G. Baronti, Margini di sicurezza. L'ideologia folclorica della morte in Umbria, Morlacchi Editore, Perugia, 2016. Three volumes, Vol. 13 of the series Itaca. Itinerari di Antropologia Culturale, edited by Cristina Papa, 1,299 pp.

Ma tu vò sapè si come se muria prima

 e come se more adè?… Tale e quale!

Giuseppina C., born 1907, homemaker (Foligno, 10 June 1993).

[G. Baronti, Margini di sicurezza, cit., p. 38]

«Things unfold, in truth, as if culture and society emerged among living beings as two complementary responses to the problem of death: society, to keep the animal from knowing that it is mortal; culture, as the human being's reaction to the awareness of being so» [Claude Lévi-Strauss, Parole date. Le lezioni al Collège de France e all'École pratique des hautes études (1951-1982), Einaudi, Torino, 1992, p. 22].
This is the epigraph, drawn from Claude Lévi-Strauss and delivered in one of his last lectures at the Collège de France, that Giancarlo Baronti chose to place at the head of his weighty three-volume work titled Margini di sicurezza. L'ideologia folclorica della morte in Umbria [Morlacchi Editore, Perugia, 2016].
Baronti's choice is motivated not only by the unquestioned homage paid to the great French ethnologist, who died at the age of one hundred and one in 2009. It is motivated also by the interpretive evidence that the Lévi-Straussian text evokes: death is a dominant human theme, one that anthropology must sooner or later reckon with, in its many paths of study on the forms of social and cultural life.
Echoing in this awareness of Baronti's is the theme that the historian Carlo Ginzburg took up at the close of his valuable study of the shamanic substrata of witchcraft, of ecstasy and the myth of the "night flight". In its closing pages, Storia notturna elaborated a singular definition of death and of its cultural experience: «In the participation in the world of the living and in that of the dead, in the sphere of the visible and in that of the invisible, we have already recognized a distinctive trait of the human species. What we have tried to analyze here is not one tale among many, but the matrix of all possible tales» [Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba, Einaudi, Torino, 1989, p. 289].
In Baronti's imposing work, death, anthropologically interpreted, certainly takes shape as the "matrix of all possible tales", not only for the great richness and variety of the narratives gathered and interpreted by the scholar across the three volumes of his work, but insofar as the event of death qualifies as a primary narrative source, the origin of the tale, apt to give cultural motivation to social actions and representations, to choices and adherences to historically stratified cultural paradigms.

