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La parola rituale, nel linguaggio comune è altamente inflazionata.
Tutto diventa rituale.
Come se si trattase della ciliegina sulla torta, la caratteristica esotica che aggiunge sapore al piatto insipido, alla situazione noiosa, all'atto ripetitivo.
A momenti scivolo nella doccia mi ritrovo tutte le boccette di magico sapore rituals della mia coinquilina tra le mani, l'algoritmo mi consiglia video di rituali coreani per avere la pelle di porcellana da una settimana, ahia punge profondamente le mie insicurezze oh no, apro un giornalino plastificato, ecco il rituale per dimagrire, ritrovare la femminilità? ritrovamela caro giornalino tu che sai, rituali tutti femminili questi, nessun capretto che fa una brutta fine qui, virile virile, solo spray al rosmarino sul cuoio capelluto per sentirmi donna e non pensare all'amante di mio marito. Guardo la mia pila di libri entrata nella mia stanza, grida contenuti scritti da uomini in crisi esistenziali, ricchi annoiati che si sono dati all'occulto e al sadomaso, così disincantati dal mondo. Ritualizzatemi sto cazzo.
Seguirò la massa, renderò la mia stessa scoperta dei rituali un rituale, cercherò di deritualizzare il dederitualizzabile. Nessun valore esplicativo, ma quanto suonerà figo.
Ripeto, ritualizzatemi sto cazzo.
⤷anthropology and ethnography supported by new multimedia languages, anthropology of the contemporary
the conceptualisation of ritual, rite, symbolic meaning
Tinbergen - four questions
Ritual morphology
Performance
De-ritualization?
Classic sociological theories: Durkheim, Weber, Lévi-Straus.
Dissolution of traditional networks of meaning, crisis of the modern concept of the individual, loss of relevance of the
ritual within the frame of social practices.
Ritual as pre-industrial, pre-modern model to be rejected, modernity as liberation from ritual.
Highest expression of the annulment of the individual in social conformity.
Sacred-profane dichotomy, ritual to be deciphered, two parts of human rationality economic+social, Malinowski with the functionalist theory.
Giglioli, Fele
Goffman, rite as the construction of morality and sociality
Turner, performance, liminarity, leisure
Clifford Geertz
shopping, devotion
De Martino, body-magic-modernity
De Martino ethnologist anthropologist, one of the first in Italy to do field research in teams, was born in 1908 a bourgeois, fascist then socialist. No fear of changing his mind is evident in his works. A contemporary world in modern italy but the cultural context becomes problematic. De Martino was profoundly influenced by phenomenology and existentialism, schools of thought that remained outside of the anthropological realm until few years ago. He is becoming more and more compelling to the anthropological studies scene thanks to this change in the mentality of the public, probably the crumbling of an everlastic eurocentrism, western centric view in all sciences ans studies. De Martino himself was surely influenced greatly by that point of view, so common in those years, still he struggled with the idea of his mentor, Croce, that drew a line between human and non-human, primitive and non-primitive. Croce insisted on presentism, the idea that all history is contemporary. Functionalists didn’t enjoy De Martino theories, as too philosophical and, surely, political.
De Martino delved deeply into phenomenology and existentialism, both of which were not part of the anthropological discourse until recently. His growing significance in anthropological studies seems linked to a changing public mindset, possibly indicating a change from the longstanding Eurocentric perspective that once pervaded various scientific disciplines, and we all know that.
De Martino himself was undeniably shaped by this outlook of society. However, he was against the ideas of his mentor, Croce, who firmly drew distinctions between “human” and “non-human”, the “primitive” and the “non-primitive”. Croce was all about presentism, saying that all historical events are contemporaneous.
De Martino's theories faced resistance from functionalists who found them too philosophical and overly political.
