giuliano e la mia famiglia. By Manuel (‘San Rocco, make all those in San Giuliano well and my family. By Manuel’; in a childish hand and referring to the recent earthquake at San Giuliano in Molise where a number of school children were crushed to death after their school collapsed on top of them).

Contemporary postcard of the wooden statue of San Rocco di Torre Paduli. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] As at Polsi, pilgrims would traditionally arrive for the Festa di San Rocco on foot, then discharge their annual voto (vow) to the saint to make the pilgrimage by entering the sanctuary to pray and perhaps make some special request of the saint (richiesta di grazia). With the inimitable blend of the sacred and the profane so typical of Southern 229

Italian feste popolari, other traditional features included a horse market run by local Rom (gypsies), now defunct, and numerous stalls offering sweets, local produce and horse meat (a Salentine specialty) and streamers (‘nzacareddhe) in the green and red colours of San Rocco, which are tied around the head in a mark of devotion to the saint. After the visit to the sanctuary, the profane aspect of the festival would begin, as peasants danced in ronde (round dance circles) on the broad grassy area in front of the sanctuary, to the accompaniment of the Salentine tamburello (tambourine). Dancing would continue until late at night, whilst other pilgrims slept outside the sanctuary awaiting the first mass at dawn.

Pizzica

In contrast to traditional religious devotees of San Rocco, urban revivalists today focus exclusively on the secular side of this festival, the most celebrated element of which is the danza scherma traditionally performed on the night of San Rocco. This dance is one of three distinct varieties of pizzica: •

pizzica pizzica: Salento’s answer to the tarantella, a dance of courtship performed in the ronda by a man and a woman, which has enjoyed a boom throughout urban Italy over the last few years (Gala, 2002; Lüdtke, 2009);

•

pizzica tarantata: subject of de Martino’s celebrated study (2005 [1961]), once used as a form of dance therapy to cure victims of taranta possession, danced by a single possessed victim in their home, accompanied by a group of musicians hired to perform this traditional form of music therapy;

•

la danza scherma: a highly ritualised dance of aggression traditionally danced by two men in the ronda. The index and middle fingers are extended to represent a knife, as the two male dancers attempt to ‘stab’ one another. This dance is traditionally performed at the Festa di San Rocco at Torre Paduli, and is today a major attraction for revivalists (Tarantino, 2001). 230

The danza scherma at Torre Paduli was kept alive by the same local gypsy community which once ran the horse market at the Festa di San Rocco until it was ‘rediscovered’ by

revivalists

in

the

late

1980s

(Pellegrino,

2004;

Chiriatti, 1998). Older residents of Torre Paduli remember the dance being performed by strangers from outside the town who were considered less than ‘respectable’. Parents of folk revivalists Cinzia Villani and Ada Metafune were at first shocked to learn that their daughters had been frequenting this ‘milieu of delinquents and mafiosi’, and Ada comments that the festival always had a reputation for being ‘a bit dangerous because of the presence of a criminal element, and you had to keep an eye out for pickpockets at the market’.

The other traditional dance form associated with the San Rocco festival, pizzica pizzica, has experienced a boom throughout Italian urban centres over the last few years which has made this dance form synonymous with Salento. The courses in pizzica and the tamburello from which it is inseparable have now diffused an at times sketchy notion of such traditions to many city dwellers far beyond Salento. In this engaging peasant dance of courtship, a capricious female dancer flits about in an alternately flirtatious and evasive response to the advances of the male dancer, to the infectious primal rhythm of the pizzica beaten out on a tamburello. While tarantella and tammurriata are danced by any combination of genders, the traditional pizzica pizzica form is unique in being structured around contrastive male and female dance roles [SFX2].

Revivalists of a more ‘philological’ stamp, however, highlight the significant transformation and hybridisation of this traditional dance form in the postmodern ‘No Global’ version of pizzica. As in the similar tammurriata dance craze in Campania, dance scholars such as Gala and D’Ajello now make a formal distinction between il ballo contadino (the peasant dance) and il ballo metropolitano, pointing to the stylisation and eroticisation of the original dance forms which have taken place as they have been streamlined for consumption by a new youthful and non-conformist urban clientele (D’Ajello, 1997; Gala, 2002).

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In their traditional context within Southern Italian peasant communities, dances like pizzica, tarantella and tammurriata were only ever danced by a single couple at a time, whilst other participants watched on the sidelines of the ronda awaiting their turn to dance. In peasant society, the traditional mode of cultural transmission of the dance form occurred during this moment of observation in the ronda, rather than today’s intensive weekend dance courses held in the city. As noted earlier, Calabrian tarantella is to this day even further regulated through the important social figure of the mastu i

ballu, while any dancer or musician who is not up to scratch is politely requested to leave the circle, or to stop playing. This strong emphasis on the structural and aesthetic integrity of dance performance is in keeping with the ritual nature of traditional dance practices associated with Southern Italian peasant society, as well as the gendered norms of the traditional community. Salentine musician Gigi Toma recalls that similar traditional conventions were still being enforced in relation to pizzica at the Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli until the 1980s (Lüdtke, 2009, 163). But as will be apparent from the following account of the 2002 festa, these older conventions are now breaking down.

Within the context of urban pizzica, very different cultural values are emphasised. In the more socially atomised and less constrained milieu of a Centro Sociale dance floor, the emphasis is on mass amateur participation and individualised self-expression. Urban pizzica thus moves towards the more spontaneous and individualised mass dance modes associated with mainstream urban dance venues. Instead of being performed by couples inside a highly structured ronda, urban pizzica is often danced individually, so that individual bodies are disarticulated from their traditional relationship to other bodies, and the traditional formal and social properties of the ronda are dissolved. Milanese informant Chiara even used the verb pogare (to jump round on a pogo stick) to describe one extreme variety of urban pizzica, which seems reminiscent more of the contemporary mosh pit than of the original ballo contadino.

The popularity of the tamburello as a new sign of alternative identity has led to a craze for the instrument amongst urban amateurs, fuelling a boom in production amongst locally based artisans. Armed with sketchy or even misguided notions of local performance tradition, these ‘spontaneous’ revivalists thus descend en masse from the 232

city into the highly structured context of the traditional festa popolare, imbued with what ethnomusicologist Pino Gala has termed ‘today’s mania for protagonism, where everyone wants to dance, but no one wants to observe any more’. Within the delicate equilibria of the local festa popolare, ‘philological’ revivalism’s reflective and respectful observation as a way of learning from the locals sometimes gives way to the ‘spontaneous’ revivalist ethos of subjective self-expression, often fuelled by cannabis and alcohol.

The Night of San Rocco, August 2002

My guide to the Festa di San Rocco in 2002 was Francesco, a painter and art teacher of romantic disposition from the Salentine town of Melpignano, celebrated as the location for the other major event on the Salentine folk calendar, La Notte della Taranta.

On the night of San Rocco, we wait till evening for the Salentine August heat to abate, before setting off by car through the olive groves to Torre Paduli. Francesco’s annual visit to San Rocco seems to rekindle for him childhood memories and a sense of reconnection to his family history: he recalls how his grandfather used to travel along this very same road to the festa each year in a horse drawn wagon. We are greeted on the outskirts of Torre Paduli, however, by the less bucolic reality of an enormous traffic jam caused by the large numbers of people arriving for the festa. Francesco parks his vehicle in an olive grove, and we walk into town through the darkness on foot: it is to be the first of many feste popolari in which I participate during my twelve months of fieldwork.

We arrive just in time to witness one of the dramatic highlights of the festa; the traditional flight of giant paper balloons which soar aloft in honour of the patron saint, powered by a simple burner mechanism. The streets of Torre Paduli are decked out in a magical display of fairy lights, and as we walk along a long avenue of illuminated arches, I feel I have strayed into a scene from The Wizard of Oz. Crowds mill around an array of gimcrack stalls and fairground attractions, in a scene of intense vitality which also reminds me of the night-time streetscapes of India. Soon there is the 233

spectacular display of fireworks which I later learn is an obligatory element in any patronal saint’s festival. A large Heineken beer franchise suggests however, that a mainstream commercial element is beginning to intrude on this former peasant festa popolare at which previously, homemade local wine would have been the only alcoholic beverage on offer. Francesco feels that commercialism is starting to play a stronger negative role in the festa each year, and blames the short-sightedness of the organising committee, which he likens to a group of developers exploiting a beautiful seaside area, oblivious of the fact that it is actually the uncontaminated nature of the beach which is the real resource, and that once this is destroyed by pollution and development, people will simply stop coming altogether.

A small portion of the huge fireworks barrage unleashed annually at the Festa della Madonna delle Galline, Pagani, Campania, 2003.

We move on to the festa epicentre, a large open space in front of the sanctuary of San Rocco which is balefully illuminated by two monstrous mushroom-shaped lamp posts recently set up by the local council, in an aesthetically dubious modernist contribution to the festa. Things here are still hotting up at 11 pm. There is a large out-of-town 234

contingent of ‘No Globals’, and a range of stalls selling tamburelli and other revivalist knick knacks. Francesco next takes me on a visit to the sanctuary of San Rocco. Inside, people file past the statue of the saint, deposit an offering, touch the glass case in which the wooden statue of San Rocco is housed together with a silver reliquary containing one of his teeth, make the sign of the cross, and then move on.

As we exit into the Walpurgisnacht outside, the air is by now pulsating with the throb of literally thousands of tamburelli, which seem to release an extraordinarily exhilarating energy, in turn generating a strange alteration of collective consciousness in the crowd and ourselves. There is by now a huge gathering of people, mostly it seems non-Salentine; local council staff later estimate the numbers at 50,000. We meet two young women from Turin down from the North for summer holidays in Salento, as well as a group of Spaniards I had met at ethnomusicologist Pino Gala’s folk dance workshop at the Festival of Carpino two weeks earlier. Throngs of ‘No Globals’ sit around chatting on the ground amid growing piles of empty bottles and the occasional whiff of hashish. Tamburelli with the green and red San Rocco streamers seem to be de rigeur, although the African djembe is also much in evidence among the urban No Globals. Although this instrument has become a popular accessory within Italian alternative youth culture since the boom in World Music in the mid-1990s, its presence at feste popolari is frequently denounced by ‘philological’ revivalists, who consider it extraneous to ‘tradition’ and disruptive of the tamburello rhythm which is at the core of festa popolare musical practice. I later collect a number of flyers for folk events in Campania specifically requesting participants not to bring the instrument to folk events.

The piazza is by now packed with exuberant youngsters performing amateurish versions of pizzica in somewhat ragged ronde accompanied by tamburello players. The traditional convention of only one couple dancing at a time has completely broken down, as multiple individuals attempt to dance in the confined space of the ronda, crushed in at times by the great weight of the encircling crowd.

La danza scherma which we have come to see is far less widely known than the more popular pizzica, but still well enough known to have produced a number of what 235

Francesco feels are cheap imitators: he points out two dancers in a ronda whom he describes as ‘fake’ and not the real thing at all, before leading me off in search of una ronda vera (a proper dance circle). However, ‘traditional authenticity’ proves highly elusive. Wherever the schermatori (sword dancers) manage to get a decent ronda going, they seem to get crashed by overexcited youngsters performing their own somewhat sketchy versions of pizzica, apparently oblivious of the separate and distinct conventions associated with this very different sword dance. The danza scherma is traditionally danced only by men, and so the intrusion of young women dancers into these ronde highlights the difficulty faced by local dancers in maintaining the integrity of traditional practice in the face of the revivalist onslaught. We come across one ronda which seems like ‘the real thing’, but the tamburellista in charge soon breaks off in disgust after yet another pizzica intrusion. It begins to seem almost as senseless and chaotic as a professional boxing ring invaded by a bunch of spontaneous amateurs from the audience.

In the crowd, Francesco recognises a group of Rom he had seen expertly performing the sword dance at the festa the year before, accompanied by a grizzled older gypsy who plays the role of guapo (boss). The following year, I witness two of the younger Rom men performing the danza scherma with real knives on stage at the University of Salerno’s Campus in Festa (see Chapter Three). They also appear in the same guise in a 2003 video clip by Salentine folk group Allabua. Clearly these men are widely regarded as the most authoritative traditional exponents of this particular popular traditional practice.

Francesco is interested to know what the Rom think about the obvious breakdown of traditional convention going on all around us. ‘We're the ones in charge here: wait till later and we’ll show you a real ronda,’ the guapo assures us, before trying to persuade Francesco and me to pay them to go off to a deserted area nearby for a private demonstration of the dance. Francesco cautiously demurs, although not before we are shaken down for a round of drinks. ‘Non si paga per il rito, questo è per l’amicizia’ (‘You can't sell a ritual, this is out of friendship’) Francesco states pointedly as he hands out the drinks from the Heineken franchise, and then poses us for a group photo.

236

La danza scherma had survived as a central element in the San Rocco mythos almost entirely thanks to the local Rom community. And yet in a pattern which later became familiar at other feste popolari, these portatori della tradizione had seemed curiously powerless and marginalised from proceedings by an oppressive throng of urban interlopers with only the sketchiest awareness of local performance conventions. The guapo’s attempt to convert local cultural capital into cash had also highlighted the process of cultural commodification taking place in the wake of the Salentine revival, and the way in which understandably, members of the marginalised local Rom community were also now seeking to turn this to their financial advantage.

Later, amid the crowd of No Globals, I notice an elderly local man sitting alone with his tamburello on a bench near the sanctuary. Zeroing in on this icon of ‘traditional authenticity’, a young man approaches with a video camera, excitedly asking this authentic-looking portatore della tradizione to play to camera. The urban enthusiast captures the action with a melodramatic sweeping camera pan worthy of MTV, as the language of peasant culture meets the language of modernity in a gesture of mediatic appropriation. Later I catch a glimpse of Pino Gala’s wife Tamara dashing through the crowd with a camera searching for a suitable fragment of authentic Southern Italian tradition to document. ‘Ormai non c’è più niente,’ [‘there’s nothing left any more’] she comments in a revivalist cliché which will soon become familiar to me: ‘Pino told me that even 14 years ago there wasn't anything left.’

Francesco and I continue our elusive search for ‘una bella ronda’, yet the push of urban pizzica enthusiasts is relentless, and seems to have completely displaced the danza scherma. Salentine revivalists later insisted that there had in fact been ‘una bella ronda’ much later that night, after we had left, and the crowd had thinned out. This seemed to be adduced as evidence of the fact that despite everything, the continuity of tradition had been maintained, even though we had seen schermatori quitting in disgust that night.

At San Rocco 2002, an individualist urban ethos emphasising ‘spontaneous’ amateur self-expression had impacted with full force on the highly structured conventions of local performance tradition. At the same time, the traditional religious elements in the 237

festa had been submerged by the overwhelming number of non-traditional and even actively anticlerical actors who had arrived from outside.

The year before, in 2001, elderly locals at Torre Paduli had been frightened by the unfamiliar sight of strange young people from the city with face piercings, dreadlocks and outlandish clothes descending on their town in huge numbers. They described some of them sleeping out in public squares, smoking cannabis, drinking to excess and throwing empty bottles on the ground. Lucia Tridici, the elderly spinster sacristan of the sanctuary of San Rocco, and a kind of caricature of old world Southern Italian piety, did not mince her words:

From being a religious festival it has turned into a Mafia festival. It was a scandal, people standing there drinking, taking drugs...Scoundrels!

She described being forced to ask the nearby Carabinieri to escort her through the youthful throng to the sanctuary at the 2002 event. Revivalist disruption the year before had even led local priest Don Giuseppe to cancel the procession of the saint through the town which is a normal feature of any patronal festival. At San Rocco, the sanctuary doors were normally closed at 11 pm, to be reopened at first light for Mass at 6 am. After these proceedings were concluded, the dance and music would start up outside the sanctuary and continue until late at night. At a certain hour, however, the music would stop in deference to pilgrims sleeping around the sanctuary in preparation for the 6 am Mass. But in this new ‘contaminated’ version of San Rocco, dancing and music went on in an all night ‘rave’ party which stretched well into the following morning. This caused resentment amongst locals, especially those planning to participate in the religious function the following morning. One revivalist later described seeing the young local priest, Don Giuseppe, expostulating at first light as he swept a path through the layer of empty bottles deposited outside his house before going off to celebrate 6 am Mass.

While at Polsi, the Church had managed with some success to impose its own vision of orthodoxy on the festa popolare, at Torre Paduli it had seemed more or less to have lost control of the situation (cf. Loretta Baldassar’s account of tensions between clergy 238

and younger members of the local laity in a patronal festa in Northern Italy: 2001, 13544). Whereas in traditional peasant society, the sacred and profane elements in the festival had once been articulated in concert, now the religious element in the festival was under threat from newcomers from the city interested exclusively in secular elements of the festa, and indeed actively ideologically hostile to mainstream Catholicism. Here there was a contrast with Campanian and Calabrian revivalists, who despite their anticlericalism, tend to show far greater interest and respect for traditional religious practices, often participating in religious processions and even the Mass in church associated with the patronal festival. Admittedly, a careful contrast is usually made by such revivalists between ‘ecclesiastical’ elements in the festa and ‘genuine manifestations of popular religiosity’, in line with the Gramscian tenets of the first revival (cf. Lombardi-Satriani, 1974). At San Rocco, by contrast, urban revivalists from the less reflective ‘spontaneous’ tendency had predominated, many of them from more secularised areas of north-central Italy where they had perhaps not had the same opportunity for acculturation into such practices.

Philological revivalism to the rescue: the ‘bella ronda’ initiative

My first experience of a Southern Italian festa popolare had been confusing and incomplete. Amid the chaotic darkness, without having previously visited the town, many elements of the local scene had been difficult for me to make out with any degree of clarity. At this early stage of my research, I also lacked any real cultural context within which to understand the dynamics of the festival: my lack of knowledge of the langue of the Southern Italian festa popolare had precluded my understanding of the distinctiveness of the parole expressed in this particular manifestation of the Festa di San Rocco. But after attending a large number of other feste popolari in Calabria and Campania over the next couple of months, I was lucky enough to return to Torre Paduli in February of the following year to systematically explore through in depth interviews how local people experienced the rapid process of transformation which had been so evident in their patronal festival the year before.

Revivalism’s transformation of the topography of the local festa from a subaltern cultural space to a zone of interclass encounter between local and urban actors had led 239

at San Rocco to the colonisation of local space by the cosmopolitan revivalist ‘other’, a process in which local actors had lost control over local cultural space and practices. When I returned to Torre Paduli in February 2003, I discussed the situation with Ada Mettafune and her partner Biagio Panico, two local ‘philological’ revivalists who had established the revivalist Associazione Novaracne in Torre Paduli. They highlighted how mass outsider presence at San Rocco had rendered the canonical reproduction of traditional local cultural forms increasingly difficult:

The problem is that local people get sick of it, because they come, and can’t find the kind of nice dance circle they’re looking for. Maybe you and I are dancing there, everything’s fine, and then someone comes into the circle and messes it all up. So in the end people say ‘instead of going to San Rocco, I’ll just stay home’. If you talk to people of a certain age in the villages, they avoid coming. Maybe they visit the sanctuary on another day, but they prefer to defer their visit.

A few months before San Rocco in 2002, Ada and Biagio had decided to launch an initiative to address what they saw as the recent degeneration of the festa. By educating visitors to San Rocco about the distinct traditional conventions associated with pizzica and the danza scherma, they hoped to be able to maintain a space within the festa where the two dances could continue to be performed in their traditional manner. A month before the festa, Associazione Novaracne had convened a seminar in Torre Paduli to plan the initiative, summoning many of the key players in the Salentine folk scene, including the local Rom. Late on the night of San Rocco 2002, these cultural shock troops had been successful in establishing a firm ronda composed of musicians and dancers expertly versed in the relevant traditions. Less knowledgeable participants who might potentially disrupt the circle were politely asked to go elsewhere. As Biagio described:

When you’re there with a group of friends, the young guys understand what the situation is and they try to help by standing around and not letting anyone else into the circle…People understand the meaning of the circle and that it needs to be widened out; when they see people who dance at a certain level, they 240

understand the significance of the tradition and they don’t enter the circle and cause trouble…When people see a serious ronda, where the couples alternate, go in and out of the circle calmly, they’re happy to stay out, unless of course they’re

complete

dickheads,

drunks

or

idiots…

Ada and Biagio then showed me the remarkable film they had made on the night of San Rocco the year before to document this bella ronda initiative. The documentary had been edited to foreground only the ‘traditional’ elements on the night, highlighting some of the most skilled dancers and musicians of Salento performing in the bella ronda. It was only in the last few frames that any real allusion was made to the other far less ‘traditional’ activities going on all around, in a short final close up of a halfempty beer bottle left on the wall of the sanctuary. The contemporary reality of the Festa di San Rocco had thus been comprehensively airbrushed out, leaving only ‘tradition’ behind. The outlines of the ‘authentic’ festa had thus been revealed in ghostly ideal form beneath the surface chaos and disintegration of the ‘contaminated’ contemporary festa disrupted by the No Globals. As one more cynical Salentine informant commented later, this was an exercise worthy of the forensic pathologist, after which ‘tradition’ could reasonably be pronounced to be dead.

Conclusion

The Polsi and San Rocco case studies both highlight the contrasting nature of ‘philological’ and ‘spontaneous’ revivalist modes: if Polsi in some ways represents a paradigmatic ‘philological’ revivalist festa popolare, then Torre Paduli represents the archetypal ‘spontaneous’ revivalist one. Whereas ‘philological’ revivalists at Polsi adopted an almost anthropological mode of participant observation at the festa, ‘spontaneous’ revivalists converged on Torre Paduli from all over Italy and unwittingly transformed what was once a festa popolare into what has now become effectively a massive outdoor rave party, from which locals and their traditional cultural practices have been increasingly marginalised.

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There is also a clear correlation in these two case studies with geography: the ‘authentically traditional’ character of the Polsi event in the remote Calabrian mountains attracted the interest of ‘philological’ revivalists, while ‘spontaneous’ revivalists from the city with little acculturation into Southern Italian rural culture were attracted to the more laid-back and less traditional character of the San Rocco event, held in the more culturally and geographically accessible Salento region.

Both case studies also highlight the way in which the morphological transformation of traditional popular cultural forms such as the festa popolare is a central problematic for ‘philological’ revivalists. In seeking to halt the rapid transformation or even extinction of traditional forms in the local cultural ecology, ‘philological’ revivalists like Angelo, Biagio and Ada perhaps in some ways recall contemporary environmentalists in their efforts to halt the transformation and extinction of local manifestations of natural ecology. And yet as we have seen in the San Rocco case study, revivalists themselves (and especially ‘spontaneous’ revivalists) are at times the agents of such transformations.

Through new forms of communication and physical mobility increasingly widespread within contemporary Italy, space and time are collapsed, as increasingly isolated pockets of rural Italy become accessible to urban revivalist actors. All too often, the arrival of revivalists within the culturally fragile space of the festa popolare signals a shift in the local balance of power between local and translocal actors. Ironically then, revivalism’s utopian rejection of globalised capitalist modernity seems at times to lead ineluctably to the integration of the peasant rural utopia which is its object into powerful new cultural networks centred around the modern city. Like World Music (Feld, 1995, 2000), Italian revivalism may thus be read simultaneously as both a countercultural response to globalising processes, and as the handmaiden of such processes.

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CHAPTER SIX: REINVENTING THE FESTA POPOLARE: THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN ITALIAN FOLK FESTIVAL

‘

Eugenio Bennato concert, Tarantellapower, Caulonia, August 2002. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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‘They are stealing Tarantellapower from us’.

Email message from Angelo Maggio (Tarantellapower festival organising committee) July 2004.

Introduction

In this chapter, I examine the new folk festival genre (festival) which has emerged in Southern Italy since the early 1990s. Through a comparative analysis of the characteristics and dynamics of six such festivals attended during fieldwork, I highlight how, through the agency of revivalists, Southern Italian popular tradition is being represented in a new way. While the festa popolare is constituted out of a set concrete embodied traditional practices organic to local popular culture and enacted by local actors, the newly emergent festival genre has been described by Giovanni Vacca as a second order postmodern representation of popular tradition, rather than an expression of popular tradition itself (Vacca, 2002; n.d.).

As the new folk festival genre takes on a more important role within the financial and symbolic economies of some small Southern Italian towns, such events have also become increasingly significant to local political actors, by providing opportunities to transform local ‘tradition’ into economic and political capital, through the organisation of spectacularised public events based around an increasingly mainstreamed notion of local tradition. Through detailed case studies of Salento’s La Notte della Taranta and Caulonia’s Tarantellapower in Calabria, I explore how these events have become a characteristic setting for confrontation between conflicting ‘philological’ and ‘commercial’ revivalist visions as to how local popular tradition should be represented.

Characteristics of the Southern Italian folk festival

In early August 2002, as I arrived for the Festival of Carpino in this small and remote mountain community in the Gargano region of Northern Puglia, local women were 244

boiling huge cauldrons of tomatoes in front of their houses over open fires in the street in preparation for the annual Southern Italian midsummer ritual of Ferragosto tomato bottling. An occasional donkey wandered picturesquely through the streets, while the large number of cars with German number plates (including the odd Mercedes Benz), announced the return of some of the town’s more well-heeled seasonal migrants from the north for their summer holidays (cf. Ginsborg, 1990, 230).

As recounted in Chapter Two, folk music performances during the more highly politicised ‘first revival’ of the 1960s and 1970s were closely associated with political events such as the Communist Party’s annual Festa dell’Unità, or else took place in specialist venues such as Rome’s Folkstudio which were attended by a narrowly defined group of ideologically motivated enthusiasts (Chiriatti, 1998). A distinctively new and less politicised context for folk concerts has emerged during the ‘second revival’ with the establishment from the mid-1990s of a number of annual folk festivals held usually in July or August in small Southern Italian towns, especially in Calabria, Campania and Puglia. These events are often associated with iconic local popular traditions such as tarantella (Caulonia), pizzica (Notte della Taranta), or the celebrated local popular song tradition of Carpino in northern Puglia (see Table Three).

During fieldwork, I attended six of these festivals: La Notte della Taranta and Festival of Diso in Salento and the Festival of Carpino in the Gargano region of Northern Puglia in 2002, Campus in Festa at the University of Salerno at Fisciano, and the Festival of the Zampogna at Maranola in Lazio in 2003, and Tarantellapower at Caulonia on the Ionian coast of Calabria in 2002 and again in 2005. By returning to Salento in early 2003 and Caulonia in 2005, I was able to carry out extensive followup interviews and consultations focussing on the local dynamics of these last two festivals. Campus in Festa differs from the other festivals mentioned in its setting at a provincial university, rather than a ‘traditional’ Southern town, while the Festival of the Zampogna is a smaller-scale festival held over one weekend in January in the hometown of Ambrogio Sparagna, one of Southern Italy’s most celebrated organetto musicians [SFX16].

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TABLE THREE: SOME MAJOR SOUTHERN ITALIAN FOLK FESTIVALS

*=attended during fieldwork Festival

Established

Date and Place

Characteristics

Mid-August

Pizzica; intercultural

(Grecia

musical dialogue between

Salentina,

Salentine and non-

Salento)

Salentine musicians and

Salento/Puglia *La

Notte

della 1998

Taranta

traditions. *Etnica

Folk 1999

Late July

Festival di Diso

(Salento)

*Carpino

Early

Folk 1996

Festival

August Tarantella del Gargano,

(Gargano region, Carpino song tradition & Northern Puglia)

Cantori di Carpino singers

August

Tarantella. Organiser:

(Zona

Calabrian anthropologist

Grecanica)

Ettore Castagna.

Late August

Tarantella. Organiser:

(Caulonia)

Associazione ARPA.

‘U Stegg’’ Festival 2001

Mid-August

Emphasis on maintenance

di Cataforio

(Southern

of traditional tarantella

Aspromonte)

dance modes. Organiser:

Calabria Festival

di 1997

Paleariza

*Tarantellapower (Festival

1999

of

Caulonia)

Associazione Culturale Conservatorio Grecanico. Campania/Molise *Campus in Festa

1997

July (University Smorgasboard of Southern of

Fisciano, Italian folk acts on stage

Salerno) Estadanza

1984

July 246

(various Annual dance workshop

small towns in organised in a different Southern

and Southern Italian town each

Central Italy)

year by dance scholar Pino Gala

Lazio *Festival

della 1994

Zampogna

First

week

of Zampogna (bagpipe)

February (Maranola)

Festival Zampogna

della 1975

End

of

July Zampogna

(Scapoli)

One of the main things which distinguishes Southern Italian folk festivals from many similar folk festivals in the English-speaking world is the degree to which they are embedded within local popular cultural traditions and the local territory. Contrast for instance Caulonia’s showcasing of the local tarantella tradition and its rustic local exponents with the erasure of local specificity involved in the WOMAD ‘One World’ concept, in which international World Music artists jet in to perform at one of a number of venues around the world, but without any necessary intrinsic cultural or thematic link to the territory where such events are taking place. Anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has invoked Schafer’s notion of ‘schizophonia’ (1977), to describe a characteristic musical phenomenon of contemporary modernity:

[an] increasing split of sounds from sources since the invention of phonographic recording...to a final stage of schizophonia, namely, the total portability, transportability and transmutability of any and all sonic environments…mediated music, commodified groove, sounds split from sources, products for consumption with fewer if any contextual linkages to processes, practices or forms of participation that endow their meanings in local communities (Feld, 1995, 97f.).

The principal audience draw card of Southern Italian festivals is the series of free and publicly-funded mass concerts presented over several nights on stage in the main piazza by local and non-local folk musicians from all over South-Central Italy, and 247

sometimes beyond. These concerts draw large numbers of local people from the surrounding area, as well as many urban dwellers from Central and Northern Italy who traditionally spend their August holidays near Southern Italian beaches. Another segment of the non-local audience is often drawn from an alternative fringe variously described as ‘fricchettoni’, ‘No Global’, ‘hippy’ or ‘punkabestie’.

These festivals typically include a selection of intensive week-long workshops (stage) on local folk dance, performance on traditional musical instruments such as the organetto or tamburello, or even the construction of traditional instruments like the lira calabrese (Calabrian lyre) or ‘ethnophotography’, the photographic documentation of the local feste popolari which are often held at the same time as the festival, during the peak festa season in August. These residential workshops typically attract a smaller and more select hard core of folk enthusiasts from the cities of Central and Northern Italy. Participation at this more intense and ‘philological’ level offers urban revivalists the opportunity to spend their holidays in intensive study of local folk traditions in situ, in the relaxed tempo and picturesque surroundings of a Southern Italian town. These stage also provide a chance for tuition by acknowledged authorities such as dance scholar Pino Gala or Campanian tammurriata master Raffaele Inzerillo, as well as the opportunity for direct interaction with local portatori della tradizione such as the Cantori di Carpino or Calabrian organetto maestro Massimo Diano. A feature of Tarantellapower 2002 was a guided visit to the local festa popolare of San Rocco in Gioiosa Jonica (integrated as a practical component into the ethnophotography course) and the Festa di S Giovanni Battista di Gallicianò in the remote Aspromonte region.

Festival organisers often attempt to make these workshops accessible to as many as possible by arranging free accommodation for stagisti in local schools (Caulonia 2002; Carpino 2002). Partly in response to the emergence of Tarantellapower in 1999, a local association was established in Caulonia to rent out to festival-goers some of the many local houses left vacant in the town by post-war mass emigration. Amongst the stagisti, there are usually a high number of university students or recent graduates in their twenties, but also of older people with conventional jobs. There is often a high representation of second generation immigrants to the North returning south in an effort to ‘rediscover their roots’ (Simone Garofalo, Michele Russo & Domenico 248

Trimbole interviews). As the folk revival achieves greater acceptance at a mainstream, rather than merely avant garde level, there is also a growing trend towards participation in these workshops by people from the local region, as well as from Rome and other urban areas further north.

An elderly local portatore della tradizione instructs urban revivalists in the finer points of Calabrian tarantella, Tarantellapower, Caulonia, 2002. Photo: Angelo Maggio.

However, not everyone is in a financial position to afford 110 Euros for say, a tarantella workshop at Caulonia’s Tarantellapower (2005 rates). This has the effect of excluding members of the more impecunious fringe groups alluded to above, whose presence is more noticeable at the mass concerts and around town during the week of the festival: ‘students are the ones that come, not hippies’, as ARPA tarantella teacher Antonio Critelli commented at Tarantellapower in 2005, reflecting a central contrast between ‘philological’ and ‘spontaneous’ tendencies within contemporary revivalism.

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In towns like Carpino, Caulonia and Melpignano (site of the final night concert at the Notte della Taranta in Salento) the festival is unquestionably the biggest event on the annual calendar, capable of drawing many thousands of visitors over a number of days to

small,

remote

and

economically

depressed

Southern

towns

rendered

demographically threadbare by decades of mass migration. According to one estimate, there was an influx of 100,000 tourists into Salento for the period of the 2005 Notte della Taranta event (Lüdtke, 2009, 165). August is also the time of year when the town’s ‘core community’ (Boissevain, 1992a) is swelled by the ranks of emigrants returning from the north or abroad for summer holidays, along with the large fuori sede expatriate student population, who are forced to leave their home towns if they wish to pursue tertiary studies.

Festa popolare vs. festival

The origins of feste popolari are often lost in antiquity,

12

whereas Southern Italian

folk festivals date largely from the mid-1990s onwards (see Table Three). In contrast to the entirely secular inspiration of the folk festival, the festa popolare is a religious celebration of the localised divine patron couched in the idiom of magico-religious ritual, as witnessed by practices such as the magical circumambulation of local territory by the statue of the patronal saint or Madonna during the annual festival (as at Polsi). Even non-ecclesiastical feste popolari such as Carnival are often still in an important sense highly ritualised acts (Vacca, 2004; De Simone & Rossi, 1977).

If the dominant mode of the festa popolare is magico-religious ritual, then the dominant mode of the folk festival is spectacle. Vacca (2002, n.d.), highlights a key distinction between ‘popular tradition’ as manifest within the festa popolare, and the contemporary postmodern representation of ‘popular tradition’ through its spectacularisation on stage, often with the gestuality and paraphernalia of the mass rock concert, including smoke machines, powerful lighting and sound systems and

12

E.g. for Polsi, see Gemelli (1992); for the Festa dei Santi Medici di Riace, see Pazzano & Capponi, (2000, 81ff.).

250

giant video screens. By taking suonatori (traditional musicians) out of their original context in the festa popolare and putting them up on stage, a fundamental shift takes place in the relationship between audience and musicians, a passage from collective cultural and social forms typical of rural Southern Italy to those more typical of modern mass urban culture (Schiavone, 2001). This transition recalls Chaney’s celebrated distinction (1993) between traditional forms of ‘spectacle’ such as the village fair and the contemporary trend towards the ‘spectacularised society’ described by Debord (1977), in which spectacles are produced for a group of spectators who passively consume them without actively participating.

