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The Postcolonialism of Ernesto De

Martino: The Principle of Critical

Ethnocentrism as a Failed Attempt to

Reconstruct Ethnographic AuthorityEmilio Giacomo BerrocalPublished online: 21 Apr 2009.

To cite this article: Emilio Giacomo Berrocal (2009): The Postcolonialism of Ernesto De Martino:

The Principle of Critical Ethnocentrism as a Failed Attempt to Reconstruct Ethnographic Authority,

History and Anthropology, 20:2, 123-138

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History and Anthropology,

Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 123138

ISSN 02757206 print/ISSN 14772612 online/09/02012316 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/02757200902875803

The Post-colonialism of Ernesto DeMartino: The Principle of CriticalEthnocentrism as a Failed Attempt toReconstruct Ethnographic Authority

Emilio Giacomo Berrocal*

TaylorandFrancisGHAN_A_387752.sgm10.1080/02757200902875803HistoryandAnthropology0275-7206 (print)/1477-2612 (online)OriginalArticle2009Taylor&[email protected]

The year 2008 marked not only the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claude Lvi-Strauss, but also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the founder of Italiancultural anthropology, Ernesto De Martino. De Martino died in 1965, leaving a legacy ofextensive fieldwork research in Southern Italy, original works, an incomplete manuscript

(entitled La Fine del Mondo), and an impressive set of suggestions regarding theory andresearch methodologies that deserve further exploration.

In this paper, using the well known De Martinian principle of critical ethnocentrism, Ifocus on finding relationships between the theoretical and ethnographical activity of DeMartino and so-called post-colonial thought. In particular I show how, in his firstfieldwork experience in Lucania, De Martino could be considered the first post-colonialethnographer, especially through his questioning of the role of subaltern people in makinghistory and culture, and through his attempt at transforming social relationships into acolonial situation.

Nevertheless, in spite of De Martinos deep commitment at transforming both hisethnological practice and his actual engagement with his subjects, his actual realization ofthe principle of critical ethnocentrism was somewhat vitiated. This paper attempts totackle the reasons for this failure of promise. Principal among these was the constant, ifsomewhat hidden, presence of his mentor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, in DeMartinos work, even in those situations where De Martino believed himself to be firmlydistancing himself from Croce. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that an understanding of

*Emilio Giacomo Berrocal, Via Marte 19, Orvieto (TR), 05018, Italy. Email: [email protected]


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History and Anthropology 127

poesia, o la filosofia, e il cristianesimo la coscienza morale, e let delle lotte religiose lidea della

libert, e via discorrendo, ma col sottinteso che questo modo di esprimersi giova a concentrare

lattenzione su particolari fatti accaduti, e con esso non sintende punto di ridurre a fatti

accaduti leterno e la sua unit e le sue categorie .

Neither the categories of consciousness, language, art, thought, practical life, moral life,nor the synthetic unity that groups all these things, are historical products, products of

epochal manifestations of the spirit. Rather, they form part of the same spirit that creates

history, in which in our writings we divide in periods, but already according to the histor-

ical genesis of these categories (which would be a contradictio in adiecto), but according to

the rendering that we find useful to make from time to time in our historiographical

constructions of the ordering of facts. In this way one could say that Greece created poetry,

high poetry, or philosophy, and Christianity a moral conscience, and in the period of the

religious wars the notion of liberty, and so on, but with the understanding that this mode

of self-expression concentrates attention on particularly realized factsbut this does not

mean that in so doing one intends to reduce such facts that occurred to the eternal, its unity

and its categories. (Croce 2003: 248249)

This was a response to the central point of deconstruction of western thought made by

De Martino: the idea that the transcendental unity of self-knowledge (unit trascen-

dentale dellautocoscienza), formulated by Kant, had wrongly assumed that this was a

given, as if it had not really been brought about through a conquest, as it actually was;

as if it had not been an historical conquest obtained in another epoch, but rather almost

magically assumed. In addition, De Martino maintained that such an historical

conquest is not an irreversible one, but rather is always under the threat of not being

confirmed, at the risk of not being (il rischio di non esserci), employing the words that

he introduced in anthropological debate from Heideggers philosophy and to which wewill return later.

