The actual crisis of anthropology is examined in relation to its wide public success. Anthropology has prospered and the anthropologists have proliferated becoming more specific. But the theoretical debate has come to a halt over the last decades. The article suggests that both the methodology and the form of expression of the ethnographic report have developed and then become crystallized around actual protocols. A critique of the dichotomy Subject/Object, namely the key discussion about the notion of Otherness, is here reexamined as the testimony for an immanent “non-protocolar” character of anthropology. This critique together with the end of anthropology as tekhne, i.e. as protocolar activity, will allow anthropology to go on enhancing many other social and non social sciences. The article discusses the re-definition of anthropology in the context of Daseinanalysis and, therefore the changing relation between man and power, that is between the social actor and the post-Euclidean State in the era of the tekhne.

La via d’uscita dal tentativo di globalistica riduzione dell’antropologia a semplice tekhne e raccolta protocollare di dati può e deve essere ritrovata in un rinnovato rapporto con la ricerca sul terreno. L’antropologia applicata, intesa come impegno sociale di una pratica quotidiana di relazione all’Altro, mostra in questa raccolta di articoli di giovani ricercatori italiani tutte le sue potenzialità di costruttrice di socialità, affrancando la disciplina dal ruolo al quale spesso la si è voluta destinare: ancilla del colonialismo ieri e della globalizzazione oggi o semplice e autoreferente esercizio intellettuale relativo a esotismi e varie curiosità, di fatto funzionale allo status quo.

raccolta di saggi originali sul concetto di "viaggio" in antropologia

Se l’antropologia è il discorso sull’uomo, e l’uomo è tale in società, può questo discorso articolarsi per sé, indipendentemente dal discorso sul non-umano o, quanto meno, sullo extra-umano? Può l’uomo parlare di sé senza considerare ciò che è altro da sé? Rileggendo la Genesi possiamo immaginare che la relazione fra Dio, Adamo ed Eva, fosse proprio la relazione fra Dio, Adamo ed Eva. E di questa relazione poco sappiamo, se non che fosse una relazione di perfetto amore. In quella relazione, di Dio non sappiamo molto. Di Adamo sappiamo che era stato creato e che era un essere al quale era stato dato un nome, ma di che essere si trattasse davvero, poco sappiamo. Lo stesso vale per Eva. E dal momento in cui questa relazione viene a modificarsi, quella situazione si trasforma, traumaticamente, diremmo. La separazione dell’uno dagli altri, statuita da una nuova forma di residenza, stabilisce la nascita di Dio e dell’Uomo oltre a certificare l’inizio della storia: nasce l’Uomo ma nasce anche Dio.

Anthropology has become very popular over the past decades. We have witnessed a proliferation of anthropologists and anthropologies but the theoretical debate and the epistemological reflection of the discipline have come to a full stop. It seems that anthropology has reduced itself to a tekhne among many others, characterizing itself – according to the author – as «Atlantic anthropology», a protocolar anthropology in thrall to the dominating ideologies of the financial markets. The renewed discussion on the concepts of development and cooperation – concepts which have deeply marked the past three decades of social sciences and the current crystallization of anthropology – that is of contemporary economy, represents an opportunity to revivify and deepen the impact of anthropological theory. It is an epistemological and political impact with remarkable social and scientific consequences which is mostly detectable in one of the declinations of anthropology, i.e. applied anthropology, when and if intended as committed anthropology that founds its methodology and its way of being on fieldwork: a continuous dialogue with “alterity” in which the only thinkable “alienity” is represented by the tekhne and by the financial markets which support and promulgate it as omnipresent and almighty verbum. Keywords: applied anthropology, committed anthropology, financial market, alterity, tekhne

Can we speak of a Berlin School of Anthropology? During the XXth century the Institut für Ethnologie of the Freien Universität had an intense research activity and a significant plurality of theoretical approaches. Particularly, at the end of the 70’s a wide group of researchers gathered in Berlin around the IfE. These scholars not only focused their attention on specific geographical areas (above all Northeast Africa and Central Asia) but also developed common themes which led to the debate on the methodology and epistemology of Anthropology. Research activities catalysed around charismatic figures of German and European Anthropology and this led to the promotion of the idea of long-term fieldwork and to a particular attention to the critical definition of the qualities of ethnological knowledge. With the development and the application of the notion of imaginäre Ethnografie and with the theorization of the modified states of consciousness, the relationship between der Wissenschaftler und das Irrationale – to recall the title of a book published during those years – could finally be reconsidered in a continuous dialogue with researchers such as Hans Peter Duerr and Paul Feyerabend. This is how what I would like to define as “the Berlin stream of Anthropology” was born; and many scholars who later left the IfE for the wide world may or may not recognize themselves in it.

