Festivals, Affect and Identity: A Deleuzian Apprenticeship in Central Italian Communities
224
Festivals, Affect and Identity: A Deleuzian Apprenticeship in Central Italian Communities
224Hardcover(First)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857289988 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2011 |
| Series: | Anthem European Studies |
| Edition description: | First |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Festivals, Affect and Identity
A Deleuzian Apprenticeship in Central Italian Communities
By Lita Crociani-Windland
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 Lita Crociani-WindlandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-998-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book tells the story of three communities and four festivals in the Siena province of Tuscany in Central Italy. It is also a personal journey back to my own roots. The subtitle for the book aims to convey a sense of the learning process involved in this journey, which was both personal and professional. Apprenticeship is a notion that goes back to medieval times, also important to the festivals researched, and it involved learning from a master. On reaching proficiency, one would become a journeyman. The idea of apprenticeship was adopted by Deleuze (1994) to convey a kind of learning which encompasses the senses, movement and action. It involves an encounter and it is experiential and holistic. In this journey of research, I encountered things known and saw them for the first time, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, because I questioned what I saw and experienced. I started the journey back to my roots as Bergson and Deleuze's apprentice, aiming to become a journeyman. On the way I found other masters whose work seemed to chime with what I encountered. I hope that I can convey what I learnt through this book. The journey through the four festivals emerged, inter alia, as a journey via the elements. The book moves from the centuries strong attachment to soil of the Sienese, to the far more ambivalent cunning fluidity of Montepulciano, its watery and historical connection to Florence, the fluidity of the Bruscello as well as the love of fire of the Bravio. Finally it arrives at a tree rooted in air in Monticchiello. Monticchiello nonetheless is linked through its soil and history to Siena.
These geological and historical features and their interrelations, relevant to further analysis, are briefly given an overall outline in Chapter 3, before moving to the more in-depth exploration of each community and festival in different chapters. I had started my research with a question related to a particular structure of identity of the area. Different fluxes are being brought into conjunction in the different realities of the three communities. Yet, in spite of the differences between communities highlighted in my work, the link to the natural environment emerges as an enduring feature, even when ambivalently experienced.
The ethnographic material offered by these events and communities is rich, colourful, complex and affecting and I hope to have been able to convey some of its power through my accounts, offered at times by way of field notes and at other times as reflections. The research aims to address a number of different aspects and levels in relation to an in-depth exploration of community, identity and tradition and the ways that these are expressed and performed within festivals and theatres in the context of a changing Italian region. It aims to explore the meaning of festivals and the role of culture and ritual in the never-ending process of maintaining continuity in the face of change. The main perspectives adopted and adapted to explore and understand what may be going on in the story stem from the work of Henri Bergson and the later extension and elaboration of this in the work of Gilles Deleuze, with and without Felix Guattari's coauthorship. These are developed further in dialogue with the material under study and other perspectives. The ontological premises vital to the book's exploration of festivals, identity and community dynamics entail an embodied view of reality and a profound interrelatedness between nature and culture, which fits closely to the ethnographic material and grounds further elaboration of theory. This ontology opposes a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, yet acknowledges a different kind of duality. It fully acknowledges both structure and fluidity and offers a methodology able to inform the exploration of both aspects. The focus of the book is mostly concerned with tracing the affective or fluid aspects of reality through comparison of the case studies. Thus, the book operates at the level of a rich and detailed ethnographic account, while also offering theoretical exploration and development.