That is why he focused strongly on the wizards ability to control and chase away

social instability through his magical powers; on the wizards capacity of facing the risk

at re-conquering social facts before the crisis had occurred. And consequently this is

also why Croce believed that De Martino was venerating the wizard (De Martinos

sanctification or rather, veneration, of the wizard), and that De Martinos choice to

place the wizard at the beginning of our history, our civilization, was rather discon-

certing (Croce 2003: 253), in that he rendered the wizard capable of doing what he

could not do: that is, History. According to Croce, the wizard, and with him thehumanity that he represented, could only understand when the Spirit manifested itself

by reflecting after having seen it, but not transforming it. Hence the wizard could not

be the ferryman of humankind from the natural state to a cultural one, as De Martino

believed.

This is where the two differed: while De Martino was ready to recognize not only the

dignity of our civilization in the Other, but also the fact that the Other is in us, Croce

could not accept this. And here De Martino is forcing the limits of Crocian idealism

internally. I believe that, in reality, Croce was even more troubled by the fact that De

Martino was starting to place the concept of the universally human at the centre of

his thought, and that this could cause very problematic outcomes if it were done by anethnologist, as De Martino soon became.


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128 E. G. Berrocal

In some ways, we can say that De Martino approached his fieldwork activity, begun

immediately after having written Il mondo magico, as if it had been the natural contin-

uation of his deconstruction of western rationality. However, while in the field he expe-

rienced something that he could not have anticipated while being an armchair

anthropologist writing at his desk: he faced the ethnographic epochthe moment,in the ethnographic context, where the fieldworkers culture is suspended. If De

Martinos critical ethnocentrism approach is a way to negotiate a route between opti-

mismthat is, the possibility of comprehending othernessand its negationthat is,

the incapacity of interpreting what is happening, of the ethnographic experienceit is

probably because De Martinos encounter with the ethnographic epoch was astonish-

ing, or, more precisely, it was as if he really experienced the moment of not being at risk.

When De Martino writes about the role of epistemic violence in the principle of

critical ethnocentrism in the Lumanesimo etnografico paragraph, he claims that the

ethnographic encounter represents the best opportunity for western man to examinehis own conscience (De Martino 2002d: 391). I believe that here De Martino is

thinking about the images in theNote Lucane (Notes from Lucania), an ethnographic

text written in 1950 about the Rabatani district of Tricarico, in the Italian southern

region of Basilicata:

Dopo il mio incontro con gli uomini della Rabata, ho riflettuto che non cera soltanto un prob-

lema loro, il problema della loro emancipazione, ma cera anche il problema mio, il problema

dellintellettuale piccolo-borghese del Mezzogiorno, con una certa tradizione culturale e una

certa civilt assorbita nella scuola, e che si incontrava con questi uomini ed era costretto per

ci stesso ad un esame di coscienza, a diventare per cos dire letnologo di se stesso.

After my encounter with the Rabatani, I reflected on the fact that there was not merely their

problem, that of their emancipation, but there was also my problem, the problem of a

Southern intellectual from a petit-bourgeois class who, with a certain cultural tradition

and a certain civilization absorbed at school, had encountered these people and who was

therefore, as a result of that encounter, obliged to search ones soul, and to become, so to

speak, an ethnographer of oneself. (De Martino 2002a: 132)

In that period as an intellectual De Martino was involved in the Questione Meridionale,

the debate about southern Italy, and was considering documenting the folkloric world

of the subordinated southern Italians as his contribution to the entrance of this people

in History. He would do that as an intellectual assuming a war of position, as Gramsci

would say. (Gramsci speaks about two kinds of war: la Guerra di movimento, that is

the war fought by the army and so on, and la Guerra di posizione, an intellectual war

pursued by committed intellectuals.) In his 1949 paper, De Martino had intimated

such an intention a year previously, but the above excerpt seems to indicate that, once

in the field, De Martino could no longer agree with the terms of the debate to which he

had earlier contributed. Indeed, in the following excerpt, De Martino tries to explain

that as his fieldwork progressed his problem was that he had become ashamed of

himself. The following excerpt is reproduced entirely as a quotation because it is critical

as well being literally valuable:

Dinanzi a questi esseri mantenuti a livello delle bestie malgrado la loro aspirazione a diventare

uomini, iopersonalmente io intellettuale piccolo-borghese del Mezzogiornomi sento in


