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I rapporti tra diverse società con la “natura” sono stati sempre al centro nella storia dell’antropologia: lo studio delle molteplici ed eterogenee modalità di relazione ai più diversi ambienti, i diversi sistemi culturali di adattamento, i modelli di socializzazione dell’ambiente nei sistemi di credenze, nelle modalità produttive e nei sistemi politici, e lo studio delle molteplici strutture simboliche nell’interpretare le relazioni con esseri non-umani o inanimati. Da questo archivio antropologico emerge sia la specificità della nozione di “natura” del pensiero occidentale quanto la creatività culturale nell’interpretare le relazioni con molteplici forze viventi.

In queste pagine integrative alla storia dell'antropologia di Ugo Fabietti vengono esposte le principali tematiche dello studio del lavoro contemporaneo in antropologia. Si presentano alcuni autori fondamentali in questo ambito quali Aihwa Ong, Richard Sennett e Clara Han.

Every discipline poses its research questions in specific ways and thus uses concepts that are suited to find answers in its well defined disciplinary frameworks. Accordingly, the idea of cultural trait has been used and developed in several disciplines, often without any reference to each other. The result has often been non-communicability across different fields. We first show, by means of two examples, that the lack of deep interdisciplinary dialogue and reciprocal understanding has generated some harsh controversies. We argue that our book Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity tries to overcome not only the gap between cultural traits specialists and other scientists, but also the barriers among the researchers who are not specialists on cultural traits but that nevertheless directly or indirectly use cultural traits in their different disciplines.

For a long time literary theorists have been concerned with the question “What is literature?". This issue does not raise the same interest in our days. After all, what really matters is what we do with literature, whatever it is. Time has come for a comparison between literary and evolutionary studies. The question we should ask is: “Why is literature?" Where do poetic uses of language rise from? For what reason or reasons, in a remote era of our history, did our ancestors start to spend (or lavish) both time and mental energies in seemingly free and relaxed verbal activities which were unrelated to immediate needs? What are the features of human behaviour that literature tends to foster and strengthen? This article argues that, after all, the aim of literature - as in any other human activity - is nothing but survival.

The chapter explains why evolutionary genetics - a mathematical body of theory developed since the 1910s - eventually got to deal with culture: the frequency dynamics of genes like “the lactase gene” in populations cannot be modeled correctly without including social transmission. The body of theory requires specific justifications, for example meticulous legitimations of describing culture in terms of traits. It is an immensely valuable scientific instrument, not only for its modeling power but also for the amount of work that has been necessary to build, maintain, and expand it. To demonstrate such patrimony, and to emphasize the importance and accumulation of statistical knowledge therein, this paper tells a brief history of evolutionary genetics, explaining also the probabilistic nature of genotypes, phenogenotypes and population phenomena. Although evolutionary genetics is actually composed by distinct and partially independent traditions, the most important mathematical object of evolutionary genetics is the Mendelian space, and evolutionary genetics is mostly the daring study of trajectories of alleles in a population that explores that space. The ‘body’ is scientific wealth that can be invested in studying every situation that happens to turn out suitable to be modeled as a Mendelian population, or as a modified Mendelian population, or as a population of continuously varying individuals with an underlying Mendelian basis. Mathematical tinkering and justification are two halves of the mutual adjustment between the body of theory and the domain of culture. Some works in the current scientific literature overstate justification, misrepresenting the relationship between body of theory and domain, and hindering interdisciplinary dialogue.

This paper is a philosophical reflection around the concept of a cultural trait. A trait is any perceptible or intangible characteristic aspect. In addition, to be cultural, a trait must not be intentional or part of a plan, and its diffusion and repetition - even when initially intentional - must elude control. Traits are inseparable from a cultural space and power relations that are the source of their value, and that govern their spread. Consequently, cultural traits - like “the style of a period” - can only be recognized a posteriori and at distance. Traits can be mapped in different ways, but a map is no simple object. Maps can vary along two dimensions: dynamic-static and conceptual - perceptual. Some maps are schemas or diagrams. Classifying the maps used by Zenni to illustrate the history of jazz, and comparing them with analog maps from the 1970s, I show how maps depend from the observer’s (cultural) ideas. Some maps evidently express a search for hierarchy and origins. But, in contemporary philosophy, the question of the origins constitutes a problem. For Michel Foucault, history is not a search for the origin, on the contrary, it must “dispel the chimera of the origin”, because passion for the origin is functional to reassurance or self-reassurance, and there are no single origins.

This paper concludes a book on ‘cultural traits’ which features 20 contributions from the most diverse disciplines, from cultural anthropology to archaeology, from psychology to history, from economics to musicology. The paper dodges the attempt to make a conceptual synthesis, arguing positively for such avoidance. Borrowing a term from the U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the paper likens the book, Understanding Cultural Traits, to a catalysis meeting, i.e., a lowering of disciplinary barriers that influences the disciplines’ culture of data, broadens the scientific vision, and generates scientific collaborations. Catalysis is not alternative to synthesis. It is a different phase of scientific progress, one that can be hindered by an obsession for concepts and by an urge to close the discourse.

This article develops the idea that Lévi-Strauss' thought was shaped all at once in the encounter with structural linguistics. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss's readers know that his writings show blunt passages from a level of discourse that refers to the project of scientific modernity (accretion of knowledge and pursuit of generality) to one announcing the dissolution of culture into physicochemical phenomena (here defined as ultramodern level), and from these two to a language usually defined as "literary". The latter corresponds to a language which articulates the themes of loss, memory, yearning for the primitive, the concerns about the demographic and environmental transformations of the planet, and an "exaggerated" contact of cultures: themes which all persist in Lévi-Strauss' thought since its shaping as a "structuralist" one, which have been highly controversial and that could be defined as "antimodern". Accordingly, this article tries to produce a reading of Lévi-Strauss' work as articulated on three le els, which persist in Lévi-Strauss's thought since its early structuralist formation: three "musical staffs" on which his modernity, ultra-modernity and anti-modernity seem all to flow at the same time.

This article develops the idea that Lévi-Strauss’ thought was shaped all at once in the encounter with structural linguistics. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss’s readers know that his writings show blunt passages from a level of discourse that refers to the project of scientific modernity (accretion of knowledge and pursuit of generality) to one announcing the dissolution of culture into physicochemical phenomena (here defined as ultramodern level), and from these two to a language usually defined as “literary”. The latter corresponds to a language which articulates the themes of loss, memory, yearning for the primitive, the concerns about the demographic and environmental transformations of the planet, and an “exaggerated” contact of cultures: themes which all persist in Lévi-Strauss’ thought since its shaping as a “structuralist” one, which have been highly controversial and that could be defined as “antimodern”. Accordingly, this article tries to produce a reading of Lévi-Strauss’ work as articulated on three levels, which persist in Lévi-Strauss’s thought since its early structuralist formation: three “musical staffs” on which his modernity, ultra-modernity and anti-modernity seem all to flow at the same time

A partire dalla ricerca etnografica su arte e paesaggio condotta nella chefferie bamileke di Bandjoun (Camerun) si riflette sull'opportunità di riconfigurare il campo dell'antropologia dell'arte e del paesaggio entro una più generale antropologia estetica centrata sul modellamento culturale dell'esperienza sensoriale, con conseguente ampliamento della metodologia della ricerca.