The research done in the 50’s on schizophrenia leads first of all to the hypothesis and then to the theory of the double bind. The double bind appears after a thorough investigation of the notion of paradox and its effect in the pragmatic of human communication as a particularly complex form of communication with noteworthy therapeutic potentialities, if its shapes differ from the schizogenic double bind. This work takes the therapeutic double bind into consideration and defines it as such on the basis of its specific structure which is contextualized in states of trance, and not on the basis of its generic use in therapy, i.e. hypnosis is defined as its specific field of practice. The structure of the double bind shows its elasticity and efficency both in the process of hypnotic trance induction and in the induction of ritual trance. It is also efficient in maintaining the state of trance through the facilitation of dissociation processes which allow the person to elaborate new constellations of relationships and can therefore finally exploit the modified state of consciousness.

Financial economy reigns over the contemporary world and powerfully and overwhelmingly transforms organizations and social structures. It is about a world organized more geometrico – which is almost chorally constructed in successive phases that are analytically described in this article by the author – in which quantitative and mathematical relations go hand in hand with decision making devices which are highly verticalized and automatized: this new order is the order of the financial markets which, by now, sets itself up as the representative of the current rule of law. The language of measure and res extensa permeates the daily life of contemporary societies, modifies the actual languages in both their lexicon and syntax – through an outrageous exaltation of the subject-object relation – and establishes a factual consensus to this antique utopia which is finally realized. Everything that intends to escape the hegemony of the res extensa – above all persons, local and descent groups, societies – looks for space in the dominion of virtual reality where the social actor who tries to break free from the sole part of consumer and from the attribution of protocol identities. Anthropology is therefore called upon to elaborate a critical thought as a contribution to the foundation of a new res-man relationship and therefore also of a new man-man relationship in the context of an ongoing apocalypse. The duty of the anthropologist, as the author suggests, does not consists in the trivial although sophisticated practice of a tekhne anymore but rather reveals itself as the practice of testimony and demand for the right that every society should have to signify the axiological beginning of world eschatology. The duty of the anthropologist should then consist in the practice of a “different way to think” the history of man.

L’economia finanziaria impera nel mondo della contemporaneità, trasformando violentemente organizzazioni e strutture sociali. La realizzazione di un mondo ordinato more geometrico nel quale rapporti quantitativi e matematici si coniugano con meccanismi decisionali altamente verticalizzati e automatizzati ha infine avuto luogo: questo nuovo ordine è l’ordine dei mercati finanziari. Il linguaggio della misura e della res extensa permea la vita quotidiana delle società contemporanee, modificando perfino le lingue nel lessico e nella sintassi – attraverso un’abnorme esaltazione del rapporto soggetto-oggetto –, e istituendo un consenso fattuale e del tutto acritico ai rapporti dominanti, sussunti nel cosiddetto main stream. Tutto quanto intende sottrarsi all’impero della res extensa – persone, gruppi locali e di discendenza, società – cerca spazi nei domini della realtà virtuale. L’antropologia è così chiamata a dover elaborare un pensiero critico per contribuire alla fondazione di un nuovo rapporto res-uomo e quindi uomo-uomo nel contesto di un’apocalisse in divenire. Il suo compito non consiste più nel triviale per quanto sofisticato esercizio di una tekhne ma si rivela come esercizio di rivendicazione del diritto di ogni società a significare l’inizio assiologico dell’escatologia mondiale, dunque come pratica di un “pensare diversamente” la storia dell’uomo. Ogni società al di fuori del main stream può e deve rappresentare un’occasione di riflessione e di ripensamento dei processi di reificazione e di riduzione dell’uomo al mono-ruolo del consumatore.

