Thoughts of the end of the world. The work of Ernesto de Martino

This " Débat d'histoire " at the Collège de France will be devoted to an extraordinary book. Its author is a historian of religions, Ernesto De Martino, and its title is La fin du monde. Essai sur les apocalypses culturelles. Published in 1977 in Italian, the book has now been translated into French by Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. An extraordinary book, first of all, because of its history: De Martino, who died in 1965, never finished it, and the work was composed from fragments, research files and reading notes left by the author. Extraordinary, too, because the themes of the historian-ethnologist's previous works  are brought together in an immense synthesis: the forms and functions of magico-religious institutions, the differences and continuities between Christian beliefs and customary practices, the relationship between the dead and the living, and the similarities and dissimilarities between individual experiences and collective rituals. These are the themes that The End of the World interweaves with impressive power as it studies and compares various apocalypses : that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that of colonized peoples, that of contemporary societies or, again, that which haunts psychopathological experiences and suffering.

To introduce the work of Ernesto De Martino, I'll be talking to Giordana Charuty, who, with Daniel Fabre and Marcelo Massenzio, wrote, annotated and introduced The End of the World. Giordana Charuty is Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where she holds the " Ethnologie Religieuse de l'Europe " chair. Her publications include two encounters with the work of Ernesto De Martino: Le couvent des fous, published by Flammarion in 1987, and Folie, mariage et mort. Pratiques chrétiennes de la folie en Europe. Giordana Charuty is undoubtedly the historian and ethnologist most familiar with De Martino's work. She dedicated a book to him in 2009, Ernesto De Martino. Les vies antérieures d'un anthropologue and, ten years earlier, with Carlo Severi, she had edited an issue of Gradhiva magazine entitled " Ernesto de Martino. Un intellectuel de transition ".

Our dialogue with her will first look back at the books published by De Martino during his lifetime - - and their reception in France. Le monde magique, published in 1948 and translated only in 1977, asserts the thesis that " magical institutions " aim to soothe the " critical moments " of existences through ritual repetitions that calm the anguish of becoming. In 1958, Mort et lamentation rituelle (Death and ritual lamentation ) (a book not yet translated) situates the originality of Christianity in this device : the Christian religion conjures up the scandal of death through the expectation of the resurrection, and not through funeral lamentations, but it also allows for syncretisms or compromise formations that associate ancient mourners and the Virgin as Mater dolorosa. Sud et magie (published in 1969) and La Terre du remords (1963) are the other two parts of De Martino's ethnographic research and militant undertakings in the Mezzogiorno after the Second World War. Translated in 1963 and 1966, they introduced his work to France, focusing on mystical possessions, such as that of the " tarentulées ", cured of spider bites (and other ailments) by curative dances, and on magical practices within Catholic rites.

De Martino's work was forgotten during the triumphant period of structuralism, however, and only re-emerged in the 80s and 90s as a basis for criticism of " popular religion " and the foundation of an anthropology of the symbolic applied to Christian societies. Carlo Ginzburg's references to De Martino, who, in his view, enabled the rational analysis of irrational phenomena, and, even more so, the reflections and work of Daniel Fabre, who shared with De Martino the theme of the return of the dead among the living, gave renewed visibility to the work of the Italian historian. The French edition of La fin du monde, which has recomposed the book from the author's archives, thus departing from the Italian text published in 1977, allows us to take full measure of De Martino's undertaking. Starting from the contemporary awareness of the possible end of the world, prefigured by the Shoah and Hiroshima, De Martino takes a comparative approach to the apocalyptic discourse of Christianity, the prophecies and millenarianism of colonized peoples, and the apocalyptic disposition without transcendence of contemporary times, as seen in the works of Sartre, Camus, Moravia and Beckett. For De Martino, these religious or cultural apocalypses are all particular responses, situated in diverse historical contexts, to an anguish or risk " anthropological " (in the universal sense of the word), which is expressed in the " psychopathological apocalypses ", in the lived experience of an imminent catastrophe, in the terror of the disappearance of being-in-the-world. Hence the formulation that provides the key to the whole book : " The end of a given world can be treated from two different angles : as a historically determined cultural representation and as a permanent anthropological risk ".

The book thus returns to the force of symbolic logics, opposed to a dangerous reduction of human activity to the purely economic dimension (hence the criticism levelled at classical Marxism). It also returns to the singular dynamic of Christianity, which substitutes ritual repetitions of a founding act for the historical time separating the Incarnation from the Parousia, and to the proposal of a " critical ethnocentrism ", which enables us to understand both the consciousness of the actors and the conditions or constraints they ignore.