Rileggendo “Folklore e profitto”. Patrimoni immateriali, mercati, turismo

Starting from the anticipatory notes of Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani’s Folklore e profitto [1973], the paper seeks to critically articulate the interesting relation between cultural heritage, capitalistic market and mass media, updating the analysis, also, to the most recent forms of the use of media in promoting and valorizing such traditions. What emerges is a twist of cultural heritage toward consumerism that imposes to anthropologists and cultural heritage scholars new challenges and questions and a late-modern rethinking of critical categories as commodification, alienation and fetishization. A central question, finally, arises about who and what should be today the social actors asked to decide about these processes of cultural manipulation in the new post-industrial and globalized scenario, characterized, inter alia, from a generalized economic crisis.