"The War of the Saints": Religion, Politics, and the Poetics of Time in a Sicilian Town

Following the interpretation proposed by Angelo Torre, who perceives some crucial aspects of the relationship between religion, power and ritual in modern Italy, the first objectiv of my paper will be to show how the political, ceremonial, and religious contraposition which, from the early sixteenth century, has divided two parishes—parties of Catalfaro, a town in southeast Sicily, where I did fieldwork, may even now be interpreted in jurisdictional terms. I am interested in interpreting the relationships between external powers, incorporated meanings, and, in my ethnographic case, “religious” and/or “political representations and performances. In short, such choices imply an analytical look at the “social poetics” of time, memory and identity. In the Sicilian case that I studied the almost paroxystic attention to the past and the enacting of peculiar poetics of history have for at least four centuries been central to local ways of playing out the religious and political conflict, and therefore of constructing identity. The second objective of this paper will be to show the concrete practices and the contexts in which this construction of the past takes place, and to reflect on some of the problems posed by an anthropological reading of the relationships between political conflict, religion, and historical imagination.