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colpa. Altri, forse, ravviser nel fondo di questa situazione una testimonianza del peccato orig-

inale: si liberer cos del peso di unanalisi incomoda, trasfigurando in cielo la responsabilit

interamente umana di questa condizione umana. Ma io trovo qui solo la testimonianza della

mia colpa, non della colpa. Io non sono libero perch costoro non sono liberi, io non sono eman-

cipato perch costoro sono in catene. Se la democrazia borghese ha permesso a me di non essere

come loro, ma di nutrirmi e di vestirmi relativamente a mio agio, e di fruire delle libert costi-tuzionali, questo ha unimportanza trascurabile: perch non si tratta di me, del sordido me

gonfio di orgoglio, ma del me concretamente vivente, che insieme a tutti nella storia sta e insi-

eme a tutti nella storia cade. Io provo anzi vergogna del permesso concessomi di non essere

come loro, e quasi mi sembra di avere rubato solo per me ci che appartiene anche a loro. O

pi esattamente: provo vergogna di aver io consentito che questa concessione immonda mi fosse

fatta, di aver lasciato per lungo tempo che la societ esercitasse su di me tutte le sue arti per

rendermi libero a questo prezzo, e di aver tanto poco visto linganno da mostrare persino di

gradirlo, compiacendomi anzi di civettare con la dignit della persona umana al modo che

la intendono coloro che fanno gli intelligenti (Voi che fate gli intelligenti non capite prop-

rio niente) Proseguendo nellanalisi, scopro che al senso di colpa si associa un altro

momento: la collera, la grande collera storica solennemente dispiegatesi dal fondo pi auten-tico del proprio essere. Misuro qui la distanza che mi separa dal cristianesimo, che essenzial-

mente odio del peccato, salvezza sacramentale dalla storia vulnerata dal peccato, mentre la

mia collera tutta storica perch tutta storica la mia colpa (come anche la colpa del gruppo

sociale cui appartengo). La mia collera non pu avere proprio nessuno sfogo sacramentale,

nessun compenso liturgico, amore cristiano ma rovesciato, amputato di ogni prolungamento

teologico e costretto finalmente a camminare con i piedi. Appunto per questo suo carattere

storico, la mia collera proprio la stessa di quella di questi uomini che lottano per uscire dalle

tenebre del quartiere rabatano, e la mia lotta proprio la loro lotta. Rendo grazie al quartiere

rabatano e ai suoi uomini per avermi aiutato a capire meglio me stesso e il mio compito.

In front of these beings held down at the level of beasts, and despite their aspiration tobecome men, I personally, as a southern intellectual from the petit-bourgeois class, feel

guilty. One may even perhaps recognize at the core of this situation a testimony of original

sin. (If he were to do so) the ethnographer would free himself of the burden of an uncom-

fortable analysis, transferring to fate an entirely human responsibility for a human situa-

tion. But here I can only find the proof of my guilt, and not of general guilt. I am not free

because these people are not. I am not emancipated because they are enchained. It is of

negligible significance that bourgeois democracy has allowed me not to be like them, but

to eat and dress comfortably, and to enjoy the fruits established by the Constitution

because what is at issue here is not the me who puffs up his self-satisfaction through expo-

sure to such squalor, but rather of the concretely living I, who shares a living history with

them, and who will be historically judged by all. I am indeed ashamed of the privileges

conceded to me of not being like them, and I almost feel as I have stolen and appropriated

for myself that which also belongs to them. Or, more precisely: I am ashamed to have been

granted such a tainted privilege, to have permitted society to have exercised all its seduc-

tions on me to render me free at this price, and to have so little intuited its guile even to

the extent of relishing it, and even pandering to flirt with the notion of the dignity of the

human being, as those who play at being omniscient do. (You, pseudo-intellectuals, in

reality dont understand anything at all). Pursuing these reflections, I comprehend that

with this sense of guilt is also associated another feeling: the anger, the big historical anger

that unfolds from the deepest part of my being. I comprehend here the distance between

me and Christianity, which is basically the act of hating sin, a sacramental salvation of

history threatened by sin, but my anger is entirely historical because all that occurs in

history is my fault (just as it is the fault of the social group to which I belong). My anger

cannot find any sacred resolution, nor compensation through ritual relief; it is a Christian


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This violence is clearly epistemic, but it is still a material violence with material

consequences. I believe that De Martino understood this point as the excerpt quoted

above shows. Hence, he had already understood what post-colonial authors imply

when rediscovering and reinterpreting Frantz Fanons writings on the colonial

situation. For example, in Edward Saids Orientalism, the foundational work of thepost-colonial thought, Orientalism is not only viewed as a discursive construction

made by Westerners to legitimate Western supremacy of the Oriental world, but it is

also viewed as a sort of foreign language that Oriental people had been and are still

obliged to speakin the past as in the post-colonial presenteven while enacting their

resistance (Said 2001). In this light, I believe that De Martinos suggestion, that

Western ethnographers examine their conscience, finds its roots in the way he had

interpreted the acts of resistance by the Rabatani people.