A un secolo di distanza dalla pubblicazione di Der Bourgeois. Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen, 1913, le crisi economiche nel capitalismo, in particolare nel capitalismo monopolistico e maggiormente nella sua versione anglosassone, così come le sue trasformazioni studiate da Werner Sombart – l’unico “professore”, secondo Friedrich Engels, ad aver compreso Das Kapital –, perdurano e risultano di tale portata da squassare le basi dei già precari ordini mondiali e dei tradizionalmente presunti equilibri internazionali. L'articolo tratta dell'introduzione al riesame di questo lavoro compiuto a opera di numerosi studiosi italiani.

All those social and political projects aiming at the promotion of justice and morality have been labelled “utopia” – even if they will not be realized – after the publication of Thomas More’s work. But a specialist of rhetoric, and a fortiori an able rhetorician such as More, connected the word topoi first of all with the meaning loci communes, just like Aristotle, Cicerone and Boezio: recurrent arguments, organized in a conventional shape, even stereotyped and functional to the construction of the oration. The persuasive tale realized by the rhetorician. And the island of More, to More’s own eyes and to the eyes and ears of his readers and listeners, was anything but a recurrent argument or stereotype, and still less an dialectic argumentation: it actually was a “non-topos”. The article also suggests that it is essentially thanks to its non dialectic style of argumentation that the actual history of utopia and utopian thought settled between philosophy and fiction, theology and politology, economy and sociology, science and science fiction.

Today the processes of objectivation and reification reach all fields of social life. The institutions of trance notwithstanding their strong social, political, religious and existential values seem to have difficulties to whithstand this continuous and widespread interpretation and the reduction to sanitary institutions, that is, to compensative forms of modern medical therapy. This implies nevertheless the possibility of deep reflection on the concept of “therapy” and on the relation between therapy and the construction of a world of relations between social actors and also between social actors and the social and cosmological construct. The analysis of the modified states of consciousness, or more appropriately of the alternative states of consciousness, allows thus the particular analysis of “taking care of the Other”, this “taking care of the Other” being realized in the conditions of an alternative state of consciousness.

Anthropology has maybe too often confined itself in an analysis of liturgies and rituals – ideal or actual behaviours which are acknowledged by the social actor as addressed to supernatural beings or agents –, providing extraordinarily precise descriptions but renouncing to comprehend and relate the discourse on Man about himself -and implicitly about God- which is nevertheless traceable in all societies. Anthropology has avoided confrontation with the theologies, although present in all societies and inscribed in cosmogonies, theogonies, anthropogonies, ethnogonies, of which amazingly rich mythologies bear much more than plain traces. Anthropology has done so because it has given way to tekhne which is rampant nowadays. It has surrendered to tekhne because tekhne allows the elision of doubt. And yet, no matter how much one technifies it, anthropology does only exist as complementary to theology and vice versa, at least since the beginning of history. This relation was very clear to scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Maurice Leenhard, Marcel Mauss or Meyer Fortes. After all, has there ever been a liturgy without a theology, a ritual without a cosmology? A sacrifice without a God, no matter how small? Sacrifice is a ritual par excellence.

L'Autore, nell'ambito del rapporto generale tra diritto informale e diritto formale, e cioè tra diritto della comunità e dei valori e diritto dello stato, affronta la giustizia informale gestita direttamente dalle jirga dei pashtun e delle pene previste dal diritto informale per i delitti compiuti. Le jirga sono una sorta di assemblea degli "anziani", operanti a livello locale, e parallelamente alle corti primarie, secondarie e d'appello di Kabul. L'Autore illustra come sono composte e operano tali jirga. Una seconda parte dell'articolo riporta analiticamente le pene per ogni singolo delitto, secondo le categorie giuridìche del poor, del sharm e del nanawati. Nel caso le parti non accettino la decisione delle jirga, allora interverrà la corte statale. L'Autore conclude che jirga e Stato rappresentano un equilibrio tra comunità locale e Stato, che prende le mosse dalla querela discussa a livello di jirga, che così si configura come una sorta di giudice di pace.