Magico-religious ritual is an integral element of the traditional festa popolare: Festa della Pita, Alessandria del Carretto, Calabria, 1996. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Whereas the festa popolare is a distinctively popular and localised cultural form, the folk festival opens a window on the outside world through its wholesale introduction into the local arena of performers, spectators, technologies and ideologies from beyond the localised milieu. Where the traditional audience of the festa popolare was local and 251

popular, one of the aims of the folk festival, by contrast, is to facilitate and encourage the mass participation of ‘cosmopolitan others’ within the local. The folk festival thus offers the possibility for opening up a dialogue between the local and the translocal, and for establishing wider cultural and social networks which go far beyond the localised circuit of the festa popolare.

The festa popolare is largely funded by donations made by locals and pilgrims during the patronal festival, and is generally organised by a comitato festa (festival committee) comprised of local devotees (at least nominally) of the saint in question and presided over by the parish priest, often with minimal input or finance from the local political administration. The folk festival, by contrast, is almost entirely funded by public monies from the local town council (comune), provincia or regione, which are then disbursed to a local cultural association, such as the Catanzaro-based Associazione ARPA, made up of highly committed revivalists who take on the huge annual job of organising the festival.

Whereas the comitato festa has a distinctly local and popular character, the composition of the folk festival organising committee is often more cosmopolitan, with local revivalists often backed up by imported direttori artistici, consulenti scientifici or other esperti (cf. La Notte della Taranta and the ‘Kaulonia Taranta Festival’ below). In contemporary Spain, Cruces & Diaz de Rada (1992, 68) has highlighted the similar emergence of a significant new role for outsiders in the legitimation and sanction of certain aspects of such events.

Festival organisation is complicated by the fact that segments of the budget frequently arrive much later than stipulated, or even not at all (cf. budget shortfalls at Carpino 2001 and Caulonia 2003). This reflects problems of inefficiency and lack of accountability which have plagued Italian public administration throughout the postwar period (Ginsborg, 2001, 215-224). Although the festival organising committee’s recognised cultural expertise allows them a measure of autonomy in programming the festival, they are still beholden to the whims of the local, provincial and regional politicians who control the funding of such events, as we will see later in relation to Caulonia’s Tarantellapower. 252

With the gradual decline of traditional cultural forms such as the festa popolare in Southern Italy, the festival is now becoming the dominant form for the contemporary representation of ‘popular tradition’. Yet there is also evidence of a cross-fertilising dialogue between the two genres, as illustrated by the grafting of a festival programme onto the traditional format of the local patronal festival (Pagani, Torre Paduli, Riace) and attempts in Calabria at Tarantellapower and the Festival of Cataforio to reintroduce into the main piazza during each of these festivals the traditional tarantella rota associated with the traditional Calabrian festa popolare.

Tarantellapower: Calabria’s Festival of Caulonia

Tarantellapower was established in 1999 by a small revivalist group based in the provincial capital of Catanzaro, about 75 km east of Caulonia, called Associazione ARPA: Associazione di Ricerca, Produzione e Animazione del Territorio (Association for Research, Production and Animation of the Territory). ARPA’s Antonio Critelli and Danilo Gatto are two of Calabria’s most significant contemporary folk musicians, and perform in the Calabrian group Phaleg. Antonio has also been a key figure in the revival of the performance and construction of the lira calabrese, an archaic Calabrian instrument which until recently had almost become extinct. He and ARPA’s Laziobased collaborators Monica Neri and Francesca Trenta have played a major role in reviving interest in traditional Calabrian tarantella through dance courses held all over Italy. ARPA President Angelo Maggio and Luigi Briglia (the only member of ARPA actually from Caulonia) are both gifted photographers who have built up a vast photographic archive of feste popolari in Calabria (but also in Sicily, Campania and Basilicata). In 2002, I enjoyed many amusing hours on the road with ARPA’s genial and irrepressible President as we travelled to events in remote parts of Calabria, constantly refreshed by his acute and down–to-earth observations on what was going on at the Calabrian grassroots level.

ARPA’s work has drawn them into an intense engagement with the suonatori tradizionali (traditional musicians) who can still be found in some remote Calabrian communities. This often involves mediating the passage by a shy zampogna master 253

and shepherd like Sebastiano Battaglia to the modernist setting of the folk festival concert stage within a new cash economy. In the process, ARPA has played an important role in promoting and recording traditional musicians and encouraging them to set minimum standards of payment for their performances. Like many of the tasks I have carried out in Australia while working for Aboriginal land councils, Angelo’s work seemed to me like a kind of ‘applied anthropology’ which hovered on the fringes of the academic discipline, but which was perhaps richer in practical human outcomes.

Traditional Calabrian zampogna player Sebastiano Battaglia, Cardeto, Calabria, 2003. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] ARPA’s distinctive ethos of intense engagement at the local grass roots level is captured well in ARPA President Angelo Maggio’s somewhat embittered reflections on the fate of the ARPA-founded Tarantellapower Festival of Caulonia. Here, he contrasts ARPA’s philosophy with the more mainstream and technocratic approach evidenced in festivals such as La Notte della Taranta which are frequently organised by prestigious outsiders from further north, rather than Calabria:

254

You have to make a distinction between people who organise events with the intention of continuing to work within that territory (comparable to a group of herder-agriculturalists) and those who organise them, then leave (comparable to hunter-gatherers).

The first group has to take into account the fact that the audience may be disappointed, and they therefore have to think about all the kinds of things which might ruin the evening for a spectator. The second group couldn’t care less about this. If the event goes badly, there is always someone who can be blamed: too little advertising, the newspapers, the weather, etc., etc.

Paradoxically, local administrators generally prefer the second group, especially if they come from Naples or the NORTH generally: they have a ‘European’ air about them, and have never been to a festival like the Festa della Madonna di Polsi. And they are also very happy to collaborate and accept compromises.

The first group, by contrast, are a pain in the arse: they know the local territory the same way shepherds know the areas where their flocks graze. They have allies in every town, who in the hour of need will help them to look for a lost sheep, or give them shelter during a storm.

As people who are experienced in the local territory, they know that they must not pillage it. Otherwise, what would they do the following year? So they are often hostile to proposals which are handed down from on high, which are often only promoted for electoral reasons (like inviting Professor X to the festival, publishing news which highlights certain names, buying whole pages of advertising in the local papers, etc.). 13

Caulonia itself is a picturesquely situated hill town about 10 km inland from the Ionian Coast in the Locride region of Calabria, one of the poorest areas in the whole of 13

Email from Angelo Maggio to SB, 4/8/08

255

Southern Italy. In the post-war period, the town’s official population declined from 13004 in 1951 to a 2001 level of 7756,

14

though Caulonia is swelled during the

summer months by the arrival of cauloniesi who have migrated to other parts of Italy, Europe and other parts of the world, including Australia.

Caulonia centro storico, Calabria. Photo: Bennetts.

ARPA members drew inspiration for the first Tarantellapower festival in 1999 from celebrated Neapolitan folk musician Eugenio Bennato, a key figure in the evolution of the second revival in 1990s, who had recently launched his group ‘Tarantapower’. An integral part of ARPA’s vision in establishing the festival was the ambitious project of relaunching Calabrian tarantella, a local dance form which had more or less died out in Caulonia, and which revivalists felt had been unfairly stigmatised for its association

14

The population of nearby Riace declined from 2331 in 1951 to 1605 in 2001. Source: ISTAT figures quoted at ;< http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riace)>. [24 September 2011].

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with both a rejected peasant past and the ‘Ndrangheta. As Caulonia resident Giovanna commented:

Before Tarantellapower, if I heard a tarantella, I didn’t like it, because it seemed to me something too backward, not very nice...It just wasn’t the kind of music I liked.

‘Tarantella Lessons’: Eugenio Bennato’s 1999 compilation album showcased tarantella traditions from Salento and Carpino in Puglia, Campania and Calabria.

Ethnomusicologist and folk musician Sergio Schiavone highlights a key distinction between suonatori tradizionali (local traditional players) and musicisti (professional musicians from a more mainstream and cosmopolitan background). At the first Tarantellapower festival in 1999, musical and dance activities adhered closely to traditional performance modes, with traditional musicians and dancers filling the town’s many piazzas every night to perform spontaneously (Schiavone, 2001). The 257

following year, a new emphasis on spectacle was introduced, with the establishment of a concert stage in the main piazza, where recognised folk musicians from throughout Southern Italy performed alongside local suonatori tradizionali. For Sergio Schiavone, the passage of a traditional musician such as Sebastiano Battaglia onto a concert stage was ‘an important, but certainly traumatic step: what happened was that the stage gave them a new status…not exactly like a rock star, but at any rate as suonatori tradizionali who now each became known by their name, their personal style and their town’.

This classic 2002 Associazione ARPA compilation showcased traditional tarantella musicians who had performed at Tarantellapower. The cover features a night time shot of tarantella dancing at the Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi by Angelo Maggio.

ARPA’s attempt to reconstitute canonical dance practices associated with tarantella has drawn directly on models from the traditional festa popolare. In striking contrast to 258

the situation described previously for the pizzica dance at the Festa di San Rocco at Torre Paduli, ARPA has been successful in reintroducing and maintaining the traditional rota dance form in Caulonia, partly due to the association’s didactic and ‘philological’ emphasis, and partly due to the generally greater vitality of popular tradition in Calabria compared to Salento.

At the Cataforio festival in southern Aspromonte, organisers have since 2001 made an even more thoroughgoing attempt to return to the roots of local traditional musical and dance practice in the festa popolare by removing the paraphernalia of the modern rock concert and encouraging participants to learn the local tarantella dance form not through structured dance courses, but in the traditional mode of observation and imitation during the festa:

…reinforcing elements which have a direct relationship to the local territory (no stages or amplification, just the festa danced in the streets and houses, according to antique practice).

Teaching is entrusted to the traditional oral method of ‘watch and repeat’, through the presence not only of the teachers, but also as much as possible of experienced musicians and dancers from the local area. There is no archaeological or nostalgic motivation here, just the modest objective of maintaining the direct human dimension of the festa, as the local people have experienced it from time immemorial (Conservatorio Grecanico, 2010).

Whereas at Caulonia, ARPA had successfully reintroduced the traditional tarantella form by bringing in traditional exponents from outside the town after it had become locally extinct, in the even more remote town of Cataforio in Southern Aspromonte, festival participants were immersed in and learned traditional musical and dance styles which are still part of local people’s cultural life.

Sergio Schiavone describes the cultural evolution of Tarantellapower as ‘a movement from the piazza to the stage and then back to the piazza again’ (Sergio Schiavone interview). By the time I attended the festival in Caulonia in 2002, a clear equilibrium 259

between modernist ‘spectacle’ and older performance modes had been established. The evening would begin with a professional stage performance by prominent folk musicisti such as Antonio Infantino (Basilicata), Ambrogio Sparagna (Lazio), Peppe Barra (Naples), or Mascarimirì (Salento). The stage would then be taken over by suonatori tradizionali like the young Massimo Diano (often supported by Phaleg’s Danilo Gatto and Antonio Critelli) for the nightly mass tarantella session, as participants danced in the traditional tarantella rota form in the piazza below the stage. Tarantella enthusiasts would then adjourn to continue their Bacchanal into the wee hours in an open area on the outskirts of the town where the noise factor was less disturbing to local residents.

Lunchtime jam session, Tarantellapower, Caulonia, Calabria, 2005. Photo: Anna Minopoli.

ARPA’s tarantella campaign at Caulonia has borne fruit, not just as an exotic lifestyle choice for urban revivalists from the North, but also at the more problematic level of participation by locals. By 2004, ARPA had managed to break through a huge cultural barrier when, for the first time, large numbers of Calabrians attended the festival courses at Caulonia (Antonio Critelli, personal comment). In 2005, a quarter of participants in the tarantella class were Calabrian, including two middle-aged women from Caulonia. Weekly tamburello and organetto classes for children by a local 260

suonatore tradizionale were also organised in Caulonia, and in 2005, two local ten year-olds and a local Down’s syndrome man showed off their talents as tamburellisti on stage.

Earlier in the night, 94 year-old Andrea Sacco, iconic exponent of the North Puglian song tradition of Carpino, had drawn many older Caulonia residents out onto their balconies in wonder, as well as provoking widespread adulation among the younger audience in the piazza. Danilo Gatto was not slow to exploit the propaganda potential presented by this spectacle of both the very young and the very old performing local folk music, urging the older people of Caulonia to follow the example of Andrea Sacco and see that there was no shame in singing canzoni popolari: ‘Che ci siano più tarantelle per tutti!’ (May there be more tarantella for everyone!)

CASE STUDY ONE: ‘IL FESTIVAL DELLA CONTAMINAZIONE’: SALENTO’S LA NOTTE DELLA TARANTA

The best known example of the modern Southern Italian folk festival genre is La Notte della Taranta (Blasi & Torsello, 2002), a ten-day festival of Salentine folk music held each August in the Greek-speaking area of Salento known as Grecia Salentina, where some of the traditional folk repertoire is still sung in griko, the local Greek dialect. In a contrast with Caulonia’s Tarantellapower, this festival is based on a deliberate process of intercultural musical exchange between local Salentine folk musicians and musicians from other traditions outside Salento, in the syncretic musical style known in Italian folk circles as ‘contaminazione’.

For Carpino Festival organiser Luciano Castellucci, ‘contaminazione’ is a way of ‘packaging popular tradition to make it more acceptable to a wider public’, for, as Steven Feld has noted, there are specific cultural consequences

when sounds, sources and [their] creators are truly exotic to the overwhelming majority of their potential consumers. This is because enormous genres of sonic otherness from the reservations beyond Western European-derived art and 261

popular musics are unlike other mediated popular musics, and specifically unlike rock in major ways (1995, 100).

When I interviewed leading Salentine folk vocalist Enza Pagliara in 2003, she had a relatively relaxed view of contaminazione, describing how she had defended her decision to participate in the 2002 Notte della Taranta to one hypertraditionalist critic by stating: ‘I did it because I’m a professional singer, and I need to have other kinds of musical experience’. However, by 2005, she too had begun to express disquiet over the extreme contaminationist trend evident in the 2004 festival in which she had recently performed:

At one point, the audience couldn’t even recognise the melody of a famous Salentine song anymore. I’m happy to do anything, as long as the melody is maintained. But [artistic director Ambrogio] Sparagna was presenting Salentine folksong like something by [mainstream songwriter] De André…The local territory needs to be presented in its diversity, not by homogenising it (nella sua diversità, non nella sua omologazione).

Established in 1998, La Notte della Taranta highlights Salentine revivalism’s current trajectory into a more mainstream and technocratic sphere. The three driving institutional forces behind the festival are the Melpignano City Council, the Unione dei Comuni della Grecia Salentina and the Istituto Diego Carpitella, established as a centre for research into local popular traditions and named after the pioneering Italian ethnomusicologist and collaborator with de Martino on research into Salentine tarantism (Agamemnone & Di Mitri, 2003).

The nucleus of the festival is the town of Melpignano, unusual in the former Christian Democrat heartland of Salento in having a strong leftist tradition associated with the PCI and later DS administrations which extends back to the early 1980s. At the height of perestroika in the late 1980s, local PCI mayor Giovanni Avantaggiato had organised an exchange programme between local rock musicians and emergent Russian rock groups. The Comune di Melpignano’s commitment to internationalist intercultural dialogue continues today through the Notte della Taranta festival, which 262

has attracted such big names as American jazz legend the late Joe Zawinul, Moroccan raï star Cheb Khaled and Israeli singer and peace activist Noa.

La Notte della Taranta is strongly associated with Melpignano’s DS (centre left) mayor Sergio Blasi and his administration. In his view, local cultural policy has become

…one of the decisive elements for the realisation of the provincial government programme…strongly linked to other policies like tourism and the economy, but also to the affirmation of Salentine identity. The cultural policy is no longer an autonomous element, a mere policy of events, but a policy tightly linked to the whole image which Salento is projecting of itself, even on an international level, with particular attention to what is going on in the south-eastern Mediterranean area.

The political and economic agenda informing the artistic ethos of La Notte della Taranta was made even more explicit in an interview I conducted in early 2003 with the festival’s full time promoter, Mario Blasi (no relation):

Q.: Why the focus on contaminazione?

A.: [B]ecause we felt that this was the only way to make the tradition known…There

was

a

cultural

and

marketing

policy

behind

all

this…developing the local territory from a tourist point of view, by linking it to a powerful image, namely pizzica. It was a strategy: there was no anthropological research project behind it as far as I am concerned. It was simply a question of cultural policy. A person who knows they have a strong cultural heritage, in this case represented by a musical tradition, and wants to associate this tradition with the development of the local territory, thus valorising it….La Notte della Taranta was an attempt to create the conditions to deprovincialise, to foreground a tradition with a strong musical impact. By deprovincialisation, I mean creating the conditions to make this tradition known in Europe and even the world…This is a territory which needs to be

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publicised, so that it can be…not consumed, but enjoyed…and this represents a factor for economic growth.

The local axis of the festival finds expression in concerts held in the main piazza of each of the nine towns of Grecia Salentina every night throughout the ten-day festival. A series of collaborative workshops creates a meeting place for Salentine and nonSalentine musical traditions, and prepares musicians for the highpoint of the festival, the collaborative ‘concertone’, or final mass concert presented against the spectacular backdrop of Melpignano’s floodlit Baroque Convento degli Agostininiani. This collaborative encounter between Salentine and non-Salentine musical tradition is mediated by a different non-Salentine artistic director each year like Ambrogio Sparagna and Daniele Sepe, a leading jazz exponent of ‘contamination’ within the Neapolitan folk genre (Vacca, 2007).

La Notte della Taranta 2002

When I attended La Notte della Taranta in 2002, the festival’s ethos of experimental musical exchange had brought together key figures in the Salentine folk scene such as legendary gypsy tamburellista Claudio ‘Cavallo’ Giagnotti, Uccio Aloisi, Enza Pagliara, Cinzia Villani and Pino Zimba (celebrated for his role as protagonist of Eduardo Winspeare’s 2001 Salento-inspired film Sangue vivo), as well as nonSalentine exponents of other traditions such as Brazilian percussionist Gilson Silveira, the classically trained Solis String Quartet, I Nidi d'Arac (an experimental electronic group inspired by pizzica), and Riccardo Tesi (a Northern Italian World Music exponent who had collaborated with the celebrated and recently deceased Genovese cantautore [songwriter] Fabrizio De André, whose 1984 Crêuza de mä was the first ever major mainstream album recorded wholly in dialect).

My revivalist friend from Melpignano, Francesco, had earlier introduced me to the Festa di San Rocco at Torre Paduli. A week later, he invited me to attend this second major icon of Salentine revivalism. The festival had been growing larger each year, and the crowd that night in Melpignano’s main piazza was estimated at 50,000. But 264

that night, the event was reaching a wider audience than ever before. Through funding provided under the recent Legge 482 legislation on Italian Linguistic Minorities, the final concert was to be televised for the first time by the local TeleRama network, linking Melpignano via direct satellite transmission to Greece and Italian linguistic minorities scattered throughout Italy, including Greek and Albanian speakers in Calabria, Occitanian speakers in the Val d'Aosta, German speakers in Bolzano, and speakers of Friulian and Swiss dialects in other parts of Northern Italy.

The evening opened on a low key note with local musicians Roberto and Emanuele Licci, a symbolic tribute to their important role in keeping traditional Salentine folk music alive through the 1970s and 1980s with their pioneering gruppo storico Il Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (see Chapter Two).

In the next segment, a new and alien talk show format had been grafted onto the concert in response to the new televised medium. Many in the audience were uncomfortable with this alien imposition on ‘their’ event, which seemed somehow to detract from the previous ethos of homespun local folk authenticity. Proceedings began with a series of television-style interviews with local Salentine intellectual and cultural figures conducted by a literary critic from the weekly L'Espresso. Francesco commented acidly that although the TV host was married to a Salentine woman, and had published a book on Otranto, ‘he’s not from Salento, and he knows less than us about Salento’. He described the alleged pretext for this televisual space filler - that the musicians still needed time to set up - as una presa per il culo (‘piss take’). Within the context of La Notte della Taranta’s celebration of local traditional culture, the audience’s patience with the vapid and all too familiar chiacchiera da salotto televisivo (TV chat show banter) foisted upon them by people who were ‘not even from Salento’ began to wear thin. Sensing that their festival was about to be hijacked by the dominant TV culture, some began whistling as the talk show segment dragged on interminably.

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Italian National Television Strike 2010: ‘1) Turn off the TV: change programme, go out; 2) Promote the strike: download the flyer, put it up everywhere, talk about it with your friends; 3) Take part in the strike: arrange discounts and special offers, organise parties and gatherings for whoever presents their remote control’. Source: Esterni (2010).

Discontented local folk fans were relieved to an extent by the arrival on stage of Salentine singer Anna Di Mitri, who sang and danced a ‘contaminated’ experimental version of a well known local favourite in griko. The main guest, Israeli singer Noa, then made her appearance, commenting in good Italian that Salento was for her ‘like a second home’ and that pizzica reminded her very much of Israeli folk music. She then launched into a pizzica tune sung with Hebrew words, followed by a song in griko (the words of which she read off a paper), and finally a song for peace.

For hard-core Salentine revivalists in the audience, already restive after the earlier imposition of the new TV format, these intercultural experiments in World Music innovation were not really what they had come for. Their emotional allegiance was not finally won over until later in the evening, with the arrival on stage of the pony-tailed gypsy musician Cavallo and his legendary tamburello. Earlier I had noticed a little boy 266

walking around with an object which was doubly totemic; a tamburello made by Cavallo himself and inscribed with his signature. As this icon of Salentine popular tradition and his group Mascarimirì launched frenetically into a classic pizzica tune, the crowd finally went wild. ‘Siamo invincibili!’ (‘We are invincible!’) Francesco whispered ecstatically as the emotional heart of the concert finally seemed to emerge. Inevitably, Cavallo was asked back at the end of the concert for several encores, and he and many others later continued playing and dancing in the piazza after the concert until dawn [SFX2].

The festival still appeared strongly rooted in a sense of local community, as evidenced by a number of references to Simone, a young local man who lay in a coma after a car accident a few days earlier. ‘Simone, we want you. Come back to Melpignano’ read a number of posters held up during the concert. ‘We hope we can call him back through this concert’ announced one local musician from the stage, in a way which seemed to recall traditional magical practises from local peasant ritual. Yet the unease over the new televised format had brought to the surface a sense that local cultural identity was somehow under threat, powerfully dramatising cultural contradictions between the global and local.

For Francesco, the concert had been the high point of the season - ‘la massima espressione della salentinità’ (‘the highest expression of Salentinity’) - and yet he feared that it might also mark ‘the beginning of the decline’. The event had dramatised cultural contradictions at the core of Salentine revivalism, for the festival’s internationalist and modernist ethos of dialogue between local and non-local cultural traditions expressed in World Music’s warm and fuzzy notion of infinitely-expandable yet increasingly homogenised cultural diversity had sat uneasily with another notion of tradition which is dominant within Salentine revivalism: the notion of an essentialised, bounded and ethnicised local popular culture.

La Notte della Taranta has historically been the focus of major controversy over divergent orientations towards popular tradition embodied in the contradictory terms ‘tradizione’ and ‘contaminazione’. The festival had originally been set up under the auspices of the Istituto Diego Carpitella, established with the ostensible aim of 267

building on the research carried out during the first wave of revivalism in Salento by ethnomusicologists Luigi Chiriatti, Diego Carpitella, Giovanna Marini and others. Yet this research and documentational aspect of the project had largely failed to materialise by 2003, and instead attention (and funding) had been directed almost exclusively towards the Notte della Taranta event. Chiriatti had acrimoniously resigned from the scientific committee of the Istituto once it became clear to him that the Istituto and the festival had been captured by others more interested in the modernist path of World Music ‘contamination’ than promoting performance and research into Salentine popular tradition in his more narrowly conceived sense. He and other revivalists from the ‘traditionalist’ camp such as Roberto Raheli have continued since then to snipe at the festival and its management from the sidelines. Festival convenor Mario Blasi even claims that Chiriatti organised a group of young men to heckle at the main concert during the first season.

15

Some tradition-minded local musicians continue to boycott

the event as a crass commercialisation of Salentine tradition which clashes with what they see as the real highpoint of Salentine tradition held at the same time, the Festa di San Rocco. Critics of La Notte della Taranta are at times savage in their denunciation of what they see as an ignorant and meretricious exploitation of local culture as a way of ‘value adding’ to the local tourism industries (cf. Santoro, 1999).

It would be easy to dismiss critics of the festival like Raheli, Santoro and Chiriatti as hypertraditionalist party poopers. However, it must be galling for people like them who have dedicated a lifetime to recording and performing Salento’s fast disappearing folk traditions that public institutions have still failed to implement any serious measures for the systematic documentation and recording of such traditions, whilst at the same time lavishing huge amounts of attention and public funding on an event which they see as a highly dubious and selective representation of Salentine folk culture. Contrasting their own grass roots focus on local culture, they describe the festival as una cosa quasi studiata a tavolino (like something drawn up in an office) by

15

One is struck here by a parallel with the horrified response from Bob Dylan’s folk fan base to his debut with electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, memorably captured in the 2007 film I’m Not Here.

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a small elite group, motivated more by a technocratic and political agenda than by any deep commitment to or understanding of Salentine popular tradition.

The economic impact of the folk festival

The recent boom in large-scale free and publicly-funded local folk festivals in Southern Italy raises a central question: why is there increasing political support for the disbursement of significant sums of public money on such events, and what are the benefits to the local community?

The annual budget for Tarantellapower in 2005 was 70,000 Euros, of which the lion’s share was provided by the Provincia di Reggio Calabria. In 2005, a Caulonia town councillor and Reggio Calabria provincial councillor estimated that Tarantellapower was attracting a total of 35,000 visitors to Caulonia each year. Assuming that each person spent an average of 10 Euros while visiting the festival, this created a circulation of 350,000 Euros in the town each August. Local banks indicate that the only time of the year when there are major currency flows in Caulonia is before, during and after Tarantellapower. On my return visit to the Caulonia festival in 2005, the stimulus to local business activity since my first visit in 2002 was clearly evident in the expansion of food and handicraft stalls and the boost to other sectors such as restaurants, bars, grocery shops and accommodation during the festival. At Melpignano (the key Notte della Taranta venue), the proprietor of a local bar stated that the two week residential music workshop held in the town in preparation for the final ‘concertone’ was fundamental for the survival of her business.

In 2005, timely advertising of Tarantellapower was delayed until the last minute due to political infighting which continued until ten days before the festival was due to commence. With the consequent drop in numbers attending, a local butcher complained that business had dropped off by 60% compared to previous years. According to one local, the capillary economic effect of the injection of festival cash into the local economic circuit becomes most obvious in winter, as people start reinvesting money in restoring their houses, repairing their cars and so on.

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The Caulonia festival and ARPA have played an important role in supporting the establishment by three local women of the Associazione Mesos, which manages a number of houses in the town and rents them out to visitors. Under the auspices of the revivalist-inspired Associazione Città Futura in nearby Riace, the presence of revivalists attracted by Riace’s celebrated patronal Festa dei Santi Medici and other folk events has also encouraged the renovation of many houses left vacant by migration, and their transformation into accommodation for up to 100 visitors. A local grocer in Riace stated that given the marginal nature of his business, revivalist visitors drawn to the town by Città Futura project played a fundamental role in keeping him afloat financially.

‘Tourist numbers up 24%: foreign tourist numbers up 33%’: this 2010 Calabrian election poster highlights the economic significance of tourism to many small Calabrian 2010

towns.

Photo:

Angelo

Maggio,

Belvedere

Marittimo,

Calabria,

(‘L’incompiuto calabrese’ series). [Image removed due to copyright

restrictions.] Although there is some evidence of private sector funding for some Southern folk festivals, private sponsorship generally makes only a minor contribution to budgets, providing for instance only 2,500 Euros of the 70,000 Euro budget of 2005 Tarantellapower (Angelo Maggio, personal comment). ARPA has been cautious in this area, due to a concern about the festival becoming ‘too commercial’. These fears 270

seemed to be borne out at the much smaller 2002 Festival of Diso, where both sides of the concert stage were dominated by a running display of advertisements for local businesses. In extraordinary contrast with the traditional norms of the Southern Italian festa popolare, there was no locally produced wine, only beer, on sale, because the major festival sponsor (the Northern Italian beer company Warsteiner) had negotiated exclusivity for their product with the festival organisers.

Many local politicians in the poor and non-industrialised South have come to see the new folk economy as an opportunity for the transformation of the base metal of local traditions like pizzica and tarantella into political gold. As Caulonia politician Attilio Tucci commented:

If I were Agnelli and Fiat were really the salvation of the town, I would do it. But the local territory isn’t suitable for industrial activity, and so we have to focus on cultural tourism. I realise that this will not save the economy of the town, but it may be able to make an extra contribution to improving the local economy.

Local popular tradition could be an ‘added extra’ for those who want to spend their holidays here, not for mass tourism, but for those who want to have an ‘ecologically sustainable’ holiday. We have been marginalised from the rest of Europe for many years here, so that many of the local cultural characteristics have remained untouched. If we can transform this ‘marginality’ into ‘uniqueness’ then it might start to be a point of reference for a whole range of cultural activities.

In this analysis, the marginalised status of the South within the uneven processes of Italian economic development has thus had the beneficial effect of maintaining the unique character of local cultural tradition. These unique local characteristics now become a valuable export commodity in the context of new cultural needs generated within urbanised modernity dominant in industrialised Northern Italy. This commodification of the local may also be seen as part of larger economic and cultural processes increasingly evident throughout Italy, as the manufacture or reinvention of 271

regional tradition plays an increasingly significant role in the regional differentiation of commodities within a decentralised, yet globalised post-Fordist market. The cultural regionalism exemplified especially in the Salentine folk revival thus dovetails neatly with wider economic processes (cf. Rossi, 2004, 467), for as Giovanni Vacca has noted:

The ‘local’ can not only provide low cost labour, or small units of production as an alternative to earlier forms of industrial gigantism, but also reveals itself as a precious ally in one of the key necessities of the post-Fordist economy: diversification, individuation and ‘personalisation’ of products and the consumption experience (n.d).

‘Authentic regional pride’: in this advertisement, the notion of the ‘traditional authenticity’ of supermarket chain CONAD’s regional produce is reinforced by the ‘authenticity’ of the primary producer of this local cheese, who comments in the regional dialect of Emilia-Romagna: ‘I still make it the same way my grandfather used to’. Source: L’Espresso. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] 272

Roseman and others have recently described a similar process of transformation in the economically and geographically marginalised region of Galicia in Spain:

a new model of rurality was designed, centred on a diversified use of rural spaces for the tourism, recreation and conservation uses demanded by urban populations…This resulted in the transformation of cultural aspects of rural communities formerly based on agriculture and fishing into elements of ‘heritage’, in many cases promoted by the local people themselves in the form of small and medium businesses, local and cultural associations, and cooperatives…The model being promoted in Galicia is…focussing on the promotion of localities and ‘routes’ on the basis of specific landscapes, vernacular architecture, festivals, religious rituals and other elements, in order to differentiate these areas in the context of a competitive global tourism market and the demand for new experiences from consumers (Roseman et al. 2008, 78f.).

Music, particularly World Music, is an unrivalled instrument for facilitating the kind of intercultural exchange which lies at the heart of the Southern Italian folk festival phenomenon. In an era of increasingly globalised markets, there are also distinct socioeconomic advantages in establishing wider cultural networks as a way of promoting local identity outside the local. One informant summarised as follows Bennato’s motivation in abandoning his earlier Southern Italian project for his current panMediterranean focus (Bennato, 2000): ‘It suits Bennato to focus on his latest “Mediterranean” theme because that way he gets to travel more’. Similarly, Attilio Tucci’s preoccupation with expanding the cultural and geographical focus of Tarantellapower provided an opportunity for a small town Southern Italian local politician like himself to travel to Scotland and discuss the local Scottish bagpipe tradition with the mayor of Glasgow.

A third variety of festival, the sagra di paese, is sometimes a modernist reinvention of the traditional local agricultural festival, and is organised around seasonal local agricultural totems such as the chestnut, the wild boar or the local vintage (for the term sagra in Northern Italy, see Baldassar, 2001, 137f.). Through its commodification of 273

the local, this type of event is emblematic of the way objectified notions of ‘popular tradition’ are now playing an important role in local Southern Italian economies.

If the diffusion of the Southern Italian folk festival has led to the creation of a new ‘folk economy’ in many parts of Southern Italy, at an even more basic level, it has also served to put previously remote and obscure Southern Italian communities on the map for the first time. As one Calabrian informant commented in 2005: ‘before the festival, nobody went to Caulonia; nobody even knew anything about the place.’ Course participants in 2005 were astonished when I told them I had first heard of the existence of Caulonia while I was still in Australia, after a member of the Adelaide Calabrian community mentioned the town’s tarantella festival. As I will argue in Chapter Seven, the recent emergence of ‘Salento’ as a distinct geographical area within wider Italian consciousness has also been intimately linked to the revival and promotion of pizzica.

This 2001 Touring Club Italiano ‘Guide to Italian Artisans and Popular Traditions’ highlights a new interest among urban Italians in regional popular traditions, and includes details of 507 feste popolari across twenty regions as well as an introductory essay by anthropologist of Southern Italian popular tradition Luigi Lombardi-Satriani. 274

Folk festivals are one of the latest examples of a new form of public sector cultural entrepreneurialism which has emerged in regional Italy. A key slogan used by local politicians to promote many of these initiatives is la valorizzazione del territorio. The pre-history of such initiatives can probably be traced to attempts from the 1960s onwards to use organised cultural spectacles as an instrument for the economic development of small centres in provincial Central Italy. The idea was largely pioneered in the area rossa dominated by leftist regional administrations in Central Italy with such initiatives as the Spoleto Festival (1958), Umbria Jazz (1973), Pescara Jazz (1973) and Arezzo Wave (1987). The Venice Carnival was also re-established after a nearly 200-year hiatus by the city’s Socialist mayor in 1979 (Feil, 1998). This pattern is also evident in Southern Italy in the establishment in 1971 of Roccella Jazz in Roccella Jonica near Caulonia. Yet more people attended Tarantellapower in 2005 than Roccella Jazz, which has been in existence for 25 years (Angelo Maggio personal comment), suggesting a current trend in the South away from jazz and towards folk music, and a shift in emphasis from the translocal and cosmopolitan to the local and popular.

