Exploring the cohesive and social potential of a territorial ecomuseum in eastern sicily

Abstract

Thinking ethnographically with the work of Alberto Magnaghi, this paper explores the tensions and nuances embedded in the process of 'constructing territory' through the making of an ecomuseum in the Simeto River Valley in southern Italy. Conceptualised by Hugues de Varine and Henri Rivière, ecomuseums are community-based processes for reconstructing the material and immaterial signs of the past to revive a shared sense of territorial heritage. Based on our engagement in a long-term action research process, interviews and focus groups, participation in itineraries, and coordination activities, we trace how the group of actors involved in the Simeto Ecomuseum (SiEco) frame different relationships to the territory and articulations of heritage to nurture futures in the Simeto Valley. We explore the insurgent potential of this form of environmental heritagisation and local cultural transmission through an examination of diverse expressions of place attachment and political consciousness threaded through this process. We suggest that for ecomuseums to act as "territorial glue," meaning a site of social cohesion, they must generate a shared understanding and care of territory. This process, however, is complicated by diverse relationships to physical and cultural spaces made visible in the ways in which boundaries - between cities, ecologies and places, humans and non-humans - are (re)made and unmade in sometimes irreconcilable ways and in the difficulties of maintaining an ongoing and inclusive collective process over time. We call for the problematization of the meanings and actions of "territory", community, and inclusion in processes of cultural heritage-making