The Reconstruction of the Ethnographic Authority Through LocalSubject Resistance

In order to develop this last point, I have to introduce the concept of mimicry intro-

duced by Homi Bhabha and the usage of such concept. In Homi Bhabhas work, the

term mimicry is adopted to indicate the resistance agency of the colonized. Accord-

ing to Bhabha, mimicry is an exaggerated form of copying the language, the culture and

the ideas of the colonizer by the colonized. However, this exaggeration is not only a

mere repetition of the colonial discourse, but it is also adapted to the colonized world

and it is translated according to the culture and desires of the colonized. Therefore,

mimicry is a repetition, but it is a repetition that allows for differences. Thus, accordingto Bhabha, the ability of mimicry in a colonial situation is a way for the colonized to

resist colonialism (Bhabha 2001). And since Bhabha has used this concept often

referring to psychoanalysis, it is natural to question whether mimicry is a conscious, an

unconscious, or a combination of both forms of resistance. By looking at the Note

Lucane, I would say that the De Martino manages to reconstruct ethnographic

authority only by questioning it.

To better understand this central point, we need to return to the quotation where De

Martino claims that their struggle is his struggle. In analysing this quotation, I aim to

explore a list of possibilities that were not historically realized by De Martino.Once in the field, De Martino could have reinterpreted his role of intellectual as

that of an intellectual who is committed to the emancipation of the southern subordi-

nated world. However, it is important to note that he uses the expression southern

intellectual:

Dopo il mio incontro con gli uomini della Rabata, ho riflettuto che non cera soltanto un prob-

lema loro, il problema della loro emancipazione, ma cera anche il problema mio, il problema

dellintellettuale piccolo-borghese del Mezzogiorno, con una certa tradizione culturale e una

certa civilt assorbita nella scuola, e che si incontrava con questi uomini ed era costretto per

ci stesso ad un esame di coscienza, a diventare per cos dire letnologo di se stess.

After my encounter with the Rabatani, I reflected about the fact that these were not only

their problems, their problems with emancipation, but they were also my problem, the


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132 E. G. Berrocal

problem of a southern intellectual from a petit-bourgeois class, who, with a certain cultural

tradition and a certain civilization absorbed through schooling, then met the Rabatani,

and I decided that I was obliged to examine my conscience; I was obliged to become, in a

way, a self-ethnologist. In front of these men kept as animals, despite their aspiration to

become men, I personally, a southern intellectual from the petit-bourgeois class, feel

guilty. (De Martino 2002a: 132)

I now proceed to analyze De Martinos words by imagining a series of possible

scenarios.

Let us imagine that his words are the result of sense of communion that arises as a

result of interactions in fieldwork. This, then, is the universally human experience

upon which the principle of critical ethnocentrism is based. This moment probably had

been ephemeral yet intense, momentary yet memorable, and that is why De Martino

remembered it for several years before he formulated it. We could describe this univer-

sally human experience that De Martino experienced during fieldwork in terms ofexpressions such as an anxiety of emancipation, or a wish for freedom, or using De

Martinos actual paradoxical formulation: a human being who rescues himself from

not being at risk. If we select the last expression, then who would be rescuing whom?

De Martino or the object of his study? Is it both? Is De Martino experiencing the fact

that he is not at risk?

My answer to the last question is the following: De Martinos embracing of his

identity as a Southerner is doubly related to this final statement (I thank the Rabatani

for helping me better understand my duty, and my struggle is their struggle). It is

clear, then, that without the first part (helping me better understand my duty), the

realization that fighting along the Rabatani (my struggle is their struggle) is impossi-ble, and without the second part, his identity as a Southerner was not going to be the

object of his anthropological and political reflections. It is this double relationship that

clearly indicates that De Martinos fieldwork in Lucania was an existential experience

for him. We can, in fact, imagine that this was probably the first time in his life when

De Martino seriously thought about his identity as a Southerner, and about all the

things he had to suppress to become an intellectual and a part of the ruling class in the

country. In this sense, the encounter with the Rabatani had awoken critical aspects of

De Martinos personal history that he had forgotten about, or more precisely had not

hitherto questioned. After this fieldwork encounter, De Martino recognized in himselfa subaltern and realized that he, just as the Rabatani, had been subject (and was still

subject) to the same systems of power that sustained the bourgeois domination of the

country.