The desire to compare the European unification project with the recognition of “natural homogeneity”, then self legitimating, hides sometimes the attempt to restore political projects failed entirely contingent to historical periods more or less recent. The case of the Euroregion, which sees in the center region of Friuli Venezia Giulia is a particularly significant example. The institutional heterogeneity of this idea of Euroregion gives way to the realization of the only concrete objective of an area of hyper-libera1 economics.

Identities, and ethnic identities in particular, are the in fieri result of complex social and cultural processes which show how much the identities of the social actors are multiple, in transition, situational and constantly negotiated. However, the structure of the dominating social and political order of the contemporary post-global era coincides with the order of the financial markets. Based upon the ethnographies of Latin America this article claims that this new order interacts antagonistically with the structures which are acknowledged, proposed or anyway regulated by both the national juridical systems (customary law, Constitution, civil and penal law) and international law toward processes of fixation and reification of the identities. The social actor is thus reduced and constrained in the mono-role of consumer up to indebtedness and to his consequent epiphany as res. The way to a law without State is thus open: an icon and embodiment of elitist ideologies that are at the same time active and hidden but deeply inscribed the new order of the financial markets which convey social Darwinism and the subordination of man to financial capital.

In the Post-Global Reality Virtuality Comes to the Fore While Social Reality, Alfred Schutz’s "world of life", steps behind acquiring the qualification and quality of backstage. Who are then the priests of the cult of virtuality, i.e. of the present day process through which the social actors are reduced to being spectators, profane spectators? The term backstage refers to a “hidden world”, to the hidden world which is not part of the self-representation of society in the post-global era, the era in which the grands-récits have not disappeared but are more than ever boldly active thanks to their being in hiding. The grands-récits in hiding allow the hiding of the actual stage of the social actor’s deepest identity to himself rendering him thus unable to assume and institute identities –whether in accordance with or alien to his deepest identity within the complex of the post-global self-representations.

L’economia finanziaria impera nel mondo della contemporaneità, trasformando potentemente e prepotentemente organizzazioni e strutture sociali. Si tratta della realizzazione di un mondo ordinato more geometrico – costruito pressoché coralmente e per fasi successive – nel quale rapporti quantitativi e matematici si coniugano con meccanismi decisionali altamente verticalizzati e automatizzati: questo nuovo ordine è l’ordine dei mercati finanziari. Un ordine che ormai si erge a rappresentare il corrente rule of law. Il linguaggio della misura e della res exstensa permea difatti la vita quotidiana delle società contemporanee, modificando le stesse lingue nel lessico come nella sintassi – attraverso un’abnorme esaltazione del rapporto soggetto-oggetto –, e istituendo un consenso fattuale a questa antica utopia finalmente realizzata: la matematizzazione e determinazione del mondo. (Palmisano 2012a) Tutto quanto intende sottrarsi all’impero della res extensa – innanzitutto persone, gruppi locali e di discendenza, società – cerca spazi ormai nei domini della realtà virtuale, dove è confinato l’attore sociale che tenta di sottrarsi al monoruolo del consumatore e all’attribuzione di identità protocollari. (Palmisano 2010) L’antropologia è così chiamata a dover elaborare un pensiero critico per contribuire alla fondazione di un nuovo rapporto res-uomo e quindi uomo-uomo nel contesto di un’apocalisse in divenire. (Palmisano 2012b)

In this article the author discusses the role of democracy in the post-global context. By “post-global” he intends that the grands récits (systems of thought and ideologies) which according to Lyotard were doomed to disappear in the post-modern era are still present and active but that they are not obvious anymore: they work underground within the processes of economic, social, political production. The author proceeds by examining the three principles on which societies order themselves: the sharing and establishment of blood ties – or time ties –, the sharing and establishment of space ties – or territorial ties – and, finally, the sharing of common action such as planning actions for the future. The author argues that democracy is the only form of political organization which is able to guarantee the possibility to these three principles of ordering the world to co-exist in such a way that none of the three principles can survive or prosper at the expense of the other two. But today this balance is threatened by a new element which sprouts from the third principle – the sharing of common action – in this case, the order of the market: a new transnational order which is also juridical, the order produced by the relations between economic actors becomes juridical. The State, intended here as expression of the territorial principle of organization of a society, is contractually week in this new context which the author calls the post-global context, and transnational holdings easily colonize the Lebenswelt. According to the author, it is not possible to practice democracy, to have strength as territorial unit, without the public and visible discussion of other ties, which are not territorial. The practice of assembly dialogue is therefore essential. He further states that democracy is a tension and not a guaranteed condition or state that one can keep to oneself.