One of the main aspect of his work was the "critical ethnocentricm", his concerns in the postwar ideological struggles and historical movements, that bring us to his subalternity concept, subalternity can be connected to his exploration of the dynamics between dominant and subordinate cultural elements, especially in the context of religious practices, his focus in how marginalized and subaltern groups expressed their social, economic, and existential struggles through cultural practices, such as rituals and beliefs. Negotiation, coping mechanism to regain identity. He dindn't really use the term subalternity ho we now see it in postcolonial theories, but still his works helped a new understanding and humanisation of marginalized and oppressed groups.
Gayatri Spivak - postcolonial studies.
il mondo magico, problematic work, written while an anti-fascist partisan, 4 years ('48), he tried to distance himself from the past, close to Crucian liberalism. The concept of presence emerges.
Questions of extrasensory paranormal powers (clairvoyance, magical healing...) are addressed, the attempt is not to condemn is to go beyond and see how to restore a statute of reality to these phenomena, he tries to give cultural value, a rare vision of anthropology.
what emerges is that man can influence nature, Mircea Eliade, historian of the sacred, does not appreciate the magical world, he says that de martino creates an precultural idealism.
paroxysm.
Tarantism, mass hysteria
crisis of being in the world, rootedness that flows through culture, rootedness is lost and so begins the crisis that lowers man into the pure organic, pure vitality, freudian impulses, unconscious energy urges. Culture is enhancement of the world, there is horizon background natural limit where man acts vertically, culture is momentum, subject to crisis which then brings man down. De Martino feels the detachment that southern culture has in relation to a European, Italian, broader context, he does not criticise it but analyses it, hence his desire to understand what the reasons are for living in a community that seems to be outside History. Meaning of contemporaneity?
tarantismo, mass hysteria, trance and hysterical delirium, convulsion and loss of consciousness. He is the first that looks for a different interpretation. Every bite is remorse, a bite symbolising discomfort (mourning, marriage, violence...), 95 per cent women in Salento up to that time referred to as female hysteria. Link between strong discomfort and marginality and subalternity of the population (second post-war period). Suffering incorporated. In Sicily similar but often men not women. St Paul's collective performance, trance of liberation, never definitive.
Heidegger - presence concept.
Domestication of the crisis, choral and dance externals, could manifest suffering unacceptable in reality, like carnival, outburst. The ritual device does not lead to cure but to healing, healing does not imply the end of pain, but the resurfacing of discomfort and the alleviation of sorrow. Tarantismo cultural institution, there are rules, there are ritual norms, disorder comes out in an orderly manner, there is plantus? ritual technical fiction, if not disorder would lead to irremediable crisis. Symbolism does not work Institutional blockade, tarantati lose healing and condemned by new society that imposes itself. In individual houses the tarantati are assisted by the community. Spider, poison, crisis, dance within the ritual system, embodied symbols.
Shamanism. unbearable normality, historical living and suffering, either you come out badly and sink (you eat people lol) or you make cultural resolutions. Scars remain, remorse is the scar.
Forgotten suburbs, discovery of Italian national identity, historical transition, denial of historical suffering, loneliness, power structures, social isolation and mental illness. Failure of tarantism good for De Martino as a crisis linked to historical conditions, but sceptical because the discomfort could have been translated into other instruments, only one instrument is taken away (e.g. carabiniere photo looking mad tarantato on the ground, who does not participate in the ritual, incomprehension). Criticism of the system through symbols.
Mystical crises. Lévy-Bruhl ecstasy. Order in the understanding of mysticism. Alcoholism? Transcultural phenomenon, also common traits. Tarantismo is not mysticism, no supernatural contact, saints (Carlo Severi) can heal but as gods can punish, complex relationship, no love as in mysticism (Christian and otherwise, generally). Saints from a theological and cultural point of view.
