La Mietitura:Video between imagined community and auto‐ethnography

The author analyzes specimens of video‐ethnography produced by a group of elderly peasants from Acerenza, a small town in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, pointing to connections between history and memory, experience and its representation, as well as personal and communal identity. The analysis of the visual text, relations among the producers themselves, and between producers and community, shows that the video work exceeds limits of mere preservation of traditional culture and betrays a wide range of meanings and aims: ritualizing peasant identity, affirming personal and generation identity, contesting contemporary community culture, and transferring historical identity to the whole current community.