Although festival organisers like ARPA are often keen to propose a festival programme which they see has having ‘artistic’ or ‘philological’ integrity, the agenda of the local political administration is often more utilitarian in scope, since attracting the maximum number of visitors to the local festival has become an important means for them to garner symbolic political capital and to boost the local economy. One strategy for achieving this objective is by including ‘big name’ draw cards such as Neapolitan folk legend Eugenio Bennato, a musician who, despite his key role in launching the second revival, is viewed by many folk revivalists as now hopelessly compromised by commercialism. Contrasting the competing agendas of what he sees as political opportunism versus ‘artistic integrity’, Angelo Maggio states:

Politicians don’t give a stuff about popular tradition: for them it wouldn’t matter if it was just the festival of the almond blossoms. For them it’s simply a public spectacle which allows them to get votes.

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Similarly, local revivalist Peppe A’Susanna holds local politicians responsible for what he sees as the rapid ‘degeneration’ of Pagani’s Festa della Madonna delle Galline over the last ten years:

Ten years ago, people were more attached to the festa, it was less commercial, less politicised. Now the local administrations use it as political propaganda to get votes. People who don’t know their own history seek to associate the festa with their own administration, and turn it into something different, because politicians are interested in political propaganda, not history.

The beneficial economic impact of a successful summer folk festival inevitably raises the question of whether it is possible to expand the local folk economy temporally and/or spatially. Using the summer folk festival as a major pole of attraction, is it possible to bring outsiders to the town not just during the few days of the festival, but also at other times of the year as well? Caulonia town councillor Attilio Tucci aimed to establish a number of activities designed to attract scholars, students and others to the town throughout the year, while ARPA has had some success in attracting urban revivalists to Caulonia over the Easter break to participate in the spectacular rituals associated with Good Friday.

Some folk festivals expand out from beyond a single town like Caulonia to embrace a wider regional focus, exploiting the picturesque settings of a number of small local towns within a distinct cultural bloc such as the Calabrian Zona Grecanica (Festival di Paleariza: Il Manifesto, 2005) or Grecia Salentina (La Notte della Taranta). In 2004, Tarantellapower organisers acceded to a request from their major sponsor, the Provincia di Reggio Calabria, to extend festival activities to other small towns around Caulonia. But according to Angelo Maggio, this project failed due to a lack of coordination by the various town administrations, and resentment from Caulonia inhabitants who saw Tarantellapower as ‘their’ festival. Such initiatives have had greater success in areas such as the Calabrian and Salentine Greek-speaking areas, where funding obtained under the 1999 Linguistic Minorities Law (Legge 482/1999) has facilitated a higher level of collaboration, administrative infrastructure and local cultural identity. Taking advantage of funds newly available from the EU, the nine 276

traditionally Greek-speaking towns of Grecia Salentina in 2001 amalgamated into the Unione dei Comuni della Grecia Salentina. Here, La Notte della Taranta has undoubtedly played a significant role in the creation or re-emergence of a local unitary political and cultural identity. However, since my fieldwork, the event has effectively been disembedded from its local roots and turned into a road show format: in 2006, the entire spectacle was staged for the first time in Beijing (Lüdtke, 2009, 112).

In 2001, the 11 town councils of Grecia Salentina formed the Unione dei Comuni della Grecia Salentina. Source: Wikimedia Commons, . [6 September 2011].

The trajectory of the Southern Italian folk festival

We are now in a position to sketch out a tentative trajectory of the Southern Italian folk festival phenomenon. In the first phase, the festival is established by a small and dedicated group of local musicians and other revivalists, sometimes with the encouragement or charismatic leadership of prominent revivalist actors from outside such as Eugenio Bennato (Carpino, Caulonia) or Pino Gala (Carpino) who have an extensive history of engagement with the local community and its local popular traditions.

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For a variety of reasons, this visionary local revivalist nucleus often meets with initial scepticism, ambivalence or lack of support from the local community and political establishment. Within local communities, the practice of popular traditions has often largely fallen by the wayside in the headlong post-war rush towards modernity, and has become associated with a stigmatised peasant past. The idea of reviving such practices is at first often met with embarrassment by non-revivalist locals, as in Giovanna’s comment on tarantella quoted above. At a book launch in 2005, the President of the Province of Reggio Calabria admitted publicly that three years previously, after his recent election as president, he was at first appalled when Caulonia town councillor Attilio Tucci approached him with a request to fund a festival of tarantella in Caulonia. He confessed that at the time he would not have spent a lira on the project if he had not been so impressed by Tucci’s enthusiasm. Given the subsequent success of the festival however, he later stated his satisfaction at having approved this expenditure (Attilio Tucci, personal comment).

While the attitude of the local community and political class in Caulonia has become overwhelmingly supportive of the Tarantellapower initiative, at Carpino in 2002, the conservative local administration’s attitude to the festival seemed at best ambivalent, according to Carpino’s young festival organiser, Luciano Castellucci, because it was seen as una cosa di sinistra (something ‘leftwing’). A very public political provocation by Sicilian leftist and anti-Mafia musician Roy Paci, combined with the presence of visibly ‘countercultural’ outsiders, also led to a hostile reaction by a small group of Carpino locals towards festival participants. Older locals accustomed to the rural regime of retiring and rising early sometimes express resentment at disruption caused to traditional routines by a week of amplified concerts in the main piazza, which are inevitably followed by spontaneous ‘rave’ style music and dance sessions which often continue into the small hours. But Luciano Castellucci also reflected as follows on the gradual acculturation of the local Carpino community to the presence of exotic outsiders:

Before, a seventy year-old, seeing hippies dancing in the piazza till 4 in morning…they’d never seen this kind of thing…But over the years, even they get used to the idea, and it begins to seem normal. But previously, there was 278

enormous surprise. Before, if you were outside the norm, you were too outlandish, you did things which other people didn’t, you were judged negatively, but now it’s all completely normal.

CASE STUDY TWO: THE BATTLE OF CAULONIA, 2002-8

It would be drawing a long bow indeed to describe the following account of the vicissitudes of Caulonia’s Tarantellapower festival between 2002 and 2008 as a ‘longitudinal study’. And yet my fieldwork at the festival in both 2002 and 2005, and close continuing engagement with ARPA President Angelo Maggio reveal diachronic trends in this festival which seem characteristic of Southern Italian folk festivals generally.

The acrimonious dispute in 2004-8 for control of the festival between its ‘philological’ revivalist founders (Associazione ARPA) and their adversaries (local Caulonia politician Attilio Tucci and his political allies) bears witness to the success and growing political significance of revivalist-driven folk festivals in Southern Italy. As occurred with La Notte della Taranta, however, ARPA’s grass-roots aesthetic vision of valorising local popular tradition was eventually overcome by an opposing and more technocratic vision promoted by a local political elite, who in the end controlled the funding. In both cases, political actors sought to transform the festival into a vehicle which would better serve their own political agenda, by promoting mass participation through the introduction of a more translocal, commercialised and mainstream focus, with a greater reliance upon prestigious figures and institutions like Eugenio Bennato. ‘The Battle of Caulonia’ thus dramatises the deep contradictions between ‘philological’ and ‘commercial’ tendencies inherent within Southern Italian folk revivalism.

The following case study is epistemologically compromised from the start, due to my close collaboration and friendship since 2002 with ARPA members, particularly Angelo Maggio, and by my reliance on information provided by him for many details of events to which I was not a witness. Despite my inevitable foregrounding of the 279

ARPA perspective, I feel the following account still usefully highlights important elements of the local field within which the Southern Italian festival is embedded.

As long-serving councillor for the Caulonia administration with the centre-left Margherita party, Attilio Tucci had been ARPA’s political collaborator at Caulonia in the establishment of Tarantellapower. Despite previously excellent working relations between the two parties, things began to sour soon after Tucci was elected Reggio Calabria provincial councillor in 2003. Tucci’s political elevation now seemed to open up for him wider political and funding possibilities, through his new access to political influence at the provincial level, as well as raising his political stocks on the Caulonia Council, where he continued to serve as local councillor within the ruling majority. He and his political allies in the council majority now began highlighting a series of alleged shortcomings in ARPA’s management of Tarantellapower, and proposing changes to existing financial, artistic and administrative arrangements.

One of the key demands of Tucci and the Caulonia administration (of which he was a highly influential member) was the appointment of Eugenio Bennato as artistic director of Tarantellapower. This ARPA steadfastly refused to accept: like many other ‘philological’ revivalists at the time, ARPA were dismayed at the highly commercial direction which Bennato’s music had been taking, and also felt the high performance fees he was requesting would have been better spent on hiring other less mainstream performers. In his original national project of tarantella revival put forward in the late 1990s, Bennato had proposed the establishment of tarantella schools all over Italy, a series of CDs featuring each major tarantella tradition in Southern Italy, and a circuit of tarantella festivals all over Italy, including Caulonia. In the event, only two of the proposed CDs were ever produced (Lezioni di tarantella and i Cantori di Carpino), while only one festival (Caulonia) and one school (Bologna) has so far been established. Bennato has subsequently largely abandoned his initial research into Southern Italian folk musical tradition for a new artistic exploration of the panMediterranean roots of Southern Italian music, including the Mahgreb, Greece and the Arab world. In 2002, ARPA had reluctantly included Bennato on the programme at the specific instance of the Caulonia Council, and had then succeeded in beating him down

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to 6000 Euros, although Angelo Maggio had vowed then that this would be the last time. By 2005, Angelo’s position on Bennato was as follows:

We were very disappointed, because in 1999, we thought Bennato would be able to take on a certain role at a national level…We didn’t invite him in 2003 because we felt his original project was dead: there was no longer the same energy and innovation. We noticed that there was never any news from him: the whole thing was like a dead branch (from a project, not artistic point of view), so we thought it was better to simply cut it off and be done with it.

For the 2004 edition of Tarantellapower, ARPA had been formally delegated by the Caulonia administration to organise the festival in collaboration with Tucci’s recently formed Caulonia-based cultural association, the somewhat grandiloquently titled ‘Università delle Arti Performative’. However, ARPA soon found itself left out in the cold through a conveniently-discovered provincial regulation stating that cultural associations like ARPA based outside the Province of Reggio Calabria were ineligible to receive provincial funding (although the majority of ARPA’s activities are focussed within the province of Reggio Calabria, the association is formally incorporated outside the province in Catanzaro). Angelo Maggio recounted that a plagiarised version of the ARPA logo appeared on the new website entitled ‘Kaulonia Taranta Festival’ managed by Tucci’s Università delle Arti Performative, and that members of Tucci’s cultural association began contacting artists pretending to be from ARPA. In Maggio’s view, Attilio had effectively hijacked Tarantellapower: ‘They were pretending to be us!’

Angelo and his ARPA colleagues did not take these developments lying down, but instead immediately contacted all the musicians who had been engaged for Tarantellapower 2004 and informed them of what had happened, and that ARPA was no longer organising the event. By Angelo’s account, all but one of the musicians refused to collaborate with Tucci out of a sense of loyalty to ARPA. Through the organisation’s extensive network of contacts further north, ARPA supporters in the cities of Northern and Central Italy were kept informed of developments via email. In contrast to what Angelo saw as Tucci’s underhand backroom methods, ARPA instead 281

availed itself of ‘the weapons which democracy put at our disposal’ by denouncing Tucci’s Tarantellapower coup in the local press. A subsequent public meeting convened by ARPA in Caulonia to answer Tucci’s criticisms lasted until 3 am and was filmed by ARPA.

Despite frantic attempts at mediation in the lead up to the festival in August 2004, the two parties remained irreconcilable. Eventually, as popular disquiet at this impasse grew in Caulonia by the day, the Caulonia administration devised a compromise solution which Angelo described sarcastically as a ‘typical Italian-style decision of Solomon’: the available 70,000 Euro funding was split in two, with ARPA organising a three day Tarantellapower festival, and Tucci’s Università delle Art Performative organising a subsequent three day ‘Kaulonia Taranta Festival’. After what in Angelo’s account was a highly successful, if abbreviated, three day version of Tarantellapower, Tucci’s festival took place with ‘il maestro’ Eugenio Bennato as musical director, and the eminent Calabrian anthropologist Luigi Lombardi-Satriani as ‘scientific director’. There was a new ‘international’ flavour to the second festival which dovetailed neatly with Bennato’s new artistic preoccupation with exploring the pan-Mediterranean nature of Southern Italian folk music and its links to Greece, the Mahgreb and the Arab musical worlds. A musician imported from Glasgow even regaled the audience with a rendition of tarantella played on the Scottish bagpipes, that rather distant British relative of the local Calabrian zampogna.

Yet in the view of Caulonia Mayor Piero Campisi, Attilio’s festival ‘had nothing to do with tarantella’, highlighting la musica mediterranea instead of ‘our own original and unique local musical reality’. In fact, representing local musical tradition proved highly problematic, because although Attilio was finally able to locate two suonatori tradizionali from Aspromonte, the other local and national folk musicians on the original ARPA programme overwhelmingly boycotted Attilio’s festival, with one traditional organetto player from the remote town of Gallicianò reportedly declining an offer of 2,000 Euros to perform at the festival out of solidarity with ARPA. Angelo gave the following amusing, if highly partial account of the rival festival:

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Their festival was a complete disaster; the scaffolding even collapsed on top of an American woman. Every now and then Eugenio Bennato made an appearance, played a couple of chords on his guitar and people recovered slightly.

Attilio’s festival was also on a far more lavish scale than the ARPA festival, and Angelo claims it must have cost 60-70,000 Euros rather than the agreed 35,000 Euros: there was speculation at Caulonia that the budget must have been supplemented from some other undisclosed funding source.

Feeling vindicated at having stuck to their guns and put on a highly successful if shortened version of Tarantellapower under difficult circumstances, ARPA now resigned themselves to a much more relaxed summer at the beach the following year, when the Caulonia Council would presumably engage Tucci and Bennato to run the festival. But in the local elections of April 2005, the ruling Caulonia administration, of which Attilio was a member, was voted out of office, and a new town mayor, 38 year old lawyer Piero Campisi, won by 68 votes. Campisi partly attributed his victory in the April 2005 elections to disquiet in Caulonia over the handling of the Tarantellapower dispute by the previous administration and Tucci.

Dr Tucci now found himself in opposition, with a new and youthful mayor with a reputation for political propriety and plain dealing who was highly sympathetic to ARPA’s position, and also intolerant of the clientelistic politics of small town Southern Italy. After further extensive but unsuccessful attempts by Campisi and his administration to mediate between the opposing camps, finally, at the eleventh hour, the Caulonia ruling majority decided on 10 August to invest ARPA with responsibility for organising the 2005 Festival, thus excluding Attilio’s Università delle Arti Performative from the action. It was just ten days before the festival was due to begin.

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A notably stressed Angelo Maggio and Danilo Gatto prepare for the opening of Tarantellapower 2005. Photo: Grazia De Sensi.

ARPA had again played hard ball by refusing to accept the imposition of Eugenio Bennato as artistic director, but had agreed under Council pressure to at least invite him to perform, an offer which he then declined. When I arrived at the Festival ten days later, ARPA members seemed somewhat battle-scarred by the protracted David and Goliath political contest which had been taking place. Although the number of course participants was low because of the late publication of the programme, ARPA still deemed the Festival a great success. On the third night, Mayor Piero Campisi appeared on the stage before a packed audience gathered in the main piazza to hear Neapolitan folk legend Peppe Barra, and declared publicly that his administration felt vindicated in its decision to appoint ARPA, rather than the rival Università delle Arti Performative as the festival organisers. He then invited ARPA’s Antonio Critelli, Angelo Maggio and Danilo Gatto up onto the stage and congratulated them to rousing applause. Tarantellapower was literally on the centre stage of local political debate.

Meanwhile, Tucci was busying himself with a range of counter-activities apparently designed to distract attention away from the ARPA festival programme. During Tarantellapower, he chaired the launch at Caulonia of a late and somewhat lacklustre collection of essays by Lombardi Satriani, at which, in accordance with local 284

university tradition, a junior academic from the University of Calabria delivered an excruciatingly sycophantic one hour encomium to his academic patron. To the annoyance of Caulonia’s Mayor Campisi, Tucci also organised a concert by Eugenio Bennato in nearby Gerace in direct competition with ARPA’s Peppe Barra concert held on the same night in Caulonia. Making use of his excellent political connections in the provincial administration, Tucci also launched a DVD of his Kaulonia Taranta Festival from the year before at the headquarters of the Province of Reggio Calabria.

Contrasting strategies

The battle for control of Tarantellapower is emblematic of the contradictory agendas of political and ‘philological’ revivalist actors within the localised setting of the Southern Italian festival. For local politician Attilio Tucci and his political patrons at the provincial

level

such

as

Provincia

di

Reggio

Calabria

President

Fuda,

Tarantellapower’s success and the renewed local interest it had generated in le tradizioni popolari had rendered Tarantellapower functional as a vehicle for pursuing political objectives unrelated to ARPA’s original artistic vision. Tucci already controlled a large number of centre-left votes in the surrounding Locride region, especially at Roccella Jonica and Caulonia. By channelling provincial cultural funding through l’Università delle Arti Performative and extending festival activities beyond Caulonia to other towns such as Gerace, there was now the possibility of extending his political influence even more widely throughout the province.

Through his political networks, Tucci had arranged for the 2004 Kaulonia Taranta Festival DVD to be distributed to schools throughout the province of Reggio Calabria. Through the good offices of provincial President Fuda, he had also been able to hold seminars at the provincial headquarters in Reggio Calabria. He proposed raising the profile of the festival (and thus of Tucci himself) by appointing ‘soggetti di rilievo’ (key figures) like Lombardi-Satriani and ‘il maestro’ Eugenio Bennato ‘who appears on television three or four times a year’, as well as increasing collaboration with formal institutions such as universities. In order to boost numbers at the Caulonia festival, he proposed a shift in focus away from tarantella and the local, towards the 285

more populist and translocal cultural policy of ‘internationalisation’ along the lines of La Notte della Taranta.

Pietro Fuda’s electoral office, Gioia Tauro, during the 2010 Provincia di Calabria presidential elections. Photo: Angelo Maggio (‘L’incompiuto calabrese’ series). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Overall funding and control of the festival would of course be vested directly in a single Caulonia-based organisation under Tucci’s direct control, rather than the politically unreliable (and Catanzaro-based) ARPA. In contrast with ARPA’s emphasis on the valorisation of local popular tradition, Tucci pointed to the necessity for a continuous evolution of the festival, in order to remain ‘ahead of the game’, and to the danger, given growing competition for locally based festivals, that Bennato might be snapped up by the opposition in other nearby towns such as Gerace:

If we continue to only do Calabrian folk music, and we do not create parallels and bridges between the different cultures of the Mediterranean, we will find ourselves in a situation within the next six or seven years where we will come to the end of our expressive capabilities, because these are not infinite, and we will lose our position as the pioneer. We were the ones who started this off, and we cannot stop, we must keep on going, be always a year ahead of other events which may emerge, if we want to continue to be the leader. I knew that other 286

towns would follow Caulonia with this idea of the festival as a moment for coming together….To stay in front, to remain original, you always have to invent something new, so if the other towns put on folk festivals, you can create a connection with the other Mediterranean cultures. And Bennato was the first to realise this.

Angelo and Campisi represented Tucci’s political modus operandi as conforming to the age-old pattern of the Southern Italian small town galantuomo (gentleman), based around clientelistic networks in Caulonia, formalised institutions, and excellent provincial and regional media and political networks which helped to provide access to abundant sources of funding. When ARPA went to discuss their position with the Mayor of Caulonia two months before Tarantellapower 2005, Campisi had stated: ‘It’s going to be tough: these guys control not just the local council, but also the provincial administration too’. Tucci’s control of local media was evident in the lavish full page colour ads in the local Gazzetta del Sud, and the fact that his press releases emanated from the well-resourced media office of Provincial President Fuda in Reggio Calabria, while the ARPA media office was run by a part-timer operating out of the Caulonia public library. RAI 3’s regional TV news bulletins were also unusually positive in their support of the Tucci case (something which Angelo Maggio attributed to the fact that Attilio was reportedly renting a parking space in Catanzaro to the RAI 3 news director).

By contrast, ARPA’s strategy consisted in the mobilisation of more ‘grassroots’ level contacts in the local and national music scenes, as well as recourse to press interviews, discussions with the Caulonia political opposition, and an insistence on council meetings being held in public and filmed, instead of shady backroom deals. The ARPA-led boycott of Tucci’s festival by suonatori tradizionali demonstrated a striking ‘controllo del territorio’ built up over many years of direct interaction with local people at feste popolari and concerts all over Calabria: ‘We had a network of spies throughout the local territory, so whenever something happened, they rang us straight away’. In its dealings with Campisi and the urban revivalist networks, ARPA was also able to capitalise on a shared leftist rhetoric of democratic resistance to Southern Italian clientelism, by contrasting a vision of una politica democratica collettiva with 287

the more traditional Southern Italian pattern of politics as una cosa personalistica (something tied to specific individuals).

Tucci’s technocratic and hierarchical vision emphasised the importance of ‘experts’ and of establishing closer links with institutions, especially universities. Dismissing Angelo Maggio as ‘una persona che fa il ferroviere di giorno e cerca di fare il meridionalista di sera’ (a person who works for the railways in the daytime and tries to be a Southern Italian scholar at night time), 16 he described ARPA members as ‘inexperienced, with an arrogant attitude: they should be working under the guidance of Lombardi-Satriani and Bennato: first you have to be patient before you can become the number one.’ Angelo by contrast, pilloried Tucci’s emphasis on formalised institutions in the promotion of his festival as follows:

Of course these are the only kind of people he can actually get involved in the festival, because if he tried to invite any local suonatori tradizionali, they’d blow a big raspberry at him! But if on the other hand, he invites Professor X from the University of Trento, then he’ll be happy to come along.

A week after Tarantellapower 2005, Angelo sent me the following email which dramatises well the political and commercial pressures increasingly faced by festival organisers in seeking to promote their own vision of ‘artistic integrity’ based around the valorisation of local popular tradition:

If you want my opinion, the Tarantellapower situation is degenerating. No one is worried about evaluating whether or not the audience was happy with the performances and the other parts of the programme. No one is talking about the soaring prices or the appalling conditions in which the meals were served. Their only criterion is how big the audience was, which is certainly important, but shouldn’t distract attention away from the other factors.

16

Angelo, who is a registered surveyor and works for Ferrovie della Calabria, was greatly amused by this characterisation.

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If Caulonia wants to be a centre for a particular type of tourism, it can’t just ape Puglia, which through LA NOTTE DELLA TARANTA has become the region with definitely the biggest FAKE SPECTACULAR EVENT in the whole of Italy.

Apart from everything else, our incredible performance in 2005 will make us anxious to consider new ideas for the festival. All of us [in ARPA] have the kind of performance anxiety typical of men (especially Southern Italian men); after an incredible night of love, we always have a fear that we may not be able to repeat such a performance, and so I’m worried we may resort to some VIAGRA-LIKE MUSICIAN who will distort the whole event (and this is actually what I think happened this year with Peppe Barra). 17

Neapolitan folk legend Peppe Barra performs at the new Tarantellapower venue at Badolato, Calabria, 2011. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] 17

Email to SB by Angelo Maggio 1/9/2005

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2008 Epilogue: the end of Tarantellapower

While drafting the preceding section of this chapter in August 2008, I received the following dramatic ARPA press release entitled Tarantellapower, una storia tutta calabrese (Tarantellapower, a Typical Calabrian Story):

With the approach of its tenth anniversary, Tarantellapower finally comes to an end.

The Caulonia Town Council and administration have decided, in the interests of the community, that the event…was no longer satisfactory. They will attempt to replace it with something different (but as similar as possible), in its place. But we say to our devoted fans: beware of fakes!

ARPA has decided to throw in the towel, exhausted by the polemics and continual incursions of the opposing team, as if in an eternal Bar Sport. Saddened that we have not been able to explain our cultural vision of a festival which has drawn in people from all over Italy, ARPA leaves Caulonia, an unwelcome guest, but not before thanking all of the Caulonia residents and administrators who have supported and appreciated our work (ARPA, 2008).

Despite ARPA’s protracted campaign, the Tucci camp had finally prevailed: following legal advice, the Caulonia Town Council had revoked its previous delegation of responsibility to ARPA for organising the festival from 2008-10 and , and instead invested Eugenio Bennato in their place (Comune di Caulonia, 2008). The programme for the newly named ‘Kaulonia Taranta Festival 2008’ featured not only Bennato, but also his ex-wife Pietra Montecorvino, a number of other Bennato collaborators and the (non-folk) chanteuse Ornella Vanoni. The previously local and popular character of the festival appeared to have been largely eliminated. A passage in the City Council decision describing the festival as ‘belonging not only to all the citizens of Caulonia, but also to those of the whole Locride region’ seemed to Angelo to presage a future political ambition of expanding the festival beyond Caulonia to absorb the whole of

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Tucci’s political powerbase in the surrounding Locri area into one regional megaevent.

According to ARPA sources, the Assessore di Cultura for Regione Calabria subsequently vowed that ARPA would never receive another Euro from the Regione. However, since 2009, the neighbouring Province of Catanzaro has hosted and funded Tarantellapower in the new venue of Badolato in the Province of Catanzaro. Angelo Maggio ceased involvement in ARPA activities in 2008, and resigned from ARPA in 2011: for a characteristically caustic reflection on ‘la parabola dei folk festival’ in Calabria, and a critique of the current Caulonia administration’s role in the 2012 Caulonia festival, see his recent article in Napoli Monitor (Maggio, 2012).

Conclusion

Both the Tarantellapower and Notte della Taranta controversies highlight deep contradictions

between

‘philological’

and

‘commercial’

tendencies

within

contemporary revivalism. The localist and traditionalist tone of the Salento festival was liquidated early on, allowing the event’s local political sponsors to develop it along an ‘internationalist’ paradigm more consonant with their own political and economic agenda. Similarly, at Caulonia, Tucci and Bennato’s programme of ‘internationalisation’ set them on a collision course with the ‘philological’ revivalists who had founded the festival. Associazione ARPA represented their struggle to retain overall artistic control of Tarantellapower as one between their own vision of ‘artistic integrity’ and the corrupt and clientelistic practices of small town Southern Italian politics.

The ‘Battle of Caulonia’ also highlights the significance which a festival like Tarantellapower has taken on in the local politics of a small Southern Italian town in the space of only a few years, and the possibilities which the event now offers to local political brokers in the expansion of their influence at the local, provincial and regional levels. ‘Who pays the piper may call the tune’: for local political actors, aesthetic mainstreaming and the musical doctrine of ‘contaminazione’ provided the ideal vehicle for attracting a mass constituency and constructing wider translocal circuits through 291

the ‘World Music’ ethos, but at the expense of the festival’s earlier ‘philological’ focus on locally-based musical tradition.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: REVIVALISM, ETHNOREGIONALISM AND THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF SALENTINITÀ

‘What’s on in Salento, Summer 2002?’: sun, sea, a female metonym for the natural beauty of the Salento region, and of course, the ubiquitous Salentine tamburello.

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‘…there is no denying that “ethnic” identities which had no political or even existential significance until yesterday…can acquire a genuine hold as badges of group identity overnight.’

Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality (1992, 5).

Introduction

‘What’s this “Salento” they’re talking about?’ asked the mother of Salentine folk singer Enza Pagliara after hearing the term for the first time on television in the 1990s. Enza’s mother, from a Salentine peasant background, had spent her entire life in the small town of Torchiarolo, in Upper Salento, yet had never heard of ‘Salento’ before. After later hearing her daughter described as ‘a Salentine folk singer’, she objected: ‘But you’re not Salentine, you’re from Torchiarolo!’

This localist sentiment underlines the culturally constructed and recently-created nature of the geographical area now known as ‘Salento’, as well as highlighting the truth of Davis’s observation that ‘allowing for the few exceptions that prove every rule, regions have had weak roots in Italian history…The true historical locus of identity and loyalty in Italy has been more localised – the city, the village, the community’ (1996, 54).

I have argued previously that contemporary Southern Italian revivalism differs historically from many other past and contemporary European folk revivals in its general lack of connection to the kind of explicit ethnoregionalist or nation-building projects typical of nineteenth century Romantic nationalism, as exemplified in Michael Herzfeld’s account of modern Greece (1987; 2003) or the Catalan Renaixença (Hughes, 1992), and more recently in models of national folk culture promoted in the former Eastern bloc (Ciubrinskas, 2000). A major exception to this generalisation, however, is the Salentine folk revival, which does indeed display strongly

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ethnoregionalist features which recall those described by Poppi for the Ladin Carnival in Northern Italy (1992).

In this chapter, I assess the significance of ethnoregionalist ideology within contemporary Southern Italian revivalism by first outlining the wider context of emergent Italian ethnoregionalism since the 1990s, and then presenting a case study of Salentine revivalism. Using a constructivist analysis, I show how Salentine revivalism has been strongly associated with the recent ethnoregionalist manufacture of a notion of ‘Salento’ as a distinct and bounded cultural area. Finally, I assess the degree to which ethnoregionalism is also a determinant of Calabrian and Campanian revivalisms.

Ethnoregionalism in contemporary Italy

Sicily, Sardinia, Valle D’Aosta, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige have long been recognised under the 1948 Italian Constitution as special autonomous regions (Hine, 1996), while in the post-war period, Sardinia, Sicily and Germanspeaking areas in Alto Adige have been the scene of serious political separatist movements (Clark, 1996). Yet as Lyttleton comments, until recently, ‘the real problem of Italian regionalism is why there was so little of it’ (1996, 33).

Exclusivist identity politics, that familiar characteristic of late modernity (Appadurai, 1996; Berardi, 2004, 87-102; Hobsbawm, 2003, 416f; 1996), were dramatised for Italians throughout the 1990s by the tragic implosion of the former Yugoslavia taking place just over the other side of the Adriatic. Like other ‘forces long concealed beneath the frozen ice cap of the Cold War’ (Hobsbawm, 2002, 15), Northern Italian ethnoregionalism emerged following a parallel crisis of the Italian State in the wake of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal of the early 1990s (Ginsborg, 2001).

The emergence of the Northern League and its attempts to breathe life into an imagined Northern ‘Padanian’ folk identity has put ethnoregionalism firmly on the Italian national agenda (Cento Bull, 1996, 2000; Allum & Diamanti, 1996; Cento Bull 295

& Gilbert, 2001; Farrell & Levy, 1996; Gomez-Reino Cacchafeiro, 2002). A new attitude towards cultural regionalism has been reflected in Italy by the passing of the 1999 Law No. 482 for the protection of linguistic minorities (Moss, 2000), while sociolinguist Alberto Sobrero has also detected signs of revitalisation in the speaking of dialect in Italy since the 1990s, or at least a less inhibited use of dialect: ‘the first impression is that of a liberation of dialect from the negative stereotype which has afflicted it like a curse from time immemorial’ (2006, 324).

The emergence of regionalism in Italy and other parts of Europe has also been encouraged by the current EU drive towards ‘a Europe of the regions’ (Levy, 1996a, 17f.; Cento Bull, 2000). Cento Bull has argued that one important political consequence of globalisation is the emergence of ‘multi-level governance’ and the redistribution of political power ‘from certain domestic agencies to others’ with a

parallel emergence of sub-national constituencies or ‘microregions’...Multilevel governance has been accompanied by a reshaping of cultural and political identities ‘leading many local and regional groups, movements and nationalisms to question the nation state as a representative and accountable power system’

18

(2000, 265).

Under pressure from Northern League politicians now co-opted into the Berlusconi national government, Italy has been embarking on a ‘federalist’ course towards ‘devolution’: the redistribution of state power from the national to the regional level (Hine, 1996). Older redistributive patterns of Southern patronage and clientelism familiar during the post-war DC ascendancy are now giving way to a newer neoliberal agenda, in which poorer regions are increasingly expected to ‘pay their own way’ in order to keep their hospitals and schools open (Vacca, 2002; Cento Bull, 2000; Manzella, 2002).

Within this new institutional context, re-emergent regionalism and the Southern Italian folk revival are at times becoming associated with new modes of state-sponsored 18

Held, 1995, 136

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regional entrepreneurialism. The leftist Bassolino administration’s ambitious programme of urban renewal in Naples from the 1990s, billed by some Neapolitans as ‘the Second Neapolitan Renaissance’, was emblematic of a contemporary process of renewal of Southern cultural identity (Rossi, 2004a). As we have seen in Grecia Salentina, ‘La Notte della Taranta’ has become a centrepiece of the local cultural, economic and political strategy to differentiate Salento, a previously depressed area of the South, as a distinctive geographical region. As we saw in Chapter Six, Southern Italian folk events funded at the local, provincial or regional level are becoming significant in the local cultural and financial economy, as local administrations become more sophisticated and proactive in their attempts to transform newly rediscovered local cultural capital into tourist income.

‘Have you ever bought ten centuries of tradition?’: in this Regione Calabria tourist promotion, the Calabria region is connoted by a Doric column (an allusion to the many still-visible traces of Classical Greek antiquity), a traditional textile loom (‘centuries old artisanal traditions which still survive in Calabria’) and a female metonym for Calabria’s natural beauty. Source: L’Espresso, 2003. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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‘The head of Bossi’: popular Neapolitan critique of Northern League politician Umberto Bossi’s anti-Southern ideology in a traditional Neapolitan Christmas crib figure (see De Simone, 1998), via San Gregorio Armeno, Naples, January 1996. Photo: Bennetts.

The re-emergent sense of a separate Southern Italian cultural identity has deep historical roots in the pre-Unification ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’ ruled from Naples by the Bourbons until 1861, when it was annexed by the Piedmontese State. In one passage much cited by Southern revisionists, Gramsci had described the Unification of the Italian State as ‘a ferocious dictatorship which subjected Southern Italy and the islands to fire and the sword, cutting to pieces, shooting and burying alive impoverished peasants whom paid propagandists attempted to defame with the stain of banditry’ (Gramsci, 1920). Recent signs of emergent Southern Italian ethnoregionalist sentiment in Southern Italy include a nostalgic popular resurgence of neo-Bourbon 298

ideology and a revisionist reassessment of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies which challenges the ‘official’ nationalist narrative of Unification (Romano, 2004; Scarpino, 1988).

‘We’re Back! Popular Monarchical Alliance’: Lecce, 2001. Photo: Bennetts.

On a visit to the sanctuary of the Madonna of Montevergine, one of the icons of Campanian folk consciousness, I noticed the large hand painted slogan ‘Long Live the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies!’ Via Toledo, a main thoroughfare of Naples (the former capital of the Southern Kingdom), often featured somewhat luridly executed posters extolling similar themes, such as celebrations of the patriotic virtues of i briganti, Southern Italian ‘social bandits’ who opposed the Piedmontese annexation of Southern Italy under Garibaldi (Hobsbawm, 2001; Scarpino, 1988).

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The Southern Italian bandit as patriotic hero, Naples 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The contemporary recuperation of i briganti as a positive sign of regional identity parallels the positive semiotic recuperation of the formerly stigmatised phenomenon of tarantism in Salento. I briganti have undergone a similar process of folklorisation, as witnessed in Bennato’s 1980 album Brigante se more, in which they are transformed from the murderous bandits of official State historiography into patriotic resistance fighters opposing the invading Northerners (Romano, 2004; Scarpino, 1988; Bosco, 1999).

