Search results for " rites"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
Il culto dei gatti in India. Continuità ed evoluzione di credenze e pratiche religiose dall’India vedica all’India contemporanea
2019
Cat as an animal is a sporadic presence in Vedic mythology and Brahmanic works on rituals, while it appears in a few cult practices of contemporary popular religiosity in India. This article holds that in Indian devotional practices, the cat is conceived as an animal with an ambiguous nature. It also suggests that the cat cult is linked with the need to tame chaos, violence, and con$ict, and to place them in a controlled, orderly, and pacified cosmos. To understand these phenomena, this article studies, from a multidisciplinary perspective, contemporary religious practices in the light of the Indian tradition, and suggests that the cat cult was subject to substantial Brahmanization.
Gli occhi, il fuoco, il grano. Simboli, pratiche e credenze tradizionali nel culto di santa Lucia di Siracusa
2020
The folkloric traditions related to Saint Lucia of Syracuse are characterized, in Sicily as well as elsewhere in Italy, by a peculiar mythical-ritual symbolism. The eyes, fire, wheat are the main elements. The Saint is invoked to solve the problems of sight and all ophthalmic pathologies (both in a cult context and in a magical-medical one) and as such she is the recipient of ex voto objects and the protagonist of prayers and spells. On the eve of her dies natalis, bonfires are lit and processions of torches take place; for her festival, celebrated in some centers with solemn functions and processions, foods based on wheat seeds, sometimes added with other legumes, are widely prepared. This…
I ricordi figurati: «foto di famiglia» in Sicilia
2006
Today we are witnessing the increasingly insistent formation of visual stereotypes. The continuous repetition of these modules, used in similar situations, makes it easier to interpret them, so much so that they can now be considered elements of a common language: a figurative language to be investigated in the context of the anthropology of visual communication. The Sicilian family photos collected in this essay belong to this category of cultural products and allow us to reflect on the different articulations of cultural phenomena.
ХЛЕБ И ПРАЗДНИК НА СИЦИЛИИ (Bread and Festivities in Sicily)
2011
Among the important parts of the traditional calendar rites in Sicily are bakery and pastry products made in special shapes. Being produced and consumed during certain rituals and being shaped to reflect their mystic connotations, these products become the integral signs of these rituals in both the constitutive and functional sense. What is refl ected in their symbolism, beliefs, and related practices is the deeply archaic peasant worldview in the framework of which these rituals had been shaped; and in particular, it is the meaning that is attached to the infl uence of chthonic forces in the cyclic reproduction of natural and social life.
THE ARCHETYPE OF PARADISE: DYING IN HOLIDAYS DOES NOT SOUND COOL
2014
Holidays play a vital role in the configuration of our life. Our most profound expectances are posed to this magic moment. However, under some contexts, what starts as a dream ends in a nightmare. It is unfortunate this is the case of victims of Villa Gesell’s tragedy, resulted when a ray impacted directly to a beach. Nobody is immune of tragedy, even at holidays. This essay review explores not only the anthropological roots of risk and paradise, but also the journalist discourse to cover the event. Far from the general opinion, disasters affect tourism, we strongly believe it strengths its attractiveness.
L'irruzione del corpo femminile sulla scena sacrificale. Tra sessualità esibita e sessualità interiorizzata
2021
A study of women's roles and performances in Vedic rites
The posthumous condition of gossip: Death and its reputational benediction
2017
Gossiping is ubiquitous in social life. In every imaginable corner of society, people from all walks of life are gossiping their living acquaintances. But what happens when the “third party,” i.e., the subject of gossip, is absent par excellence, not only temporarily and spatially, but definitively? Do people continue to gossip their dead acquaintances? What is the fate of gossip after its target dies? These are the questions this paper sets out to address. In doing so, it develops a non-reductionist sequential model of death as a social process in which biological death is only the starting point of the bio-social phenomenon of dying. Building on some classic anthropological theories and c…
Teologia nadziei w posoborowych obrzędach pogrzebowych
2016
The faith in C hrisfs resurrection had a great impact on the funeral rites of the early Church. For his followers, the day o f death was not considered as the end o f everything but, indeed, it was regarded the day of birth for heaven. The spirit of hope for etemal life characterized the Funeral Rites o f the first Christian communities. Also the Second Vatican Council has ordered to arrange the Rites in such a way that they would express more clearly the Paschal character of death of the contemporary Christians. But in the last decades of the 20th century incredible changes o f the former funeral customs have been noted. It is clearly evident especially in the societies that - embraced by …
АНТРОПОМОРФНЫЙ ВОТИВНЫЙ ХЛЕБ В ИТАЛЬЯНСКИХ ПРАЗДНИКАХ
2014
In Italy there are various records of the recurring presence of ceremonial breads; among these we may observe votive anthropomorphic breads, in particular in Sicily. These “special” breads are prepared for calendar festivals, for the patron saints’ days celebrations or anyway for celebrations of particular relevance for single communities, being connected to critical phases of the wheat cycle: that is to say, the month of May, the earing season, and June—July, the harvest season. This allows us to make the hypothesis that a devotional and votive value as regards these breads might be added to a more ancient logic of offerings to deities, connected to a vision of the rural world. In this sen…
Le nymphai e l’acqua in Sicilia: contesti rituali e morfologia dei votivi
2012
L'articolo analizza la fenomenologia (contesti, votivi, iconografie) dei culti relativi all'acqua e al nymphai in Sicilia The paper analyzes the phenomenology (contexts, votives, iconographies) of the cults relating to water and nymphai in Sicily