Paper short abstract:

This paper represents the first systematization of an ethnography based on Molise in the framework of a wider interest in regional/national/global processes of heritagization and monitoring put in place in the last two decades, above all, but not exclusively by the UNESCO framework, Council of Europe and other global contexts of conservation/valorisation policies. The Region Molise, being small and relatively secluded, is particularly fit for advancing some methodological and theoretical issues about the challenging relationships between the sense of local identity and the late modern projection in heritagization contexts according to ‘global hierarchies of value’.

Paper long abstract:

This paper represents the first systematization of an ethnography based on Molise in the framework of a wider interest in regional/national/global processes of heritagization and monitoring put in place in the last two decades, above all, but not exclusively by the UNESCO framework, Council of Europe and other global contexts of conservation/valorisation policies. The Region Molise, being small and relatively secluded, is particularly fit for advancing some methodological and theoretical issues about the challenging relationships between the sense of local identity and the late modern projection in heritagization contexts according to ‘global hierarchies of value’.

The ethnography is focused on bio-cultural heritage and transhumance/traditional pastoralism revitalization as a cultural/tourist path, especially in the of Northern as well as of Southern inner areas of Italy. Moreover, having supported, as the Director of an Academic Centre of Research, the procedure of submission of the ‘civilization of transhumance’ to the UNESCO ICH List and many activities of revitalization and reformulation of this knowledge-practice system in the local, the a. aims at reconsidering the concrete and symbolic/representational usages of this activity in the relatively recent debate on bio-cultural heritage and sustainable territorial and community development, questioning in a very deep way the real participation of the communities to this cultural and somehow political processes.