But what does it mean to interpret death «anthropologically»?
To answer this question one must, in the first place, make clear that anthropology is a social science that studies cultural differences in a comparative key and that therefore has as its unavoidable aim a critical reading of common sense and of shared symbols; and, in the second place, that in such an anthropological perspective death ceases to be the point-like event, that final moment which biology sees as unique and irreversible (wedding itself here to an ideological rationalism whose Enlightenment root remains doubtful and, to say the least, contradictory), and becomes instead an event of passage toward other forms of sociocultural life: memory or forgetting, the notion of the distributed person, the relation between human beings and animals, the absent presence of the ghost, the practices, the beliefs and the faith in communication between the living and the dead, a conjunction so intense in the popular imagery of purgatory, of the cabala, of the dream, of mourning and of the lottery, as moments of dialogue between descendants and ancestors.
Anthropological dialogue is an ordering principle and a symbolic operator of structural moments that have to do with the different organizations of social life, including kinship and residence, descent, the inheritance of patrimony and marriage strategies, all the way to the very choice of the names of one's children and to the individual and collective declension of the life cycle. A vast imaginary and system of practices defines the anthropological reading of death and corresponds to a popular ideology whose subalternity qualifies as a cultural moment that nonetheless flourishes in the shadow of the dominant classifications of this elementary form of the human event.
With Baronti's powerful work, it is the first time that so broad a collection of forms of knowledge and practices of popular culture is taken up as the traits of a specific «folkloric ideology of death» in a regional context of central Italy: Umbria.
The Region of Umbria constitutes in effect a terrain of great historical and traditional richness, for which we have had, from 1956 onward, an enormous body of unpublished documentation, for the most part consigned to important degree-thesis works, begun in 1956 by Tullio Seppilli, who in that very year founded the Istituto di etnologia e di antropologia culturale and directed it until the year 2000, leaving us in those theses, conceived as moments of deepening within broader comparative research on Umbrian popular culture (and not only), a body of documentation of great significance. That documentation has continued to this day thanks to the work of Giancarlo Baronti who, as a scholar of Storia delle tradizioni popolari, has seen over time to updating the very instruments for gathering anthropological data, such as specific topic-lists and questionnaires, apt to delineate a genuine «folkloric ideology» of death, as of many other culturally relevant subjects.
A note: the adjective «folclorica» is deliberately written by Baronti with a "c" (folclorica) and not with a "k" (folklorica), as more often happens, in order to evoke, in the reader's eyes, the legitimation of the term and of the field of study bequeathed to us by Antonio Gramsci in the Quaderni del carcere [Einaudi, Torino, 1975, 4 volumes]. The publication of the Quaderni (from 1948 to 1951) belonged to a historical-political phase that in Italy, as is well known, influenced cultural anthropology and its method. A phase that followed the Second World War, and that saw a new attention to the culture of the popular classes which, to put it with Ernesto de Martino, "burst" into history as a «subaltern popular world».
Baronti brings these studies up to date, makes them contemporary to us. In this sense his work has an emblematic title: Margini di sicurezza. It is a felicitous and far from casual choice. Besides, Baronti's familiarity, as a scholar of anthropology, with Marxian, Gramscian and Foucauldian themes is well known. Now, this title expresses, to my reading, the effect of a precise and timely choice: to interpret, in the light of the contemporary moment, both as event and as theory and method, the great intimations that come from the forms of knowledge and the practices of popular culture surveyed in the field in the Region of Umbria.
What are the "margins" and "security" today? According to the historian of Italian studies David Forgacs [Margini d'Italia. L'esclusione sociale dall'Unità a oggi, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2014], the margins are not really foreign and distant places, but rather images of the border set at a remove and estranged by a dominant classifying gaze, which is first of all that of the Nation-State in its process of formation. Now, if this is more evident for the cultural forms drawn on by anthropology in the South of Italy (as in Ernesto de Martino's foundational work Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico [Einaudi, Torino, 1958]), that same marginality likewise emerges from the center of Italy, Umbria.
It is therefore a dimension of marginality that sets aside the question of territorial borders, and bears rather on the problem of the symbolic borders of a certain mode of intellectual production, a cognitive and symbolic status of specific popular forms of knowledge, «folkloric» ones, precisely, tied to the experience of life, indeed "everted" toward life, to use a philosophical lexicon. In our case tied to the experience of loss, to the unspeakable human experience of life and to the ineffable mystery of death.
But the qualifier «of security» is there to clarify the so to speak political quality of this cultural way of being in the world: it is the victory over uncertainty, over unease, the overcoming of what de Martino conceived as the «crisis of presence», or of that cultural labor defined as «triumph over death» (and not "of death"), by Alfonso Maria di Nola, another great historian of religions and Italian anthropologist who left us two ample volumes on the theme, the first titled precisely with a passive that instead alludes to a great capacity for action on the part of popular culture: La morte trionfata [Newton Compton, Roma, 1995].