Bennato’s celebrated 1980 folk album ‘Brigante se more’ exploited popular Southern Italian representations of the brigante (including women) as folk heroes. 300

Popular tradition and the cultural production of local identity

Traditional popular practices often deeply encode notions of local territoriality, as in the local patronal saint’s symbolic embodiment of a specific geographical area and its associated social collectivity (Tak, 2000; Christian, 1989). Before the wide diffusion from the early twentieth century of mass-produced and nationally-standardised forms of dress, peasant ‘folk costume’ showed distinctive regional variations, thus effectively semiotising locality (Massari, 2001, 267 ff.; Gianna Rita, personal comment, Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari, Rome). In its symbolic representation of local social space, the Palio, Siena’s annual patronal festival, reflects an even more microregional notion of social and geographical identity. Each of the town’s 17 contrade (quarters) are represented by a horse in the celebrated Palio horse race (Silverman, 1979). Before the race, each horse is presented and blessed in the chapel of the divine patron of its respective contrada. In his account of ‘the War of the Saints’, Palumbo (2001, 2004) has described how in one Sicilian town, the ongoing contest for political hegemony between two local factions is symbolically articulated around the patron saints (San Nicola and Santa Maria della Stella) of two adjoining localities.

In his study of the Ladin Carnival in the Val di Fossa region of Trentino in the Northern Italian Alps, Cesare Poppi has highlighted the way in which ‘tradition’ can be deployed within the contemporary world as a resource for the production and differentiation of regional ethnicity. The revitalisation of Carnival traditions in the Val di Fossa has been associated with the emergence from the 1970s of an autonomist political movement based around notions of a unique local Ladin cultural identity differentiated from a wider ‘Italian’ identity:

For Ladins, cultural policies are crucial in building their difference from their neighbours in view of objective trends towards the assimilation of the valley to a pan-Alpine model of society…Tradition is a crucial measure of difference, and therefore evidence of the legitimacy of the claim to be individuated as a distinct unit…Every single element added to the arsenal of lost and found traditions

counts

as

a

net

profit

in

the

political

economy

of

difference…Persistence through time has become in the contemporary Val di 301

Fassa a primary legitimator for the claim to difference in the present (1992, 113f., 117, 131).

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CASE STUDY: ‘NOI SALENTINI’: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF SALENTINITÀ

‘Salento is a land of mirages…it remains in my memory more as an imaginary journey than a real one’.

Piovene, Viaggio in Italia (1999 [1954], 797).

Salentine musicians and dancers at a 2009 pizzica session in Salento. Photo: Tessa Joy.

The heel of the Southern Italian boot in Southern Puglia has long been known as ‘the Salentine Peninsula’, while the term ‘Salento’ has been used in elite scholarly and literary contexts, as witnessed by the establishment in 1948 of the Premio Salento literary prize and the Accademia Salentina (Pisano, 1991; Pisanello, 2003; for other 303

earlier examples of the use of the term in scholarly and literary contexts, see Piovene, 1999 [1957], 788-797; de Martino, 2005 [1961] and Tondi, 1935).

The existence of a ‘natural’ and homogeneous Salentine cultural bloc is sometimes inferred by its proponents from the fact that the local Salentine dialect can be readily differentiated from neighbouring Puglian dialects to the north (Mancarella, 1975; cf. Chiriatti, 1998, 101), while Raheli cites distinctive features of the local folk song tradition which differ markedly from other parts of Puglia and Southern Italy (2002, 96). Yet it is hard to avoid the impression that the term ‘Salento’ does not seem to have gained currency outside the kind of elite contexts cited above until the advent of the current Salentine folk revival. Indeed, there is a rather forced quality at times about the relentless contemporary production of primordial Salentine cultural difference.

As a peninsula, ‘Salento’ is of course well defined geographically, and yet the term has never been applied in the past to any distinct administrative unit. The Salentine Peninsula was part of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire from 757 until 1068, and thus enjoyed its own distinctive juridical, linguistic, administrative and ecclesiastical forms, including the Byzantine rite. However, the area’s unique local status ended following its conquest by the Normans in the late eleventh century, and its absorption into the rest of Puglia (Mancarella, 1975, 8f.). ‘Salento’ is often identified with the ‘Terra di Otranto’, a circoscrizione (district) within the pre-unification Kingdom of Naples; yet the principal city of ‘Salento’ is today identified as Lecce, rather than Otranto. ‘Salento’ does not coincide with any contemporary administrative unit, but instead is said to include all of the current Province of Lecce, as well as some segments of the adjoining provinces of Taranto and Brindisi. By contrast, the earlier ‘Terra di Otranto’ had incorporated all of the current provinces of Taranto, Brindisi and Lecce, and until 1663 also the territory of Matera in Basilicata.

Despite this somewhat hazy historical status, ‘Salento’ has continued to burst with astonishing rapidity onto the national scene as a new cultural and political entity since I completed my fieldwork in 2003. Under the 2006 ‘Grande Salento’ project, the Provinces and Chambers of Commerce of Lecce, Brindisi and Taranto have collaborated on the design and implementation of common policies regarding culture, 304

infrastructure, education and tourism aimed at boosting local economic growth (Provincie di Lecce, Brindisi & Taranto, 2007). The Grande Salento process has since led to the renaming of the Brindisi airport as ‘Aeroporto di Salento’ and the University of Lecce as ‘l’Università del Salento’. In 2008, a new political party, Salento Libero Regione, was launched with the objective of achieving regione status for Salento (De Cristofaro, 2008). The amalgamation in 2001 of the nine traditionally Greek-speaking towns of central Salento into L’Unione dei Comuni della Grecia Salentina is also emblematic of the process of regional differentiation by which ‘Salento’ is being promoted both in Italy and beyond in response to an expanding world market (see for instance the Grecia Salentina website at ).

As in Poppi’s example of the Val di Fossa cited earlier, the folk revival has played a key role in the recent emergence of Salentine regional identity, for since the mid1990s, it has been pizzica and tarantism which have almost literally put Salento on the map. Informants comment that until recently, Salento hardly even existed as a geographical expression, and if Salentines were asked where they came from, they would as likely as not have answered ‘from the province of Lecce’. ‘Before, a Salentine was a nobody; before, people used to talk about the Province of Lecce, nobody even talked about Salento, or even knew about it. Now it’s known as the place where people do pizzica’.

Anthropologist Clara Gallini has drawn attention to a long tradition going back at least to the sixteenth century in which tarantism has been symbolically used as a sign of Southern Italian difference:

In a 1593 woodcut, the Puglia region is represented as a woman with a flowing gown covered in spider webs. At her feet are some strange instruments, recognisable as a tamburello and a lute. This image illustrates wonderfully all of the elements of a real ethnic stereotype identifying a person, a region, a spider and a certain type of dance…The stereotype of pugliesi ends up in the more generalised context of an opposition between North and South, an opposition which becomes more and more characteristic of the modern epoch, and operates not only on the level of imagination, but also in actual cultural 305

practice. The same Grand Tour travellers who arrived in Naples and went straight out to look for a shoeshine or water carrier, when they arrived in Puglia used to ask people to get hold of some possessed tarantate so that they could see them dance (Gallini, 2002, 164f.).

Tarantism and pizzica have now become one of Salento’s most successful export industries, and it is the imagery of tarantism and its trademark spider which are central to the new Salentine mythos projected so successfully throughout Italy and beyond. ‘We Salentines have the pizzica dance in our blood’: as in the nineteenth century Romantic nationalist movement, emergent Salentine ethnoregionalism is associated with the creation of an essentialised notion of local folk identity which is then deployed in the constitution of the new ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991; Macdonald, 1997). The characteristically Salentine preoccupation with the definition of this new local ethnos is signalled within the discourse of Salentine revivalists such as Luigi Chiriatti and Ada Metafune by their frequent references to ‘l’etnia salentina’. Pizzica, for instance, is held up as an embodiment of this postulated Salentine ethnos in Chiriatti’s description of the night of San Rocco as:

an intense musical moment in which it is possible to apprehend intimately that ‘salentinità’ which marks us as an ethnic group, and which is largely characterised by the obsessive rhythm of the pizzica-pizzica (1998, 53).

In the era of globalisation, Chiriatti feels that young revivalists are increasingly refusing ‘artificially sweetened cultural offerings from other cultures and are instead exploring our own culture’. It is this return to a sense of local ethnicity which he feels offers the real key to maintaining an authentic sense of identity within the modern world:

We now live in multiethnic communities and in this context it becomes essential for us to understand, possess and historicise our own ethnic group [etnia], as an indispensable instrument for communicating and socialising with other ethnic groups. And when Salentines begin this search for their own ethnic

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identity, they must of necessity come to grips with tarantism, the timeless myth and rite which have always accompanied us (52).

This emergent Salentine folk identity is symbolically articulated around the following set of totemic items closely associated with tarantism and pizzica:

Tarantism: •

La taranta (the spider—the mythological agent of possession);

•

Dance therapy (the traditional means by which taranta victims were cured of their possession);

•

The Festa di San Paolo on June 29 at Galatina and the eponymous chapel associated with the tarantism cult;

•

Ernesto de Martino and his anthropological study of tarantism, La terra del rimorso.

Pizzica: •

Il tamburello (the tambourine which accompanies this dance);

•

The patronal festival of San Rocco at Torre Paduli;

•

La danza scherma (sword dance) traditionally danced at the festival;

•

Portatori della tradizione like Salentine peasant musician, the late Uccio Aloisi, widely identified as the most senior exponent of Salentine popular musical tradition, as well as younger portatori like the gypsy musician Claudio ‘Cavallo’ Giagnotti and the late Pino Zimba, who are also said to incarnate this tradition;

•

La Notte della Taranta.

In its ‘conscious organized attempt…to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of its culture’ like tarantism or pizzica, Salentine revivalism reflects aspects of the nativist movement schema first proposed by Linton and Hallowell (1943). Such movements are concerned with particular elements of culture, never with cultures as wholes: ‘certain current or remembered elements of culture are selected for emphasis and given symbolic value’ (231). In this process of selection, the main considerations are the ‘practicability of reviving or perpetuating the element under current conditions’ and the distinctiveness of the elements selected (for example pizzica and its associated 307

tamburello), ‘since the more distinct such elements are with respect to other cultures with which the society is in contact, the greater their potential value as symbols of the society’s unique character’ (loc. cit.; cf. Poppi, 1992, cited above).

The partial and selective nature of the current reconstitution of Salentine musical tradition is apparent from other elements of the local folk corpus which have been largely displaced by pizzica and tarantism from the model: the rich canto a stisa tradition, funeral, narrative and work songs, lullabies, the traditional sacred music associated with Easter and Christmas, and Christian cultural elements generally (Lüdtke, 2009, 5, 24 n14).

‘La quintessenzia della salentinità’: this 2002 pizzica album cover condenses several elements in the contemporary Salentine folk imaginary: portatore della tradizione Uccio Aloisi (top); Franco Pinna’s classic 1959 photo of a possessed tarantata outside the Chapel of St Paul in Galatina, taken during the 1959 de Martino expedition to Salento; bandaged hands with tamburello; and a logo adapted from the prehistoric ‘dancing man’ image found recently at the Grotta dei Cervi site in Salento. 308

A Southern Italian Jamaica?

The recent process of Salentine regional differentiation has also been played out within the field of leftwing counterculture. As Salentine filmmaker Edoardo Winspeare describes, Salento became during the 1990s a Mecca for young Italians in search of an alternative to mainstream culture:

Salento has become the Woodstock of Italy. People come here from all over Italy and Europe to learn to play the tamburello and dance pizzica. It’s a strange movement which no one has been able to understand, almost like a musical version of the Seattle anti-globalisation movement (Winspeare, 2002, 174).

‘Salento presente’: this statement of Salentine ethnic identity associates Salento with the countercultural motifs of peace and cannabis. Photo: Anna Minopoli. 309

An important precursor to the second Salentine folk revival had been the emergence from the late 1980s of a local reggae movement associated with the group Sud Sound System (Lo Massaro, 2001). With their lyrics in Salentine dialect, these musicians had constructed a new cultural discourse which was simultaneously localist and countercultural, as flagged in the title of their 1996 album Tradizione. One Milaneseborn Salentine informant recalls the curious experience of discovering songs by Sud Sound System extolling the merits of l’erba salentina (Salentine grass) in his mother’s dialect, and then showing her the lyrics:

I found myself reading reggae song texts in my mother’s dialect which talked about experiences and opinions which I was familiar with. I said to her: ‘Mum, come and listen: look, look, they’re talking about [political] violence, they’re talking about marijuana!’

‘Tradition’, a notion more frequently associated with reactionary ideologies of the right, was now being reappropriated in Salento within a distinctively leftist and countercultural discourse.

French scholar Lapassade (2001, 2007) had linked the pizzica craze to what he saw as a widely manifested need among contemporary urban youth to seek states of trance. There are perhaps here some parallels between ‘neotarantismo’ and the British rave scene of the 1980s, with its initial emphasis on outdoor rural locations, its left-wing alternative ambience and collectivist ethos, and the induction of trance states through the use of repetitive dance beats and drugs. Within the ‘spontaneous’ wing of revivalism, there is certainly an interest in ‘lo sballo’ (‘getting out of it’: cf Sanguanini, 1999), though this is induced through the medium of frenetic pizzica dancing, local bottles of vino artigianale and cannabis. Although le pasticche (pills) are popular in the urban night club scene, synthetically-produced chemicals are not in keeping with the homespun localist ethos of folk revivalism; an early ‘Salentine roots’ theme of Sud Sound System had also been their attack on the heroin-fuelled genocide of young Italians in the 1970s and 1980s (cf. Robb, 1996), with the group extolling in its place the merits of locally produced Salentine wine and pot over heroin.

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Sud Sound System also pioneered the distinctive ‘Salentine sound system’: concerts held on beaches and in the abandoned peasant masserie of the rural hinterland using portable sound gear. For the many young people who come in droves from Rome and other northern cities in summer to camp along its striking coastline, Salento is now imagined as a kind of Southern Italian Jamaica; a remote and unspoiled area of magnificent beaches, distinctive countryside, pizzica, festivals, Salentine reggae, and, not least, readily available cannabis cultivated locally or brought in by Albanian organised crime from just across the Adriatic. For younger Italians of a countercultural bent, these and other modernist elements have thus been integrated into the Salentine folk mythos of pizzica and tarantism.

The evolution of ‘the Salentine sublime’

Simon Schama’s account of the cultural production of notions of ‘the sublime’ associated with the European Alpine landscape during the eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantic period (1996, 463-98; cf. Morgan, 1983 for the evolution of the Welsh sublime) recalls a similar process which has taken place recently in Salento. Although Salento is a flat and rather bare region devoid of major forests or mountains, it is distinguished by gli ulivi secolari, ancient olive groves with enormously thick trunks which are sometimes many centuries old. The flat Salentine fields are enclosed by long rough walls built from piles of the characteristic local limestone, set off by distinctive pagliare (beehive-shaped stone barns) and masserie (peasant farmsteads), all built from the same simple local materials. These and other archetypal images of the Salentine natural and cultural landscape are increasingly exploited in local tourism promotional material. The self-conscious nature of this contemporary project of regional identity construction was highlighted for me in a conversation one day with a barber in Melpignano. After proudly showing me a selection of glossy magazines published regularly by the Provincia di Lecce showcasing the riches of Salento’s architectural, historical and natural heritage, he offered me the view that ‘here in Salento we’re like a small nation’.

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For my romantic Salentine painter and revivalist friend Francesco, the annual ritual of the festival of San Rocco had seemed to play an integral role in the annual reaffirmation of Salentine identity which he enacts each summer when he returns from Cosenza in Calabria to spend his holidays painting in his Melpignano birthplace. Exile from his beloved Salento seemed at times to weigh heavily on him; ‘Salutami la mia terra’ (greet my land for me) he asks me by phone from Cosenza as I prepare to return to Salento in February 2003. Francesco’s paintings highlight many of the distinctive natural and architectural elements of the Salento landscape which are now being integrated into a new romantic vision of the ‘Salentine sublime’ closely linked to local peasant culture.

19

At Melpignano, he prepares me friselle (simple, round, rock-hard

pieces of dried bread which are reconstituted in water and eaten bruschetta-style). He describes this rustic local specialty poetically as ‘the food of Odysseus’.

Francesco displays a distinct pride in the fact that Salento, once virtually unknown, is now becoming widely celebrated throughout Italy, largely due to the pizzica revival. ‘Salento is in fashion’, he comments, describing how on a recent trip to Perugia in central Italy, there was even a Salento Week offering local food: ‘friselle and snails are now considered “chic”, even though they were once considered foods suitable only for peasants’. In 2003, he turned an exhibition of his latest paintings at the University of Cosenza into a veritable expo of Salentine culture, featuring not only his own Salentine landscape paintings, but also Salentine food and music, and an appearance by ‘Cavallo’, the Salentine gypsy musician who has been transformed into yet another icon of salentinità.

The ruined Saracen watch towers along the coast bear witness to the fact that Salento was once the outer perimeter of Christendom against the marauding Saracens; a collection of severed skulls still displayed behind glass above the main altar of the Otranto cathedral commemorates the ‘800 Martyrs of Otranto’ beheaded by the Saracens in 1480 (Capponi, 2007, 12). This port city on the eastern seaboard, once known as Porta Orientis (Gateway to the East), was the port of embarkation for the Crusaders departing for the Holy Land, while major attacks along the coast by 19

For an earlier articulation of the ‘Salentine sublime’, see Piovene 1999 [1957] 787-97.

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Albanian Muslim pirates continued into the early nineteenth century. An invasion of a different kind brought this forgotten corner of Southern Italy to national attention in 1992 with the arrival of thousands of Albanian refugees on the Salentine coast after the collapse of the Albanian Communist regime. Some have highlighted this episode as an important stimulus for the cultural ferment out of which the current Salentine folk revival emerged.

Salento has always been una terra di passaggio (a land of transit) linking different peoples and cultures, a fact emphasised by Salentine proponents of contaminazione, the experimental musical dialogue between local and non-local folk traditions exemplified in La Notte della Taranta. The Spanish domination of Southern Italy over several centuries has also left its mark on Salento’s spectacular Baroque architectural heritage. ‘Noi salentini siamo greci’ (We Salentines are Greeks) is a familiar statement of Salentine cultural difference, and traditional folk songs in griko, the local Greek dialect, are used in the folk revivalist repertoire to highlight another exotic element in the construction of Salentine cultural difference. Griko, which is still spoken in the nine towns of Grecia Salentina, bears witness to the fact that Salento was part of the Byzantine empire for centuries (Mancarella, 1975, 40-42). But despite the emphasis within Salentine revivalist ideology on this local griko song tradition, in reality the language is today spoken only by a handful of elderly people.

This ‘lembo di terra’ (‘sliver of earth’—the official poetic term used by Salentine revivalists to invoke the Salento Peninsula) is washed on one side by the Ionian Sea and on the other by the Adriatic, along a spectacular series of beaches and rocky headlands. The stiletto heel at the base of the Italian boot bears the full brunt of the noisome African Sirocco wind in summer, necessitating an afternoon siesta, followed by a careful strategic choice about whether to take one’s daily swim on the Adriatic or Ionian side of the peninsula, depending on local wind conditions. Salentines certainly appear more closely attuned to their local landscape and the natural elements than Italians in many other parts of the country, and several informants identify the wind, sea and land as essential components in their unique sense of Salentine identity.

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A further picturesque feature of the landscape is provided by the survival of many prehistoric dolmens and menhirs left by the Messapi, the pre-Roman inhabitants of Salento. Salentine romantics like musician and ethnomusicologist Pierpaolo De Giorgi have attempted to link pictorial images on some of these monuments to the tarantism cult for which Salento is now renowned, seeing these relics as expressions of an ancient Salentine Volksgeist which serve to underwrite the mythos of primordial Salentine uniqueness (De Giorgi, 1999). Chiriatti has even adduced a recently discovered dancing figure at the 4000 BC Grotta dei Cervi site as evidence of a link between prehistoric cult activity in Salento and tarantism. The alleged timelessness of Salentine popular cultural identity is attested for him by this ‘dancing shaman…chosen as the symbol of a people six thousand years ago, still able to move the people of the Saint [Paul] with that “crazed desire to dance”’ (Chiriatti, 1998, 113; cf. also De Giorgi, 1999, 209f.).

The cinematic production of salentinità

The production and diffusion of the new model of Salentine folk identity has also been greatly facilitated by the emergence of a local cinema industry, highlighted by the establishment in 2004 of an annual Salento International Film Festival at Tricase. Salento-based film maker Edoardo Winspeare has played a key role in the emergence of the second Salentine revival since the early 1990s. His 1996 film Pizzicata, set in the rural Salento of 1943, represented a sustained attempt at the imaginative reconstruction of Salentine peasant society, recapitulating many of what have now become central motifs in the Salentine revivalist imaginary. The film is inevitably framed at either end by scenes of possessed tarantate outside the Chapel of St Paul at Galatina, but also manages to accommodate within its somewhat tenuous storyline wheeled peasant carts, olive groves, pizzica, the buttea or traditional Salentine wine bar which was a focus for traditional folk culture in Salento until the 1960s, Salentine dialect, the danza scherma, the canto a stisa (a distinctive local traditional song form), the hot air balloons of San Rocco, and ‘gli Ucci’, the two iconic Salentine portatori della tradizione, the late Uccio Aloisi and Uccio Bandello. The lengthy cast and credit list provides a comprehensive Who’s Who of the contemporary Salentine folk scene. 314

The primitivist aesthetic of Pizzicata reappeared in Winspeare’s next, but more sophisticated Sangue vivo (2000). Despite the extensive dialogue in Salentine dialect (which required subtitling even for Italian viewers), the film captured a national and even international audience. Set in contemporary Salento and featuring real-life Salentine portatore della tradizione (and ex-jailbird) the late Pino Zimba as himself, the film explored the continuing resonance of folk tradition within today’s Salento. At the film’s dramatic climax, it is local music, and Zimba’s reconnection to a sense of local place, tradition and family which is offered as the means of redemption by which the destructive forces of modernity can be resisted and transcended.

Winspeare comes from an Anglo-Neapolitan aristocratic background, and describes his revivalist project as a highly personal attempt to overcome his ‘problem of roots’. His family history reads almost like a caricature of mobile hybridised postmodern identity:

I’m a mixture of nationalities. As a boy I always lived here [in Southern Salento], but with long periods in Austria and Naples, because my father is Neapolitan, though originally English with Spanish blood. My grandmother, his mother, is Sicilian, though originally Danish-American, all mixed up, while my mother was Bohemian, but also Italian and Polish, so really from Mitteleuropa…We speak all of these languages at home, so I have always had a problem of ‘roots’. I spent a long time looking for my roots, but at a certain point decided that I was from here, because I grew up here, and here at Depressa [in Southern Salento] is where I feel at home (2002, 171).

For Winspeare and many others troubled by the rootlessness and alienation of contemporary modernity, the imagined landscape of Salentine peasant culture seems to offer the possibility of ‘l’appartenenza’ (belonging), and a stable emotional anchor point in which to embed and construct an alternative sense of cultural identity.

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The role of elite local actors in Salentine revivalism

As highlighted in my earlier account of the genesis of La Notte della Taranta, the national pre-eminence of Salento within the Southern Italian folk scene is testimony partly to the enthusiastic boosterism of its local political class, but also to the discursive activities of a large group of revivalist intellectuals, many of them associated, like Pierpaolo De Giorgi, Piero Fumarola and the late Giorgio di Lecce, with the University of Lecce, which even offers courses on tarantism. Given the major contribution of University of Lecce academics to the production of this new discourse of salentinità, the institution’s recent change of name to ‘University of Salento’ seems highly appropriate. Local publishers such as Besa Editrice have also created a veritable local industry through the publication of many obscure texts on tarantism and other manifestations of Salentine popular tradition.

Lecce’s Piazza Duomo. Source: . [22 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Although academics and intellectuals have also played a significant role in the Campanian folk revival, there is a sense that the Salentine revival is a more contrived 316

and technocratically-inspired operation, motivated at times by a ruthless competition over the cultural spoils of local popular culture between members of a Lecce intellectual and cultural elite. In the words of Salentine broadcaster Anna Nacci, ‘every Salentine intellectual wants to be a de Martino’.

With its plethora of florid Spanish Baroque churches hewn from the soft honeycoloured Lecce sandstone, the jewel-like city of Lecce is celebrated as the highpoint of the Southern Italian Baroque. Seat of the provincial aristocracy for centuries, Lecce’s architectural riches were underwritten by the prized blend of local olive oil extracted from the surrounding peasantry. Now a revival of the folk culture of these same peasants seems to be driven largely by a Lecce-based elite strongly associated with its University. Beneath the surface modernity of Salentine life, the patterns of clientelism more familiar in other parts of Southern Italy still seem to operate in Lecce. Social relations in this inward-looking provincial town seem at times to have a slightly feudal quality, embodied in a local aristocratic preoccupation with birth, social position and whether people are of ‘good family’ (cf. Piovene, 1999, 788-797; Salvemini, 1994, 197). Returning in September 2002 from ten days in the mountains of Calabria to Lecce’s brilliant Southern Baroque scenography, I had the momentary sensation of straying into the poisonous world of the eighteenth century French aristocratic salon depicted in Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons.

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Salentine folk singer Enza Pagliara at her parents’ home in Torchiarolo, Salento, February 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Salentine folk singer Enza Pagliara’s family background differs radically from those of the Lecce-based elite described. A computer programmer by training, Enza lives between the ‘big smoke’ of the city of Bari and the very different world of her parents’ home in the small town of Torchiarolo in Upper Salento. Both her parents are from peasant backgrounds, and so their house seems to pullulate with home-made wine, olive oil, grandchildren, an open fire and constant, insistent invitations to eat. On the day I visited, Enza’s father was wearing a white eye patch following an earlier accident while pruning his olive trees. He later pointed out to me an orange tree onto which he had expertly grafted a lemon (in background of previous photo).

Enza had earlier stated to me her view that the festa popolare no longer really existed in Salento, but that Salentine popular tradition was often still maintained within the 318

private and family sphere. I got a sense of this popular Salentine milieu during a night of folk singing at her parents’ home, where her aunt Annunziata described how she used to leave home on foot before dawn and break the weary monotony of agricultural labour by singing to her companions in the fields. In contrast to many other Salentine folk musicians, Enza seemed to have a direct link through her family to this living local popular musical tradition. Through her organic connection to the world from which Salentine music and dance had sprung, she seemed able to negotiate with greater integrity the gap between the semi-peasant world of her parents and the metropolitan mondo dello spettacolo of the Notte della Taranta stage.

Enza’s account of her early career as a young Salentine folksinger revealed a strong sense of class consciousness in relation to certain members of the Lecce based folk elite. She and two other young female Salentine folk singer colleagues all described negative experiences while collaborating with one key revivalist group, whose male cofounder and leader was well known for his outspoken denunciations of less ‘traditional’ interpretations of Salentine folk culture, especially La Notte della Taranta. The group would pay young female vocalists like Enza only about 50 Euros a night to perform, yet require them to cover their own travel expenses from, say, Bari to Naples. Despite this low rate of pay, the group’s leader still insisted they should perform exclusively with his group. Performing for virtually nothing was not problematic for a person of his extensive private means: one of the young women in fact described him resentfully as ‘il più grande latifondista salentino’ (the biggest landowner in Salento). But for young women from humble backgrounds trying to make a living as folk singers, this insistence on exclusivity caused considerable bad feeling.

Enza’s sense of class consciousness was also pricked at the launch in Lecce of the Ritmo Meridiano collection (Santoro & Torsello, 2002), during which the group’s leader publicly staked his claim to expert knowledge of Salentine folk tradition by recalling how he used to wake up on his family’s country estate to the sounds of peasant women singing in the fields. As Enza pointed out, while he was still waking up in ‘his family castle’, these women had already been working since 5 am. Much of Enza’s repertoire of course, had come directly from her aunt, who had learned these songs while performing exactly this type of agricultural labour in the fields. 319

The Salento folk scene is famous for the intensity of its controversies, rows and acrimonious fallings out (cf. Lüdtke, 2009, 106; Raheli, 2002, 99). For Raheli (loc. cit.), these rivalries are ‘caused by the fact that the scraps of a common Salentine musical tradition [which have survived] are not enough to revitalise Salentine music in any real way’. Given the substantial absence of many traditional living exponents of local folk practices, the cultural reproduction of Salentine tradition becomes intensely problematic and the arena for endless controversy, claim and counterclaim, as in the debates over tradizione versus contaminazione we have seen in relation to La Notte della Taranta. By contrast, folk musicians in Calabria like Danilo Gatto and Antonio Critelli seemed to move effortlessly between traditional ‘philological’ performance modes informed by their intense study of local musical tradition and instruments, and the more ‘contaminated’ and experimental styles epitomised in the work of their group Phaleg [SFX15]. This was seen as simply another style which a folk musician might choose to play as a change from purely traditional music, yet such apparently innocent aesthetic choices seemed sometimes to characterised in Salento by disputes over ‘traditional authenticity’ which took on an almost religious fervour.

‘Tarantism and Neo-Tarantism’

The characteristic revivalist transmutation of tarantism into a positive symbol of local identity was dramatised for me when I attended a concert with German anthropologist Karen Lüdtke at Novoli in August 2002 by leading Salentine folk group Allabua.

20

Described in their publicity poster as un gruppo etnomusicale salentino, the name Allabua appears in Greek lettering in an allusion to the local griko dialect tradition. The nearby stalls sell tamburelli and books on tarantism, including the inevitable classic text which almost literally first put Salento onto the cultural map: de Martino’s La terra del rimorso. From the back of his APE three wheeled truck, one rather down at heel local farmer is trying unsuccessfully to sell bunches of fresh celery which is now in season.

20

Cf. Lüdtke’s similar account of another Allabua concert in Galatina in 2001 (2009, 45).

320

‘Noi Salentini siamo greci’: Salentine ‘ethnomusical’ group Allabua foregrounds a connection to local Greek heritage. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] As the band begins to play, young local women begin enthusiastically dancing pizzica. The young percussionist’s tightly bound right hand is soon bleeding from the thrashing he gives his tamburello, and by the end of the concert, the instrument is stained with blood. I learn later that this is one of the classic tropes of pizzica primitivism (Lüdtke, 2009, 178), so much so that it has already been appropriated by the Italian advertising industry:

321

This ad for neo-hippy designer clothing exploits the primitivist trope of a pizzica musician beating his Salentine tamburello until his hand begins to bleed. The instrument depicted here, however, is the djembe, associated, like the Salentine tamburello itself, with the recent craze within Italian alternative circles for the ‘neo-tribal’. Source: L’Espresso 2003. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Two large screens have been mounted on either side of the stage. On the left hand side are projected scenes from Carpitella’s 1959 film of the possessed tarantata Maria di Nardò, while the latest Allabua video clip is screened on the other. The screen on the left shows dramatic and horrifying black and white footage taken in Salento in the late 1950s depicting one of the last of the tarantate in full flight. A powerfully built middle-aged woman in full possession state strides demonstratively around a circle of townspeople gathered outside the Church of Saint Paul in Galatina, before collapsing into the arms of a male relative. Another older woman lies in a swoon on a white sheet spread out on the floor of her house, swings spider-like from a rope attached to the ceiling, then crawls around on her hands and feet, her back arched to the ceiling like a

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spider. The musicians play to her on the three classic instruments - violin, piano accordion and tamburello - in an effort to exorcise the taranta which possesses her.

Meanwhile, the colour video clip on the right of the stage presents an updated postmodern version of Salentine ‘tarantism’. To the hypnotic beat of the classic pizzica tune Lu Rusciu te lu Mare, we see a beautiful, but clearly dissociated young woman dressed in a white hospital night dress confined in a padded cell, in what is apparently an image of contemporary urban psychosis. As the pizzica beat starts up, she begins to display the classic taranta symptoms of agitation, rushing from side to side of her cell, then crawling on the ground like a spider and swinging from a cord suspended from the ceiling. These scenes are intercut with shots of the band thumping out a pizzica rhythm on huge tamburelli in a classic Salentine country setting. Other shots show the girl in a more normal state of mind and dress beginning tentatively to dance pizzica. By the end of the song, the music and modern day ‘dance therapy’ have effected healing, and she has recovered her senses and been re-integrated into the group.

The Allabua clip powerfully enacts the bridging of the cultural and historical gap between tarantism (a shameful pathology afflicting illiterate peasant women) and ‘neotarantismo’ (a modernised, eroticised dance form popular among contemporary city folk, and which, like tarantism, is purported to procure trance states and to bring about healing). As we stood in the main piazza of Novoli where possessed tarantati might well have passed not so long ago, there was something almost shocking about this dramatic exploitation of tarantism in the modern context of entertainment. Tarantati and their families had endured terrible suffering, the financial burden of the music therapy and the stigma associated with the annually recurring symptoms. Yet this imagery had clearly lost much of its former sensitivity, and had already been distanced and transmuted into folklore. The transfiguration of the abject into a badge of local identity was complete: half way through the concert, the lead singer of the group announced proudly that even as he spoke, the video clip was being judged by a jury in Salerno. As Poppi comments on the revival of the Ladin Carnival tradition in the Italian Alps: ‘tradition was at once sufficiently behind the times not to appear an embarrassing burden of backwardness, and not behind enough to appear meaningless: it had become, in other words, an excellent ground for cultural politics’ (1992, 123). 323

In this contemporary reimagination of the traditional taranta music therapy session, the motif of female sexuality already latent in the taranta cult is sensationalised for the benefit of a youthful contemporary audience. Photo: A Morgante. Source: postcard produced in collaboration with Salentine folk group I Tamburellisti di Torre Paduli.