While De Martino was reflecting on these issues, he also noted that the resistance of

the Rabatani had an ambivalent side and was rather problematic. In De Martinos

eyesthe eyes of an anthropologist trained to seize the difference between a twitch

and a wink, to use an expression by Geertzthe Rabatani appeared to have embodied

the patterns of expression and the thought processes of bourgeois hegemony. That is:

if they superficially seemed to be challenging bourgeois dominance, deep inside they

did not. Analysing De Martinos state of mind under Bhabhas framework, we can seethat if on the one hand the half that threatens, which represents the resistance of the


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Rabatani against bourgeois superiority, awakens De Martino to his southern heritage,

on the other hand the half that mimics and reproduces southern subordination

troubles him.

This is the point of no-return from which De Martino could have departed in his

Lucanian fieldwork, and which could have initiated a process that would have led himto very interesting conclusions. For instance, let us suppose that De Martino asked

himself: how can I fight bourgeois hegemony together with the Rabatani? Let us

suppose that he answered this question by using the ethnographic tools of the twentieth

century in a different way. Let us assume that he decided that in order to construct a

new type of hegemony it was necessary to deal differently with the local people during

fieldwork, and that that had to be considered the starting point of a communication

strategy. We should thus look more closely at the strategic uses he could have employed

of his ethnographic texts.

To begin with, De Martino believed that the ethnographic text has to be territorial-ized, where by terrorialized he meant that the Rabatani could read the ethnographic

texts and comment on them. By doing so, De Martino believed that the Rabatani could

become more aware of the effects on them through the relationships established in the

field. In addition to this, De Martino aimed at establishing an intimate relationship

with the Rabatanis by working side by side with the locals in fighting the class in power.

His desire was to introduce in local struggles a need for reflection about the way such

struggles were carried out. To achieve this, De Martino sought to organize activities

that could generate discussion among the locals, such as, for example, seminars on

issues like the Questione Meridionale or public talks directly connected to local

struggles. After doing so and receiving feedback on the quality of the ethnographic text,De Martino proceeded to territorialize a new ethnographic text and the process was

repeated. This was called the process of establishing ethnographic relationships.

Why did De Martino offer these two different procedures of territorialization?

Because with the first process, De Martino aimed at creating an intimate relationship

with what cannot anymore be called the object of his study. With the second process,

De Martino aimed to deconstruct the relationship between his local subjects and

the wider society in which they were located. In other words, De Martino wanted the

Rabatani to understand themselves in order to struggle more effectively against the

structures of domination they were subject to. He wanted the Rabatanis to understandthe psychic life of such power mechanisms in the same way he had when he realized

how both his body and his mind had been manipulated without him knowing it. And

he had been able to understand all this by staying with them in the field. He wanted the

Rabatanis to recognize, as he did, that their resistance was capable of posing a threat to

the power authority and to realize it could be enacted. He wanted them to be able to

work together in a different way. The purpose of this new way was to create a language

that could represent the universally human, reflecting the experiences of the Rabatanis

as well as enabling them to think differently about themselves.

The second ethnographic territorialization process is a consequence of the first, and

it would have been more successful if it had been pursued with the intention of produc-ing post-coloniality, that is, the final stage of post-colonial emancipation, and much


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For instance, he proclaims the aim of the research that he and his team carried out

in Salento. If the aim is the same as in 1949, that is of studying the vision of the world,

the religion and the history of the Southern people as cultural aspects of the Questione

Meridionale, now he is rightfully declaring himself as a distant observer and not an

involved participant:

Se vero che loggettivit scientifica si conquista per entro una originaria motivazione trasfor-

matrice, e se vero che la efficacia della volont di trasformazione trae alimento dal progresso

della oggettivazione scientifica, anche vero che si tratta di due momenti rigorosamente

distinti, e che la scienza tanto pi operativamente efficace quanto pi conquista e mantiene,

nel movimento generale della vita culturale, la propria autonomia. Nella nostra esplorazione

etnografica noi ci impegnavamo dunque a scegliere il momento della conoscenza del fenomeno

e a mantenerci fedeli a questa scelta

If it is true that scientific objectivity is reached through an originating motivation to

change, and if it is true that the efficacy of the will to change is nourished by the progress

of scientific objectivity, it is also true that these are two strictly distinct processes, and that

science is operationally effective the more it conquers and maintains its own autonomy in

the general movement of cultural life. Therefore, in our ethnographic explorations, we

focused on choosing the moment in which to know the phenomenon and to remain

faithful to this choice. (De Martino 2002c: 35)

It is clear that De Martino does not view himself as a native anymore, and he does not

seem inclined and interested anymore in understanding the social function of the

ethnological researcher as we imagined he could possibly have done.

However, it is not in these words that we can find the clear abandonment of the

potential in De Martino. To phrase such a perception in terms of Goyatri C. Spivakscriticism of Subaltern Studies (2004), De Martino is now viewing himself as respon-

sible for a double epistemic violence, during his fieldwork activity in Lucania, it is

also true that De Martino continued acting like that during all the rest of his intellectual

life because he really believed in the intrinsic superiority of the Western world.

In his 1962 paper Promesse e minacce delletnologia, De Martinowhile attacking

for the first time the feelings about colonial and semi-colonial world (De Martino

2002b: 88) of his mentor Crocealso firmly declared that ethnology must be

anything but Eurocentric (De Martino 2002b: 105). Yet this statement was not new

to De Martino: he had already declared it in his first bookNaturalismo e Storicismo

in Etnologia (Naturalism and Historicism in Ethnology) of 1941, twenty years

earlier. If, in 1941, De Martino was prepared to adopt the relativistic method of

inquiry as he said in Il Mondo magico, by 1962 it appeared clear to him that relativ-

ism has not faced, in the twenty-year interval, the crises of the Western world as it

should have done; that is, relativism has turned into a doctrine which, in seeing the

Other as a self-sufficient world, was not disposed to treat the universally human

through the traces of a common past. Thus, in the post World War II scenario,

when a new world was coming into being and the old one was already dead, it

remains important to De Martino to confirm that ethnology must be anything but

Eurocentric, because for him the distinction between who studies and who isstudied must be retained.


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136 E. G. Berrocal

Therefore, we can say that De Martinos usage of relativism was only to shed light

and explain the superiority of the Western world, and that his universalism was in

reality a particularist universalism as Mondher Kilani calls this kind of Western

universalism. In short, a particularism that wrongly represents itself as universalistic. I

believe that under De Martinos conception of relativism stands the constant presenceof his mentor, Benedetto Croce. From this point of view, De Martinos full acceptance

of Croces criticism about the making of History and Culture of the Others should not

be called a surrendering to Crocean idealism.

Conclusion

De Martino was without doubt more ethnocentric than a critic of ethnocentrism.

However, while in the process of formulating the principle of critical ethnocentrism,

I think that he could have looked at his ethnocentrism in a more critical way, partic-ularly as he discovered unexpected levels of sameness with his object of study. As De

Martino had always historically articulated the ethnographic experience as a way of

putting his own worldinto parenthesis, he did not place fieldwork interactions at the

centre of his stay in the field. For this reason neither he, nor his object of study, could

have enjoined the possibility of expanding their world limits as a precise consequence

of their fieldwork interactions. De Martino became more aware of himself as an

intellectual, and his Rabatini became more aware of themselves as Rabatini, but they

may rarely have reached a common awareness of themselves together. Because of the

theories that he had formulated in advance, for example in Il mondo magico, De

Martino spent his fieldwork experience finding confirmations and not contradic-tions. Eventually, however, the contradiction arouse in front of him under the form

of what I had defined the extra dimension of the process of deconstruction of ones

self.

Hence, if we claim that the reason why De Martino didnt trust himself with his

otherness and didnt trust his sameness is his belief of Western superiority, then De

Martino cannot be considered a post-colonial thinker. However, if we believe that De

Martino was capable of recognizing the importance of what he didnt doat a

personal, epistemic and political levelthen De Martino can be read as the first post-

colonial ethnographer committed to the production of post-coloniality. In this sense,the new generation of native anthropologists could perhaps draw inspiration from De

Martinos potential and unaccomplished work.