Freud vs. De Martino
the Dehistoricisation of the negative + Signorinelli
-you keep repeating stuff, cleancleanclean-
Dehistoricisation connected, from a philosophical and anthropological point of view, to the ethos of transcendence and the crisis of presence, applied to subaltern cultures (cultural exclusivism, and hegemonic cultures) a concept that can also be re-actualised by associating it with alienation in Marx and in Feuerbach.
How can dehistoricisation be extended to contemporary social phenomena? How to interpret the present rituals and its symbolic language?
Dehistoricisation is a protective occultation of the historicity of existence, where dehistoricisation means mystification/alienation from the present, from time and thus from History. Man 'makes history', constructs it, chooses what he wants to valorise, but when this capacity threatens the ethos, man, in order to protect himself, destorifies his 'making history' and institutes the mythical-ritual medium, thus dissociation from the present takes place. Through the mystification of history by the mythical-ritual symbol, man can escape the protruding situations, the unpredictable, the becoming. Man stands in history as if he were not there, finding refuge in a metahistorical plane, placed above it.
The dehistoricisation of the negative allows the universalisation of one's condition in a mythical-symbolic dimension, mediated by religion and ritual. Myth is narration, ritual is behaviour repeated with words and gestures of symbolic meaning. The whole then becomes a circuit aimed at resolving the crisis. When the negative prevails, there is a crisis, of existential misery simply called, in which the ethos of transcendence can no longer resolve the inner evil and pain transcends its own position, causing the individual to lose his conception of reality and the deconstruction of his own being.
The symbolic universes, which human groups have produced to date, have mostly had magical-religious cultural content. Magic and religion already rest on the idea of the existence of a transcendent world, which nourishes itself. Religion is a 'protective technique mediating values', capable of creating regimes of protected existence, above chaos, to counter the risk of passing with what passes (Károly Kerényi). Kosmoi that are isolated from the larger kosmos that is history. Religion with its symbolic stratagems contrasts the unrelated dehistoricisation (clinical madness) with the institutional dehistoricisation of becoming, the creation of a unitary, limited and limiting cosmos, a beautiful enclosure full of flowers.
In contemporary societies that pretend to be secularised, the dehistoricisation of the negative through magical-religious symbolism has not disappeared, on the contrary, it is reinforced by the development of symbolic languages that invest the spheres of economics (symbolic, conspicuous consumption) of politics (apocalyptic-millenarian projects, but also the figure of the leader and his charisma), of recreation and leisure (popularity and its allure, group membership and conflict, narcissistic exhibitionism and the 'symbolic' achievement of success, protagonism, individual affirmation).
homogenised western society, now lacking in myth? No, as humans able to use creativity to create new rituals in response to discomfort (e.g. covid time), no search for cure.
personal crisis vs. cultural crisis,
Magic of the South
crisis of the presence ideology of the compromise stiches and knots rituality symbolism pagan catholic syncretism
ethnographic research about the still present cultural forms, visible in new configurations, apotropaic and religious practices adressing moments of crisis, or cultural revival s such as the one currently turning the magical misfortune of an unmamable, infested villages into touristic destinations. To clarify the extent to which there are still some continuities between magic and religion as discussed here and the mechanisms by which we face "crises of presence" in our modern society.
magic vs rationality as one of the greatest theme that gave rise to the western civilization. From demonology to natural reinaissance magic. Southern catholicism withh its notes of gaudiness and exteriority, with its particular ceremonial and ritualistic flourished. Ceremonial magic, its psychological function. Links, passages, syncretisms, and compromises that connect extracanonical low magic with the modes of popular devotion and the liturgy's own official forms.
Jettatura ideology of compromise not the same as fascinazione (dark binding)
low forms of of cerimonial magic, not only formed by relics of archaic rituals, that sharply reveal the structural and functional features of the magical moment refined and sublimated also present in catholicism, but also by the particular magical tone of southern catholicism, crudeness and elementary quality,
euro mediterranean folkloristic data, crisis of mourning, hegemonic until the advent of catholicism.
