Pointing out the extraordinary amount of ethnographic work relating to trance, the Author demonstrates the possibility of distinguishing between the trance of vision, posession and of ecstasy thus challenging the current interpretation concerning tarantism, an interpretation that has implicitly encouraged the timid and hardly audacious research activity following De Martino’s studies: a kind of imaginary ethnography for internal use and consumption, or ad usum of the urbanized intellectuals who took a distance from the rural world of their forefathers. Considering trance as representation, it is then possible to recognize a specific image of man, and it is an image of suffering man. To analyze the story of humanity as a story of Grenzerfahrung, desired or feared, however realized and more or less controlled, leads us to recognize that all these experiences at the limit, these experiences of consciousness of alterity or also of an alterity to themselves, to their own egos, and their own unraveling can certainly lead the way to ethnopsychiatric or ethnopsychoanalytic interpretations; however the institutionalized trance demonstrates above all that society creates a cosmology, or rather represents this tragedy in the individual perspective but in the interests of everyone.
Presenza, assenza e rappresentazione nelle trance rituali
Antonio Luigi Palmisano
2018-01-01
Abstract
Pointing out the extraordinary amount of ethnographic work relating to trance, the Author demonstrates the possibility of distinguishing between the trance of vision, posession and of ecstasy thus challenging the current interpretation concerning tarantism, an interpretation that has implicitly encouraged the timid and hardly audacious research activity following De Martino’s studies: a kind of imaginary ethnography for internal use and consumption, or ad usum of the urbanized intellectuals who took a distance from the rural world of their forefathers. Considering trance as representation, it is then possible to recognize a specific image of man, and it is an image of suffering man. To analyze the story of humanity as a story of Grenzerfahrung, desired or feared, however realized and more or less controlled, leads us to recognize that all these experiences at the limit, these experiences of consciousness of alterity or also of an alterity to themselves, to their own egos, and their own unraveling can certainly lead the way to ethnopsychiatric or ethnopsychoanalytic interpretations; however the institutionalized trance demonstrates above all that society creates a cosmology, or rather represents this tragedy in the individual perspective but in the interests of everyone.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
