Beyond Order and Madness. Death and the Hereafter in the Ethnographies of Ernesto De Martino

Journal title PARADIGMI
Author/s Fabrizio M. Ferrari
Publishing Year 2013 Issue 2013/2
Language Italian Pages 16 P. 51-66 File size 118 KB
DOI 10.3280/PARA2013-002005
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

The paper discusses the views of Ernesto De Martino on thanatology. Although De Martino worked extensively of mortuary rituals and myths and beliefs related to death, little has been said about his last interview, Rapporto sull’aldilà ("Report on the hereafter"). The author explores here the philosophical and anthropological argument of De Martino vis-à-vis themes such as ritual, presence and labour, and the way they relate to death as a cultural construction. Borrowing from Marxist anthropology and continental philosophy, the paper argues that De Martino was eventually sceptical of classic phenomenology and developed a philosophical approach which was deliberately polemic towards the dominating ideology of the 1950s and 1960s academic study of religion.

L’articolo intende discutere la posizione di Ernesto De Martino nel campo della tanatologia. Sebbene De Martino abbia indagato temi quali rituali funebri, miti e credenze relative alla morte in gran parte della sua produzione scientifica, poco è stato detto circa la sua ultima intervista, il Rapporto sull’aldilà, apparso postumo nel 1965 su L’Europeo. In questo articolo, l’autore analizza il pensiero filosofico e antropologico di De Martino rispetto a te- matiche a lui care (presenza, rito, mito, lavoro) e il modo in cui si interfacciano al tema della morte nel sociale. Basandosi su una metodologia costruita sull’antropologia Marxista e la filosofia post-strutturalista, l’autore analizza la critica di De Martino al pensiero fenomenologico corrente ed sostiene che l’analisi sulla morte e aldilà permette una più chiara presa di coscienza del radicalismo demartiniano in merito a temi di ordine sociale.

Keywords: Apophaticism, death, hereafter, Marxist anthropology, phenomenology, thanatology.

  1. Adorno T. (2005). Reason and sacrifice. In: Mendieta E., ed., The Frankfurt School on Religion. Key Writings by the Major Thinkers. London and New York: Routledge: 149-175.
  2. Angelini P. (2001). L’uomo sul tetto. Mircea Eliade e la “storia delle religioni”. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
  3. Bakhtin M.M. (2004). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.
  4. Bauman Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  5. Bourdieu P. (2007). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  6. Cherchi P. (1996). Il peso dell’ombra. L’etnocentrismo critico di Ernesto De Martino e il problema dell’autocoscienza culturale. Napoli: Liguori.
  7. Cherchi P. (2010). Il cerchio e l’ellisse. Etnopsichiatria e antropologia religiosa in Ernesto De Martino: le dialettiche risolventi dell’“autocritica”. Cagliari: Aìsara.
  8. Colebrook C. (2011). Time and Autopoiesis: the Organism has no Future. In: Guillaume L. and Hughes J., eds., Deleuze and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 9-28, DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638642.001.000
  9. Crapanzano V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons. An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
  10. Daboo J. (2010). Ritual, Rapture and Remorse. A study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento. Bern: Peter Lang.
  11. Dentith S. (1995). Bakhtinian Thought. London and New York: Routledge.
  12. Derrida J. (1992). How to Avoid Speaking: Denials. In: Coward H. and Foshay T., eds., Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press: 73-142.
  13. Derrida J. (1992). Postscriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices. In: Coward H. and Foshay T., eds., Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press: 283-323.
  14. Derrida J. (2007). Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge.
  15. Di Nola A. (1998). How Critical was De Martino’s “Critical Ethnocentrism” in Southern Italy? In: Schneider J., ed., Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country. Oxford and New York: Berg: 157-175.
  16. Durkheim É. (2005). Suicide. A Study in Sociology (Reprint 1897). London and New York: Routledge.
  17. Eagleton T. (2009). Reason, Faith, and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  18. Ferrari F.M. (2012). Ernesto De Martino on Religion. The Crisis and the Presence. Sheffield: Equinox.
  19. Flood G. (2012). The Importance of Religion. Meaning and Action in Our Strange World. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
  20. Foucault M. (1977). Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon.
  21. Foucault M. (2007). Madness and Civilization (Reprint 1961). London and New York: Routledge.
  22. Ginzburg C. (2010). Mircea Eliade’s Ambivalent Legacy. In: Wedemeyer C.K. and Doniger W., eds., Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press: 307-323, DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394337.001.000
  23. Golding S. (1988). The Concept of the Philosophy of Praxis in the Quaderni of Antonio Gramsci. In: Nelson C. and Grossberg L., eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press: 543-563.
  24. Lotman J. (2005). On the Semiosphere (First published in Russian in 1984). Sign System Studies, 33, 1: 205-229.
  25. Marx K. and Engels F. (1947). The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers.
  26. Mauss M. (1934). Les Techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 32, 3-4: 271-293.
  27. Mauss M. (1966) The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West.
  28. Mukharji P.B. (2012). Chandshir Chikitsha. A nomadology of subaltern medicine.
  29. In: Hardiman D. and Mukharji P.B., eds., Medical Marginality in South Asia. Situating Subaltern Therapeutics. London and New York: Routledge: 85-108.
  30. Negri A. (2009). The Labor of Job. The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
  31. Ricoeur P. (2009). Living up to Death. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226713502.001.000
  32. Saïd E.W. (2003). Orientalism (Reprint 1978). London: Penguin Books.
  33. Weil S. (2001). Oppression and Liberty (Reprint 1955). London and New York: Routledge.
  34. Žižek S. (2007). On Belief. London and New York: Routledge.

Fabrizio M. Ferrari, Beyond Order and Madness. Death and the Hereafter in the Ethnographies of Ernesto De Martino in "PARADIGMI" 2/2013, pp 51-66, DOI: 10.3280/PARA2013-002005