End of the world, cultural apocalypse
The apocalypse, unfinished work. Entire peoples experience their own end of the world. America, scope of disaster, genocide and migration. De martino trying to connect personal and cultural crisis in the western context. He gets political, Marxist apocalypse. Apocalypses are experienced, upon the body, dimension of the crisis of presence (it is the fil rouge!) that is never experienced on an individual level but on a collective level, individual vs. collectivity returns, each crisis embedded in cultural context, embedded crisis. Psychopathological crisis, schizophrenia, borderline, crisis of the world is degraded, fragmented personality, in this case individual. But is the face always the body? There is always a lack of rooting in the world. We have shaped ourselves over time through culture, social/biological interweaving.
Religious syncretisms. Clara Gallini on land of remorse? Giordana Charuty, De Martino bibliography, french edition. Silvia Mancini, De Martino metapsychic.
There is no culture in which man does not set himself against the outside world, so it is not only this evil of western culture, but it has certainly weaponised it.
Living in the time of catastrophes, among the ruin of capitalism (Tsing), thinking about that is clear how to apply De Martino analysis over the feeling of anguish that loom our lives today.
https://www.amantropologiamedica.unipg.it/index.php/am/article/view/675/593
Not as individuals but as a society, after covid, few wars that fractured our western bubble, it could be interesting to study the rites we are celebrating to contain and exorcise apocalypse anxiety.
The identification of presence is not to be taken for granted. It is a fragile, precarious conquest, which can continually shift. In the magical world, the shaman intervenes to resolve crises and to discipline them culturally, he performs rites for the community that involve the descent into the abysses of chaos and the return, the reintegration of the self. In magism there is the redemption of presence, unstable in people's lives, exposed to the disintegration of self, enduring catastrophes, famines, wars. Losing oneself is an anthropological risk in every age, including our own.
Magism experiences are different from the relics of magical thinking that continually reappear in new forms influenced by unbridled consumerism and an absolute selfish individualism we all are influenced by.
“Può finire il mondo?”, scriveva De Martino, “chi così chiede e vaga col suo terrore di congettura in congettura, proprio perciò pone il finire del mondo, si immette nel corso del finire che non si trattiene più in nessun nuovo inizio, corre al termine sottraendosi all’unico compito che spetta all’uomo, cioè di essere Atlante, che col suo sforzo sostiene il mondo e sa di sostenerlo”.
Le apocalissi contemporanee, che denotano un senso di disagio della civiltà occidentale senza prospettiva di rigenerazione, un finire senza palingenesi, lo ossessionavano. La civiltà occidentale ha dei limiti e delle ambiguità, può essere criticata, non demonizzata. Nella nostra cultura ci sono i buchi neri e le risorse per ricominciare e andare avanti. E questa ambivalenza va risolta ogni giorno, a ogni risveglio, dal campo psicoanalitico a quello culturale. In un processo senza fine, c’è storia finché c’è questo processo”. Domani è un altro mondo.
spells, amulets
I enter my land dead, oozing with despair.
I can't really reabsorb anything here, unfortunately I breathe. I have to write everything down, if I write everything down, I will feel real Writewritewrite ritualsritualsrituals
folklore
Femina - Coro a Coro, Canti e Incanti, Voci in Ascolto
Apulia gateway to the East, "porta d'Oriente", land of migrants, crossroads of men, of people who flee and then return. Discovering Coro a Coro would soothe anyone's wounds. it is interesting to discover how silently fervent the art scene in Salento really is. I found myself in these meetings where many were young like me, all with their families rooted in the land, and they instead ran away, out of disappointment and need, free souls, weirdly nice people :)) I have never sung in my life, much less in a choir. I found myself singing in a dialect I do not speak, in Arabic, Albanian, Greek and in Italian, which seemed to me the most incomprehensible language of all. All in a circle, soothing the distances.
Celebration, ritual and healing.
Introduction to Maquams, Mawashahat, rhythmic patterns and oriental singing.
