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The intricate relationship between morphology and history plays a crucial role in Darwin’s evolutionary theory since his first major work, The Origins of the Species (1859). The paper explores the distant roots of Darwin’s reflections on rudimentary characters: a theme in which morphology and history intersect. Darwin’s debate, both implicit and explicit, with his scientific interlocutors, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, led him to explain rudimentary characters on the basis of a linguistic model, which turned morphology into history: a path-breaking solution.

My essay concerns two cases, two individuals, who lived at about the same time, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One is very well known: Garcilaso de la Vega, « El Inca ». The other is known only by specialists: John David Rhys. The first, the son of a Spanish soldier and an Inca princess, analysed his mother tongue using his father’s language, in which he wrote his historical works. The second, born in Wales, studied medicine in Siena, wrote on the Italian language (in Latin) and on the Latin language (in Italian), before devoting himself to the analysis of his mother tongue. A comparison between the two cases allows us to put forward some general reflections.

Lecturas: Carlos Ginzburg sobre Marcel Mauss

In a trial which took place in Livonia (today Latvia) at the end of XVIIth century, a man known as “old Thiess” confessed to be a werewolf. His anomalous confessions have been interpreted in different ways, raising the problem of the ambitions, and limits, of comparison. The paper explores, focusing on the case of “old Thiess”, the possibility of using a) the notion of “conjunctive anomalies”, inspired by textual philology, b) the notion of “family resemblances”, proposed by Francis Galton, as instruments of comparison in the domain of history of religions.

The hero of this essay by Calro Ginzburg is XVII-th century clown and distiller Costantino Saccardino, who also was active in the field of medical art. Accused together with his companions of secretly defiling city saint painting with excrements, Saccardino preached that religion – particularly its approach towards hell – was pure fiction and that first people were not created by God but were born out of mud. Ginzburg draws attention to the affinity between Saccardino’s heretical views (marked by the awareness of crisis and the anticipation of political, religious and cultural revolution) and the diagnoses made by Galileo, Bacon, Campanella, Rosicrusarians or even Descartes. At the same time Sccardino’s sensibility is that of a professional comedian – not a great intellectual – and this is what makes his case exceptional. The case of Saccardino, who – as is demontrated by Ginzburg – had a good knowledge of libertine literature while rejecting libertine elitism, shows that in this period the relations between the high culture and the culture of the subordinated classes could include an exchange that went through a detour, mediated in various, sometimes opposing codes.

The reflections on civilization, barbarism, and their intricate relationship, which were put forward in ancient Greece, from Herodotus to Aristotle, had a longterm impact. In the mid-16th century debate which took place in Valladolid, between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, about the status of the native populations of the New World, the Latin translations of Aristotle’s Politics, and its comment by St. Thomas Aquinas, proved to be especially relevant for both opponents. Were Indian natives comparable to Aristotle’s “natural slaves”? Was the war against them comparable to hunting wild beasts? The paper focuses on the debate and its contemporary implications.

The paper argues that the development of recording data over the last five thousand years can be regarded as chapters in a basically continuous narrative. This continuity explains why Plato's reflections on the oral and the written, and Aristotle's remarks on memory and reminiscence, are still relevant in our globalised world. In the conclusion, the paper comments on Paul Ricoeur's attempt to bridge the gap between memory, history and forgetting, as well as on its controversial political implications.

The circumstantial reasoning is a common and widely used way of acquiring inferences based on a very limited number of premises. This paradigm emerged as an epistemological model at the end of the 19th century but has not yet received any systematic theoretical treatment. The paradigm became famous as the 'Morelli method' utilized by the historians of art to identify the authorship of various pieces of art, paintings in particular. The method allows the identification based on the investigation of certain features that are unnoticeable to the majority of observers. The same procedure seems to be operational among hunters who are capable of reconstructing the behavior as well as the species of an animal with the help of residual traces left in the surroundings. Also, it has its importance in medicine. The trace reasoning is essentially different in its methodology from that of the contemporary natural sciences within the Galilean paradigm. The difference consists in the radical importance of an individual as an individual as opposed to common regularities in nature studied by the natural sciences. Thus the circumstantial reasoning bears distinctively anthropocentric character. The theoretical analysis of this kind of reasoning may be helpful to overcome the tension between rationalism and irrationalism.

Traducción de la Conferencia Magistral dictada por Carlo Ginzburg el 12 de noviembre de 2008 durante el Coloquio Internacional Archipiélagos de la Antropología, celebrado en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa, y donde recibió, por parte de esta institución, el nombramiento de doctor honoris causa.

Argumentos Arte y sociedad: Michael Baxandall

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