In this chapter, the reader will find an outline of the case studies and of the central concepts and perspectives used, their definitions for the purposes of this work, their interconnections, and outlines of later chapters. The aim and scope of this research is to give examples of how we can broaden our understanding of social dynamics without losing specificity (Kapferer, 1997: 11). In a time when environmental issues have become a real focus of debate, elements in the natural environment appeared recurrently at different levels of enquiry in the various festivals, though I did not look for them specifically in the beginning. This confirmed how the theoretical approach adopted is organic to the issues explored. I present my journey of research in relation to them in this introductory chapter along with further commentary and examples of the importance of other recurrent themes and images. This links to and anticipates some of the themes of Chapter 2 on methodology, for which some basis of theory has been prepared in this chapter. The analysis of case study material confirms the importance of theoretical orientations able to comprehend fluid aspects of reality and the interactions between internal and external milieus at different levels. This emphasis of focus demands an interdisciplinary approach, which is best located within the area of psychosocial studies, but may be of interest to a readership drawn from different fields of study, such as sociology, anthropology and folklore, European ethnology, cultural and Italian studies and social and cultural history, to name a few. The first two chapters may seem heavily philosophical, yet they are essential to set the direction of travel in understanding the festivals in all their – at times – seemingly idiosyncratic and paradoxical aspects and details. However, for readers more interested in the ethnographic dimension, the option may be to forgo reading Chapter 2, which deals with methodological concerns in more depth.
Affective and Psychosocial Dimensions of Three Communities and Four Festivals
The subject of the ethnographic research conducted concerns processes of cohesion and identity in small- to medium-sized communities in the central Italian region of Tuscany. In particular, the focus is on the role played in these matters by cultural traditions drawing on historical roots and a particular connection to land, body and memory. Festival traditions abound not only in Tuscany, but also in many parts of Italy, with a tendency to revival particularly oriented towards medieval times. Previous research focused on the city of Siena highlighted the importance of research into the 'affective' (see following section) and psychosocial dimensions of festival culture to afford an understanding of their wider social and political implications (see also Crociani-Windland, 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2005). I restricted detailed analysis to a duality of cultural events in the Siena province of Tuscany in the years 2000–04, which allows all of the main theoretical themes to be illustrated in some depth. Two of the events are based on territorial divisions and competition, be it horse or barrel races, and are based on medieval traditions. The other two use the medium of theatre in connection to an agrarian past that lives on in memory. Thus, three communities and four festivals have been the focus of inquiry. These communities and events are:
• Siena, a medium-sized medieval city with its enduring tradition of the horse race known as the Palio. This is based on the territorial division of Siena into 17 wards or contrade, as they are locally known, competing twice annually in what may at first sight appear as an unregulated and wild race. The division of towns into wards or contrade was part of the medieval communes' territorial and administrative subdivisions, not just in Siena (for more on the complexities of Siena's medieval territorial subdivisions see also Bowsky, 1981 and Silverman, 1979). The Palio, as we shall see, is central to Siena's identity and civic structure. It can be traced back to the twelfth century. Its present form evolved in the 1600s and its normative structures have remained essentially unchanged since they were formalised in the early 1700s.
• Montepulciano, a small medieval and Renaissance town in the province of Siena, host to two of the different events selected for research. Firstly, the town hosts a theatre production set to music, known as Bruscello Poliziano, where the musical themes take on a similar role to that of masks in Commedia dell'Arte in its identification of archetypal characters. This production, according to local sources, perpetuates a travelling minstrel tradition of the Tuscan agrarian past, which would have died as it did in most other places had it not been actively taken up and transposed into a regular event in the main square in 1939. Secondly, it hosts a barrel race, known as Bravio, which is rooted in a horse-race tradition dating back to the 1300s and is based on the territorial division of the town into eight wards or contrade, which compete amongst themselves. It was revived and transformed from a horse to a barrel race in 1974.
• Monticchiello, a medieval village in the same province only a few miles from Montepulciano, and its community theatre. This started in the 1960s from a wish to reenliven the community at a time when people were abandoning the countryside and it appeared to them that an agrarian way of life was coming to an end. Known as Teatro Povero, it focuses debate on current affairs affecting the village around the yearly production of a script and a community performance every summer.
