«Il Nostro Tempo e la Speranza», Nuova Serie, n.

7 (luglio 2011)

Berardino Palumbo

POLITICS, HERITAGE, AND GLOBALIZATION: SOUTH EASTERN SICILY IN

THE “PATRIMONIALIZATION” PROCESS (1996-2011)

When UNESCO heritage politics started in south eastern Sicily (1997), I was spending
my second year of fieldwork in a town (Militello Val di Catania), which only five years
later would be included (with other seven localities) in the WHL. At that time, I was not
directly interested in heritage politics, as I was working on the connections among ritual,
politics, conflict, social memory, history and the poetic construction of (male) self. I was,
therefore, interested in local poetics of time/space (Boyarin 1994), with their “metalessic”
character (i.e. their attitude to manipulate chronological axes: Faubion 1993), and by the
role “monuments” and objects of the past – the same monuments and artistic objects that
would be inserted in the WHL – played in these rhetorical, pragmatic, and political
manipulations. At that time, it was already evident to me (Palumbo 1997, 1998) that such
manipulative strategies were part and parcel of the local political field and of its
“schismogenetic” character. By disarticulating temporal axes through the narrative and
material manipulation of “artistic”, “monumental” or simply ancient objects, people use(d)
to fight for the control of symbolic and political resources. These “metalessic” politics
were expression of a very conflicting social scene dominated by a five hundred year old
fight between two ritual-political partiti-parishes.
It was only when the “patrimonialization” process started, in 1996, with the collapse of
Noto’s baroque cathedral, that I was prompted to investigate it and the ways it affected
south eastern Sicilian political scenarios. We can find here the first point I would like to
stress in this essay: when we study heritage construction processes (the
“patrimonialization” process) from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective, we
should never forget the density of the meanings which agglutinate themselves under our
label “heritage”. A too much specialized approach and a too much restricted focus on
“heritage” could, in fact, produce an excessive simplification of the analysis. When I
started studying heritage construction process in my ethnographic context, my perspective
was already affected (also) by local ideas on agency, self, conflict and violence, history,
time, and memory. After two years of fieldwork in a context where the disarticulation of
chronological axes via the manipulation of monuments, artistic objects, archaeological
finds, human remains, archive sources and oral narrative is a key trait of the political scene,
I was somehow immunized from the risk – that a certain number of recent studies which
directly focus on heritage politics actually run – to uncritically adopt the heavy cultural and

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ideological presuppositions which lie behind western institutional notions like “heritage”,
“patrimoine” or “monument”1. As Handler (1988) showed us more than 20 years ago, the
notion of “heritage”, in fact, is strictly connected with a possessive, economic grounded
self, a juridical responsible Nation-State, a bureaucratic administration of social spaces and
of politics of culture, an objectified and discrete notion of culture. It presupposes a linear
time and a computable space too, which are often different from, and sometimes opposed
to (Herzfeld 1991, 1997) “local” social poetics of time/space. Any of these cultural and
ideological presuppositions could be taken for granted in the area I was studying, any
should be uncritically accepted in a good ethnography.
The project to propose an official candidature to the WHL was elaborated in the area
between 1996 and 1999. I have had the opportunity to study it since the beginning (when it
included only two cities: Noto and Caltagirone) till to the final inscription of 8 cities of
south eastern Sicily (2002). I cannot consider here all the complexity of the process, but
only stress some aspects I maintain to have a general character. First of all, the intervention
of a transnational agency like the UNESCO (with its bureaucratic procedures, its
ideological biases, and its neo-colonial imaginary topography: see Palumbo 1998, 2003,
2006, 2007, 2010) did not suppress, but excited, local politics. If conflict and aggression
are basic characters of local (and regional) political scenes, the presence of a self
proclaiming universalistic and peaceful transnational institution directly produced and
reproduced them: conflicts inside a single community, among cities of the area and among
their elites, conflicts among different institutional apparatuses of the Italian Nation-State,
conflicts among politicians, and between them and technicians, conflict among
intellectuals, journalists and students. If some of these conflicts are absolutely new, some
organized themselves along lines of fracture which were ancient in the area. Cities which
had been enemies during the last centuries (Noto and Siracusa, Militello and Caltagirone,
Catania and Siracusa, or Caltagirone) started fighting again: the activation of UNESCO
WHL procedure reactivated social tensions and political fractures. This is a second point I
want to stress in this paper (and that I’ve already stressed in my previous ethnographic
texts): like every political process, the construction of a heritage scenario produces
conflicts at each level (or step) of its processing procedures.
Conflict, under the “liberalistic correct” form of competition, is admitted by UNESCO
official ideology. Each year, in fact, many candidatures compete to obtain the inscription in
one of the WH lists. The true competitors, anyway, are Nation-State members, who,
                                                                                                               