L'Autore analizza un mito di fondazione, "Salomone e la regina di Saba", all'esempio della sua recezione in Etiopia. In quanti modi può essere trasmesso un racconto, una fiaba, una leggenda? E un mito, con la sua specificità? L’evocazione di fatti e dinamiche sociali, paradigmatizzati in figure e vicende di Dei, di esseri divini e di eroi, di imprese in mondi che appaiono spesso come copie invertite o al negativo del mondo degli uomini, non è confinata ai mezzi espressivi della sola letteratura orale o scritta. Il mythos trova straordinaria espressione anche in azioni sceniche, come il mimo e la danza e naturalmente il teatro. Gli attori e i danzatori reinterpretano il materiale mitologico: modellandolo attraverso l’idioma sacrale, rappresentano personaggi ed evocano azioni note a tutti o quasi tutti gli attori sociali di una determinata comunità o società. E in questa rappresentazione è la stessa società degli uomini a essere rappresentata. Il nostro pensiero analitico ha facilità a identificare il racconto con le forme verbali e logico-speculative della comunicazione, tralasciando spesso le forme non-verbali e analogiche della comunicazione; negligendo in primo luogo l’immagine, che pure è così onnipresente e rappresenta il medium forte, più appropriato per la diffusione del mito, anche solo per icone, soprattutto in contesti sociali plurilinguistici. La rappresentazione mitica si avvale infatti anche di statue, bassorilievi, coppe, dischi e naturalmente dipinti.

Vi sono monografie che incidono profondamente nella storia del pensiero Occidentale – sempre che vi sia un “pensiero Occidentale” – e Der Bourgeois. Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen, 1913, è una di queste. A un secolo di distanza, le crisi economiche nel capitalismo, in particolare nel capitalismo monopolistico e maggiormente nella sua versione anglosassone, così come le sue trasformazioni studiate da Werner Sombart – l’unico “professore”, secondo Friedrich Engels, ad aver compreso Das Kapital –, perdurano e risultano di tale portata da squassare le basi dei già precari ordini mondiali e dei tradizionalmente presunti equilibri internazionali. In questa nostra epoca, epoca post-globale nella quale le grandi narrazioni, grands récits, si conclamano come più che mai presenti benché velate se non nascoste, comunque inscritte nel linguaggio della contemporaneità, molti studiosi sono chiamati a rivolgere le loro attenzioni, i loro sforzi di ricerca, sui temi del capitalismo e sugli imprescindibili connessi concetti di transizione e di crisi. Parallelamente ai loro consueti interessi di ricerca, studiosi e ricercatori, sempre in crescente numero, perfino scostandosi dai propri usuali percorsi di ricerca, sono di fatto afferrati dagli herrschenden Verhältnissen e spinti a rivolgere il loro pensiero e la loro riflessione sulle verità ultime del capitalismo. Così profondamente permeante è in effetti il processo di colonizzazione del mondo-della-vita da esso operato.

raccolta di saggi originali sul concetto di "utopia"

The ritual trances are the expression of the institutionalization of modified states of consciousness. This essay identifies and proposes three major paradigms of institutionalization – vision, possession and ecstasy – and proceeds then to the analysis of the modes and modalities of ritualization and institutionalization of modified states of consciousness – initiation, therapy, liturgy and divination – which lead to a thematization of the structure of trance. Beginning with the discussion of the preceding ethnographies which contribute to the elaboration of a new general theory of trance and are at the same time the result of this same theory of trance – certainly not wholly formulated although much has been done – the author examines the ethnographic material on the zar cults of Ethiopia on the basis of his many years fieldwork in Ethiopia and in other ethnic, social, political and cultural contexts, always concentrated on ritual trances of vision, possession and ecstasy.