Territorial collective identities and the internet. Processes of individuation of Siena’s neighbourhoods

This article brings together philosophical anthropologist Hemuth Plessner’s views on identities with geographer Anssi Paasi’s concepts of border and boundary. Plessner viewed personal identity as a kind of ‘void’ able to coordinate internal and external personal relations in such a way that an imagined unity unfolds. This happens through a process of individuation understood as both at once persisting as and becoming that imagined unity. It is shown here that this perspective can be transferred to the collective level by referring to the work of Paasi who demonstrates that the processes of institutionalizing social boundaries and spatial borders are the critical moments in the formation of territorial collective identities. These two concepts are particularly useful for understanding the historical dynamics by which social and spatial orders reproduce and change in relation to social, political and technological alterations. This theoretical discussion is developed here by examining ethnographic and digital data relating to the neighbourhoods of Siena’s historic city centre, the contrade, and the urban festival, the Palio di Siena, in which they constitute the main protagonists. This case shows that the neighbourhoods engage with the internet in order to maintain control over their collective identities vis-a-vis potentially global audiences.