Includere marginalizzando. Etnografia del volontariato in una Festa de l'Unità a Bologna

Festa de l’Unità is a unique case of political festival in Italy from the point of view of its persistence and its diffusion. Based on ethnographic data gathered in a Partito democratico branch in Bologna, the article analyzes the role of Festa’s practices in structuring voluteers’ participation, an aspect which has been scarcely covered by existing literature, which mainly associates participation with ideological adherence and the need for sociality. The article shows the Festa de l'Unità as an event fragmented event and distributed over time, in which preparatory activities are at least as crucially important as the actual festive event in building the sense of participation. With a focus on the different organizational levels on which volunteering is distributed, the research has allowed to identify both a set of factors and processes that support participation, and the centrality of forms of structuration that together include and place a significant part of volunteering on the organization’s margins, regulating access to scarce resources, such as power and recognition.