Events that want to become heritage

The scholarship about festivals, festive heritage and the politics of culture and identity during/around/based on such events has been expanding fast. In the revitalised carnival pantomime of the deer-man, in Castelnuovo al Volturno, a small village in the central Apennines, the process of heritage-making has acquired a peculiar form. One way of looking at the vernacularisation of the heritage discourse and practices is to consider the general transformations that have been observed comparatively and theorised/named in the last few decades in the literature. In intangible cultural heritage-related issues, authenticity and inauthenticity have been problematised especially with respect to the interrelated processes of commodification and touristification especially in Castelnuovo and Hlinsko, and are actually often observable in many other European public rituals. The fact of being associated with a primistivistic, magical and ‘pagan’ imaginary has fostered sentiments of authenticity, typicity and therefore the need for conservation and promotion through heritagisation.