Despite Lüdtke’s extensive evidence for the contemporary persistence of some tarantism-associated phenomena in Salento, by 2006, there were said to be only about six ‘ex-tarantati’ left in Salento (Lüdtke, 2009, 12; 86). As one informant observed to her, ‘the success of pizzica today is directly linked to the fact that tarantism no longer exists’ (2009, 121). The contemporary reinvention of ‘tarantism’ as ‘neotarantismo’ thus takes place in the context of an ‘inherent historical fracture’ with historical tarantism (Lüdtke, 2009, 132), and a collapsing of the genre boundary between two functionally distinct dance forms, pizzica pizzica and pizzica tarantata. While tarantism was associated with the pizzica tarantata danced by possessed victims, to the accompaniment of musicians like Luigi Stifani (2000; Chiriatti, 2005), what Anna Nacci terms ‘neotarantismo’ is associated with the distinct pizzica pizzica dance of courtship which is the focus of the current dance revival. Lüdtke has also highlighted how this collapsing of genre boundaries is also manifested at a linguistic level, in the recent Salentine catchphrase pizzica e taranta, used to signify not only the spider of tarantism, ‘but also Salentine music and dance more generally’ (2009, 6). 324

By bridging the gap between the pizzica dance of courtship and the pizzica tarantata associated with the very different context of tarantism, Nacci and others have constructed a semi-fictitious link between tarantism and ‘neotarantismo’, thus integrating the huge symbolic power of tarantism into the new model of ethnicised Salentine folk identity. In a characteristic New Age trope, alleged continuities between the two distinct phenomena of tarantism and pizzica are also highlighted by emphasising the supposed therapeutic benefits of dancing pizzica, as in Winspeare’s personal account of using the dance as a form of personal psychotherapy (2002; cf. Nacci, 2004, 31; Lüdtke, 2009). Claims are also made for the dance’s alleged ability to provoke trance states, and the current spread of pizzica is likened to the contagious madness of medieval dance crazes like the tarantella. Anna Nacci’s pizzica boosterism is characteristic of this tendency, and her popularisation of the controversial catchphrase neotarantismo has been influential in milieus associated with the CSO and ‘No Global’ movements.

Like the partly ‘imagined’ peasant festival of San Rocco described in Chapter Five, the tarantati live on in a kind of ghostly half life, and have become an important element in Salentine revivalism’s symbolic constitution of local folk identity. The Festa di San Paolo at Galatina is still a key event within Salentine revivalism, and serves to symbolically reproduce a sense of continuity with the ancient tarantism tradition. Each year, large numbers of revivalists flock to the Galatina chapel early on the morning of the 29 June in the hope of glimpsing one of the ‘last of the tarantati’. Lüdtke (2009) has extensively documented this bizarre annual manifestation of ‘meta-tarantism’, but a Calabrian informant (hardly an unbiased source) commented in disgust that any selfrespecting tarantata would have been scared off by the battery of cameras, videos and ‘No Global’ pizzica enthusiasts he saw waiting in voyeuristic ambush outside the shrine in 2001.

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‘Barbie Tarantata’: this 2011 mockery of the clichés of Salentine revivalism depicts Barbie writhing on the ground as a tarantata in a white peasant woman’s outfit, then leaping

to

her

feet

to

dance

to

a

primal

pizzica rhythm. Source:

. [19 September 2011]. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] De Martino

Like anthropologist Jane Cowan (1988), I sometimes found during fieldwork that ‘anthropology’ was misunderstood by revivalist informants as the kind of uncritical folklorism reminiscent of the nineteenth century folklore scholars who underwrote Romantic nationalist notions of nationhood based on ‘the culture of the people’ (Burke, 1978). Within the symbolic economy of Salentine revivalism, de Martino now functions as a kind of tutelary divinity, a sign emptied of its original discursive content and redeployed as an uncritical validator of local Salentine popular tradition. As Clara Gallini has highlighted, de Martino’s weighty La terra del rimorso has now become

a necessary item to symbolically mark a sense of belonging and closeness to the world of the pizzica...Even though no tarantata in the past would have felt the need to derive support from a scholarly text, today things have changed, and people look to the cult book to give the seal of high cultural authenticity to this renewal of a tradition (Gallini, 2002, 163).

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In the process, de Martino’s nuanced and critical Gramscian perspective on popular tradition has been elided. Despite his achievement in foregrounding Southern Italian popular cultural practices as a subject worthy of serious scientific study, de Martino’s actual position was far from the uncritical fetishisation of folk culture found at times within contemporary revivalism. Instead, he shares with Gramsci a critical ambivalence towards the nature of popular tradition which at times reflects a Marxist horror of ‘primitive superstition’ and ‘false consciousness’ (Di Nola, 1998; cf. Crehan, 2002).

A pensive de Martino has set up a temporary ethnographic base camp in the court house of Montemurro, Basilicata, during his 1956 expedition to Southern Italy. Photo: Franco Pinna in Gallini & Faeta (1999, 194).

De Martino’s ethnographic team in Salento had included a social worker and a psychiatrist, demonstrating a concrete social commitment to his informants as human subjects, rather than as mere accessories of a purely scientific enquiry into ‘folklore’. In a passage of the appendix to La terra del rimorso much overlooked by contemporary revivalists, de Martino offers an unsentimentally Gramscian meditation on what might constitute an appropriately rational ‘intervention’ in the interests of social welfare into the ‘folkloric’ phenomena described in his ethnography. Although he recognises the persistence of classical tarantism within the music therapy sessions held in victim’s homes, he is dismissive of the practices associated with the Chapel of 327

St Paul in Galatina. In one passage which might surprise many contemporary fans of ‘tarantism’, he writes that:

The chapel displays turned out to be nothing more than tarantism in disintegration, and more exactly, a variegated explosion of morbid psychic states: what we had [witnessed] in the chapel was neither popular Catholicism nor pagan survivals, nor even a pagan-Catholic syncretism, but simply behaviours subject to medical evaluation (de Martino, 2005, 319f.).

Since tarantism was already doomed to disappearance through the onset of modernity, why not try to hasten the demise of this painful form of psychotic behaviour in a way which would have the beneficial effect of producing a ‘raising of consciousness’ among local people?

It was now necessary to remove it from the chapel, because for such a ‘reduced’ tarantism, the most fitting site was not the chapel, but a hospital or a neuropsychiatric clinic. This was then basically a matter of continuing the operation that the clergy had already been conducting for some centuries, with different means and in a different perspective (320).

De Martino seems to have no use at all for Salentine revivalism’s essentialised and objectified notion of ‘tradition’ which transcends human historical processes and referents. Despite his central symbolic role within contemporary Salentine revivalism, his emphasis on ‘reason’ and his historicist lack of sentimentality about the disappearance of ‘folk tradition’ flies in the face of contemporary revivalist notions of the value of an objectified form of ‘tradition’ for its own sake. In the concluding words of this work, de Martino seems to displace romantic ahistorical notions of folklore and ‘tradition’ with a Marxist view of culture in which human beings and their history take centre stage:

In this chaos which we give the romantic name of ‘folklore’, and which—at least in this case—is really oppressive history humbled to the level of nature, it

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is up to awareness and reason to reestablish the active order of a civil transformation armed with historical knowledge (321).

Ethnoregionalist sentiment among urban revivalists

Perhaps not surprisingly, ethnoregionalist sentiment amongst revivalists is often strongest amongst second generation emigrants to the North like Mimmo, Fausto, Domenico and Simone. Their revivalist rediscovery and exploration of le tradizioni popolari is frequently framed in terms of ‘a search for roots’ within the region of origin of their parents (who frequently lack detailed knowledge or even interest in such matters!).

Apart from Rome and Naples, Milan and Bologna are two other major urban nodes of the Southern Italian folk revival. Given its high number of Southern Italian studenti fuori sede and well established CSO scene, Eugenio Bennato found Bologna a congenial location for the establishment of his initial Tarantapower project. In Milan too, the expansion of revivalism has been facilitated by the high number of first and second generation immigrants from the South, but also by a very Milanese sense that the folk revival is ‘the latest thing’. Amongst the large Calabrian and Salentine fuori sede student population based at Universities in Central and Northern Italian cities, a key feature of contemporary revivalism is the constellation of newly emergent forms of regional identity around revivalist activities like tarantella and pizzica. Just as the novel and newspaper played a central role in the creation of national subjects in nineteenth century Europe, folk music is playing a role in the formation of these new regional Southern Italian ‘imagined communities’. Such communities are ‘imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson, 1991, 6).

Simone is a thirty two year-old working class man from Milan whose father came north from Salento as a carpenter at the age of 16. Attending a festa popolare for the first time while on holiday with relatives in Salento in 1997, he was impressed by the 329

‘emotional abandonment’ of pizzica: ‘It really struck my senses…any woman who danced pizzica seemed to me incredibly beautiful’. After the release of Winspeare’s Sangue vivo in Milan, Simone remembers returning home from a concert by Salentine group Officina Zoe thinking ‘there must be a group of pugliesi in Milan who do this too!’

After discovering a cultural association in Milan where Southerners met to play, dance and listen to Southern folk music, he began exploring Salentine folk traditions in a process which he described as ‘a search for my roots...it was something which was burning me up inside…Now I feel more Salentine’. He contrasts what he sees as the lack of historical and cultural depth in Milan with the rich culture and history of the South:

‘Ormai

a

Milano

non

c’è

più

niente’ (there’s

nothing left

in

Milan)…Everything in Milan is in the present, there’s nothing from the past’. Although Simone was clear that ‘peasant society is light years away from my life’, he felt that his reactivation of his dormant Salentine ancestry had made him feel ‘more focoso (fiery) than someone who lives in the North’.

Simone’s partner Cinzia, who accompanied him to the festival of Carpino in Northern Puglia, was Milanese, with genealogical roots in Lombardy and Emilia Romagna. Interestingly, she was the only genuine milanese who frequented the predominantly Southern milieu of the Milan folk club Simone had discovered. She contrasted Simone’s strong recently acquired sense of cultural appartenenza (belonging) to Salento with her own ‘typically Milanese’ lack of knowledge about her own cultural background: ‘It’s good to know your origins and where you come from... I miss that sense of belonging. I’d like to discover my roots. I feel a sense of emptiness.’

Mimmo is a Milan-born son of Calabrian migrants who discovered the Festival of Caulonia while on summer holidays with relatives in nearby Bovalino. Since then, learning the tarantella calabrese has had a huge impact on Mimmo’s cultural identity:

I feel more enthusiastic about going to Calabria now; I feel a stronger bond with my parents’ country. I no longer go there just for the beach, but also to actually experience the land…I’ve fallen in love with this music [tarantella], 330

and the power and energy which it transmits, and it makes me proud of my origins.

In Northern cities like Milan, revivalism thus facilitates the construction of a new and more positive Calabrian cultural identity by those like Mimmo whose family origins are in one of the most traditionally stigmatised regions of Italy (Teti, 1993):

As a Calabrian, I’m different from a Lombard: they don’t have a local dance tradition. If I speak with my Lombard friends, they envy me a bit: ‘you’ve really brought something back from Calabria with you. Here we don’t have anything, only fashion, television, nice cars and that’s it’. There aren’t any traditional dances [here]… only ballroom and mazurka…

Mimmo contrasts himself with other Calabrians he knows in Milan who he feels are closer to the dominant local values and who, according to him, have not discovered the same sense of Calabrian cultural identity which he has:

They are just part of the rest of the society. They think about family, work, keeping healthy, money…For them, those are the important things, the dominant values. Milan is a very bourgeois city…a city of fashion…It’s difficult for Southern Italian tradition to get here, because it is of no interest to Lombards, and they aren’t familiar with it...It’s easier to interest them in a nice pizza napoletana than a tarantella.

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‘Welcome to designer heaven’: a huge Armani hoarding greets passengers arriving at Milan railway station, 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

Like Simone, Mimmo uses the imagery of calore (heat) to represent cultural differences between North and South: ‘What is lacking in the North is human warmth, though I don’t mean that everyone’s like that’. In Calabria, he says, traditional forms of social aggregation have persisted more than in Northern cities:

Families are more united: they get together more for birthdays, family parties, lunch and dinner. But in Milan it’s often hard to meet as a family. In the South, people are less sophisticated, while in the North, work often distracts you from those kinds of simple and unsophisticated things.

Mimmo’s account also highlights the way in which revivalist activity is now coming to be associated with new modes of ‘mobile identity’ typical of globalised modernity, as traditional notions of culture and ethnic identity are ‘deterritorialised’, disembedded from the geographical spaces within which they have traditionally been articulated, and then reterritorialised in new settings (Rosaldo & Inda, 2002a, 10-15; Appadurai, 1996).

There is at times a slightly fanatical and nativist edge to expressions of the newly emergent cultural identity associated with the Salentine revival. In a sometimes heated 332

conference on tarantism held in 2001 at Galatina, anthropologist Paolo Apolito caused a stir by openly challenging the tendency among some Salentine participants to fall back on the terms ‘noi salentini’ (Karen Lüdtke & Ada Metafune, personal comments). At a later Allabua pizzica concert at Rome’s Centro Sociale Occupato Villagio Globale, lead singer Gigi Toma paused between songs to say: ‘Vorrei dare un saluto a tutti i salentini nel pubblico’ (I’d like to say hello to all the Salentines in the audience). ‘What about us?’ I thought, finding such narrow ethnic sectarianism inconceivable in a folk group from any other part of Southern Italy. At a later Salentine reggae concert at the same venue, one informant, excited by my interest in the folk traditions of his native Salento, began enthusiastically introducing me to each of his Salentine friends with the words ‘Lui e un salentino DOC’ (he’s a Salentine DOC). Like Italian regional wines marketed with the label ‘denominazione di origine controllato’ (‘verified description of origin’), the authenticity of these Salentines, it seemed, was unimpeachable.

With the touchy regionalist sentiment characteristic of many Salentine enthusiasts, Anna Nacci refused to attend the 2002 book launch of Il ritmo meridiano, a collection of scholarly essays reflecting at times critically on the Salentine folk revival which she described as ‘an offense to Salentine musicians’. Perhaps she was thinking specifically of the brilliantly-documented ‘philological’ analysis of leading dance scholar Pino Gala, in which he mercilessly deconstructs urban pizzica style by showing how contemporary pizzica, just like Campanian tammurriata, has been extensively ‘contaminated’, i.e. stylised for urban consumption. In this deconstruction of the ideological discourses which constitute Salentine revivalism, and its refusal to buy into revivalist rhetoric, Anna clearly saw the book as undermining, rather than affirming, her own highly objectified and idealised notions of local tradition.

Of the three regional folk traditions out of which contemporary Southern Italian revivalism is constituted, Salentine revivalism is most highly inflected with ethnoregionalist sentiment, and Campanian revivalism least so. As we have seen from Mimmo, Calabrian revivalism too, at times shows an ethnoregionalist tinge. After all, the region and its inhabitants have perhaps played a similar function to Ireland as the most underprivileged and despised region within the entire national popular 333

imagination (Teti, 1993). Like Ireland, Calabria perhaps also represents that segment of the national whole which has also suffered the most ruthless exploitation by the colonial metropolis, with the opulence of pre-Risorgimento Naples being firmly grounded in a social and economic subjection of Calabria which dates back to the Roman period (Caligiuri, 1996, 13ff.; Hammond & Scullard, 1979, 183).

Yet within their revivalist discourse, Calabrian revivalists such as Angelo Maggio and Mimmo seemed at times to invert the hierarchy of values inherent in the dominant post-war Italian ideology of modernisation by transforming Calabria’s most universally stigmatised features into virtues through a celebration of the vital, raw, archaic and pre-modern features of Calabrian rural culture (such as those embodied for Angelo Maggio in the Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi). By contrast, the competing Salentine folk scene was typically dismissed by revivalists familiar with Calabria or Campania as ‘commercialised’, lacking in ‘authenticity’ and devoid of any genuine engagement with a living popular tradition.

No Campanian revivalist however, would ever self-consciously frame their ethnic identity as ‘Campanian’ in the manner described at the Salentine folk concert above. With the long-established local cultural dominance of Naples, Campanian revivalism is less preoccupied with ideologies of regional identity (Levy, 1996a, 15), and the selfconscious localism embodied in the Campanian revivalist discourse of Gianfranco (Chapter Four) is essentially ruralist and class-based in character, rather than ethnoregionalist, as so often in Salento.

The outsider as validator of local tradition

‘Perhaps I owed their esteem to the natural prestige of a stranger whose faraway origin makes him a sort of god’.

Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1982, 44)

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During her fieldwork on a local Carnival in Greece, Cowan observed that local people saw her ‘scholarly position as a source of both knowledge and legitimation’ and that ‘the folk’ are ‘often willing to invoke and appropriate the pronouncements of scholarly “authority” when it suits their interests’ (1988, 256, 255). Similarly, Boissevain and others have highlighted the growing influence of outsiders upon the ongoing reproduction of popular traditions in Europe. He notes that

the participation of strangers, often from distant cultures, has created a category of outsiders, an audience of Others, in previously homogenous communities. This has furthered the performative aspect of many of the celebrations…[in a] gradual shift away from full participation to performance for the outsiders at whom many of the innovations seem to be directed…The introduction of strangers has made local populations aware of their own identity, seeking to mark off their communities from the newcomers by defining and ritualizing boundaries (1992a 6, 9, 15).

This new self-consciousness about tradition is also exemplified in Cruces and Diaz de Rada’s observations about traditional celebrations in Spain’s Jerte Valley, where some outsiders such as folklorists or anthropologists are coming to have an important role ‘in the legitimation and sanctioning of certain parts of the events as opposed to others’ (1992, 68; cf. Cowan, 1992, 194).

Anna Nacci concluded her first meeting with me in Rome in July 2002 with the pregnant words ‘I think it’s a very important thing that you have come from Australia to study our popular traditions.’ The presence of an Australian anthropologist who had ‘travelled from the other side of the world’ to attend folk events seemed to be interpreted by her and some other revivalists as an exciting cosmopolitan validation of the value of their own local popular culture. When Enza Pagliara invited me to participate in her ethnomusicological research project collecting songs from elderly people in her home town of Torchiarolo, she felt there would be distinct methodological advantages in having me along to demonstrate international interest in local folk traditions. My presence would thus help to validate local tradition and

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overcome the sense of shame about peasant culture which many elderly informants had internalised during the post-war period.

Enza Pagliara documents local folklore with an elderly resident of her home village of Torchiarolo in Upper Salento, February 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

In a similar vein, ARPA ethnomusicologist Sergio Schiavone described to me the startling effect which his presence as a researcher had on local actors during his documentation of popular songs on the island of Ischia. When he asked elderly singers to record local songs with him, they would at first sing very softly and with obvious embarrassment, louder the second time, and thereafter at the top of their lungs. By the time he left Ischia, he had the sensation that his scholarly presence on the island had sparked off a kind of mini folk revival, in which locals were no longer embarrassed by their own popular cultural traditions.

I became distinctly uncomfortable in Lecce when after virtually getting off the plane at the start of my fieldwork in July 2002, Salentine musician and ethnomusicologist Pierpaolo De Giorgi insisted on crediting me and anthropologist Karen Lüdtke in the 336

preface of his latest book on the Salentine revival. Apart from anything else, I felt I still knew nothing about the subject, so why mention me at all?

I soon became aware of a certain amount of competition amongst my informants for me to pay closer attention to their own particular region of origin. This was particularly true of Salentine and Calabrian revivalists, who seemed to have most at stake in terms of projecting a strong notion of regional cultural identity based around popular tradition. In Rome, I started to notice an interesting pattern among Rome-based enthusiasts from Salento. After mentioning that I was carrying out research on le tradizioni popolari, their faces would light up, perhaps imagining that I was yet another of the legion of researchers working on tarantism on their home turf. When I added that I had also spent some time at Calabrian feste popolari however, their faces would drop, and they would start to look distinctly uncomfortable and a lot less enthusiastic. Something about the Calabrian folk milieu seemed to pose a threat to their projection of Salentine identity through pizzica and tarantism. For Calabrian revivalist Angelo Maggio, this betrayed ‘a fear of comparison’, with the greater vitality and integrity of folk traditions in Calabria somehow drawing attention to the degree of imposture and hype with which Salentine pizzica was being been foisted on an unsuspecting urban or foreign audience. One left-wing Salentine student revivalist in Rome even ventured the culturally defensive view that it was obvious from stylistic variations between Salentine pizzica and Calabrian tarantella that women were traditionally far less oppressed in his native Salento than in Calabria. My direct experience of Calabrian popular tradition had seemed to disrupt his attempts to talk up Salentine folk identity to a foreigner, and in response, he had resorted to a negative stereotype about the reactionary nature of Calabrian rural society.

Conclusion

It would be drawing a long bow indeed to compare the benign ethnoregionalism of Salentine revivalism with the openly racist, anti-Southern, anti-immigrant ideology of the Northern League. And yet, there are nevertheless some compelling parallels: as within Salentine revivalist ideology, the Northern League has constructed an ethnicised 337

Northern Italian identity around the notion of an imagined ‘Padanian’ community (Cento Bull, 2000, 259f.). As with the Salentine revivalist imaginary, this ‘imagined community’ is projected back in time to an earlier Golden Age (symbolised in the image below by the warrior on the Northern League roundel evoking the medieval Lombard League’s resistance to external domination by the Holy Roman Empire). As in the characteristic Southern Italian folk festival genre, the Northern League also makes extensive use of extravagant folkloric spectacles (like the annual gatherings at Pontida commemorating the 1167 oath of allegiance to the Lombard League), encourages the speaking of local dialect, and advocates the defence of ‘le nostre tradizioni’, as in the following poster attacking Arab immigration.

‘Yes to Polenta, No to Couscous: Proud of Our Traditions’: a Northern League poster expressing disquiet over the cultural effects of recent Arab immigration to Northern Italy. Source: . [19 September 2011].

In his account of the clandestine Soviet-era Lithuanian nationalist revival, Ciubrinskas describes how peasants ‘were regarded as Lithuanians par excellence, as the nation’s most genuine representatives, on the grounds that they were the least contaminated by foreign influences and most in touch with the nation’s distant past’ (2000, 28; cf. also Kahn, 1995, 48-75). Similarly, on the website of the Associazione Culturale Identità e 338

Tradizione, a trio of distinctly militant-looking peasants are deployed as representatives of ‘Le Nazioni Padano-Alpine’ in a defence of ‘our ethnic idenity and traditions’, which are said to be under threat from ‘racial mixing’ caused by global migration flows.

Militant peasants of the ‘Alpine-Padanian Nations’ deployed in defence of Northern Italian cultural and racial homogeneity. Source: website of the neo-Fascist Centro Studi ‘La Runa’: . [9 November 2011].

The same buzzwords of ‘identity’, ‘tradition’ and ‘peasant’ used by Southern Italian revivalists in the seemingly virtuous context of left wing anti-globalisation are here redeployed within Northern ethnoregionalist discourse in the service of racism and neo-Fascism (cf. Griffin’s 1985 analysis of anti-modernist elements within Italian Neofascist ideology).

Hobsbawm has explicitly identified what he sees as a recent mania for identity politics as a symptom of globalised capitalism: 339

As old regimes disintegrate, old forms of politics fade way and new states multiply, the manufacture of new histories to suit new regimes, states, ethnic movements and identity groups becomes a global industry. As the human hunger for continuity with the past grows in an era designed as a continuous break with the past, the media society feeds it by inventing its version of a boxoffice national history, ‘heritage’ and theme parks in ancient fancy dress (2003, 417).

What Salentine revivalism, Poppi’s account of the revitalisation of the Ladin Carnival and the wider emergence Northern Italian ethnoregionalism all seem to highlight is the characteristic deployment within contemporary modernity, right across the political spectrum, of the notion of peasant cultural traditions as a means for the production of ethnic difference, and as a rallying point against ‘globalisation’ in its many forms.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: ‘FRICCHETTONI E PORTATORI DELLA TRADIZIONE POPOLARE’: A TYPOLOGY OF LOCAL ACTORS

‘Fricchettoni e portatori della tradizione’ [hippies and bearers of tradition]: Monica, a young urban revivalist, dances tammurriata with ‘Zio Fedele’, an elderly local portatore della tradizione at the opening of the Spring festival of the Madonna a Castello, Somma Vesuviana, Campania, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

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Introduction

Revivalism brings the urban revivalist actors who are the focus of this ethnography into an encounter in local space with traditionally-oriented local actors and the cultural practices of which they are the leading exponents. In the process, a new intercultural and interclass space within the local, and a new mode of cultural exchange between the metropolitan core and the rural periphery are established. Such transformations highlight the accelerating rate of circulation of cultural commodities in the modern world, and the increasing integration of the local within the global (Rosaldo & Inda, 2002a; Appadurai, 1996).

At its best, this newly created intercultural space offers the possibility for a genuine mutual exploration of cultural difference through a dialogue with the ‘other’, as exemplified perhaps best by Ester, Sabatino, Cicetto and their circle. The revivalist networking of local rural communities also provides new cultural, economic, social (and sometimes even sexual) opportunities for local actors. At the same time, the cultural modes in which popular traditional practices have previously been reproduced by traditional actors are rapidly transformed (often in ways lamented or even actively resisted by ‘philological’ revivalists). The power imbalance inherent in the new engagement between cosmopolitan and local actors at times leads some local actors to experience revivalism as a negative manifestation of ‘globalisation’, and to provoke complaint, secession and sometimes, but by no means always, open resistance.

In order to better understand these processes, I begin with a detailed case study exploring the interaction between local and cosmopolitan actors in the rural Calabrian town of Riace, which became a focus for revivalist activity from the late 1990s. I then outline a typology of a range of local actors, contrasting their differing motivations and agency with respect to urban revivalists. In the final section, I interpret the negative responses of some local actors to the intrusion of cosmopolitan outsiders as a form of resistance to globalisation.

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CASE STUDY: LOCAL AND COSMOPOLITAN ACTORS IN RIACE, CALABRIA

Riace Superiore, Calabria, my fieldwork base for two months in late 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

In late 2002, I spent two months as the guest of Riace’s revivalist-inspired Associazione Città Futura, after attending a stage (residential study group) held during the town’s spectacular patronal Festa dei Santi Medici in September that year. This local cultural association was engaged in a highly ambitious project to develop the town culturally, economically and socially, by valorising aspects of local tradition and opening the town up to outsiders. In the process, many of the town’s abandoned houses had been restored, providing accommodation for up to 100 visitors. This infrastructure, along with Città Futura’s leftist ideological complexion, and the town’s markedly ‘traditional’ quality, had made Riace an attractive base for University students in their twenties to carry out field research on the local festa popolare for their Honours theses. While in Riace, I collaborated with three of them: Jacopo (Ethnomusicology, University of Padova), Dafne and Tatiana (Anthropology, University of Rome). 343

As city folk, we were all attracted by the picturesque folkloric quality of Riace, with its donkeys in the streets, florid village characters and the colourful three day patronal festival where itinerant gypsies lead the procession of the Saints in a lively Rom version of Calabrian tarantella. One Sunday, while taking a stroll from Riace down to the coast, I fell in with one of Riace’s two goatherds as he herded his flock across the hills. After introducing myself, he asked me what I was doing in Riace. When I answered that I was carrying out research on local tradizioni popolari, he commented as if this were the most normal thing in the world: ‘Do you know how many people come here from all over the world to do that sort of thing?’ For a Riace goatherd, the presence of un antropologo australiano had already become unremarkable, an indication of the speed with which Riace was being integrated into wider translocal processes through the agency of revivalism.

Donkeys are still used for transport in some remote Southern Italian towns like Riace. Photo: Bennetts, 2002. 344

The Città Futura project had been developed by local school teacher Domenico, whose idealism seemed at times to place him in a long line of Calabrian visionaries stretching back to 17th century Calabrian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, born at nearby Stilo, and author of La città del sole (1602), which proposed the establishment of an ideal utopian society based on collective ownership. Although a Riace local, Domenico’s ideological orientation was strongly influenced by his experience outside the local, while working in Northern Italy, especially through his contact with the radical left politics associated with Radio Popolare in Milan. The Radio Popolare experience so emblematic of 1970s Italian left counter-culturalism (Berardi, 2004, 91f.), is memorably captured in I cento passi, the 2005 film on the life and death of Sicilian anti-Mafia activist Peppino Impastato. The fact that independent radio stations were operating in this period in both Riace and Melpignano (site of La Notte della Taranta) is suggestive of a correlation between local level radical politics then and the re-efflorescence of revivalist activity at these same revivalist sites from the late 1990s.

The Città Futura project was multifaceted, but had received its initial impetus from the arrival of a boatload of African asylum seekers on the Calabrian coast in 1999. Domenico and his wife Pina immediately arranged for the asylum seekers to be hosted in Riace, with the aid of a government per diem allowance designed to assist in integrating them economically into the local community through Città Futurasponsored activities. Later, Città Futura established annual summer work camps, during which young people from all over Europe came to work on the restoration of dilapidated houses left behind in the wake of massive post-war peasant migration.

Palazzo Pinnarò, once the seat of the main family of the local gentry, had long since fallen into decay after the post-war collapse of the local galantuomini class and their decampment to Naples, in a process also echoed in Melpignano and many other Southern Italian towns (cf. Tak, 2000, 213). It was now refurbished as the Città Futura headquarters in the centre of town, and also became the symbolic focus for revivalist events organised by Domenico in an attempt to revalorise local popular tradition.

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This long abandoned seigniorial residence of the leading family of the local galantuomini (gentry) was being restored in Melpignano, Salento, in early 2003, with the aid of EU funds. Photo: Bennetts 2003.

As in the Neapolitan periphery described by Saviano (2006), the depressed local Locride region has one of the highest rates of unemployment in Italy, making it an ideal site for the exploitation of the local workforce. After negative experiences working in greenhouses and as a member of a women’s cooperative in the tertiary clothing sector, Pina had hit on the idealistic revivalist notion of re-establishing the local tradition of spinning and weaving textiles from ginestra (broom), with financial support from Bishop Bregantini and the local Banca Etica.

Outside the peak festival season in summer, Riace reverted to being a town of old people, with most of the young adults away studying or working in Northern Italy or Germany. In an attempt to reverse the consequent collapse in local agriculture, Domenico had re-established the traditional local olive mill and employed asylum seekers and others to pick the local olive crop, with a view to marketing locally grown and produced organic olive oil.

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As part of Pina and Domenico’s attempts to revive interest in local artisanal skills, they had been successful in attracting funding from the Reggio Calabria Region for two traditional handicraft courses in the Riace Scuola Media taught by local artisans, one in ginestra weaving and the other in goldsmithing. Yet to Pina’s disappointment, these courses came to nothing, after local parents complained to the headmaster that their children should be studying, rather than learning traditional craft skills during school time, observing that ‘after all, it’s not as if they’re handicapped’. Apparently, the parents had seen the programme as a course for ‘retards’ who would never be able to transcend their Calabrian rural backgrounds. ‘In the North, they maintain craft traditions like this through courses in schools. I can’t understand why they don’t do the same in the South too,’ lamented Pina. In the South, it seemed, such traditional artisanal practices had yet to take on the exotic folkloric glamour which they enjoyed in parts of Italy which had been industrialised for longer.

For many older people in Riace, the traditional spinning and weaving of ginestra was associated with the misery of peasant women condemned to an isolated life of backbreaking toil indoors. Pina struggled to maintain the project in the face of the indifference of local women, for whom it had strong associations with this recent and stigmatised peasant past. Pina was disappointed by the fact that only one of her friends from the women’s co-operative had showed any interest in the project, and that even she had dropped out after only two weeks and had then never even set foot in the workshop since. Even the Ethiopian refugee women who had retrained in these traditional techniques had all subsequently left to seek other opportunities in the big city working as au pairs in Bari.

There was thus a gap between Domenico and Pina’s urban-influenced revivalist model of local cultural revitalisation and the less sentimental views of other locals, who seemed more preoccupied with the difficult struggle to survive economically in a small rural town in the Calabrian hinterland. Their ambitious revivalist-tinged project of local cultural and economic revitalisation thus faced huge obstacles, including from the conservative local administration, with which Domenico was continually at loggerheads.

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Riace locals like Franca, who ran a local store with her husband, were broadly supportive of the Associazione Città Futura project, which had made a positive impact on the depressed local economy by bringing more visitors and money into town. Riace’s other grocery shop had been on the verge of going out of business, but had been saved, according to its owner, by the arrival of Città Futura. In summer, locals tended to travel about outside town and not spend money in Riace, whereas the young people who came from all over Europe for the summer work camps did spend, and this helped to make ends meet. Winter was a particularly hard time, and one winter afternoon, Franca admitted to feeling very stressed because hardly anyone had come into the shop all day. She and her husband had two children at university, and she worried that because Città Futura was not doing well financially, it might not survive, which in her opinion would be a disaster for the whole of Riace.

Although enthusiastic about Città Futura’s positive economic impact on Riace, Franca was more sceptical of the association’s revivalist cultural agenda. The harsh reality of peasant society so romantically evoked by revivalists like Domenico and others was an all-too-recent and bitter memory for many in Riace, and the struggle to make a living, even today, was not easy. Domenico had tried one Christmas Eve to recreate a traditional popular Christmas festivity by organising a candlelit dinner in Palazzo Pinnarò without electricity. Franca had found the event completely bizarre:

I don’t like the gloomy things they do at Città Futura, like those candlelit dinners in the big palazzo. If it’s something more happy, that’s OK. But my mother doesn’t want to know about any of the things they do at Città Futura: ‘We were starving!’ she says of those times. ‘And those things they do with ginestra; it reminds me of the hard times back then’.

According to Franca, le tradizioni popolari were of greater interest to younger people of her son Giuseppe’s generation who were now at university, than to those of her mother’s generation with direct experience of peasant life: ‘People like my son who have been to university are interested in those kind of things. He asked me once “what was it like back then?” But what am I supposed to say?’

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She and her mother were also perplexed by the obsessive interest she thought Roman anthropology student Dafne was showing in traditional peasant magico-religious practices such as the removal of the evil eye which she had read about in de Martino’s Sud e magia (2001 [1959]):

Dafne talked to my mother about [rituals for removing the evil eye]…But people from the city tend to romanticise these kind of things. It’s all nonsense: don’t believe any of it. Even I know how to remove the evil eye, but it’s nonsense to say that this or that can bring the evil eye. Once people used to believe this stuff, poor things. It was all because of poverty: how could they pay for a doctor?

Urban revivalists’ conception of life in rural Italy is highly coloured and romanticised by their subjective experiences of towns like Riace during the peak summer festival season, when migrants return to the hometown and everything seems to throb with festive activity. But life in Riace during the winter months I was there took on a far more humdrum and even frustrating quality, especially for the small number of younger people who had not left to study or work in the North. Dafne and I were cultivated by the small group of young local men still living in town, who identified themselves with the self-ironic epithet ‘gli stronzi di Riace’ (‘the Arseholes of Riace’), in a play on i bronzi di Riace, the celebrated Greco Roman bronze statues recovered off the coast of Riace in the 1970s. They spoke of how eagerly they awaited the summer months each year when the summer work camps and the patronal festival attracted urban visitors from other parts of Italy and abroad, thus offering the chance to meet new people (especially young women) from outside Calabria, and even to pursue low-risk sexual adventure.

Given the highly constrained nature of gender relations in rural Calabria (Siebert, 1991), young women were largely absent from this social scene, and instead spent large amounts of time indoors, perhaps only going out on Fridays or Saturdays. Through the process of cross cultural exchange initiated at Riace through Città Futura and revivalism, these local young men’s sexual longings had become refocussed, as on the Circumvesuviana tammurriata circuit, on urban cosmopolitan women from outside 349

the local like Dafne, or around the more sexually-liberated milieu of Germany where they periodically went to work as Gastarbeiter in the hospitality trade. During the rest of the year in Riace, they complained of stultifying boredom, claiming there was virtually nothing to do except drink to excess every night with their friends in the local bar. ‘If you weren’t here tonight’, they told me one evening, ‘it would be a night like so many other ones, drinking in the bar, smoking on the bridge, going somewhere in the car’.

