Programme

Lectures will be given by an international team of scholars of heritage processes (Dorothy Noyes, Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Laurent-Sebastien Fournier, Alessandra Broccolini, Berardino Palumbo, Gianni Pizza, Daniele Parbuono, and Tobias Boos, among others), who will also lead workshops drawing on the shared experiences of Summer School participants. The week will also include an experience-based reflection on methodological approaches to a collaborative, comprehensive, and critical anthropology of heritage processes and institutions. The teaching team will include distinguished experts on the Palio, on Siena’s history, and on cultural management and tourism economies.

Students will be invited to undertake individual or group ethnographic fieldwork, under the guidance of an expert team. Fieldwork sessions will bring participants into contact with grassroots community resilience around tradition and the very form of the festival. Meetings with one or more of the seventeen autonomous Contrade (and their collective democratic representative organizations) will be arranged, so as to explore efforts to support the tradition’s transmission and to protect its image and symbols.

Lectures and seminars will be held at the Università di Siena, workshops while encounters with Contrade administrators and Palio authorities will be held on site.

PhD students from Folklore, Anthropology, Heritage Studies, Cultural Studies, and Tourism will have priority access, though Master’s students at an advanced level, or fledgling post-doc applications, may also be considered, until the maximum of 20 participants is reached.