The Palio race is run twice a year on 2 July and 16 August; the Monticchiello theatre production usually starts in the last week of July and runs until mid-August; the Bruscello theatre runs over three or four performances in mid-August; and the Bravio race is fixed for the last Sunday in August.
Versions of some of the chapters contained in this book have already been published; however, this book offers the possibility of showing the full value of comparison between case studies, which in turn allows the theoretical framework to demonstrate its flexibility and usefulness in a way that single chapters or articles taken in isolation cannot evidence. Reference to available published material is given throughout, though the research is based on fieldwork, formal interviews and many informal conversations and observations over years of ongoing regular visits, including periods of intense fieldwork and participant observation.
Festivals, Issues and Perspectives
The basic tenets of my theoretical analysis of festivals hinge, as already mentioned, on a particular ontology, whereby reality encompasses not just what can be spoken and articulated, but also aspects that can only be glimpsed (this will be dealt with in much more detail in Chapter 2). Some positions give a better view. This is what I believe to be true of festivals, play, ritual and art, which give access to a differently ordered space and time, attested to by many authors speaking from different disciplinary perspectives. To name a few, the work of Van Gennep (1909), Turner (1995 [1969], 1982) and Schechner (1994) in anthropology all hinge on the concept of 'liminality' as a 'betwixt and between' space, able to encompass paradox and fundamentally anti-structure. It is a place of transgression, intense relationality, or to use Turner's term, 'communitas' and transformation. Bakhtin (1984) and Gadamer (1975) from the field of philosophy, Ladurie (1979: ch. 12) from history and Winnicott (1971) from psychoanalysis, whose concept of 'transitional space' is similarly framed, agree. In this book, the most important orientation is given by Bergson's work and Deleuze's extension of Bergsonian theories, which can be expanded upon via analysis of the case studies herein. At times other perspectives have been included in analysis, where they have proved to offer a useful addition or particularly poignant application. Bergson and Deleuze's notion of the 'virtual' theorises one of the realms that 'liminality' is 'betwixt and between', a notion I flesh out in considerable detail below; the other is the 'actual', everyday life. Both are real. Rituals, festivals and play stand between them and partake of both. Bergson and Deleuze's work has a lot to offer in relation to the interactions between the realms of the actual and 'virtual'.
For the sake of accessibility to a way of thinking that I believe offers the possibility of embracing the fluidity of affective dynamics, I have chosen to disregard some of the differences between different frameworks. I have rather attempted to highlight what I see as fundamental agreements relevant to my analysis, more than disagreements between theories, taking these as springboards for further thinking about my observations. When dealing with fluidity, it is difficult and potentially unhelpful to arrive at specific definitions. This is something Deleuze also appeared to avoid, changing his use of terms throughout his work, relying on the explication and characterisation of meaning through the use of examples rather than once and for all definitions. This is a way of respecting the pre-representational, multivocality of the virtual, which has some methodological value: 'Vague concepts, and concepts of vagueness, have a crucial, and often enjoyable, part to play' as logical resources able to address the ontogenetic indeterminacy of virtuality (Massumi, 2002: 13). Nonetheless, I will attempt to introduce the reader to some of what I have found to be the most important concepts, the way I have used them and sometimes appropriated them, extracting from them some other nuance or connection that appeared substantiated by the material with which I was working.
