Alas there are only sixteen of us left: social disintegration, identity transformation, and visual changes in a rural Italian village

The aim of this research is to explore the identity of a small community in the globalization era using a visual sociological approach. The place is Valle di Soffumbergo, a little village in northeast Italy. This village has changed radically in the last fifty years, not only in landscape, building, and human activity, but also in the values people ascribe to these transformations. After a presentation of this community of only sixteen residents, this paper will focus on the methodological framework. Three methods used in this research will be examined: photographic fieldwork, re-photography, and photo elicitation. Then I’ll look closely at the relations among identity and rural tourism in Valle’s community. Places have always been connected with identity but now, in liquid modernity, globalisation and commodification change the meanings of local material culture and rural landscape images by trying to follow the wants of the “tourist gaze.” New visual symbolic markers sign the landscape and the transformations of public and private spheres. Beyond the manifest changes there are some invisible ones: these are the signs of a lost agriculture only old residents recognize. I’ll claim that recreational and cultural events, organized by the association called “Proloco,” are the main occasions where global meets the local. In these events the old agricultural and the new post-industrial society stand face-to-face; the survival of the agricultural culture meets the recreational intent for the new use of the village and its environs. In Valle di Soffumbergo the old residents and the newcomers have to negotiate their points of view. Oral history, invented traditions, material culture, landscape, celebrations, and food change their meaning in accordance with a market oriented approach, which is incomprehensible for that vanishing agricultural world. Many authors (Bauman, 2003; Appadurai, 1996) have noticed how the world is increasingly ‘deterritorialized’ and consequently how the significance of space and place has been transformed. In this research the focus is the impact of glocalisation (Robertson and White 2004) on social groups and how it affects the perceived identities of the village. According to Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman 2000), the principal characteristics of our post-modern society can be ascribed in the category of the liquidity. One of the elements of modernity is the development of a strategy for a rural tourism economy. The “nostalgia” for traditions and the quaint representations of the past (which have an extensive role in the effort to market a renewed and reinvented local identity in a global scenario) inform the tourist gaze (Urry 1990). Visual sociology allows the study of these material and cultural changes, helping us to understand how global and local values merge within this community. Research into the analysis of landscape is undertaken by geography, anthropology, history, semiotics, and cultural studies (Duncan 1993; Feld 1996). Also, Visual Sociology is now used to study rural communities. Consider, for example, the aspect of particularly meaningful architectures in the panorama (Burgin 1995), the agricultural works with particular attention to the procedures and the employed technology (Harper 2001), the social lifetime and modes of aggregation (Schwartz 1989), or the transformations of the agricultural landscape (Beilin 2005). Visual Sociology has been the approach used in this empirical research, following Douglas Harper’s research on lost agriculture (Harper 2001) and Charles Suchar’s studies on gentrification (Suchar 2004). The method has been a combination of Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990; Glaser 1967) and Shootings Scripts approach (Suchar 1997), re-photography (Rieger 1996), and photo elicitation (Collier and Collier 1986). The visual as a sign, symbol, or representation constructs a sense of place and is central in communicating identity. Therefore, the photo-elicitation technique allows us to discover the different values that social groups ascribe to the same images of Valle and to discern how cultural differences can modify what we see.