Notes

1

[1] Saunders (1993: 875893).2

[2] De Martinos Italian texts quoted in the paper are translated with the assistance of the

editor of History and Anthropology. They will be enclosed in typeset as displayed

quotations. Original titles are left in the Italian language. The same applies for Croces

texts.3

[3] In using this expression, De Martino refers to Lvi-Strauss, who coined the expression to put

in the discussion the system in which one was born and grew up. See also footnote 6.


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4

[4] The reference is to the paper Understanding a Primitive Societyof 1964. To analyse in more

depth the stages of rational debate in anthropology, see: Dei F., Simonicca A., a cura di, 1990,

Ragione e Forme di Vita, Franco Angeli, Milano.5

[5] It is probably useful to recall Croces re-reading of Hegels philosophy. His philosophical aim

of was that of a historiography of the Spirit, in the sense that philosophy has to look at and

explain the real acts, the real facts, of the Spirit. Croce, together with another great Italianphilosopher of the first half of twentieth century, Giovanni Gentile, were strongly anti-

Cartesian, because they contested the dualism bewteen res extensa and res cogitans. In postu-

lating the unity bewteen spirit and reality, Croce maintained that a history that is not contem-

porary could not exist, because both the will of the historiographer who looks at the past to

understand what happenned, or past happenings, are made of the same material, that is the

Spirit of History. For this reason, history is always history that is going to happen, and not that

has already happened.6

[6] In drawing a comparison between the Jesuit missionary and modern ethnographer, De

Martino says: also the modern ethnographer who, even with a different intention, walks

over the southern trails where once the Jesuits walked, cannot and should not avoid to ask

himself the questions that Lvi-Strauss asked himself during the painful pit stop at Campo-Novos: What have you come to do? What is your goal? What is your hope? It also happened

to me ten years ago, during a visit to Rabata di Tricarico, to ask myself those morally challeng-

ing questions and to find out that my rising passion as a travelling ethnographer in Southern

Italy impliedrepeating once again Lvi-Strauss wordsquestioning the system in which

one was born and grew up, and this was taken as a symbol of expiation and blackmail. Later

my role became clearer to me, and that is the utilization of ethnography with the goal of

defining a religious history of the South as a new cognitive dimension of the so called

Questione meridionale. (De Martino 2002c: 20). To understand the relationship between

this text,Note Lucane and the principle of critical ethnocentrism, see Cherchi (1996).7

[7] I will never accept the way in which my essay Per una storia del mondo popolare subalterno

was edited. (De Martino 2002c: 40)

References

Bhabha, H. (2001), I luoghi della cultura (1994, original title: The Location of Culture), Meltemi,

Rome.

Cases, C. (2003), Introduzione (1973), in Il mondo magico, E. De Martino, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin,

pp. VIIXLIX.

Cherchi, P. (1996), Il Peso dellOmbra, Liguori, Napoli.

Croce, B. (2003), Intorno al magismo come et storica (1949), in Il mondo magico (1948), E. De

Martino, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, pp. 242253, (Text originally contained in Croce, B.(1949), Filosofia e storiografia, pp. 193208).

De Martino, E. (1949), Per una storia del mondo popolare subalterno, Societ, vol. 5, no. 3,

pp. 411435.

De Martino, E. (2002a), Note lucane (1950), in Furore simbolo valore (1962), E. De Martino,

Feltrinelli, Milan, pp. 119133.

De Martino, E. (2002b), Promesse e minacce delletnologia, in Furore simbolo valore (1962), E. De

Martino, Feltrinelli, Milan, pp. 84118.

De Martino, E. (2002c), La terra del rimorso (1961), Net, Milan.

De Martino, E. (2002d), Lumanesimo etnografico, in La Fine del mondo (1977), E. De Martino,

Einaudi, Turin, pp. 389394.

De Martino, E. (2003), Il mondo magico (1948), Bollati Boringhieri, Turin.

Gramsci, A. (1964), Gli intellettuali e lorganizzazione della cultura (1949), in Quaderni dal carcere,

vol. 2, A. Gramsci, Einaudi, Turin.


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138 E. G. Berrocal

Said, E. W. (2001), Orientalismo (1978, original title: Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient),

Feltrinelli, Milan.

Saunders, G. E. (1993), Critical Ethnocentrism and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino,

American Anthropologist, vol. 95, no. 4, pp. 875893.

De Martino Pos Colonial

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