‘Nothing Is Less Universal than the Idea of Race’

In 1950, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a student of Marcel Mauss, was appointed to head a new Race Bureau at UNESCO in Paris whose mission was to combat racism with the tools of social science. Métraux had worked in the Americas since the 1930s, and his appointment allowed French social scientists to join the global struggle to remove prejudice ‘from the minds of men’. To what extent did French scholars help shape Métraux’s efforts, given that at the time American sociologists and social psychologists dominated the study of race relations? Booklets commissioned by UNESCO and authored by French and American scientists in the early 1950s suggest that linguistic and conceptual barriers made cross-national discussions of race difficult, but not impossible. Thanks in part to Métraux’s campaign, the social scientific study of race relations in post-war France began earlier than is typically remembered.

Gandhi’s Militant Nonviolence in the Light of Girard’s Mimetic Anthropology

Nuclear rivalry, as well as terrorism and the war against terror, exemplify the dangerous escalation of violence that is threatening our world. Gandhi’s militant nonviolence offers a possible alternative that avoids a complacent indifference toward injustice as well as the imitation of violence that leads to its escalation. The French-American cultural anthropologist René Girard discovered mimetic rivalries as one of the main roots of human conflicts, and also highlighted the contagious nature of violence. This article shows that Gandhi shares these basic insights of Girard’s anthropology, which increases the plausibility of his plea for nonviolence. Reading Gandhi with Girard also complements Girard’s mimetic theory by offering an active practice of nonviolence as a response to violent threats, and by broadening the scope of its religious outreach. Gandhi’s reading of the Sermon on Mount not only renounces violence and retaliation like Girard but also underlines the need to actively break with evil. Both Gandhi and Girard also address the religious preconditions of nonviolent action by underlining the need to prefer godly over worldly pursuits, and to overcome the fear of death by God’s grace. This congruence shows that Girard’s anthropology is valid beyond its usual affinity with Judaism and Christianity.

Furio Jesi Translation Theorist

The figure of the cultural anthropologist Furio Jesi has experienced a major rediscovery in recent years thanks to the commendable republication of his books and the publication of numerous unpublished works. In this rediscovery, however, a non-secondary aspect of this multifaceted author still remains in shadow, namely his philosophical and hermeneutic interest in the idea of translation. There are many traces of Jesi’s interest in the theory of translation. A volume entitled Translation and Duplicity of Languages was not completed, but there are some chapters from this project (already published in magazines) and materials still awaiting publication. After the study of Walter Benjamin’s Essays on Language, translation represents for Jesi a fundamental ‘linguistic’ junction of the relationship between the sacred and the profane, between myth and mythologem, between the origin and history of language. The aim of this essay will be to reconstruct and clarify Jesi’s idea of ‘translatability’, trying to trace a common thread among the theoretical essays in which Jesi determines translation as a further gnoseological background of his ‘mythological machine’ on the one hand, and the excursus of history of the language and his critical essays on literature on the other.

Spojrzenie z bliska. Koncepcja kosmosu i ciał niebieskich jako świata oswojonego kulturowo

A View From Up Close: The Concept of the Cosmos and Celestial Bodies as Culturally Tamed WorldThe concept of the cosmos, shaped in ancient Greek philosophy, has a different meaning today. This change of meaning reflects rejection of the idea of the cosmos as order established by the gods. The author of the article, as a cultural anthropologist and amateur astronomer, describes this problem by analyzing selected examples of the concepts of the cosmos and of celestial bodies, such as Venus and Sirius. These concepts are examples of alternative knowledge that was an important component of cultural systems. Also touched upon in the article are issues of epistemology and philosophy of science. Spojrzenie z bliska. Koncepcja kosmosu i ciał niebieskich jako świata oswojonego kulturowoPojęcie kosmosu ukształtowane w starożytnej filozofii greckiej ma współcześnie odmienną treść, co odzwierciedla porzucenie idei kosmosu jako ustanowionego przez bogów porządku. Autor artykułu, jako antropolog kulturowy i adept astronomii, opisuje ten problem, analizując wybrane koncepcje kosmosu oraz takich ciał niebieskich, jak Wenus czy Syriusz. Koncepcje te to przykłady alternatywnej wiedzy, która była ważnym składnikiem systemów kulturowych. Na drugim planie podjętych w tym artykule rozważań brane są pod uwagę kwestie dotyczące epistemologii i filozofii nauki.

Raja Shehadeh’s “Cartography of Refusal”: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks

In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.

Nature Influencing Characters- An Analysis of the Malayalam Movie Iyobinte Pusthakam

Space and place are two complex concepts in literature. These can in turn affect the course of characters, situations and the plot of story. Presently in visual media, especially in movies; a relation between nature and surroundings can be traced. Both nature and surroundings influence each other. Malayalam cinema is going through many different paths which are always open for study. Each movie in it is incomparable in plot, techniques and narration. A relation between surroundings and characters can always be drawn. Keith H. Basso is an important cultural anthropologist who found a noticeable connection between nature and human beings. Nature always creates mystery and wonder. Nature always has a great influence in the human evolution and culture formation. Tagore’s ‘The Religion of Forest’ says the link between forest and ancient Indian culture. In the same essay, Tagore represents the European belief on nature as a war between good and evil. ‘IyobintePustham’ is analysed in both these views. The forest depicted in the movie can be interpreted as a provider and protector to its character. In another sense, it mirrors the goodness and the evils in the mind of characters. Forest is an important archetype in human history and culture.

Who are you? What do you do? What do you bring? A florin!

My contribution consists in some ethnographic notes taken by a freelance cultural anthropologist living in Turin (capital of Piedmont, in the North-West, one of the regions most affected by Covid19) on the situation of the pandemic in Italy as seen with a very informal participant observation. After a very short chronicle of the lockdown, useful to set the different phases of the lockdown in Italy and the timing of the events, I write about the many issues faced by Italian citizens in the period, from inequality in living the pandemic to grassroots initiatives to answers it, from reclusion conditions in a variety of contexts (house, prisons, retirement houses) to strategies to get out anyway (for good reasons), from stereotypes Italian are (sometimes correctly) perceived abroad to the misunderstanding of the instruction of personal distancing, from the concept of family to that of community. All this reporting my same participation to some initiatives and actions, introducing my reflections and moreover witnessing the irony we used to face the fear.