The focus of research, as already stated, is on the 'affective' dynamics for which these festivals appear to offer a relatively safe channel of expression and enjoyment. Affect, in a Deleuzian formulation, specifically refers to a level of intensity of experience, which is prior to emotion and can contain paradoxically opposite emotions, i.e. both pleasure and pain in an ambivalent and undifferentiated way (Massumi, 1996: 221–4). In spite of the word being most often loosely associated to both, they are of a different order; parallel systems able to interrelate (Massumi, 2002: 27). Emotions are reductive of the content of affect, implying a qualification, the entering into a narrative representational structure, which by its very nature implies the choice and exclusion of some of what has impacted intensively on the body. Affect is intensive, rather than extensive (DeLanda, 2002: 157). Extension, in this sense, relates to space and time as distinct and linear, while intensity relates to a space-time continuum, real but not actualised. This is the realm of the 'virtual', which Bergson, for convenience, mostly speaks of as indivisible (Deleuze, 1991: 42; see also Chapter 2) and qualitative. In Deleuze's extension of Bergson's work, it is further analysed as composed of tensions between quantitative and qualitative aspects of different forces, whose effects manifest as signs which can be sensed intuitively, a process I discuss at length below. These tensions in the 'virtual' are genetic; they constitute reality. Yet the 'virtual' must not be thought of as some original place or time, constitutive in a 'once and for all' way. It is ever-present and its tensions are always in some way impinging on actual life. These tensions generate what Deleuze calls the 'problem' or the 'idea' (see also Williams, 2003: ch. 6). In this sense life (and identity) is continuously constituted by way of problems. Sometimes these tensions are acute enough to cause rupture, a break in continuity. The problem of identity is how to endure, that is, maintain enough continuity in relation to the continuous process of reconstitution demanded by the problems of existence without becoming so fixed and habitual as to be sclerotic. Festivals are, in this sense, constituted by problems, for which they are both expressions and solutions. However, the term solution denotes in this case not the elimination of problems, but ways of living with them. This ontology forms the basis of tthe methodology outline in Chapter 2 and informs the analysis of the case studies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Festivals, Affect and Identity by Lita Crociani-Windland. Copyright © 2011 Lita Crociani-Windland. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1. Introduction; Chapter 2. Learning, Identity, Duration and the Virtual; Chapter 3. Siena and its Province – An Overview; Chapter 4. Siena and the Palio – War and State Machine – Identity and Becoming; Chapter 5. Montepulciano’s Bruscello Theatre – Rupture, Continuity and the ‘Refrain’; Chapter 6. The ‘Problem/Idea’ of Montepulciano – How to be Autonomous in the Face of Overwhelming Force; Chapter 7. Montepulciano’s Bravio Delle Botti – A Festival in the Making; Chapter 8. Sharecropping and Modernity; Chapter 9. Monticchiello – A Community Under Siege; Chapter 10. A Tree with its Roots in the Air – Monticchiello’s Theatre of the ‘Virtual’; Chapter 11. Conclusion; Bibliography; IndexWhat People are Saying About This
‘This is a highly original piece of work, centring upon a theoretical framework which is innovative to say the least – one might even call it adventurous. It combines painstaking and meticulous ethnography with considerable theoretical sophistication and reflexivity in an engaging way that makes the book not only very readable, but immensely enjoyable.’ —Professor Ullrich Kockel, University of Ulster
‘Crociani-Windland offers an incisive analysis of the intersection of politics, memory, social history and the unconscious in the formation of subjectivity. Combining attunement to the ancestral echoes of her own being, sophisticated psychosocial analysis, and carefully grounded ethnography, the author challenges the dichotomy of past and present, and offers hopeful evidence that in a homogenizing and materializing world, everyday rituals offer powerful potential for the reclaiming of agency and the reclaiming of genealogy and identity in communities.’ —Professor Michael O’Loughlin, Adelphi University, New York, Co-chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society
‘A brilliant book! With extensive ethnography, Lita Crociani-Windland captures Siena’s famous Palio and other colourful community festivals in Tuscany. As she shows convincingly, an understanding of the festivals benefits from a Deleuzian perspective. This book will attract a wide readership.’ —Professor Helena Wulff, Stockholm University
‘This is a highly original piece of work, centring upon a theoretical framework which is innovative to say the least – one might even call it adventurous. It combines painstaking and meticulous ethnography with considerable theoretical sophistication and reflexivity in an engaging way that makes the book not only very readable, but immensely enjoyable.’ —Professor Ullrich Kockel, University of Ulster