1
Cfr. Edison 2005, Breglia 2006, Di Giovine 2009, Braumann 2009, De Cesari 2010.

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besides a shared rhetoric of cooperation, fight to have their sites inscribed as far as
possible. Inside each State member, competition (and conflict) are admitted, according to
the correct bureaucratic procedures: every year only one (or two) project(s) acquire(s) the
status of national official application(s) to the UNESCO Committee. The same organized
and bureaucratically controlled competition is allowed at lower levels of the process. What
is not possible to accept for the UNESCO ideological pattern is the kind of conflict I have
seen working in south eastern Sicily: the social, factional, and basic conflict among
institutions, individuals, groups, and places belonging to a (supposed unitary) area inside
one Nation-State. “If you fight among yourself – said the head of the Italian UNESCO
Club Organization during a Conference in “my” town – if you fight among yourself, you’ll
never get the candidature”. Here, we find a third point to stress: Even if UNESCO
produces it, and partially admits it as competition, conflict is never accepted when it
crisscrosses bureaucratic and institutional levels and when it explodes at or erodes the
basic social level of the institutional machine. If this kind of conflict manifests itself during
the Candidature it can stop the procedure; if it emerges after the site is inscribed, it has to
be controlled and can produce the exclusion from the WHL. In any case, social and
political conflict cannot menace the integrity and the essential fixity of a universal
declaration of exceptionality.
Till 2003, when I published my monograph “L’UNESCO e il campanile” (UNESCO
and the Church Tower), I thought that hiding basic social and political conflicts was a
consequence of the institutional articulation of the UNESCO imagination. Entirely
centered on the Nation-State – which is the pivotal point of its diplomatic, legal, and
institutional picture – UNESCO classification system cannot admit any element disturbing
Nation-States’ cultural and political integrity. This is of course true, as many studies attest,
but I believe, now, that the reasons for such a removing are more complex. A sign of this,
to tell the truth, was already present in the heritage construction process I had been
studying for so many years. The removing of conflicts from the official surface of
UNESCO classification system had, in south eastern Sicilian Baroque Towns, a
paradoxical character. The “jurisdictional” (Torre 1995), political, and ritual conflict
played, in fact, a key role in the rebuilding of the area after the earthquake of 1693 which
produced the urban and architectural baroque style that UNESCO recognized as having a
universal value (Doufour 1981, 1985, Scalisi 2001). Removing it from the cultural labeling
produced by the UNESCO WHL Classification system, was a sign of the more general
conceptual troubles the system has in dealing with social and political dimension of