The gap between revivalist rhetoric and local perception was further dramatised for me when Dafne’s student friends from Rome University came down to Riace for two weeks in late 2002 to pick the olive crop in exchange for free accommodation, hoping for a revivalist working holiday with a difference. These educated middle class student leftists had obvious difficulties in relating to their local peers, gli stronzi di Riace. Città Futura was going through a particularly tortuous period, and caught up in these difficult political and social dynamics, they soon complained about the oppressive and stressful quality of life in small town Calabria, and were eventually delighted to leave two weeks later. On the Riace side, Pina quoted approvingly a negative assessment of the students by one of the Eritrean asylum seekers working with them on the olive harvest: ‘They’re good at drinking, eating and sleeping, but not at working’.

As the local school teacher, Domenico was probably the only older person in the town apart from the priest with any post-secondary qualifications. His articulation of a selfconscious revivalist agenda in Riace was representative of the typical role of cosmopolitan local actors in the revivalist mediation of local popular tradition, and of the traditionally important role of educated middle class actors within folk revivalism generally (Hobsbawm, 1963, 313ff.; 1993, 103-5; for the role of middle class scholar figures in other revivalist movements, see George Oliven, 2000 for Argentinian gauchismo; Hughes, 1992, 253-323 for the nineteenth century Catalan Renaixença; Handler, 1988 for Quebec; Herzfeld, 1987, 2003 and Cowan, 1988, 1992 for Greece). Although he and Pina had made enormous personal sacrifices to keep their idealistic Città Futura project afloat, many in the local community found it difficult to embrace their utopian leftist ideology of disinterested social ‘solidarity’ and the revalorisation of local tradition. Nevertheless, after returning to Australia, I learned to my delight that 350

Domenico and Pina’s efforts had been rewarded politically by Domenico’s election as mayor of Riace in 2004.

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A TYPOLOGY OF LOCAL ACTORS

As highlighted by aspects of the Riace case study, revivalism’s engagement between cosmopolitan urban ‘others’ (often students or intellectuals) and local actors, occurs across a fundamental class divide which manifests itself in contrasting political ideology, language (dialect versus standard Italian), education, economic status and worldview. In the following section, I present a detailed typology of a range of local actors, exploring their interaction with urban revivalists and contrasting what is at stake for each of them in their own understandings of ‘popular tradition’.

‘Portatore della tradizione popolare’

The key symbolic figure of the portatore della tradizione popolare has become central within the contemporary urban revivalist imaginary. As the human repositories of the orally-transmitted local popular cultural traditions which are the focus of revivalist activity, elderly peasant portatori like Riccardo, Cicetto, Sabatino, Cosimo, Venerdina, i Cantori di Carpino, Uccio Aloisi and Gianni seem today to embody the continuing, yet precarious, reproduction of such traditional cultural practices within the contemporary world. As in many other non-literate societies, these elderly custodians have traditionally played a key role in the intergenerational cultural reproduction of such traditions (cf. Michaels, 1985; for the similar role in rural Greece of the meraklís figure, see Cowan, 1988, 255).

Riccardo Esposito Abate, an important portatore della tradizione from the rural town of Somma Vesuviana outside Naples, is continuing to pass on his knowledge of the

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For an update on the recent fortunes of Riace, Domenico and the migrants, see Aloise (2011).

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tammurriata and other local rural traditions to a new generation of local youngsters, as well as urban revivalists. His role in this process of intercultural and intergenerational transmission in the age of revivalism became clearer to me after I took part with him and his family in the local festa popolare known as ‘Sabato dei Fuochi’ (Saturday of the Fires) in April 2003.

Riccardo Esposito Abate directs his group of young local tammurriata performers, Sabato dei Fuochi, Somma Vesuviana, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

In the fertile mountainous area surrounding Mt Vesuvius, this spring festival of the local Madonna a Castello near Somma Vesuviana is strongly associated with agriculture, a moment in the year when contadini traditionally ask the Madonna to protect their crops, and when blazing ceremonial torches are carried down the mountain to apotropaically drive away the frosts. The cult of the local supernatural patron, the Madonna a Castello, is closely intertwined with the mountain, where just as in Holmes’ Friulian worker peasant community (1989, 27), the local forest has 352

traditionally provided timber, game, chestnuts and other forest products, as well as plots of land on the mountain slopes where many locals have now established casolari, ‘weekender’ shacks surrounded by small but highly productive gardens.

At an initial ceremony at the small shrine of the Madonna in the forest at Ognundo, the festa is opened with ritual tammurriata dancing. We are then invited back for lunch to Riccardo’s casolare. The nearby hillside is dotted with similar structures, each surrounded by gardens, fruit trees and grape vines. Riccardo has invited members of his extended family, Cicetto and Sabatino from Ester’s folk group and a number of other folk musicians (including one talented young singer from a local Camorra family) and a number of urban revivalists.

Opening ceremony, Sabato dei Fuochi, Ognundo, Somma Vesuviana, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

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Cicetto had earlier deferred to Riccardo (‘o’ vecchierello’) [the old bloke] as representing ‘the real tradition of the Vesuvius region’. As in Aboriginal Australia, people like Riccardo are much sought after by anthropologists, and he was in fact a De Simone informant during his documentation of local tradition in the 1970s (De Simone, 1979). Two of De Simone’s former Neapolitan collaborators, photographer Lucia Patalano and Antonio Orselli, are also present. My Croatian anthropology student friend Gea has brought along a video camera, and we are both looking forward to a profitable day of research. We sit down in the spring sunshine at a long table laden with a gargantuan feast of locally produced wine, cheese, bread, olive oil, artichokes, eggplants, pepperoni, tomatoes, pastiera napoletana and more, prepared by the women members of the family.

A woman from Riccardo’s family roasts locally grown artichokes, Sabato dei Fuochi, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

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The tammurriata starts up soon after lunch as a group of about fifteen local children to whom Riccardo has been teaching tammurriata begin performing under his close supervision. Despite being a chain smoker in his late 60s, Riccardo is a man of prodigious energy and enthusiasm, a fact confirmed the following week on a strenuous mountain pilgrimage to the Madonna shrine at Ciglio di Somma Vesuviana (the ‘brow’ of Vesuvius), during which many twenty year olds are left struggling.

The tammurriata gets under way soon after lunch at Riccardo’s casolare, Somma Vesuviana, April 2003. Note Croatian anthropology student Gea (right) recording the music on my minidisk recorder and Sabatino (left) with triccebalacche. Photo: Bennetts.

After the warm up, Riccardo’s paranza moves off to carry the tammurriata round to each of the local casolari. It is an unforgettable afternoon: as we arrive at each household, the paranza strikes up, and the dance begins. Several of the maternal chef figures are now beginning to let their hair down after their earlier culinary exertions, and one starts dancing tammurriata in her kitchen apron. A number of more obvious urban revivalist types have also begun drifting in. Characteristically, Sabatino launches 355

into a spirited dance with the most attractive of the younger hippie women from the city. After each musical interlude, we are insistently offered wine and still more food, before moving on to the next household. As the sun goes down, we return to Riccardo’s casolare in a state of ecstatic inebriation, with the young man from the Camorra family singing a haunting local air to the Madonna.

A local man dances tammurriata with a young urban revivalist woman in a configuration of contrasting class, gender and age roles characteristic of the Circumvesuviana tammurriata scene, Sabato dei Fuochi, Somma Vesuviana, Campania, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

As with my experience of local popular tradition in the home of Enza Pagliara’s parents in the village of Torchiarolo, the Sabato dei Fuochi event had taken place within an intimate popular family context which contrasted with many of the more ‘contaminated’ folk events held in the public sphere, where commercialisation, the high number of outsiders and other elements were often strong determining factors. Although translocal cosmopolitan actors like ourselves had participated, we were there as guests of locals like Riccardo, rather than as chaotic interlopers, as at Torre Paduli. In contrast to revivalist dance courses or stage, traditional cultural practices were being 356

passed on to younger people in a more traditional mode, through intergenerational transmission and the medium of observation and imitation during the festa popolare.

Portatori della tradizione are often people who go against the current, or who before the revival were considered barely even respectable. Michele Russo, a second generation immigrant to Milan from Carpino, recalls that the now much lionised Cantori di Carpino who carried on the local song tradition were ‘culturally different’, and were dismissed by his parents as ‘people who didn’t want to work’. 92 year old Cantore di Carpino Andrea Sacco commented to me in 2002 that ‘the Carabinieri were always after us’. Cicetto continues to experience serious tensions with his own family over his obsessive involvement in tammurriata festivals: his son even asked him once ‘Why do you want to go and hang around with people like that who get drunk all the time?’

We have seen already how the post-war economic boom introduced the new bourgeois values of perbenismo (respectability), projected through the powerful ideological medium of television and lead to a decline in interest in the values and practices associated with the popular traditional milieu. Some however, like the late Amadeo Puttano of Torre Paduli in Salento, continued stubbornly to keep alive traditional popular practices in the face of widespread indifference among other locals (including those of his own generation), who dismissed such things as anachronistic, or solely the province of criminals and drunks.

But for contemporary Salentine revivalists like Ada Metafune and her brother, Amadeo had provided a key link in their own rediscovery of local popular tradition, even though their father used to look askance:

Amadeo was a character in the village who was not exactly marginalised, but not really considered respectable…Not a good-for-nothing, but someone who was only interested in music, and didn’t think about more serious things much…

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But he was actually a marvellous person…He really had a sense of the festa, he used to really motivate people, and he would always ask women to dance with him…[In the late 1970s] my brother and I and a few others would take off with Amadeo in a car to play music. Whenever we went with Amadeo, people like my father used to ask: ‘Who are you going with? With Amadeo? Don’t you realise he’s the most stupid person in the whole village? And to think that you want to train to be an engineer!’ Amadeo was someone who maybe didn’t work in order to go and play pizzica. It gives you some idea of how little he cared about what people used to think…At that time, his reputation in the village was just about zero. But it’s all different now, of course, because now, Amadeo is untouchable.

Through its valorisation of these once despised local popular traditions, the revival has immeasurably enhanced the status of local portatori della tradizione who were previously regarded as eccentric and anachronistic good for nothings. The late Uccio Aloisi, a rough eighty year-old Salentine peasant farmer, was universally acknowledged as the senior Salentine portatore della tradizione, and regularly received with rapture by the young leftist crowd at Centro Sociale Occupato Villagio Globale in Rome, who seemed to project their own emotional and ideological preoccupations with class struggle, ‘subaltern’ identity and resistance to authority onto Uccio’s charismatic yet brusque personality.

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‘Concerto storico’: Uccio Aloisi introduces the pizzica craze to Rome, Villaggio Globale Centro Sociale Occupato, March 2000. Source: album cover.

As the major living exponents of recently ‘rediscovered’ local traditions, such ‘alberi della memoria’ (trees of memory) are often accorded cult status by youthful urban revivalists. The distinctive intergenerational flavour of the folk scene seems to transcend the ‘generation gap’ often associated with contemporary urban life, which Debord (1977, para 62) has identified as a characteristic feature of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. At the Carpino Folk Festival in 2002, the elderly Cantori di Carpino were feted in a manner which recalled for me scenes of traditional youthful deference to elders in Australian Aboriginal society. At one point, 86 year-old Antonio Piccinino was seated amidst an admiring throng which included ethnomusicologist Pino Gala and his wife Tamara. One young local man had brought along an entire troop of young female friends who each lined up to kiss the elderly cantore on the cheek, one greeting him with the words ‘Ciao nonno’ [‘Hello, grandpa’].

Local exponents of popular tradition are segmented by age and knowledge levels. Men such as Cicetto and Sabatino, who are slightly younger than Riccardo, are considered to be ‘della tradizione’, that is, having an organic link to traditional practice through their peasant backgrounds, but are not accorded the same status or knowledge as a full 359

portatore della tradizione like Riccardo. Cicetto and Sabatino’s degree of connection to traditional practice is more tenuous, due to their upbringing in the transitional worker/peasant community of Pomigliano on the fringes of Naples (Vacca, 1999; cf. Holmes, 1989), whilst Riccardo’s entire life has been spent in the tammurriata heartland of Somma Vesuviana.

Sometimes, traditions are more robustly maintained within marginalised subcultural groups such as the Southern Italian Rom community (or even among members of criminal or para-criminal subcultures, as perhaps at Polsi). At Riace in Calabria, Calabrian gypsies from out of town effectively function as portatori della tradizione in the local Festa dei Santi Medici by continuing to practice the votive dancing of tarantella to Saints Cosimo and Damiano in the town’s annual patronal procession, long after this tradition has died out among the non-gypsy population still living in town (Plastino, 2003). Until ‘rediscovered’ by revivalists in the late 1980s, the danza scherma at Torre Paduli was kept alive similarly by the same local gypsy community which once ran the horse market at the Festa di San Rocco (Pellegrino, 2004).

Members of the Calabrian Rom community dance votive tarantella before the statues of Saints Cosimo and Damiano during the annual patronal procession, Riace, September 2002 (note ARPA’s Angelo Maggio with camera, top right, and ethnomusicologist Sergio Schiavone recording the music, top centre with hat). Photo: Bennetts. 360

For many of the elderly locals in Ester’s circle, the creation of the new folk economy has brought about a huge expansion of their traditional horizons. In earlier times, Riccardo told me, peasants from Somma Vesuviana would never even go to Naples, and the pilgrimages to the Madonna a Castello at Ciglio [the Brow] of Somma Vesuviana were remembered as rare opportunities to gaze out on the sea and the city of Naples below. Now however, as Ester recounts,

the oldies get invited by festival organisers to perform and they love it, because they’ve never really done anything before in their lives: all they know is factory or farm work, so getting up on a stage for them is fantastic.

They love the opportunity to meet old folks from other areas, like old folks from Abruzzo who do the saltarello,

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or ones from Puglia who do pizzica.

They swap stories and give each other bottles of wine. They take [Campanian] sausages and exchange them with the old guys from Puglia for crates of grapes…It’s been a huge opportunity for them to see other things, to have new experiences. Otherwise, an old guy from here would never have known what the saltarello was. They might have been a fantastic tammurriata singer in Campania, but what would they have known about what was going on in Abruzzo, or Lazio, or Puglia? Through these festivals, this new commercial network, they have discovered all of this.

Where once, popular tradition had been reproduced within an exquisitely local or even micro-regional context, revivalism has created a new translocal folk network. Locals in the Circumvesuviana region would once have attended only the local festival of the Madonna, and perhaps made an annual pilgrimage to one of the three regional sanctuaries at Montevergine, Pomigliano or Castello. Now, local tammurriata enthusiasts like Cicetto and Sabatino do not seem to miss a single tammurriata event in the entire Circumvesuviana region (Lello D’Ajello, personal comment).

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Traditional popular dance of the Lazio and Abruzzo regions.

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‘Io sono devoto’

Religious belief typically marks out the rural/metropolitan divide in revivalism, with local actors regularly motivating their participation in popular religious practices with the formula ‘ma io sono devoto’ (‘I am a devotee’, i.e. of a specific saint or Madonna). Riccardo laconically describes his attachment to the Madonna a Castello in the following terms: ‘Famme sta bbuon’. Se me fa’ sta bbuon’, te vengo a trova’ al

Ciglio pe’ diec’ ann’’ (‘Make sure I’m OK. If you make sure I’m OK, I’ll come and visit you at Ciglio for the next ten years’).

By contrast, the orientation of urban revivalists is overwhelmingly secular. Revivalism thus introduces into the festa popolare new secularist actors who are devoid of religious belief, and even actively hostile towards both the ideology and hegemonic practices of the Church. As we have seen, the penetration of secular urban actors into what was originally a religious and ritual context at Torre Paduli has led to a process of desacralisation within the festa popolare, as traditional local norms of cultural and religious behaviour have been eroded.

Anticlericalism is of course not the exclusive province of urban actors, but is also quite widespread amongst local actors as well, especially men. As in rural Spain (Behar, 1990), anticlerical sentiment may preclude one from attending Mass, but is by no means always an impediment to simultaneous popular religious devotion to the Madonna and saints. ‘I’m a devotee [of the Madonna], it’s just I can’t stand priests…What use to me is a Pope dressed up in a Carnival costume?’: Riccardo, a PCI member for over 30 years, is still nevertheless a declared ‘devoto della Madonna a Castello’. Although traditional anti-clerical actors like him privately despise priests, their religious beliefs are broadly congruent with those of the church. By not openly contesting the church’s role within the festa popolare, they thereby tacitly assent to the local social consensus around its role.

A characteristic contrast in attitudes towards religious practice between ‘philological’ revivalists and traditional locals on the one hand and ‘spontaneous’ revivalists on the other was highlighted by responses to the ‘No Global’ protest against the exclusion of 362

femminielli from the Festa della Madonna di Montevergine in 2002. Although an anticlerical Communist, and no fan of the Church at all, Riccardo immediately phoned Campanian folksinger Marcello Colasurdo to reprove him for his orchestration of the protest. In Riccardo’s view, Colasurdo should have negotiated with the Church beforehand, ‘not because of the priests, but because of the people praying inside who were upset’. Ester and Gianfranco also became visibly agitated when I raised this incident, with Ester claiming angrily that Colasurdo’s actions had been based on

a completely invented tradition, a piece of exhibitionism which I reject completely…The very same people [from the CSO milieu] who throw bottles on the ground and wreck the festa were the ones who were taking part in the demonstration. It’s a question of manners: you can’t just turn up and behave however you like!

Pilgrims to Montevergine traditionally climbed the steps to the Sanctuary of the Madonna on their knees, as in this postcard reproduction from this original photo from the 1950s (?). Source: Matonti Editore, Salerno. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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Urban actors’ formally secularist position is sometimes undercut (especially among Campanian and Calabrian ‘philological’ revivalists) by a tendency towards a ‘folkloric’ mimesis and imaginative identification with local traditional religious practices, for instance by participating in pilgrimages, lighting candles to the Madonna, or collecting the printed images of the saints and Madonnas known as santini. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Communist Refoundation veteran like Michele commented on the procession for the Madonna of the Chickens in 2003 as follows:

Personally, I couldn’t care less when I see the Madonna passing by. But I really get moved when I see those [local] people who offer up those songs to the Madonna. I get moved by the idea that they are still able to experience a religious moment like that…That Sunday [at Pagani] when the Madonna [delle Galline] passed, there was a group performing one of those invocations to the Madonna, and I was nearly crying…[For me] these are extraordinary moments in terms of a traditional culture, not in terms of the Madonna as a religious figure.

In his exploration of modes of ‘repeasantization’ and ‘re-enchantment’ amongst Friulian worker peasants, Holmes has highlighted ‘the tenacious hold of a folk consciousness which continues to mediate the experience of the modern world’ (1989, 147). Despite the massive cultural and economic transformations which have taken place within post-war Southern Italy, ‘enchanted’ traditional categories, forms and practices originating in peasant society continue to inform the cultural subjectivities of many of today’s Southern Italian population, in the same way that ‘folk consciousness’ persisted amongst Holmes’ Friulian worker peasants in the 1980s.

The maintenance of popular traditional cultural modes is apparent even within many urban contexts. A good example of the ongoing vitality of popular tradition even within the contemporary urban setting is the persistence of the traditional Roman practice of anonymously pinning up denunciations of government abuses composed in Roman dialectal verse on Rome’s famous ‘talking statue’, il Pasquino (Giovannini, 1997; Hughes, 2011, 261f.). 364

Two Romans check out the latest denunciations of the Berlusconi Government posted on Rome’s ‘talking statue’ Il Pasquino. Photo: Bennetts, 2002.

In a recent ethnography of the Monti area of central Rome, Herzfeld (2009, 53-73) argues that ancient theological notions of original sin continue to deeply structure apparently secular cultural and social processes in contemporary Rome (including the widespread disregard of the official urban planning code). I found that traditional popular religious practices were even more deeply engrained within contemporary daily life in Naples, even among apparently ‘secular’ actors. I was stunned for instance, to notice an atheist feminist friend from Naples making the sign of the cross as we came across a funeral procession one day. Virgilio, a leading light in a radical Centro Sociale Occupato in Naples, was dressed in a No Global-style Palestinian scarf, smoked two joints while I was interviewing him, and yet at one point stated ‘ma io sono cattolico’ [I’m Catholic], and described how he always made the sign of the cross as he left his house for work every morning. His Northern Italian ‘No Global’ comrades, he said, were appalled by his open self-identification as a Catholic.

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The ease with which some young urban secular revivalists are able to participate in Southern Italian peasant devotional practices associated with feste popolari of the saints and Madonna is sometimes striking, although this is usually rationalized by revivalists on the grounds that such practices embody ‘la religiosità popolare’ rather than ‘la cultura della chiesa’ (cf. Lombardi-Satriani, 1974). Such examples of revivalist practice seem to suggest the deep persistence of traditional religious patterns within the context of an apparently secularised Italian modernity.

Persistence of popular tradition in a contemporary urban setting: a local devotee’s flower offering to the ‘Souls in Purgatory’, believed by their Neapolitan subproletarian devotees to be embodied in bones and skulls housed in underground crypts like this one at the Church of Purgatorio ad Arco on via dei Tribunali, a main thoroughfare in the Naples centro storico. Photo: Bennetts, Naples, 1996.

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Younger local actors

Sometimes local young people are so fully immersed in the world of popular tradition, or develop such a precocious and early command of its expressive practices, that they achieve a status as important points of reference for local popular tradition: Campania’s o’ Lione, Salento’s Lamberto Probo, Calabria’s young organetto maestro Massimo Diano and shepherd zampogna player Sebastiano Battaglia are some examples. Usually their knowledge has been passed on by a significant older portatore della tradizione, as with Massimo, who studied organetto under older portatore Cosimo Lo Monaco.

Yet being a portatore della tradizione is itself no automatic guarantee of the intergenerational transmission of traditional practices within the family, as in the case of Cicetto’s son, whose attitude to popular tradition is actively hostile. As Ester comments, ‘It’s rare that the “children of the tradition” get involved in popular traditions – mostly they couldn’t care less’.

For many young locals, popular tradition is negatively associated with their grandparents’ generation and a stigmatised past of peasant poverty. Such negative or ambiguous attitudes towards popular tradition are often the flipside of urban revivalist romanticisation, and show an obvious correlation with class difference. The irony of young urban revivalists’ pursuit of the romantic peasant ‘other’ is that their rural peers in the same age group are often far more interested in pursuing the alien metropolitan ‘other’ embodied in the very same dominant ‘homogenised’ ‘consumerist’ cultural models rejected by urban revivalists.

As a sop to the cultural needs of this local youth constituency (and sometimes to the chagrin of urban revivalists), the programma civico (i.e. non-religious) section of the festa popolare programme often features highly commercial rock acts from out of town, rather than local folk acts. Sometimes the cultural generation gap and indifference of younger locals to both revivalist ideology and the traditional practices of their older local kin is dramatic, as in the case of the pilgrimage to the Cave of San Michele described in Chapter Four. As one village elder commented to anthropologist 367

Cesare Poppi, local youths in his Northern Italian town were ‘too keen on “becoming modern” to care for Carnival’ (1992, 122f.).

At other times however, younger locals’ interest in popular tradition can be triggered after leaving the provinces to study in another part of Italy, through exposure to the cultural and ideological milieu of the Italian university, as in the case of Giuseppe Gervasi, a young member of Riace’s patronal festival committee. Other young small town Southerners, however, take a more nuanced position. Silvia, a studente fuori sede from Salento’s Torre Paduli studying in Naples, enjoyed dancing pizzica, always attended the local patronal festa of San Rocco, but rejected what she saw as the romantic revivalist obsession with Salento among some of her student revivalist friends in Naples. Despite her strong emotional link to Salento and her home town, she found life in small town Southern Italy very trying at times, and welcomed the ‘emancipation’ which she felt life in a big city had made possible for her as a young woman from a small Southern Italian town. Similarly, for Fausto, a second generation Salentine immigrant to the North, growing up in Milan had helped him to be ‘more open’. Despite his strong sense of Salentine identity, and the fact that he used to enjoy spending summer and Christmas holidays in his parents’ town of Matino in Salento, he commented that in Matino, there was crime, the Mafia, one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the country and ‘not much to do’ apart from the Church.

For the reasons outlined, portatori della tradizione in Southern Italy (as well as in Aboriginal Australia) sometimes find a more attentive audience among younger urban cosmopolitans (such as anthropologists) than among younger members of their own kin group, thus producing a radical transformation in the nature of intergenerational transmission, and a new cultural exchange process between city and country. During the opening tammurriata performance at the shrine of Ognundo during Sabato dei Fuochi for instance, I was touched by the sight of Monica, an urban revivalist from Latina in her twenties dancing with ‘Zio Fedele’, a local portatore della tradizione in his 1970s (see photo at the beginning of this chapter). Monica told me later of her excitement at being honoured by Zio Fedele’s invitation to attend the ceremony and formally open the tammurriata ritual by dancing with him; as she danced, her face 368

seemed suffused with a sense of nervous joy. Although Zio Fedele’s wife was also present at Ognundo, I was told that in this Madonna cult closely linked to fertility, the presence of young women in the tammurriata dance circle was ritually essential, and so Ester and a number of other young revivalist women from Naples had also been summoned to take part. In another touching moment after the ceremony, three young hippie girls made a bee-line for the old man, obviously ecstatic at this chance encounter with a living embodiment of a tradition with which they had clearly fallen in love.

‘Zio Fedele’ explains the finer points of tammurriata performance to three young women urban revivalist fans, Festa della Madonna a Castello, Somma Vesuviana, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

This dynamic of charismatic older traditional local males dancing with attractive and much younger urban revivalist women is a particularly characteristic feature of the Campanian tammurriata scene. For one man in his late 1950s from the Pomigliano worker peasant community with difficult personal circumstances, the tammurriata revival has provided a much needed emotional outlet. According to Ester’s account, he was almost considered the village idiot before the revival: he had never married, never had a job, and still lived at home with his mother in a one room flat in Pomigliano. But as Ester recounted, ‘through tammurriata, he has acquired a prominent position: he’s 369

considered the best [male] dancer in the Circumvesuviana region’. Thus, the tammurriata boom has provided this man since the mid 1990s with a new status, as well as the emotional release of dancing with attractive younger women from the city of a higher class status than himself who specifically seek him out as a highly ‘traditional’ dance partner.

Yet Ester was critical of the ‘contamination’ which has taken place in this man’s traditional dance style in the process:

Four years ago [in the late 1990s], he started to lose face [locally], at the same time as the tammurriata boom took off. He’s lost respect by taking on ‘hippie’like moves when he dances. He used to dance really gently, but now he lets it rip. This kind of behaviour is mostly directed towards younger women, because dancing is their only way of relating to women. He’s lost his personality by dancing with hippies, especially younger women. But when he dances with the old folks, his own personality comes out again.

Neapolitan dance scholar Lello D’Ajello described to me the process of cross-cultural and intergenerational fertilisation and exchange which has occurred as follows:

There’s been an exchange between kids from the city and older people: the older folk have adapted their dancing to the dance style of the young ones, because they felt that this was what they wanted. The old folk go to the Centri Sociali, and are accepted by the young people, and they feel pleased. The kids are pleased because there are these old folks from the provinces with them, so the whole thing works well…

But senior portatori like Zio Giannino have not watered down the tradition in the same way, but have instead maintained it: he’s very open, happy to go anywhere, but if he hears someone singing who doesn’t know how to sing, he simply picks up his tammorra and leaves.

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But some less senior portatori don’t care: they’re more superficial. For them, it’s also a way of transcending their own existential difficulties. Alfredo for instance, has huge difficulties being involved, because his family doesn’t accept what he does, and it’s as if he had freed himself of his family, like a second youth.

Cultural hybridisation: this elderly local man’s adoption of ‘hippie’ style dress highlights the processes of cultural exchange which are taking place between urban revivalists and locals in the Campanian tammurriata scene. Festa della Madonna dei Bagni, Scafati, May 2003. Photo Bennetts.

Cosmopolitan local actors: mediators of revivalism at the local level

By valorising certain aspects of local popular tradition, local cultural associations like ARPA, Riace’s Associazione Città Futura, Associazione Novaracne (Torre Paduli), Suoni Fedeli (Pagani) or folk festival organising committees (Carpino, Caulonia) have 371

pioneered a new form of revivalist cultural tourism which opens up the local to new translocal actors and generates much needed local economic activity. The revivalist encounter within the local milieu between locals and cosmopolitan outsiders takes place across a cultural, class and geographical divide which is often mediated by cosmopolitan local actors. Through previous residence or study in cities outside the local area, such actors are often effectively bicultural, and therefore have a greater capacity to mobilise translocal actors and networks around revivalist activity within the local than older and more ‘traditional’ local actors. These cosmopolitan local actors are thus able to put their higher social and cultural capital at the service of the local community by promoting local revivalist projects.

Theorists like Bravo (2001) and Bausinger (1990) have stressed that far from representing a kind of antithesis to modernity, ‘folklore’ is in fact a kind of complex dialectical response to it. In an account of research on the revitalisation of the festa popolare in rural Piedmonte from the 1970s, Bravo (189ff) has made the apparently paradoxical observation that the vitality of local festive activity was characteristic not, as might have been expected, of those areas which were more geographically isolated and therefore protected from the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation, but rather, of those areas which were more linked to the wider socioeconomic context of the city. He found that the key protagonists in the revival of local popular traditions were ‘not those associated with distant corners of the rural area, and the old peasant model,’ but rather to a type of person he termed pendolare (‘commuter’), who typically travelled regularly outside the local area to the city for work, and who was ‘more innovative, mobile and open to the outside world, and often active in the institutions or productive apparatus of the contemporary world’ (190).

Lüdtke observes that ‘many of those who passionately brought about the revitalisation of the pizzica in the 1990s had spent some time working or studying in northern Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany or elsewhere before returning home to the Salento’ (2009, 70). The activities of local cosmopolitan revivalists are often partly inspired by exposure to cosmopolitan political or aesthetic ideologies imbibed during residence in cities outside the local area. Thus, Riace’s Associazione Città Futura project is strongly influenced by Domenico Lucano’s experience of radical left politics in Northern Italy, 372

while Novaracne’s Torre Paduli revivalist project is also engaged with urban leftist ideology through its strong connection to the Centro Sociale Occupato milieu and the leftwing daily Il Manifesto.

The modern television-inspired remodelling of popular traditional ritual in the ‘Uomo Cervo’ Carnival in Castelnuovo a Volturno in Molise (below) has been strongly determined by the fact that its ‘artistic director’, Michele Perri, studied at Art School in Naples. Similarly in Pagani, the recent artistic stylisation of the local Madonna delle Galline festival has been strongly influenced by another influential local ‘aesthetic’ actor, the late Francesco Tiano, recruited by De Simone in his late teens as an ‘authentic’ local singer for La Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. Franco’s early exposure to this wider artistic world, and his own personal identification with the traditional femminiello role within Campanian popular culture has lent this local festa popolare an inimitably camp quality.

Official poster for the 2003 Festa della Madonna delle Galline, Pagani, Campania, April 2003. Photo: Bennetts. 373

Through a dual commitment to revivalist ideology, combined with a detailed understanding of local community mechanisms, mediators such as ARPA’s Angelo Maggio or Luigi Briglia are able to act as cultural brokers by skilfully integrating cosmopolitan outsiders into remote local communities such as Caulonia and Riace in Southern Calabria. Although Luigi Briglia lives in the provincial capital of Catanzaro, he was born and raised in Caulonia. He describes Caulonia’s Tarantellapower experience as ‘an educational process for the town because they’re not used to hosting outsiders’. Luigi’s job as local cross-cultural mediator involved arranging free accommodation for festival course participants in the local school (a task rendered more complicated after the school cleaners discovered a number of joint butts left behind by urban revivalists after the 2001 Festival).

Novaracne’s Biagio Panico and his partner Ada Metafune are also emblematic of the mediational role which local cosmopolitan revivalist actors often play within the local. Both trained as physiotherapists, and Ada still runs a practice from their home in Torre Paduli, but Biagio now works full time on revivalist activities. Ada Metafune’s mother is an elderly woman from a local peasant background, thus giving Ada an added ‘folk’ cachet. Both women are accomplished pizzica dancers and some of the best known teachers of the dance in the country. The Association’s study centre in Torre Paduli has a large collection of materials on pizzica and tarantismo, and sleeping room for ten people to accommodate the droves of Italian students who descend on Torre Paduli each year to research another of the multitude of ‘theses on tarantism’. The association has also launched a number of initiatives to safeguard and publicise the more traditional aspects of the local festival of San Rocco, including the ‘bella ronda’ initiative described in Chapter Seven.

Local agency in the revitalisation of local tradition: the ‘Uomo Cervo’ extravaganza

In parts of Northern and Central Italy, the revitalisation of local Carnival traditions has opened up cultural circuits which spread even beyond the new Southern Italian folk circuit described earlier by Ester. A fundamental difference here is the greater agency 374

of locals in such initiatives compared to the folk festival circuit outlined in Chapter Six, in which ‘philological’ revivalists are the key agents.

At Castelnuovo a Volturno in the mountains of Molise, Carnival was traditionally observed with an archaic ritual in which the Uomo Cervo (Stag Man) invaded the town, before being expelled back into the wilderness (Gioielli, 1997; for the Carnival Wild Man motif, cf. Kezich, 2008).

In the wake of a 1993 RAI television piece on this traditional local Carnival, locals were influenced by ‘mediatic models’ to streamline and repackage the Uomo Cervo event as a modern media spectacle, thus making it possible to take the entire show on the road. One 75 year-old local man who had played the role of Uomo Cervo in his youth has since become an enthusiastic participant in Castelnuovo’s new travelling Carnival troupe of 30-40 people:

Since the Uomo Cervo thing took off, it’s been getting stronger and we’ve got involved in cultural exchanges with Putignano and Teramo in Abruzzo, and Rocca Grimalda [in Piedmonte, Northern Italy]. We’ve also set up a twin town relationship with a town in Sardinia and went there three or four years ago. In Teramo we were able to measure up against [the Carnivals] of Viareggio and Putignano…There was a big procession with all the other communities...Last week, I was at Rocca Grimalda in Piedmonte, and the reception there was fantastic…People from our area who live in Genova, Varese, Milan and Turin were there too: everyone came to see it.

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L’Uomo Cervo [Stag Man] greets visitors to the Carnival of Castelnuovo al Volturno, Molise, March 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Local Carnival enthusiasts from Rocca Grimalda also brought their own Piedmontese Carnival to Castelnuovo in 2003, presenting a distinct contrast in their refined and aestheticised Northern Italian-style Carnival dress to the archaic costumes of the local Uomo Cervo event. In a similar instance of translocal cultural exchange, the nearby Carnival of Tufara in Molise was also enlivened in 2003 by the presence of a troupe of mamuthones, traditional Sardinian Carnival figures who came to Tufara specially for Carnival.