The Muwashah (plural of Muwashahat) serves as a vocal passage within the wasla, an integral part of the classical Arabic repertoire, a musical form born in Aleppo in the XVII century
Alan Lomax, Eugenio Barba, Odin Teatret, The living archive
https://fondazionebarbavarley.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/LA-FLIS-LIVING-ARCHIVE-ITA.pdf
https://fondazionebarbavarley.org/en/laflis/
Panofsky?
─── ・ 。゚☆: *.☽ .* :☆゚.・ 。゚☆: *.☽ .* :☆゚.・ ───
psychosis and spirituality, circles, social cognition
Jung approach, God image/God
Cults
prey on the vulnerable, growth industry.
Freedom of Mind by Steven Hassan
Cults In Our Midst by Margaret Singer
Aleister Crowley - The Paris Working
Alternative Spiritualities, New Religions, and The Reenchantment of the West by Christopher Partridge
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton
Esotericism in New Religious Movements by Olav Hammer
Virtually Religious: New Religious Movements and the World Wide Web by Douglas E. Cowan and Jeffrey K. Hadden
Something Peculiar about France: Anti-Cult Campaigns in Western Europe and French Religious Exceptionalism by Massimo Introvigne
Egyptian Book of The Dead
Witches, Wiccans, and Neo-Pagans: A Review of Current Academic Treatments of Neo-Paganism by Síân Lee Reid and Shelley Tsivia Rabinovitch
https://ia802202.us.archive.org/35/items/ThoughtReformAndThePsychologyOfTotalism/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism.pdf
false mystics, dualism, transcending the spiritual crisis
occult, aesthetic, media, boringness, violence
ritualised speech, language
ritual re‐actualizations, consumption
exorcising fear
algorithmic rituality
https://www.manifattureknos.org/knos/ Sudestudio http://sudestudio.com/en/ https://www.pugliasounds.it/en/
Jean Marc Caimi - Valentina Piccinini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR0GaHM4aMQ&ab_channel=LUCADePaolis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UssmrM_uSxY&ab_channel=NottedellaTaranta (grico - italian/greek dialect)
Porte d'Oriente, Accademia di Belle Arti Lecce + Venezia https://boa.unimib.it/retrieve/e39773b6-9cdd-35a3-e053-3a05fe0aac26/phd_unimib_818149.pdf Bicocca study Land Art - Parco dei Giganti, Nardò, Ulderico Tramacere, Massimo Donati (mappatura digitale interattiva del Campo dei Giganti) Via Francigena salentina -- Via dell’Olio
Alfredo Panzini's Dizionario moderno ("Modern Dictionary") in 1950 Racism, xenophobia, Lombroso, Niceforo,
Progetti di Rigenerazione Urbana e Territoriale ReGerOP
Alan Lomax https://archive.culturalequity.org/collections?search_api_fulltext=&member_of_op=empty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLcMrQhaQKY&list=PLjTm5BQoe47kvPq_WmNdkBvK5mYcDBAH2
https://land2.leeds.ac.uk/ritual-creativity-performance-contemporary-art-anthropology/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1005551410889
Ontology formulated by integrating Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Yuasa Yasuo's Eastern-based phenomenology of the body, and Psychoneuroimmunology
https://www.istitutoeuroarabo.it/DM/culti-extraliturgici-e-possessioni-aspetti-rituali-configurazioni-di-genere-nella-post-modernita/
In each of these accounts of embodiment, the flesh is revealed as simultaneously consisting of presence and absence, incarnation and transcendence, being and consciousness. As a result, the Heideggerian approach to ethics, which is based upon the relationship we have with being, can be realized on many levels of embodiment. This makes the cultivation of a holistic ethos more feasible. Such an ethos overcomes the shortcomings in Heidegger's ethics and, in particular, those revealed by Levinas, Levin, Krell, and Caputo.