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cultural processes. All things considered, in fact, we could propose – as I did – the
possibility (and the historical correctness) to “patrimonialize” (to insert in the heritage
construction process) exactly the socio-political-ritual conflicting side of the historical
process which produced the cultural-material baroque “things” (churches, palaces, cities,
paintings, etc.) whose universal value is recognized by UNESCO WHL, and which is still
alive in the social life of local people. But this eventuality was not accepted by specialists
who were in charge of the project, as well as by the great majority of local social actors.
This socio-political “immaterial” dimension connoting both the historical process that
produced the baroque landscape, and the contemporary political process which was
producing the transformation of that landscape in a cultural heritage universal label, cannot
be exposed to the official UNESCO classification system.
In order to understand such difficulty, I had to analyze the way the UNESCO
classificatory system operates, and its internal ideological coherence, trying to (re)connect
this analysis with the main theoretic anthropological approaches to politics and
globalization (Palumbo 1998, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2010a, b). Of course, I cannot reproduce
here my researches trajectory and results. What I suppose could be useful for our
discussions, is to stress what I consider some key points of my analysis. First of all,
UNESCO WHL system is a transnational classification system which – like others Global
Taxonomic Systems – produces formal labels (having an iconic character) for a global
market. The UNESCO GTS not only produces objectified and essential “cultural things”,
but transforms such “cultural things” into markers of collective identity, also imagined
essential, rarified, and abstract. These labeled objectified identities can become
commodities in a global market of the imaginary. As the localities in Appadurai analysis
(1996), these labeled identities are ideologically presented as “purely cultural” phenomena,
evicted from material, social and political contexts of production. In such a neoliberal
scenario, “authenticity”, “typicality”, “antiquity”, “diversity”, “difference” become
resources institutionalized power compete for in order to get a (better) place inside what
Herzfeld (2004) has called a “global hierarchy of values”. The UNESCO GTS, thus,
produces socio-political conflicts, and, at the same time, removes them, because its main
goal is to produce official super-rarified symbols which can work as identity markers in a
global market of the transnational imaginaries, and which can, de facto, act as instruments
of a new neo-liberal global governance. If we consider the semiotic and political character
of these symbols, comparing them with those which express belonging at a national level
(Palumbo 2010a, b), we can say they are more abstract, general: they are symbols of

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symbols, objectifications of already culturally objectified things. Like global sport national
qualities, fashion models, food typicality, or touristic stereotypes, they are brands in the
global market of culture.
When I hold this point of view, I do not mean these Global Classifications are socially
or politically ineffective. They seem to work very well, in certain conditions. In 1994,
when I started my long term field research in South Eastern Sicily, “Val di Noto” was an
expression which had no meaning for the great majority of the population of that area. The
“Val di Noto”, in fact, was one of three administrative regions into which Sicily was
divided during the Islamic domination (827-1091 AC). Such a partition, which had already
lost any political value at the beginning of the XVI century, during the last years of the XX
century still had some meaning only inside professional and local historical or architectural
circles. At the end of February 2011, the Italian Government has decided to allocate 1
million Euros to the “Cultural District of South Eastern Sicily”, the Association of the
South Eastern Sicilian Towns which have been included in the UNESCO WHL between
2002 and 2005 under the labels “Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto (South-Eastern
Sicily)” and “Syracuse and the Rocky Necropolis of Pantalica”2. What is more intriguing
from an anthropological point of view is the popular movement against the oil drilling an
American company was supposed to start in south eastern Sicily, which arouse in the area
between 2005 and 2007. In some papers I published between 1998 and 2001, and in a
monograph which appeared in 2003, I stressed both the creative character of the WH
“patrimonialization” process, which had been able to revitalize historical conflicts and
former institutional levels of belonging, and the possibility that such a process would
produce new political emotions, sentiments, and practices. In the conclusive remarks of my
2003 book I suggested that the “Val di Noto” recreated by the UNESCO heritage politics
would have become part and parcel of social actors’ habitus in a few decades. The
emergence of the anti-drilling movement, if from one side confirmed my hypothesis,
revealed, on the other hand, the inadequacy of my chronological predictions and the
governamental power of the UNESCO heritage politics: people (young students,
politicians, touristic operators and entrepreneurs, farmers, neo-rural immigrants coming
from northern European countries, local, regional, and national intellectuals) took to the
street to defend a sociocultural and institutional entity (the Val di Noto with his baroque
architecture) that only ten years before (when UNESCO politics were yet to come) simply

                                                                                                               
2
Actually the Association includes also the towns of Piazza Armerina (where the famous Villa Romana del
Casale WHL site is), Acireale, Ispica, and Mazzarino which aim at participating in the WHL.

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didn’t exit in their daily experience. At the same time, in “my” town nothing happened that
concerned heritage and touristic politics, and UNESCO Global Taxonomy wasn’t able to
act as an effective impulse to change. Based on my ethnographic experience, I suppose this
has something to do with the force that social conflict and political fighting have in this
context. The possibility to generalize this analytical model is surely tied to the
ethnographic density, and to the theoretic quality of future comparative researches.

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