[Download] "Coordinates of Power and Performance: Festivals As Sites of (Re)Presentation and Reclamation in Sardinia." by Ethnologies ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

📘 Read Now     📥 Download

eBook details

• Title: Coordinates of Power and Performance: Festivals As Sites of (Re)Presentation and Reclamation in Sardinia.
• Author : Ethnologies
• Release Date : January 01, 2001
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 222 KB

Description

A few summers ago, my Sardinian friend and collaborator, who wishes to be known to academic audiences only as "E.T." sent me a clipping from the Nuova Sardegna, the island's largest circulating newspaper: a full-page ad announcing a prominent Italian publishing house's sponsorship of a celebration of the summer solstice and autumnal equinox, to be held on the site of two nuraghi, dry-stone towers from the Early Bronze Age which dot the Sardinian landscape. The ad claims the nuraghi were ancient temple-observatories whose purpose was to indicate the solstices and equinoxes by lining up with the rising sun and moon on those dates. It reads, in part: "After vast, accurate research conducted over a period of years ... the mystery of Sardinia's thousands of megalithic monuments has been revealed! The sacred nature of the constructions; the discovery of a nuragic calculator ... erected by the ancient inhabitants to the gods of the sun and moon [has] left a stamp of extraordinary spirituality on the island." To support this image of Sardinia as a sacred site, the promoter cites Classical authors who called it "the sacred isle" and "the kingdom of the gods." He invites tourists to experience "the revival of the ancient traditions of the great nuragic civilizations" in a sound-and-light show featuring narration and performances by well-known Sardinian musicians, singers and folk dance ensembles on the evenings of the summer solstice and fall equinox. For those unable to attend in person, he generously offers the videotape of the show for the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars (La Nuova Sardegna, 9/10/1994: 26). This ad may strike us as amusing or ironic, as it did E.T., who sent it to me with a post-it alluding to the fact I could also study the New Age movement, the subject of my latest research project, in Sardinia. But it is also a recent example of what Peter Odermatt calls the "politics of (re)presentation" -- a combination of presentation of self and representation by and for others (Odermatt 1996: 85) -- in Sardinian year-cycle rites and festivals. Festivals are arenas where the combination of ideologies, coordinates of power and performances of identity that characterize cultural contact and conflict on the island are played out. This example contains all the elements which have historically characterized the outsider's construction of Sardinia: a focus on the island's remote past; a connection to Classical antiquity; an emphasis on mystery and spiritual practice; and the unproblematized linking of contemporary folk performances with an ancient past. It concerns a tourist event which purports to re-create archaic ritual practice, but which is in fact creating a new item of consumer culture. In linking Sardinia's nuraghi with sacredness, the ad succeeds in transforming the whole island into a sacred site that could potentially be experienced by the tourist.

Download Free Books "Coordinates of Power and Performance: Festivals As Sites of (Re)Presentation and Reclamation in Sardinia." PDF ePub Kindle