Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Gubbio, Italy and Jessup, a town in the United States, share a common religious festival titled La Festa dei Ceri (the Festival of Candles). In this festival, they honor the patron saint of Gubbio, Saint Ubaldo Baldassini. It is not by chance that both cities celebrate this tradition, though. Immigrants from Gubbio came to Jessup in the late 1800s for work, and began to celebrate the tradition there as well. Today, Gubbio and Jessup share strong ties and recognize each other as sister cities. Being from Jessup myself, during the summer of 2017 I lived in Gubbio through a research grant from George Washington University to study how the culture of Gubbio and the Festa dei Ceri affected one another, what role the festival played in the lives of the people there, and how diaspora and interaction with a “home community” change a festival and its meaning in the diaspora community. This paper answers several overarching questions. How does globalization play a role in affecting two different cultures connected by a common history and a common festival? How might we better think of the concept of “tradition”? How do music, dialect, and different national languages affect and change communities split into different countries? The significance of this paper is to add to greater anthropological themes of globalization and to contribute to the developing study of diaspora; in addition, this paper establishes a basic framework by which future studies can better analyze diaspora and its intricacies.