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Sardinian Carnival comes to town: a troupe of Sardinian mamuthones on ‘cultural exchange’ at the 2003 Carnival of Tufara, Molise, 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

The effect of the dominant ‘new visual regime’ (Crain, 1992, 109) was clearly evident in the restructuring of Castelnuovo’s Uomo Cervo ritual as mediatic spectacle to serve new cultural needs. Though the agency of locals, the Uomo Cervo event had lost its earlier traditional significance as magico-religious ritual, and had instead been converted into a cultural artefact for export, which could now be traded and exchanged with communities in other parts of Italy. This small and isolated Molise community has thus inserted itself into an accelerating national pattern of circulation and exchange of folkloric goods. In the process, local cultural identity has been affirmed and new possibilities created for locals to travel and make social links in the wider world, with younger people in the town now being provided with a much needed cultural and social outlet through the town’s local cultural association.

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Philological revivalists often draw a clear distinction between traditional cultural practices (‘folklore’) and ‘folklorismo’, a phenomenon perfectly exemplified in the contemporary Uomo Cervo event. Whereas the revivalist emphasis is upon the continuity and direct experience of a ‘living tradition’, ‘folklorismo’ self-consciously historicises, sentimentalises and distances traditional practices from the present, in the process transforming them into a pure sign of ‘tradition’. From a traditional magicoreligious ritual intimately linked to the seasonal transition from winter to spring, the Uomo Cervo event has now been reconstructed as a postmodern sign of ‘the archaic’: a spectacle designed to attract visitors from outside, in an attempt to culturally and economically revitalise this demographically threadbare Molise hill town.

Yet this ‘folkloristic’ mode, in which locals actively ‘commercialise’ or ‘sentimentalise’ local popular tradition, has regularly been the focus of critique by ‘philological’ revivalists and leftist scholars, especially during the more explicitly Marxist first phase of the revival (Padiglione, 1979; Chiriatti, 1998). Daniele Durante, founder of the first revival Il Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, contrasted the highly political motivations of his own group with those of i gruppi folkloristici as follows:

We rejected the clichés of these folkloristic groups with their costumes, simplistic allusions to the bucolic, and exaggerated ‘wine and mandolins’ sentimentality…Their elaborate costumes and peasant dances seemed to stink of falsehood, of cadavers exhumed for the occasion (Chiriatti, 1998, 98, 103).

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‘Accelerating circulation of folkloric goods’: as in the evolution of the Uomo Cervo Carnival ritual described above, this publicity shot for a local folk band from a small town in Le Marche, Central Italy, epitomises the highly ‘folkloristic’ mode often adopted by locals in objectifying and commodifying their own local folkloric goods, in a process which is regularly critiqued by ‘philological’ revivalists. Diacritical markers like ‘folk’ costume, olive trees and wheeled peasant carts are here condensed into a pure sign of local peasant ‘tradition’. Note however, the integration of the African musician (front row, left) into this vision of local ‘tradition’.

My Italian anthropologist host on the Uomo Cervo trip had come expecting a far more ‘traditional’ Carnival event than the one we had witnessed. Completely appalled by the entire proceedings, his response was a classic of ‘philological’ revivalist disgust:

Did you see how it was? Awful…kitsch…like something on Saturday night TV…And everyone absolutely delighted by the whole thing!!!...They could easily have adapted it so it didn’t do violence to tradition like that…Everything was out of place: the gestuality, music, the use of the space. It wasn’t a popular ritual, it was a spectacle, with a separation between actors and audience. 379

My Italian anthropologist friend’s observations dramatise the degree to which, just as we have seen in the recent evolution of the Southern Italian folk festival, local and ‘philological’ revivalist actors often have very different issues at stake in the contemporary representation of tradition.

Local commercial actors

Feste popolari are often large scale annual events which have traditionally attracted mass participation from all over the region, offering important opportunities for peasant farmers to sell produce at the end of the harvest season. Fiere (market days) held concurrently with major feste popolari have thus played an important role in the local rural economy. The traditional protagonists of the annual fiera del bestiame (cattle market) held until recently at the patronal festivals of Riace and Torre Paduli were members of the regional Rom community, and their close association with these festivals is reflected in the central ritual functions they perform to this day at both events.

At the fiera associated with the Festa di San Rocco in Salento, there has been a recent shift away from local agricultural and artisanal products towards modern consumer goods. Commercialisation is a far more significant element in the second revival than was the case in the first revival, where leftist political ideology played a more central role. Within the low-income, high unemployment rural areas of Southern Italy, revivalism’s riscoperta della tradizione has also created a new kind of market which offers expanding economic possibilities for both local and urban musicians.

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Small scale enterprise at the fiera (market) associated with Caulonia’s patronal festival of Sant’Ilarione, November 2003. Note the car’s Turin number plate. Photo: Bennetts.

A new mania for the commodification of the local is reflected in the explosion of newly-invented sagre di paese (village agricultural festivals), with one informant commenting that her parents’ town of Matino in Salento had recently witnessed the establishment of two such festivals in the space of only two years. At similar small town events, extremely cheap and simple foods traditionally eaten by peasants are now being reappropriated and rebadged as ‘il piatto etnico’ (‘ethnic dish’) in a culinary objectification of local cultural tradition.

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The objectification of local popular tradition by local actors: two locals, one wearing ‘traditional costume’, sell the local ‘piatto etnico’ at the Carnival of Castelnuovo a Volturno. Note the bottle of home-made local wine. Source: Gioielli (1997, 53). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.] Yet the ‘commercialisation’ of local traditional events can also have the opposite cultural effect, as in the Festival of Diso and Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli in Salento, where no local wine, only commercial beer was available, due to conditions imposed by the festivals’ beer sponsors. Revivalism has also introduced new commodities into the festa popolare, such as book stalls selling folk CDs, videos and copies of the de Martino classic La terra del rimorso. Urban revivalism’s emphasis on direct ‘spontaneous’ participation has also boosted demand in the city for traditional dance courses, as well as the simple percussion instruments used in Southern Italian dance music such as tamburelli, tammorre and nacchere.

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The commodification of local popular tradition by local actors: a local man sells handmade wooden nacchere (castanets) used in tammurriata dancing at the Carnival of Montemarano, February 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Antonio Matrone, known universally as o’ Lione (‘the Lion of Scafati’), is a charismatic middle-aged peasant tammorra player from the Scafati area of the Circumvesuviana zone who played a central role in getting the early Campanian tammurriata revival off the ground. By mediating the process of cultural transmission between the Scafati backblocks and the culturally vibrant urban milieu of the La Pantera student movement at Naples’ Istituto Orientale in the early 1990s, o’ Lione effectively pioneered a new mode of local cultural entrepreneurialism.

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Promotional image of Campanian tammorra player and builder Antonio Matrone (o’ Lione ). [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

But his development of a local market for tammorra drumming, dance courses and handmade musical instruments among keen young urban revivalists in Naples has inevitably led to charges by some revivalists that he has introduced a negative element of ‘commercialisation’. Dance scholars like Lello D’Ajello and Gala are also critical of the urban stylisation and hybridisation of the traditional tammurriata dance form which has ensued (D’Ajello, 1997; cf. Gala, 2002). Both Gala and D’Ajello run dance courses too, but their motivations are somewhat different: as middle class scholars who already have a guaranteed income, their strong commitment to ‘philological integrity’ contrasts with locals like o’ Lione, who are more strongly motivated by a need to make a living by packaging tradition in a form which appeals to a mass youth market, as in the promotion of the more eroticised metropolitan version of the traditional dance, dismissed by Lello D’Ajello as la tammurriata scopatoria [‘the “fucking” tammurriata’]. In this process of urban stylisation, the distinctive regional varieties of tammurriata such as the sommese or giuglianese have also been submerged into a onesize-fits-all ballo metropolitano (D’Ajello, 1997). These tendencies have also been accentuated in a kind of multiplier effect by a new pattern, in which some urban 384

revivalists learn the basics of tammurriata at dance courses, rather than directly from local portatori della tradizione, and soon afterwards go off to set up their own dance classes.

At Torre Paduli, the symbolic epicentre of Salentine revivalism, Biagio and Rocco both make a living by building tamburelli, the essential totemic object of Salentine revivalism, closely associated by revivalists with the local Festa di San Rocco. Rocco estimates that he makes and sells about 2000 tamburelli a year, and that there are perhaps six other producers who make and sell the instruments in Salento. As a traditional local actor from the iconic town of Torre Paduli, Rocco, like Gianfranco, has a certain folk cachet: unlike other tamburello makers, buyers come to him, and he does not need to travel around the folk festival circuit to sell them. He derives the rest of his income from courses on tamburello performance and construction, some of them funded in local schools by the EU, and also by performing with the folk group I Tamburellisti di Torre Paduli, which is closely associated with the town and its patronal festival of San Rocco. The group was established in 1989, largely through the agency of Lecce ethnomusicologist Pierpaolo De Giorgio, who plays a familiar role as a well-connected cosmopolitan mediator of the ‘authentically local’, by organising most of the group’s gigs, and providing a revivalist ideological gloss to their presentations. From 1994, they have travelled widely, including abroad, and now perform about 60 concerts a year.

Like Rocco, Biagio Panico works as an artisan by building and selling tamburelli, but is also involved at the higher end of the commercial folk spectrum too. As manager of celebrated Salentine portatore della tradizione Uccio Aloisi, Biagio organises concerts throughout Italy, and also produces recordings of Aloisi and other folk musicians. He was a major local mediator in the launch of pizzica in Rome through political connections with the Centro Sociale Occupato Villagio Globale and the leftwing daily Il Manifesto. Biagio now travels to festivals all over Italy selling his hand made tamburelli, books, DVDs and other revivalist paraphernalia, but his business is more regularised at an official level than Rocco’s, allowing him to sell tamburelli on consignment to shops in Bologna, Arezzo, Rome and Milan. Although Biagio is 385

disappointed by the degeneration in the local Festa di San Rocco, he is also conscious of his own agency in this process as a commercial actor:

Obviously once the revival took off, if I go to Rome and sell 100 tamburelli, that means 100 young people who buy them. They know what pizzica is, and so obviously, for them, the only idea they have in their head then is to come here to Torre Paduli [for la Festa di San Rocco] to play pizzica, and so people come…

The commodification of local tradition by external actors: this Lazio-based constructor of Salentine tamburelli has travelled to the Festival of the Zampogna in Maranola, Southern Lazio, to sell his latest stock, February 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Tradition and Contamination: suonatori tradizionali vs. musicisti

The recent creation of an urban market for Southern Italian popular culture has had dramatic implications for the ongoing reproduction of Southern Italian traditional 386

cultural practices over time, and folk music practitioners are key agents in such transformations.

We should here note again the important distinction between suonatori tradizionali (traditional players) and musicisti, their cosmopolitan urban counterparts. The role of the traditional local musician was and still is less highly differentiated and professionalised than is the case in contemporary urban society. Traditional instruments are often easier to play technically than modern instruments, and within the collective cultural milieu typical of the small scale community, almost everyone could and did participate in at least basic song and dance practices. In accordance with the cultural norms of balanced reciprocity and hostility towards the cash economy which often prevail in peasant societies (Herzfeld, 2006, 107), musical performances were typically conceived of as an ‘offerta’ [offering] to the community, or to a Madonna or saint. Calabrian musician Valentino Santagati states that in Calabria, traditional musical performance took place largely outside the conventions of the cash economy, and the notion of payment in cash for musical performances was generally alien to popular tradition, with traditional musicians more often being recompensed in kind with gifts of food, wine or other agricultural produce (two important exceptions to this generalisation include the taranta musicians who were hired to treat victims of tarantism, and the zampogna players who traditionally circulate at Christmas time in Southern Italy collecting offerings in exchange for their music).

‘Offerta musicale’: suonatori tradizionali escort the Madonna during the Festa della Madonna del Pollino, San Severino Lucano, Basilicata, 1998. Photo: Angelo Maggio. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions

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Marx famously observed in his Grundrisse that ‘as money expands…the social character of the relationship diminishes’ (1971, 157, quoted in Nash, 2005, 19). For Nash, the spread of money exchange through globalisation leads to the commoditisation of all social relations, and the diminishing of the social content previously inherent in them, so that ‘money exchange comes to substitute earlier reciprocity and redistributive traditions’, with money not only coming to stand for the value of the product, but releasing the seller and the buyer from any further social obligations to each other (Nash, 2005, 19f.).

Many of today’s generation of elderly portatori della tradizione have now been ineluctably drawn into the expanding cash-based folk music market, as urban revivalists and entrepreneurs explore the economic possibilities offered by the revival. But in an attitude which is eloquent of the traditional peasant resistance towards the cash economy, some like Riccardo, still express discomfort at the notion of cash payments for performance, or even feel honour-bound to ‘play for free’.

The clash between these traditional local values and the values of the new cash economy was dramatised for me at the celebration of Sabato dei Fuochi at Ognundo in 2003. Although the event had been billed as an intimately local and hyper-traditionalist event, one young urban revivalist was scandalised when it was later revealed that, in an alleged breach of local convention, a number of young female tammurriata dancers from the city had actually been engaged to dance at this event in exchange for cash. As one of them explained later, the engagement of the young urban women had been necessitated by the fact that ‘le ragazze locali non ci stanno’: in contrast with the more romantic attitude of Monica and the three young ‘hippie’ women, ‘the local girls wouldn’t have a bar of it’.

In contrast to ‘traditional’ musical practice, contemporary urban folk musicians are deeply embedded within a market system, so that their relationship to ‘popular tradition’ is determined not simply by disinterested philosophical or aesthetic notions of traditional orthopraxis, but also by economic factors, given their need to support themselves professionally through performance within the setting of a market 388

economy. In their work of cultural reproduction, ‘cosmopolitan’ folk musicians are thus constantly caught between revivalism’s normative ideological and musicological notions of ‘tradition’ on the one hand, and an emphasis on a process of continuous creative innovation which is characteristic of our own post-Romantic musical sensibility, and which has now been firmly embedded within the ideology and practice of the music market (Feld, 1995, 2000). Out of this difficult aesthetic and ideological contradiction arises the debate over ‘tradition’ and ‘contamination’ which we have seen dramatically reflected in Salento’s La Notte della Taranta, and which has notoriously been the focus of controversy between representatives of these two respective camps.

The reproduction of some elements of local popular musical tradition is sometimes rendered problematic by the inherent technical difficulty and ‘otherness’ of some of the repertoire, as folk singer Roberto Licci recalls in an account of the pioneering days of the first revival:

It became clear that we couldn’t go on imitating and reproducing the voices of people who were 60-70 years old and who used to sing while harvesting tobacco, olives and so on. These work practices allowed them to develop certain techniques which were difficult to reproduce or assimilate. At that point, I started to develop my own vocal style. This of course meant working to reformat my voice, because it is one thing to sing pop music and another thing entirely to sing folk music (Chiriatti, 1998, 91f.).

One of the major debates within the first revival involved the question of whether urban folk musicians should faithfully reproduce the traditional style and execution of folk songs (il ricalco), or else adapt and ‘repropose’ them in la canzone di riproposta (Leydi, 1972; Chiriatti, 1998). Contemporary revivalist musical practice can be segmented into at least five different modes of musical production in relation to their relative distance from popular traditional music practice:

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1) Field recordings of traditional performers in situ in traditional settings, as exemplified by Pino Gala’s extensive ethnomusicological field recordings in his Ethnica series (2009); 2) Folk music performances by urban folk musicians executed in a ‘philological’ style, as close as possible to traditional performance modes (‘il ricalco’), as exemplified by some of the work of Salentine folk singer Enza Pagliara and the group Arakne Mediterranea [SFX2]; 3) La canzone di riproposta: stylistic adaptation or ‘reproposal’ by urban folk musicians of an original traditional song for a non-traditional audience, exemplified in much of the aesthetic re-elaboration of traditional material by the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, or Bennato’s 2000 album Lezioni di tarantella; 4) ‘Contaminazione’: a deliberately experimental mode in which non-traditional instruments or musical styles are introduced into original traditional material, as exemplified in La Notte della Taranta and much of the work of Neapolitan folk/jazz musician Daniele Sepe; 5) The invention of new folk songs and texts ex novo in a folk style, as in Eugenio Bennato’s 1999 album Tarantapower [SFX13].

Revivalist music practice is thus a two-faced beast, simultaneously looking back to its traditional source in the past, but at the same time towards the future, through its readaptation of traditional material for the present. The double sided nature of revivalist temporality is at times symbolised in the characteristic diptych of ‘traditional’ and ‘contaminated’ albums released by the same artist, as in Bennato’s Lezioni di tarantella (2000) and his more ‘contaminated’ Tarantapower (1999) albums [SFX13], or ARPA’s 2002 Tarantellapower: Musica della tradizione a Caulonia [SFX3], and Tarantellapower Festival, a compilation of more ‘contaminated’ folk acts from the festival.

In la musica di riproposta, musicisti sometimes use the term appiattimento (flattening, levelling out) to describe the process of stylistic mainstreaming of traditional material. 390

Although for Raheli, polyphony is one of the distinguishing features of Salentine folk song (2002, 94f.), not many contemporary Salentine folk groups are actually up to the technical demands required, and so inevitably fall back on the less demanding pizzica favourites, which remain the real crowd pleasers, as we have seen at La Notte della Taranta. As Winspeare (2002, 172) has remarked, ‘the canto a stisa is of interest to connoisseurs, whereas everyone likes pizzica’. Few performers of Salentine folk music today have the possibility of such direct access to a living musical tradition which Enza Pagliara in Torchiarolo or musicians in Calabria or Campania enjoy. This too leads inevitably to a narrowing and standardisation of the repertoire, and to a greater temptation towards modernist ‘contamination’ of an already reduced corpus. In a reference to perhaps the most celebrated Salentine folk song of all, gypsy folk singer Cavallo’s exasperation with this increasing standardisation was apparent when he performed on the Caulonia concert stage in 2005 wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘NON MI CHIEDERE DI “LU RUSCIU TE LU MARE!”’ (Don’t ask me to sing ‘Lu Rusciu te lu Mare’!).

LOCAL RESISTANCE TO REVIVALIST AGENCY

The impact of revivalism within local space can be interpreted as a classic manifestation of globalising processes in which the local is increasingly invested by the translocal (Rosaldo & Inda, 2002a). Despite the often positive economic, social and cultural benefits of revivalism for local actors, Gianfranco’s earlier critique highlights elements in this process which some local actors consider less positive. In the concluding section of this chapter, I consider negative attitudes by locals towards the urban revivalist invasion of local space, and explore their responses to such phenomena. I argue that just as the revivalist penetration of the local can be interpreted as a manifestation of globalisation, some of these forms of resistance can be understood as responses to the ‘globalisation’ of the local.

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‘The invasion of the photo snatchers’

The increasing presence of photographers and video operators at feste popolari is suggestive of the growing objectification and commodification of popular tradition, as well as the ‘relentless search of the contemporary culture industries for new areas to colonize and thus capture “difference” so that it can be recoded for mass consumption’ (Crain, 1992, 102).

‘The invasion of the photo-snatchers’: photographers (including ARPA’s Angelo Maggio and Luigi Briglia, centre) scramble to capture a manifestation of ‘traditional authenticity’ (shepherd zampogna player Sebastiano Battaglia) at the Festa della Madonna di Polsi, September 2002. Photo: Bennetts.

Although photographers often motivate such activities with reference to the ‘philological’ revivalist discourse of ‘documentation of popular tradition’, their appropriation of popular tradition via technology also seems characteristic of the increasingly ‘mediated’ modes of experience typical of late modernity. In her account of participants in the El Rocío pilgrimage in Southern Spain, Crain has highlighted a similar contrast between locals and cosmopolitan outsiders, arguing that the increasing 392

participation of the media and tourist industries in El Rocío has privileged the visual dimension in this event, allowing ‘particular visual regimes [to] insinuate themselves in the ritual as new forms of domination’ (1992, 95). Echoing Debord, she notes that ‘in this new visual regime, the active agency of participants is frequently replaced by the passive consumption of images by spectators’ (103). By contrast, traditional local actors on the El Rocío pilgrimage ‘subordinate the visual to speech and touch, while in other instances they ground it in bodily forms that resist appropriation’ (96). As at Torre Paduli, some locals vote with their feet by simply boycotting the increasing media saturation of the final event at the El Rocío sanctuary, and participate solely in the actual pilgrimage. Rejecting the spectacularised ‘media-based mode of constructing reality’, their ‘world is increasingly produced through everyday practices in which they prepare for the journey and reinscribe the landscape with religious significance’ (109).

We have already considered local musician Gianfranco’s hostile attitude towards the urban revivalists he considers insufficiently respectful towards local cultural practices. But Gianfranco’s negative views also extended, he informed me, to anthropologists and other documenters of local culture. As a musician, he said, he felt that ‘the work of anthropologists is completely useless: it serves no purpose. They can’t understand anything about me!’ I found Gianfranco’s melodramatic vehemence enormously engaging. When I ran into him and his friend Francesco at a festa popolare one day, Gianfranco hammed up this alleged hostility towards me as an anthropologist by holding a knife against my lower abdomen and asking me ‘Do you know what we do with anthropologists around here?’

Gianfranco’s negative attitude seemed to reflect the same characteristically localist anxiety about cultural appropriation of the local by cosmopolitan outsiders reported by Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos among members of the Garifuna community in Honduras (2004). In economically deprived societies like rural Southern Italy or Aboriginal Australia, the anthropologist’s apparent capacity to alchemically transmute local cultural capital into material capital or enhanced social status can be seen as deeply problematic. The local community is conceived by locals as being economically poor but culturally rich, with local cultural capital becoming almost the 393

only currency in which locals can enter into reciprocal exchange with outsiders. Yet locals often highlight what they see as the asymmetry of this cultural exchange between them and cosmopolitan outsiders like anthropologists and photographers.

Young local actors like Riccardo’s son and Gianfranco made surprising claims that De Simone, Pino Gala and other researchers had ransacked the local culture for material, then gone away and made money out of their research recordings and videos, without giving anything back to the local community or the portatori della tradizione they had worked with. It was a localist critique of anthropological practice with which I was already familiar from views expressed by Aboriginal people. These complaints seemed to dramatise locals’ sense of their own poverty, disadvantage and lack of access to power relative to the anthropologist, who was seen as a member of a wealthy and privileged urban elite who always had the convenient option of escaping from the problems of local community life back to a more comfortable and affluent city lifestyle.

Localist actors sometimes saw the activity of cosmopolitan actors with cameras and videos as a similar case of asymmetrical cultural exchange between local and translocal actors. In their view, photographers would arrive from outside the community, engage in minimal interaction with the locals, appropriate local cultural material, and then disappear whence they came, leaving nothing behind. Because filming is in many ways a far more radical mode of appropriation of local cultural resources than photography, it was perhaps to my advantage that I followed advice to stick to taking a few pictures, and then conversing with the locals, as I am convinced I would have been given far shorter shrift by informants like Gianfranco and Vincenzo if I had turned up with a video camera.

On a more concrete level, the presence of photographers from outside the local can also disrupt the delicate performative dynamics of the local festa popolare. The Good Friday re-enactment of the Last Supper on the Island of Procida in 2003 was notable for the large number of video and camera operators anxious to record the action, and almost led to a punch-up between members of the local confraternity and one particularly intrusive photographer (for similar accounts of the disruptive presence of 394

media operators in Spanish festivals, cf. Crain, 1992, 103; Cruces & Diaz de Rada, 1992, 68).

Procida’s Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception prepare to tuck into a recreation of the Last Supper, Easter Thursday, 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

‘Il controllo del territorio’

As revivalism transforms the topography of the local festa from a subaltern cultural space to a zone of interclass encounter between local and urban actors, it sometimes becomes impossible to continue the canonical reproduction of traditional local cultural forms such as music and dance. Contexts like Torre Paduli’s Festa di San Rocco highlight the power imbalance between local and cosmopolitan actors, which inevitably leads to locals losing control over local cultural space and practices, in a process of colonisation by the cosmopolitan other. Yet as witnessed by the response by the young tarantella hoods at Polsi to Bishop Bregantini, locals do not always respond passively to such external interventions. 395

One marginal outsider group sometimes present at festivals and feste popolari, the punkabestie, dramatises the problem of the anomic outsider in extreme form. Representing a kind of degree zero of Italian counterculturalism, punkabestie are a regular sight in large Italian cities, where they live on the streets with their dogs by begging or selling simple handmade jewellery (Lüdtke, 2009, 108). Biagio describes the impact at Torre Paduli of the first appearance of punkabestie at San Rocco in 2001:

No one at Torre Paduli had ever seen a punkabestia. People were shocked by the fact that they slept on the ground with their dogs in the middle of everyone. It’s understandable that a person of 50 or 60 who’s never seen them before is shocked, because they don’t see them every 100 metres or so like in Rome.

The punkabestia’s consistent rejection of conventional interpersonal social norms is considered problematic not merely in this isolated traditional rural setting, but even within the more laid back urban leftist milieu of the CSO. Alessandro, an open minded and tolerant Neapolitan anarchist, wryly described his own experience of punkabestie while running the anarchist Occupied Social Centre Tien’ a ment’ in Naples:

You start off thinking, these are people like you, they hang out in the same milieu…But for someone who is involved in running a CSO…often you end up having to fight them: they become your enemies, because they steal things, vomit everywhere, they have millions of dogs, so there’s dog shit all over the place, they don’t clean up, they don’t do anything. You can’t describe their attitude as ‘political’. Sure, they were ‘against’ everything and everyone, but they were also ‘against’ us too!

Following a series of provocations at the Festival of Caulonia in 2002, a group of disruptive punkabestie were violently expelled from the town by local youths. ARPA’s Danilo Gatto later represented the incident to the somewhat stunned Roman and Northern urban revivalists attending the festival course as a legitimate traditional form of defence of the local community’s ‘controllo del territorio’ rather than ‘un comportamento mafioso’ (‘Mafia behaviour’). 396

The term ‘il controllo del territorio’ encodes traditional Southern Italian notions of local control over local space, most notoriously in relation to Mafia hegemony. As we have seen at Polsi in 2002, empowered local actors had continued to exercise their traditionally strong controllo del territorio, thus minimising the influence of one group of translocal actors: urban revivalists. This resistance to domination by outsiders had been reflected in some local actors’ sceptical attitude towards me, and an insistence by one young local in communicating with me in Calabrian dialect, rather than the national language of Italian. The unspoken taboo on photographing the morra players reflected the fact that Polsi had until recently been a ‘no go’ area for photographers, because latitanti had been known to frequent the festival. In contrast to the urban revivalist disruption of traditional dance forms at Salento’s Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli, all the dancers at Polsi had seemed to be locals. Yet the growing number of photographers and camera crews, the police intervention against the goats, and the dramatic extension of ecclesiastical hegemony within the festa also seemed to suggest a shift in the balance of power between local and translocal actors, and a gradual breakdown of this locally-enforced ‘controllo del territorio’.

I came across a number of instances where locals seemed to draw on similar traditional notions of ‘il controllo del territorio’ to defend the integrity of local cultural space against outsiders. At the 2002 Carpino festival, a highly political intervention by Sicilian musician Roy Paci provoked an aggressive response from one right wing element in the town. The local branch of Forza Italia had somewhat cheekily placed their party banner above the concert stage, and Roy Paci, an outspoken critic of the Mafia and Berlusconi’s alleged Mafia connections, had refused to perform unless the banner was removed. During his concert, he launched a further highly provocative attack on Berlusconi and Forza Italia. Returning after the concert to the school where festival course participants were billeted, we discovered that our possessions had been ransacked, apparently in a search for drugs, and that persons unknown had driven over one of the tents on the lawn outside the school.

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‘Kiss the Boss’s Hand’: Sicilian musician Roy Paci’s highly provocative anti-Mafia and anti-Berlusconi stance was not well received by some sectors of the local population during the 2002 Festival of Carpino (2002 album cover).

Where mass outsider presence has rendered traditional performance modes impossible, as at Torre Paduli, some locals vote with their feet by simply not attending the festa, as in Lello D’Ajello’s comment cited earlier that senior portatore della tradizione Zio Antonio is ‘very open, and is happy to go anywhere, but if he hears someone singing who doesn’t know how to sing, he picks up his tammorra and leaves’. One elderly local responded to Biagio’s invitation to come along to San Rocco and join the ‘bella ronda’ initiative as follows: ‘Ma che ci faccio a Torre Paduli, che cazzo dobbiamo fare lì con tutti quei cagnolastri che non sanno ballare?’ [why should I go to Torre Paduli? What the fuck are we supposed to do there with all those punkabestie who don’t even know how to dance properly?]. In response to the growing revivalist and media frenzy associated with the 29 June Festa di San Paolo at the Chapel in Galatina, the small number of elderly people in Salento still afflicted by seasonally occurring affective disorders are increasingly abandoning their traditional ritual pilgrimage to Galatina in favour of other sites associated with St Paul in the Salentine countryside (Lüdtke, 2009, 87). 398

The practice of strategically planning ‘una bella ronda’ by forming a dance circle capable of physically withstanding the chaotic force of massed outsiders who are ignorant of local dance traditions can be seen as another form of local resistance to the ‘contamination’ of local cultural tradition and space by outsiders. Biagio described how one local man at San Rocco in 2002 enforced local notions of dance convention by physically expelling a disruptive outsider from a pizzica scherma ronda:

A young guy who didn’t know how to dance pizzica scherma entered the circle, where there was another young guy who was an expert at pizzica scherma, who told him ‘Go away, I can’t dance with you.’ But the first guy said ‘No, I want to dance’, and immediately started to get into dance pose. Then the other guy hit him [lightly] on the face, and the first guy couldn’t understand what was happening, because usually in pizzica scherma, you never touch anyone.

Then the expert guy said to him ‘Go away, you can’t dance here’, and he hit him on the face again, and still the guy didn’t understand. And the guy started to get into pose a second time, so he knocked off his glasses, and still he didn’t understand. The last time, he hit him again and said ‘Listen, you’ve got to go, because you can’t stay in this circle’, and finally he understood. This kind of thing happens when people don’t understand after things are explained nicely; you use the moves of the pizzica scherma itself to respectfully explain what the situation is.

Yet initiatives like the bella ronda at San Rocco in 2002 are typically instigated not by locals themselves, but instead by ‘philological’ revivalists like Lello D’Ajello (as at the Festa della Madonna delle Galline in 2001) or cosmopolitan locals like Ada and Biagio (San Rocco, 2002), who then act as agents in the mobilisation of traditional local actors in defence of ‘il territorio’.

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‘No alla tammorra contaminata’

A somewhat different form of cultural defence of local cultural space is highlighted in the following ‘Stop the Contamination of the Tammurriata’ poster distributed in Pagani during the 2001 Festa della Madonna delle Galline. This intervention by local cosmopolitan revivalist actor Francesco Tiano and others took place after the local administration had introduced a stage and amplification, thus in Francesco’s view ‘contaminating’ the traditional character of the festa popolare. He argued that these innovations represented a spectacularisation and commercialisation of popular tradition for instrumental ends by local politicians, and that the tammurriata should continue to take place in its traditional grass roots setting at the mass level of the piazza.

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‘Stop the Contamination of the Tammurriata’: flyer from the 2001 Festa della Madonna delle Galline a Pagani. 401

Similarly, the following poster for a 2003 tammurriata concert by Cicetto’s group in a Neapolitan Centro Sociale Occupato contains the following footnote: ‘No stage, no amplification, no djembe, no bongo drums thanks’. This reflects opposition by locals and ‘philological’ revivalists to the disruption caused to traditional performance modes through the introduction by countercultural urban actors of the djembe drum into the traditional tammurriata space.

‘No stage, no amplification, no djembe or bongos thanks’: tammurriata concert flyer, TNT Centro Sociale Occupato, Naples, 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

Yet the attitude of locals, especially older ones, is often one of extraordinary generosity, in accordance with traditional canons of Southern Italian hospitality towards outsiders. According to Lello D’Ajello, many older portatori delle tradizioni are remarkably tolerant of the kind of problems caused by young urban enthusiasts, whom they view somewhat indulgently as ‘children who don't know any better’. Gianfranco contrasted his and his friend Vincenzo’s highly militant response to the disruptive presence of urban revivalists with the more passive attitude of older locals:

They won’t talk [critically about urban revivalists] in the way I have; they won’t ever make a fuss about it, they don’t talk about this kind of thing. They are used to putting up with things – they’ve had to put up with everything: war, 402

hunger, unemployment and so on. Maybe it’s normal for them that things change like this, and so they accept it.

At Polsi, resistance to clerical hegemony had been openly manifested by younger locals active within the more ‘secular’ sphere of the tarantella. But within the liturgical sphere, dominated by older locals, particularly women, ecclesiastical incursions had largely been met with passivity. As in Crain’s account of the hostile attitude of local rural working class youths towards cosmopolitan outsiders during the Andalusian El Rocío pilgrimage (1992, 107), it is often younger enthusiasts from the provinces such as Gianfranco or his friend Vincenzo who seem to articulate a more radical and self-conscious ideology of localism, and express the most vocal criticism of translocal actors.

Conclusion

Despite the critique of globalisation which is central to revivalist ideology, many of the phenomena associated with urban revivalist activity in the Southern Italian rural periphery closely reflect processes associated with capitalist globalisation. Through the agency of both locals and revivalists, local cultural forms are commodified, objectified, hybridised or homogenised for consumption by urban actors. Although the new patterns of exchange being established between rural periphery and urban metropolis are at times viewed positively by local actors, the increasing penetration of local space by translocal actors is at other times experienced as a form of cultural colonisation. This process provokes local responses ranging from bemused tolerance through to acts of resistance, extending at times even to actual physical violence.

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CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION

Student revivalists practice tamburello during Campus in Festa, University of Salerno at Fisciano, July 2003. Photo: Bennetts.

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Summary of arguments

From first to second revival

I began this study by posing the following key research questions: why has the Southern Italian folk revival emerged, what have been its effects, and what is its wider significance?

I have argued that the contemporary Southern Italian folk revival must be contextualised within the field of post-war Italian left politics, and in particular, the Gramscian tradition which has been so influential within both post-war Italian anthropology (Grottanelli el al., 1977; Saunders, 1984, 1993) and left political culture generally. Rejecting the mechanistic base-superstructure model which had previously dominated Marxist cultural theory (Williams, 1977, 75-82), Gramsci instead articulated the more nuanced theory of cultural hegemony, arguing that the Communist revolutionary struggle must take place on a cultural as well as political plane, and therefore must engage with cultura subalterna, the culture of the masses.

