Francesco Faeta

Università di Messina

Passion play and via crucis in northern Italy: History of art and social anthropology

2011-2012: Spring

Francesco Faeta is Professor of Cultural and Visual Anthropology at the University of Messina (Italy), where he is Vice-director of the Department of Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the PhD Program Anthropology and Cultural Studies. He is also Director of the School of Visual Ethnography (SEV) at the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione Integrata (College of Photography and Integrated Communications) in Rome.
He has been appointed guest speaker at several seminars and lessons; in Italian Universities and abroad (University of Calabria, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', University of Siena, University of Torino, University of Palermo, University of Basilicata, College "Suor Orsola Benincasa" of Naples, University of Salzburg, University of Toulouse, University of Paris " La Sorbonne", École Pratique des Hautes Études, École Française de Rome, University of Valladolid, University of La Curuña, etc.). Dr. Faeta's essays and ethnographic photographs have been published in the most reputable Italian reviews and in some of the most valued foreign reviews, including "Terrain" and "Gradhiva" in France. His essays and works have been translated in French, English, Spanish, German, Rumanian and Hungarian.
Director of an operative staff of the Research Project "Cultural Heritage" of CNR and, for Franco Angeli, publisher in Milan, of the collection "Imagines. Studi visuali e pratiche della rappresentazione" (Imagines. Visual studies and practices of the representation), he was a member of the National Committee for the Study of the Anthropological Heritage, founded by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Cultural Affairs. He is currently a member of AISEA (Italian Association for Ethnological and Anthropological Studies) and holds a board position at SISF (Italian Society for the Study on Photography).
Dr. Faeta has performed extensive research in the field of anthropology of Europe, focusing on Southern Italy and, in it, especially on Visual Anthropology production, the social and cultural organization of territories and folk- architectures, the ethnological and anthropological museums, and popular religious beliefs and the dynamics of festivals and rituals. He has a particular interest in the relationships between Anthropology and Art History, mainly in the field of popular religion, and is now engaged in the study of the cultural imaginary related with the making of Italian Nation-State; in a wide research project, carried on at an European scale, in the theoretical perspective of an Anthropology of memory, on cemeteries and remembrance techniques in the urban and rural contexts; in the study of the (ancient and contemporary) holy drama of Cerveno (Brescia), in Northern Italy.