Image et survivance en anthropologie visuelle : Ernesto De Martino et l’ethnographie interdisciplinaire
This project deals with the production of images in Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s 1950s “interdisciplinary ethnographies” in southern Italy. These expeditions, innovative for their time, involved a team of researchers (including a religious historian, ethnomusicologist, psychiatrist, photographer and, at times, a filmmaker) and gave rise to mixed-media documents. While the textual aspects of De Martino’s work have been studied in depth, my approach focuses on image-making practices: photography, film, drawings. Building largely on his famous work La terra del rimorso (1961) on tarantism – a possession ritual observed by De Martino’s team in Puglia in 1959 – as well as on the iconographic atlas of Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico. Dal lamento pagano al pianto di Maria (1958) – his study on mourning rituals led in the southern Italian region of Lucania (Basilicata) –, this thesis suggests that images, despite their ancillary status, formed a major part of De Martino’s fieldwork and transmitted much more than documentary knowledge. Not only does the visual haunt De Martino’s own text as a literary device, but it is also tightly connected to a series of intermedial elements (sound, objects, bodies) inherent to the ritual “apparatus” itself and its documentation process. It was thus possible to perceive a dialectical relationship between technological imagistic devices such as photography and film, which “reproduced” possession rituals, and those practices’ own repetition processes, temporal rhythms, and performativity. Lastly, these images also suggest an anthropology of “afterlife” by means of visual analogies passed through bodily gesture, reminiscent of Aby Warburg’s work.
archive Ernesto De Martino ethnographie possession visual anthropology tarantism Aby Warburg memory photography film ethnography media