The revivalist movement emerged originally out of the political hothouse of Italy’s socalled ‘long 68’, which lasted from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. This era of political and cultural ferment was followed in the 1980s by the so called anni del riflusso, a period of cultural and political stagnation during which folk revivalism, like the radical left politics with which it was intertwined, fell out of fashion altogether. The emergence of the second revival has been associated with the rebirth, beginning in the early 1990s, of an Italian anti-hegemonic youth subculture from the ashes of this Italian ‘long 1968’. Although the re-establishment of the second revival has been facilitated by the pre-existence of strong cultural models established during the first revival, important contrasts between these two successive revivalist waves are also evident.

While first wave revivalists saw folk music as a tool for the political mobilisation of the working classes, second wave revivalists have adopted a less instrumental and reductive approach, instead exploring popular traditional cultural forms more on their 406

own aesthetic terms. Especially within the CSO and anti-globalisation movements with which ‘spontaneous’ second wave revivalism has become associated, tradizione popolare is seen as providing an alternative to the increasingly ‘homogenised’ and ‘commercialised’ forms of cultural production held to be dominant in contemporary capitalist society (Klein, 2001), symbolised for many revivalists in the values propagated by the powerful media system controlled by Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Whereas the first revival typically focussed on popular cultural forms like worker songs associated with Northern Italy, the second revival has shifted attention to rural Southern Italy. The strong persistence in many parts of Southern Italy today of traditional cultural forms originating in peasant society makes this area of Italy more amenable to the new revivalist project, an exploration of precapitalist cultural forms held to be more ‘authentic’ and less compromised by modes of cultural production dominant in contemporary capitalist society (cf. Kahn, 1995, 48-75).

Another significant transformation apparent in the transition from first to second revivals is the diversification of revivalism into three contrasting currents (‘philological’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘commercial’), which I have argued may be interpreted as three differing responses to globalisation. In its emphasis on scholarly research, ‘philological’ revivalism shows greatest continuities with Marxist scholarly practices associated with the first revival, and the critique of the transforming effects of ‘mass culture’ on popular traditional cultural forms. The ‘spontaneous’ strand is an emergent form of second wave revivalism which does however have historical roots in the ‘creative’ current of 1970s left counterculture exemplified by the ‘Metropolitan Indians’ movement (Ginsborg, 1990, 381f.). More vitalist and less reflective in orientation, this tendency is strongly associated with a focus within the CSO and ‘No Global’ movements on forms of countercultural practice conceived as ‘resistance’ to ‘la società omologata’. The third ‘commercial’ tendency reflects the increasing demand for commodified folkloric goods within Italy’s market economy, and the strong agency of both local commercial actors and professional folk musicians operating within this market framework. In rural Southern Italy, ‘commercial’ revivalism is also reflected in the efforts of local politicians and business people to capitalise on new opportunities offered by the post-Fordist restructuring of the rural

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economy, through the objectification and commodification of the local, the rural and the ‘traditional’ (Roseman el al., 2008).

Despite the transformation in the ideological content of revivalism evident in the transition from first to second wave revivalism, the current Southern Italian folk revival remains deeply embedded within the general Italian leftist critique of contemporary capitalism, and thus shares common ideological ground with other contemporary movements in Italy such as the CSO, ‘No Global’ and Slow Food movements. In the context of contemporary capitalism’s unprecedented transformation of the human lifeworld, all of these movements openly challenge what they see as the negative effects of increasing domination of cultural production by market forces (Klein, 2001; Leitch, 2003). Baudrillard (2000), Debord (1977), Berardi (2004, 2005) and others also suggest that human life within contemporary capitalist societies is becoming increasingly ‘virtualised’ and ‘imagined’, leading to the marginalisation of many forms of human experience. I have argued that revivalism proposes vitalist and embodied forms of cultural practice which attempt to recuperate these ‘lost faculties and sensations’ (Baudrillard, 2000), and that these modes are exemplified for instance in the engagement by Ester with the traditional cultural practices and actors of the Campanian rural periphery.

At another level, revivalism’s preoccupation with popular cultural forms from the past may also be interpreted as a response to the accelerating rate with which contemporary capitalism appears to be either liquidating all traces of the past (Hobsbawm, 1995, 3) or else recycling it into a ‘vast and spectacularised theme park’ (Hobsbawm, 2003, 416f.). Although movements such as revivalism or Slow Food are sometimes critiqued as ‘nostalgic’, I have argued that at their best, both may be interpreted as active forms of cultural politics which challenge capitalism’s inbuilt bias towards the ‘creative destruction’ of the past and the fetishisation within the capitalist productive cycle of the new, the transient and the ephemeral (Appadurai, 1996, 84; Harvey, 1990, 17, 156, 180).

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Forms of contemporary revivalist practice

I have outlined the significance within revivalist practice of two contrasting types of contemporary folk event: the traditional festa popolare and the emergent modern folk festival genre (festival), which is largely an innovation of the second revival. Following Giovanni Vacca (2002, n.d.), I have contrasted the festa popolare (a distinctive form of traditional popular cultural practice associated with magicoreligious ritual) with the contemporary folk festival (a characteristically second order, spectacularised, postmodernist representation of ‘tradition’: Vacca, 2002).

By revalorising traditional local cultural practices such as tarantella, the folk revival has introduced new urban actors into the local, thereby stimulating economic and cultural activity in otherwise moribund Southern Italian rural communities. The emergence of publicly funded folk festivals in the rural South has been favoured both by a political shift at the national and EU level since the early 1990s towards regional devolution, and by the wider post-Fordist reconfiguration of the rural economy with its new emphasis on tourism (Roseman el al., 2008).

Local commercial and political actors have been quick to exploit the potential of the new festival genre for promoting their own agendas. Through case studies of Caulonia’s Tarantellapower and Salento’s La Notte della Taranta, I have showed how both events have become sites of contestation between philological revivalist and local political actors over the mode in which local popular tradition is represented. In both cases, the ‘internationalist’ paradigm of World Music and the fusion musical style known in Italian as ‘contaminazione’ have proved amenable to the political and economic objectives of local politicians, who have thus encouraged an increasingly mainstreamed representation of local popular tradition within the local folk festival. In both cases, the revivalist pioneers of these events were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to pursue their own more disinterested ‘aesthetic’ vision, in which local tradition was represented in a more traditionalist and localist mode.

In my account of the Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi in Aspromonte, I foregrounded the nature of the ‘traditional’ festa popolare and its typical elements, as 409

well as showing how attendance at such feste popolari has become a characteristic mode of revivalist engagement with le tradizioni popolari, particularly within the ‘philological’ branch of revivalism.

Representatives of the State, Mafia and Church at times seek to publicly associate themselves with the symbolic power of the local divine patron. The highly symbolically charged nature of the traditional festa popolare was exemplified at Polsi in 2002 when the festa became the arena for symbolic contestation between ecclesiastical, criminal, state, scholarly, journalistic and revivalist actors over the form and content of traditional ritual practices associated with the festa. This festa popolare also dramatises the age old contradiction between official, ecclesiastically-sanctioned forms of religious practice and contrasting popular modes of religiosity (Christian, 1989; Schneider, 1991; Carroll, 1992). The patronal festivals held at Polsi and Torre Paduli in 2002 also highlight the important question of the relative distribution of control over local space within the festa popolare by local versus translocal actors, which I explore with reference to the emic notion of il controllo del territorio.

Representatives of the State, Mafia and Church at times seek to publicly associate themselves with the symbolic power of the local divine patron: Good Friday procession in the notoriously Mafia-ridden town of Trapani, western Sicily, 2005. Photo: Calogero Russo (from Perricone 2007, 60). [Image removed due to copyright restrictios.]

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Highly ‘traditional’ feste popolari such as the one held at Polsi in 2002 serve as important points of reference for revivalists in the constitution of revivalist discourse in relation to local ‘tradition’ (cf. Crain, 1992; Poppi, 1992). Subsequent revivalist debate over disruption to traditional popular practices at Polsi caused by ecclesiastical and State actors reflected a characteristic ‘philological’ revivalist critique of the contemporary transformation (‘contamination’) of this festa popolare. Reflecting the Gramscian schema established within post-war Italian scholarship by scholars such as de Martino, Rossi and De Simone, ‘philological’ revivalists framed their analysis of the events at Polsi in terms of the contrasting agency of hegemonic and subaltern actors within the event (cf. Lombardi Satriani, 1974). Although Polsi’s longstanding association with local organised crime dramatises the frequent coexistence of criminal subcultures and popular tradition within il mondo popolare, revivalists like Angelo Maggio sought to dismiss the popular representation of Polsi as la festa dei mafiosi, and instead represented the event as a positive expression of Calabrian folk culture which was largely autonomous of criminal actors.

The contemporary Southern Italian folk revival is constituted out of a selection of regionally-specific traditional popular cultural practices and events which originate in Campania, Puglia and Calabria. At one extreme, these popular traditional practices are disembedded through revivalist agency from their original local contexts and meanings, resituated in a new urban environment and ascribed a new set of cultural meanings by urban actors. In more intensive and less deterritorialising modes of revivalist practice however, urban revivalists seek out these traditional popular practices and their exponents in their original rural settings within the three regions. This has led to the constitution of a mode of revivalist cultural exploration sometimes glossed by revivalists as ‘il viaggio nelle tradizioni popolari’, and which I have termed ‘the revivalist itinerary’, essentially a formalised set of time-specific traditional calendar events (feste popolari) which take place in specific geographical locations, each of which are associated with traditional and place-specific festive and dance practices.

Despite the increasingly routinised nature of this ‘revivalist itinerary’, at least three elements stand out as possible selection criteria for incorporation into this latter-day 411

revivalist Grand Tour: the degree to which a festa popolare is capable of embodying the revivalist notion of ‘traditional authenticity’, the spectacular or striking nature of the traditional practices associated with such events, and the degree to which they are able to offer an outlet through traditional dance practices for the vitalist and embodied impulses which are at the core of contemporary revivalist subjectivity.

Feste popolari located in more geographically or culturally isolated areas of Southern Italy such as Central Calabria have been far less subject to the transforming effects of outside cultural influences, and have thus remained more ‘traditional’ in character. Within the revivalist hierarchy of ‘traditional authenticity’, an event like the Calabrian Festa della Madonna della Montagna di Polsi is thus accorded a similar status to Poppi’s Ladin Carnival in the remote Italian alpine town of Penia, conceived of as ‘the Ultima Thule of Ladin culture…the last repository of a pre-touristic “authentic” and unbroken Ladin cultural tradition’ (1992, 124).

Some urban revivalists rank events on this itinerary in terms of a hierarchy of ‘traditional authenticity’, with Salento at the bottom, Calabria at the top and Campania in the middle. This revivalist hierarchy closely reflects the differential penetration of rural Southern Italy by processes of post-war capitalist modernisation and the subsequent disruption to traditional local processes of cultural reproduction. Urban revivalist subjectivity is thus deeply structured around the strong contrasts which still persist within contemporary Italy between the urban milieu of the metropolitan core and the culturally ‘other’ milieu of the Southern Italian rural periphery.

Angelo Maggio, Giovanni Kezich, Cesare Poppi and others have highlighted the persistence in Northern Italy of highly ‘traditional’ Alpine Carnival forms which seem comparable in their traditional aesthetic vitality to the feste popolari which are the focus of revivalist interest in Southern Italy. Yet the contemporary urban revivalist gaze seems to remain firmly fixed on the South, with Northern Italy being apparently too strongly associated by revivalists with capitalist modernisation for its popular traditional practices to function effectively as signs within the revivalist economy of cultural difference. This highlights neo-Orientalist elements in the revivalist

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construction of Northern and Southern Italy similar to those identified by Schneider and others (1998).

Unlike many other European countries, Italy did not experience a significant Romantic nationalist folk revival in the nineteenth century, for the Italian nation building project was associated more with practices of centralisation and modernisation than the romantic evocation of Italy’s highly regionalised and pre-modern peasant cultural forms (Burke, 1978, 3). I have argued that Southern Italian revivalism is in any case far broader ideologically than purely ethnoregionalist concerns, given the highly distinctive critique of capitalism which has been integral to both first and second wave Southern Italian revivalist ideology. And yet the contemporary revival does reflect to greater extent than the first a new preoccupation in Italy since the 1990s with ethnoregionalism and the speaking of local dialect. These developments are evident in an emergent Southern Italian ethnic consciousness and the appearance within Italian youth culture of Southern Italian hip hop and reggae groups like 99 Posse and Sud Sound System who perform in local dialects. I have argued that the Salentine folk revival does indeed embody distinctively ethnoregionalist motivations, and has in fact played a critical role in facilitating the cultural and political emergence of a newly invented, essentialised and ethnicised model of local regional identity in Salento. In the Salentine and (and to a far lesser extent) Calabrian revivals, the increasing historical distance between contemporary urban life in Italy and previously stigmatised peasant cultural forms has freed them up to serve new needs as postmodern symbols of regional identity, as in the revivalist recuperation and reconfiguration of tarantism and Calabrian tarantella.

Revivalism and the globalisation of the local

Wendy Parkins has observed that

Italy has a long literary history of functioning as an idealised site outside modernity (for non-Italians) where the self can be re-discovered and refashioned…The representation of the exotic everyday in this literary tradition, especially as embodied in the essentialised figure of the peasant ‘other’… 413

positioned Italy as an Arcadian backdrop against which the existential dilemmas of modernity could be illuminated and explored by subjects from elsewhere…More recently, the popularity and proliferation of this ‘Tuscan farmhouse’ genre by American, English and Australian writers seems to have tapped into a contemporary desire to escape from the speed and anomie of global postmodern culture (2004, 258).

For some urban revivalists, il mondo popolare seems to serve a similar function as an ‘imagined space outside modernity.’ But at another, more embodied and less imagined level, revivalism also transforms local space into a zone of intercultural and interclass encounter between urban revivalist and traditional local actors. Within more intensive revivalist modes such as those exemplified in the revivalist practice of Ester, this intercultural space can become the setting for substantial forms of cross cultural exchange between local and cosmopolitan actors and between metropolis and rural periphery.

In this new zone of cross-cultural encounter, traditional local actors are also being brought into contact with wider revivalist circuits which offer them new cultural, social and economic opportunities. At the same time, local space and cultural practices are increasingly being subjected

to

processes

of transformation,

hybridisation,

homogenisation and deculturation, as they are integrated into an increasingly global sphere centred on the metropolis.

Revivalism brings together urban and local actors with radically contrasting orientations towards tradition. Whereas religious devotion to the localised divine patron is frequently cited as a motivation by elderly portatori della tradizione popolare for their engagement in the festa popolare, urban revivalists are overwhelmingly secular in orientation, despite their engagement at times in the folklorised mimesis of traditional popular religious practices.

As evidenced by the activities of young local actors during the Grotta di San Michele pilgrimage described in Chapter Four, the fascination which urban revivalists feel for the ‘otherness’ of rural popular tradition is sometimes reversed by their young local 414

peers into a rejection of these traditions, and a fascination instead with the ‘otherness’ of the same dominant and ‘culturally homogenised’ forms rejected by revivalists. At other times, as in the case of Gianfranco, local popular tradition can become a vehicle for the articulation by younger locals of a distinctively localist ideology which is actively hostile towards the invasion of the local by cosmopolitan outsiders.

Wider cultural processes inevitably impact on the morphology of the popular traditional cultural forms like the festa popolare which are the focus of revivalist attention. Philological revivalists distinguish between what they define as the ‘festa tradizionale’ and the ‘festa contaminata’, which is held to have lost its ‘traditional’ character as a result of morphological changes caused by the ‘contamination’ of capitalist modernity. In their quest for cultural spaces regarded as still being ‘uncontaminated’ by globalised capitalism, urban revivalist actors are thus increasingly penetrating more and more remote areas of the rural periphery. The Festa di San Rocco di Torre Paduli is emblematic of the breakdown of the traditional structure and practices associated with this festa due to the mass invasion of local space by urban revivalist actors. San Rocco also represents a radical shift in the balance of power between local and translocal actors, and in this sense may be read as a case study of the cultural effects of globalisation at the local level. In this colonisation of local cultural space, the ‘No Global’ urban revivalists at San Rocco are viewed paradoxically by some locals like Gianfranco as themselves a negative manifestation of ‘globalisation’. Local responses to this phenomenon range from the boycotting of ‘contaminated’ events, attempts to exclude ‘non-traditional’ forms such as the stage or the djembe, the organised collective reimposition of traditional cultural forms (eg though the ‘bella ronda’ initiative described in Chapter Five), or even a defence of the cultural integrity of the local community couched in the sometimes sinister traditional idiom of ‘il controllo del territorio’, as in incidents described previously at the Festivals of Carpino and Caulonia.

Tonkinson (2000, 172) has highlighted that fact that ‘tradition’ is frequently conceived and deployed within contemporary modernity as a resource to meet new needs. Through the objectification by locals of traditional cultural forms such as Castelvolturno’s Uomo Cervo Carnival ritual, ‘tradition’ can be transformed into a 415

tradable commodity which serves to integrate the local community into wider national or even global circuits of cultural exchange, thus stimulating the cultural, social and economic revitalisation of small towns in Southern Italy. Revivalism’s differential appropriation of popular traditional practice also highlights the flexible and contextual nature of ‘tradition’, and the fact that it is always a selective reading of the past from the point of view of the present (Cowan, 1988; Williams, 1977, 115f.).

Some further questions

Clearly, the Southern Italian revival needs to be contextualised and contrasted with similar revitalisation processes taking place in Northern Italy. Despite my admitted lack of direct engagement with Northern Italian revivalism, it is possible through a study of the Northern ethnographic literature to identify some clear divergences between revitalisation processes in Northern Italy and the South (see Holmes, 1989 for Friuli; Poppi, 1992; Poppi & Morelli, 1998; Carnival King of Europe, 2009 for Trento; Ridler, 2002 for German speaking South Tyrol; Falassi, 2004; Feil, 1998 for Venice; Filippucci, 1992; 2002; Baldassar, 2001 for Veneto; Silverman, 1979 for Siena; and Bravo, 2001, 187-205; 2005 for Piedmonte).

This ethnographic literature highlights a number of elements which seem distinctive for Northern revivalism: a greater degree of self-consciousness and historicisation in the way popular tradition is represented; a characteristic emphasis on the performative aspect of popular ritual, which often seems to be self-consciously presented for a ‘new audience of outsiders’ (Boissevain, 1992a), typically glossed as ‘tourists’. Southern Italian revivalism is strongly associated with urban revivalists from a distinctively countercultural or leftist political subculture espousing Gramscian or other broader contemporary anti-capitalist ideologies. Yet in the North, this highly distinctive subculture seems to be largely absent, with the new ‘audience of outsiders’ instead typically composed of ‘tourists’, perhaps signalling the greater degree to which processes of commodification and objectification of local tradition have advanced in 416

Northern compared to Southern Italian revivalism. In contrast to the leftist and countercultural flavour of Southern Italian revivalism, Northern Italy shows a distinctive ideological emphasis on ethnoregionalism, and the self-conscious production and projection of a unique local ethnic identity through the medium of local folkloric resources.

Many of these tendencies are of course increasingly visible in the South as well, as instanced in the ethnoregionalist preoccupations of Salentine revivalism (Chapter Seven), or in locals’ highly self-conscious remodelling of local tradition in the Uomo Cervo spectacle in Molise to serve new contemporary needs such as tourism and cultural exchange with ‘Carnival communities’ in other parts of Italy (Chapter Eight). And yet there is a sense that the current (second) revivalist wave in the South is more recent, dating back only to the early to mid 1990s (cf for Salento, Winspeare, 2002, 172, quoted above), while the revitalisation movement in the North has been under way for longer (cf Holmes, 1989; Poppi, 1992; Poppi & Morelli, 1998), so that the processes outlined here are further advanced in the North. Ridler describes how in one German-speaking area of Sűdtirol in the Italian Alps, the summer Ferragosto celebration has recently been transformed from a celebration for locals into a spectacle self-consciously devised for outsiders, featuring the ‘reenactment in traditional costume, of historical skills and past occupations from the days before tourism for an audience mainly composed of tourists’ (2002, 92). This self-consciously historicising mode is glossed by Ridler as a form of ‘ethnomimetic performance’ which provides a way of ‘publicly differentiating individual and collective senses of identity within a local field, and from the homogenising mass culture which the tourists themselves represent’ (106).

Bravo notes that although peasant culture in Italy, (especially for instance during the first revival), had often been strongly associated with notions of class, the external bodies which today fund such folkloric events tend to ‘support proposals which valorise a sense of local community identity as “historical” or “ethnic”, rather than related to class or politics’ (2001, 197). For Filippucci, this is all part of a ‘Europe-

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wide trend of identifying “historic” artifacts as marketable signs of social distinction’ (2002, 77):

The local community, as the custodian of a rural, artisanal, pre-industrial or pre-modern tradition which it either possesses, or which it is widely recognised by outsiders as possessing, compensates for its sociocultural and productive defunctionalisation by constructing an image of itself which is strong and ‘antique’; by the mythologisation of an image of an already extinct peasant culture, thus reconstituting a past which is cohesive and harmonious in a way it never actually was, and striving for a form of ‘recognisability’ and belonging which is both symbolic and precarious (Bravo, 2001, 198).

A characteristic Northern Italian emphasis on medievalist events such as Siena’s Palio (Silverman, 1979) or Prato’s Corteggio storico, imagined and structured around the idea of the local city as medieval polis, is also suggestive of the contrasting historical influence of the Northern Italian commune on the contemporary articulation of popular traditional festive practices in the North:

The North and Centre, particularly Tuscany, are showing an exponential growth in historical recreations in a somewhat mannered medieval style, events which are either artificially contrived or of dubious historical foundation: palios, tournaments, processions in costume with banners, sieges by enemy troops, and visits by noblemen, events which although diverse, always seem to end up proposing the same kinds of costumes and elements, and which also involve urban centres as well (Bravo, 2001, 193).

In contrast to these forms of self-conscious historicisation which appear so characteristic of Northern revitalisation processes, there seems to be a greater sense within Southern revivalism of a continuity with tradition and the past, and the redeployment of traditional popular practices as resources which may still be of use within the present: witness for instance the reappropriation of pizzica and tammurriata in the context of the urban Centro Sociale Occupato.

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Whereas Southern revivalism is strongly influenced by the legacy of Gramscian Marxist ideology, the Northern revivalist ideological landscape is deeply inflected with ethnoregionalist or autonomist ideologies similar to those associated with the Northern League, for as Ridler has observed:

Almost every distinctive North Italian language group from the Valdôtain in the west to Friulani in the east has generated political associations which view the decreasing importance of national borders within the EU as a political space in which to establish regional platforms of ethnic identity on the basis of historical models (2002, 102).

Bravo links the revitalisation of the festa popolare in the alpine areas of the provinces of Cuneo and Torino with the emergence from the early eighties of a new interest in the local Occitanian dialect (2005, 192). The localist emphasis signalled in the title of Trento’s Folk Museum (‘Museum of Customs and Traditions of the Trentine People’), is also apparent in Holmes’ characteristic framing of his theme of ‘rural reenchantment’ around notions of the ‘Friulian patria’ and ethnic identity, as well as his observations on the Friulian autonomist movement (1989, 217-8). A characteristic association between Northern revivalism and ethnoregionalism is also apparent in Poppi’s exploration of ethnoregionalist elements in the revival of the Ladin Carnival (1992), and the Northern League’s well known use of folkloric spectacles to foreground notions of an imagined ‘Padanian’ ethnos.

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Northern League leader Umberto Bossi and medieval attendant at the annual recreation of the 1167 ‘Giuramento di Pontida’. Source: . [21 September 2011].

In my account of the ‘Uomo Cervo’ event in Molise in the previous chapter, I highlighted the greater agency of locals in this representation of their own local traditions compared to Southern Italian folk festivals, in which urban revivalists from outside the local sometimes exercise greater agency in how local tradition is represented. The Northern Italian ethnography is striking for the degree to which revitalisation processes are managed by locals with their own specific localist agendas, rather than by urban revivalist outsiders with very different motivations, as is often the case in the South (cf Ridler, 2002; Filippucci, 1992, 2002).

Angelo Maggio has remarked to me on the fact that many Milanese folk fans seem too obsessed with Salentine pizzica down in Southern Puglia to notice the vibrant traditional Carnival dance forms still being practiced on their doorsteps in nearby Bagolino. His observation highlights the accelerating circulation of countercultural urban actors from all over Italy in the emergent Southern Italian ‘revivalist itinerary’. In July 2003 for instance, one Northern Italian informant travelled all the way from Trento in northeastern Italy to a remote part of Campania for the weekend, just so he 420

could take part in tammurriata dancing at the Festa della Madonna dell’Avvocata. Yet the highly routinised ‘revivalist itinerary’ familiar from Southern Italy appears to be absent in the North: in a year of ethnographic fieldwork with revivalists from both Northern and Southern Italy, only one urban revivalist (Elisabetta) described participating in a Northern Italian folkloric event.

‘Countercultural actors’: Revivalist musicians serenade the Madonna dell’Avvocata, Maiori, July 2003. Photo: Bennetts. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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Persistence of popular tradition in Northern Italy: reading the will of the Bècia [Old Woman] in the piazza of Palù, Province of Trento, 1998. Photo: Cavagna, in Morelli & Poppi (1998, 77).

The Northern Italian ethnography also highlights the greater salience of winter masquerades during the Carnival period, whereas as Angelo Maggio has highlighted, Carnival traditions in some parts of the South like Calabria are less significant, with a far greater emphasis on traditional patronal feste popolari of the Madonna and Saints (although the strength of the Carnival tradition in rural Campania is well attested by De Simone & Rossi, 1977). There is perhaps here a correlation with regional variations between North and South in the relative advance of secularising processes (cf Baldassar, 2001, 135-44). Carroll (1992) has also identified the former Kingdom of Southern Italy as ‘the Land where Trent never arrived’, and highlighted the greater success of Counterreformation reformers in Northern Italy compared to the South in the regulation of popular religious practices after the sixteenth century Council of Trent. This historical legacy, he argues, has favoured the greater persistence in

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Southern Italy of non-orthodox or syncretic popular religious practices which are such a focus of attention for Southern Italian revivalists (cf. Canzanella, 2002).

Syncretic religious cults such as Pagani’s Festa della Madonna delle Galline are a key focus of interest for Southern Italian revivalists, and are regularly glossed by them as ‘pagan survivals’. Photo: Bennetts.

Another key variant between North and South which of course would need to be problematised in any comparative study of Northern and Southern revivalism is the differential effect upon revivalist activity of the large regional variations in respective standards of living. Another obvious regional contrast is the key structural role played by the coscritti (members of the age cohort who have just come of age) in some Northern Italian feste popolari and Carnivals (Baldassar, 2001, 135-6; Poppi, 1992; Poppi & Morelli, 1998, 116f.), and the apparent absence of this group as a significant ritual category in the South.

A further line of research which could profitably contribute to the anthropology of globalisation would be further investigation of new forms of circulation of objectified folkloric cultural goods, such as those exemplified in my accounts of the Carnival of Tufara and Castelnuovo a Volturno in Molise. These reveal emergent circuits of 423

cultural exchange in which local Carnival forms are effectively traded between rural communities in Northern Italy, Molise, Abruzzo and Sardinia.

Given the speed with which revivalism has developed, there is clearly scope for a longitudinal study of the evolution of Southern Italian revivalism over time, with attention to contrasting developments in the three major revivalist regions, but also to the question of whether or not revivalism has emerged more noticeably in any other regions since my fieldwork.

Although the main focus of this study has been the agency and ideology of urban revivalists, my research also suggests an entirely different project which would further develop themes outlined in Chapter Six: a systematic analysis of processes of cultural transformation within the morphology of the contemporary festa popolare. The methodological advantages of a longitudinal focus in such a study are obvious, although a synchronic and pan-regional framework such as the one I have adopted here could also provide a range of useful comparative data on differently located feste popolari at a number of different stages of transformation.

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EPILOGUE

In summarising, I would contrast my own conclusions with those reached by Enza Pagliara in her own rather different inquiry into revivalism, which has brought her from an upbringing as the daughter of Salentine peasants in the town of Torchiarolo to her current status as perhaps the most distinguished female folk vocalist in Salento:

A me piacerebbe se [gli abitanti del mio paese] se ne rendessero conto dentro di loro di non essere poveri di cultura; questo mi piacerebbe veramente. Perché da figlia di contadini sono cresciuta col complesso di non essere figlia di professori. E qualche volta anche qualcuno mi ha fatto capire che io ero figlia di contadini e dovevo stare zitta... Io vedo mio padre che parla con la madre del mio fidanzato che è professoressa e diventa tutto rosso perché si vergogna che non sa coniugare i verbi. E questo mi dà fastidio, perché mio padre non ha niente da temere e nessun motivo per sentirsi inferiore... E adesso che io ho capito che in realtà in questa cultura, nella loro cultura che loro mi hanno trasmesso, c’è cultura, e non c’è ignoranza: c’è un’altra cultura e basta, la cosa che io vorrei restituire a loro da me che l’ho capito al di fuori, è proprio di fargli capire che quello che loro hanno è un tesoro, e ce l’hanno proprio perché sono contadini, e non perché sono professori.

I would be really pleased if [the people of my town] were able to realise that they are not culturally poor; that would really please me. Because as a daughter of contadini (peasants), I grew up with a feeling of inferiority about not being the daughter of teachers. And at times people have reminded me that I was the daughter of peasants and should therefore keep quiet…When my father speaks to my partner’s mother, who is a teacher, I see him blushing with embarrassment because he doesn’t know how to conjugate the Italian verbs properly. And this makes me angry, because he has nothing to fear, and no reason to feel inferior…And now I’ve realised that within my parents’ culture, which they have passed on to me, there is cultura, not ignorance – it’s just a different culture. And the thing I would like to give back to them, which I have understood by moving away from [Torchiarolo]…what I would like them to 425

understand is that what they have is a real treasure, and the reason they have it is precisely because they are peasants, and not teachers.

Enza’s highly personal commentary on ‘popular tradition’ here synthesises an awareness of her own class identity with her sense as a musician that popular tradition represents a rich aesthetic resource for the present. But for many urban actors, less grounded than Enza in the milieu of which Torchiarolo is emblematic, the category ‘popular tradition’ has, I think, followed a trajectory in post-war Italy similar to that which the category ‘Aboriginal culture’ has followed within the mainstream cultural discourse of my own society (cf. Morgan, 1994; Stanton, 1995; Marcus, 1997): from racist rejection to sympathetic revivalist acceptance, to uncritical New Age fetishisation, romanticisation and appropriation. Inevitably, the Southern Italian mondo popolare, no less than ‘Aboriginal culture’ or the Tuscan farmhouse (cf. Mayes, 1996), are all potential ‘imaginative spaces outside modernity’ onto which many modern urban dwellers project the dilemma of their own existence within contemporary capitalist modernity (Parkins, 2004, 258).

In my view however, it would be superficial to dismiss revivalism, as some have sought to do with the Slow Food Movement (Craig & Parkins, 2006), as a mere romantic utopian fantasy based around an essentialised and idealised notion of a vanished organic society. As we have seen with Ester, revivalism potentially proposes a far more serious cultural project, and at its best constitutes a concrete, embodied exploration of cultural difference, alternative lifeworlds and an engagement with the ‘other’ through real dialogues with real historical actors, from whose radically different personal and cultural experiences urban cosmopolitan actors such as ourselves may, who knows, still be able to glean some useful insights into our own contemporary condition. For me, revivalist practise seems to propose a qualitatively different mode of experience from the increasingly virtualised, commodified and mediated experience of the digital age, thus providing inspiration to those who are committed to cultural dialogue with the ‘other’, and to constructing meaningful cultural and social forms alternative to the ones dictated by the hegemony of the market.

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‘The mythos of popular tradition’: this idealised representation by popular genre painter Gaetano Gigante (1770 – 1840) depicts nineteenth century Neapolitan proletarians returning from the Festa della Madonna dell’Arco (note tammorra, nacchere and Madonna banners). Source: postcard reproduction of ‘Ritorno dalla Madonna dell’Arco’, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples. [Image removed due to copyright restrictions.]

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APPENDIX : ‘TRADIZIONE E CONTAMINAZIONE’: LIST OF SOUND RECORDINGS ON ENCLOSED CD Track 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Name Tammurriata d’ o’ Pepe Pizzicarella Tarantella riggitana Tarantella montemaranese Per amare questa donna Fronna ‘e limone Processione di giovedì santo

8.

Accussì

9.

Canzone dei sette mariti

10.

Bella Ciao

A: TRADITIONAL DANCE AND SONG GENRES Artist/group Album Genre & region Tammurriata di Scafati O’ Vesuvio (1997) Tammurriata (Campania) Enza Pagliara Massimo Diano (organetto); Massimo Buongiorno (tamburello) Suonatori di Montemarano Andrea Sacco Tammurriata di Scafati I Cantori di Carpino

Donna de coppe (2002) Tarantella Power: musica della tradizione a Caulonia (2002)

Pizzica (Salento) tarantella calabrese

Tarantella Power Festival (2005)

tarantella di Montemarano (Campania) tarantella del Gargano (northern Puglia) fronna (traditional Campanian song genre) traditional song from Holy Thursday procession (northern Puglia)

La Tarantella del Gargano: I Cantori di Carpino (2000) O’ Vesuvio (1997) La Tarantella del Gargano: I Cantori di Carpino (2000)

B: THE FIRST REVIVAL Nuova Compagnia di La voce del grano (2001) contemporary folk song Canto Popolare (Campania) Nuova Compagnia di La Gatta Cenerentola. Favola in folk opera (Campania) Canto Popolare musica in tre atti di Roberto Simone (1998). C: THE MUSICAL BACKGROUND TO THE SECOND REVIVAL Modena City Ramblers Materiale resistente 1945-1995 modernised version of (1995) traditional northern Italian partisan song

Record label Edizioni Musicali il Ponte sonoro C&P ARPA

ARPA Compagnia Nuove Indye Edizioni Musicali il Ponte sonoro Compagnia Nuove Indye

Fanzines SRL EMI Music Italy

I dischi del mulo

11. 12.

Curre curre guagliò Fuecu

99 Posse

Curre curre guagliò (1993)

rap (Campania)

Novenove/BMG

Sud Sound System

Tradizione ‘91-‘91 (1996)

reggae (Salento)

P & C/ Compagnia Nuove Indye

13.

Tarantapower

Eugenio Bennato

14.

Santu Paulu

Nidi d’Arac

15.

Psyche

Phaleg

16.

La rondine aurunca

Ambrogio Sparagna

D: THE SECOND REVIVAL Taranta Power (1999) contemporary folk song (Campania) Ronde Noe (1999) electronic version of traditional Salentine song to San Paolo Psyche (2000) contemporary folk song (Calabria) Vorrei ballare (2001) contemporary folk song (Southern Lazio)

EMI CNI SRL ARPA Felmay