South Italian Festivals: A Local History of Ritual and Change

Abstract

South Italian Festivals is a story and study of socio-economic changes in an Italian mountain town Calvello (Basilicata) over a five-hundred-year period; from traditional society to modernity. Instead of exploring a single festival the book studies a ritual one year cycle of local and ecclesiastical rituals. With the analysis of field research, oral history, iconography, topography, as well as archival sources, Herman Tak reveals an interplay between the structures of social life and their ritual expression. South Italian Festivals elucidates processes of ritual continuity and change by exploring the dialectic between local production, reproduction and reworking of rituals. It also analyses the structures of power underlying an interplay of internal and external forces which govern socio-economic relations.

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