Suspended Ceremonials. Heritage Communities, Shared Practices and Social Distancing in Pandemic Times

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on collective practices and expressions of intangible cultural heritage has profoundly marked communities of practice: closed spaces, inaccessible places. The ceremonials have all been postponed, canceled or radically transformed. UNESCO and other dedicated agencies and institutions immediately activated systems for monitoring and inventorying these compensatory occurrences and this survey system is already an excellent context for an ethnography of institutions devoted to patrimonial issues in line with the action of numerous national and transnational institutions. Festivals and ceremonials have shown an extraordinary adaptability during the months of distancing and a formidable creativity: parties celebrated online, strong patrimonial impetus, forms of mediation in practical terms. The result was a certain hypertrophy of media coverage: digital storytelling of suspended parties, development of new, creative, digitally translated solutions, construction of ad hoc photographic archives, an evident intensification of the circulation of video-documentary material close to the ceremonials. Some notions have marked the ethno-anthropological reflection on these shared practices: absence, suspension, waiting, restlessness, uncertainty about the continuity of the ceremonials, implicit reflection on the very idea of tradition that is transformed in the face of the radical transformation imposed by distance. Above all, a question about the very nature of celebrating together, of shared festive practice: how to rediscover or safeguard the ineffable emotional charge of proximity, of the crowd, of sweat, of becoming one body with others with men and - in this specific case - with animals. At the same time, a drive to increase, if possible, heritagization processes: to keep instead to forget, to collect instead to lose. Virtual platforms and repositories not only as archives for the future, but also as a creative opportunity to explore new ways of describing the locality, the territory and the sense of bond and social bond. Virtual square, at times compensatory, but also creative and transformative of absence: symbolic prosthesis in the deprivation determined by suspension and distance.