Sonia Trampetti

The Festival as a Collective Rite and as a Cultural Exchange

This work explores both from a sociological and an anthropological point of view the phenomenon of festivals' explosion. My aim is to analyse the phenomenon of festivals as a collective rite and as a moment for cultural exchange. The term rite is generally used by anthropologists for primitive societies, where social, religious and political dimensions were in a continuum. In present times, instead, the rite has moved from the very centre to the margins of society, loosing much of its importance, mainly due to its being mainly associated with the spare time rather than with something strictly related to a job. As a result, the rite has lost its solemnity.
According to the current anthropological literature, the main peculiarity of a rite is the repetitiveness, which is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Other important characteristics are the collective dimension and the symbolic power of the actions. In my view, festivals do indeed satisfy all these characteristics of repetitiveness and collective and symbolic dimensions.
The festival is a situation carrying culture (music, dance, film, poetry, theatre, etc.), it is the enjoyable "display window" for pieces of culture. The festival is getting more and more the form chosen to celebrate minor arts. This is a way to revitalize some unlucky sector. In the past, festivals were often considered an occasion for celebrating the national culture. Now the atmosphere of festivals tends to be more international and, in my view, their main purpose has became to provide opportunities for different backgrounds to meet each other.

Sonia Trampetti is currently enrolled in a PhD program in "Science of the Text" at the University of Siena and cooperating with the University of Paris 3. Her mainfield of research is the study of short film festivals.