A Baron, Some Guides, and a Few Ephebic Boys: Cultural Intimacy, Sexuality, and Heritage in Sicily”

In this paper I will assemble a comparative frame within which to read social practices connected with the construction/production of cultural collective identities in some Sicilian contexts. The case studies I collect refer to different historical periods (some Sicilian guides to eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Grand Tour voyagers, a few poor youths interacting with a gay German baron in the nineteenth- and twentieth- century Taormina, and two tour “guides” living today in a Sicilian UNESCO World Heritage List site.) and have an unequal analytic thickness (ranging from a pre-textual episode where a Sicilian male tour guide interacts in Taormina with two young European female tourists, to a very long ethnographic experience in a Southeastern Sicilian Town). Crisscrossing these case studies I would like to achieve two analytical goals. First I hope to shed light on some distinctive traits of the historical process through which Sicily and Sicilians entered, and accommodated themselves with, an hegemonic “global hierarchy of value”. Secondly, drawing from some recent critical interpretations, I will discuss the analytical relevance of Michael Herzfeld’s notion of “cultural intimacy” to read the historical and social process I describe.