«Margini di sicurezza», then, is the interpretive key that, in the forms I have tried to summarize, frames the great popular cultural riches on the funerary theme to which Umbria has borne witness, within the contemporary frame of uncertainty and of necropolitics, that is, in the light, and at times in the darkness, of the governmental choices of death made by those who control multitudes of people. Choices that, in this dramatic and apocalyptic present-day world scene, appear to carry an insecurity that those margins mean to limit, to reduce to a minimum, if not to dissolve: a veritable assault on what Baronti instead saves as the «labor of culture» that distinguishes the human species and that constantly emerges from every datum recorded by the anthropologist bearing on the theme of death in folkloric ideology.
This, in effect, is precisely the anthropological aim: to place oneself at the point nearest to the concrete experience of people of flesh and blood, to draw with methodological humility on the knowledge that emerges from their lives and to respect it by studying it, and then to project it into debates only apparently distant from such "local" forms of knowledge. National and international debates that concern not only the fate of a discipline such as demo-ethno-anthropology, but that touch all human beings who live in society. And on this point anthropology and the history of death have always met, as allies. As the great historian Alberto Tenenti wrote in the afterword to the new edition of his book Il senso della morte e l'amore della vita nel Rinascimento [Einaudi, Torino, 1957 and 1989, p. 504]: «It is necessary […] to develop ever more strongly the awareness that any aspect (ritual, funerary, mental) of the sense of death forms part of concrete social, political-economic and cultural life».
In the end, these three volumes of Baronti's are a veritable antidote against many ills of our time, and in short they are so against cynicism: an anti-sentiment that, in the social sciences, sometimes disguises itself as a methodology of objectifying coldness, of feigned neutrality, only poorly concealing its true nature of indifference and of anti-recognition, today revalued in common sense, in the rampant conformist "meanness" of our day. The voices that Baronti restores to shared dialogue are fecund. Every page of this work teaches us that we must return to being human. Even if being human always has a cost. The primary cost is precisely the way societies have (choose) for treating the dead culturally. The dead are not a problem of waste disposal. This is why the Shoah was absolute evil. The dead summon around themselves the highest form of cultural labor, the one supremely devoted to the continuity of the species. Whether or not they are spoken of, they remain as an admonition for the education of the generations to love for the other, to intersubjective sharing, to the persistence of hope in the reproduction of plural times and spaces that look toward the future.
In the lines placed at the foot of this piece, I entrust to the very rich index of the three volumes the sequence of subjects and the creative irony of the chapter and paragraph titles that Baronti is able to deploy, revealing the dialogical nature of irony, one of the few expressive forms, perhaps together with sarcasm and poetry, able to evoke the generative power of culture.
But before turning to the index I would like to recall the great teaching in the anthropology of death that comes to us from a great master, Alfonso Maria di Nola. Besides that of his last important works, cited above, which Baronti discusses, there is a lesser-known di Nola, a young man of twenty, poet-anthropologist, who in a forgotten book of 1950 [Autunno del mondo, Guanda, Parma, 1950, p. 87] closed a sequence of short poetic compositions with the song of a lost generation, the generation of the Second World War.
It is a poem titled The Dead of All Peoples, which anthropologically gives voice back to those who, in the rebirth of the postwar years, were absent and therefore present, in the ceaseless relation between the visible and the invisible, a dialogue that still feeds the matrix of every possible voice.

Hatred has died out forever
We dream the same dreams,
we weep the same tears.
Love one another,
for the shadow on this side
is terrible.

Contents of the work:

Volume I:

1. Premises: 1.1 Elective Affinities / 1.2 Skeletons in the Closet / 1.3 The Anthropology of Death in Italy: Tears and Regrets / 1.4 Memories of Life and Death / 1.5 Dwarfs (Few) on the Shoulders of Giants
2. Domestic Death: 2.1 The Common Affliction
3. Precognitions, Presages, Premonitions, Presentiments, Forewarnings, Forecasts, Prognostics…: 3.1 Anthropocentrism / 3.2 Birds (and Other Animals) of Ill Omen: 3.2.1 Messenger of Death / 3.2.2 Hens: Taxonomic Disorders / 3.2.3 Man's Best Friend / 3.3 The Assiduous Vigilance of the Saints: 3.3.1 Saint Ursula and All Her Company / 3.3.2 The Diligence of Saint Paschal / 3.3.3 La morte sta anniscosta in ne l'orloggi / 3.4 The Language of Dreams / 3.5 Fatal Combinations
4. The Death Agony as a Cultural Institution: 4.1 The Language of the Hands / 4.2 Traveling Companions / 4.3 Last Glimmers / 4.4 The Death Agony as a Public Event / 4.5 Final Devotions / 4.6. Dying Too Is a Labor / 4.7 Hard to Die
5. The House of the Dead: 5.1 Women and Men: To Each Their Own / 5.2 For Whom the Bell Tolls? / 5.3 Household Chores / 5.4 The Window onto the Hereafter / 5.5 The Shape of the Soul / 5.6 We Cannot Enter: 5.6.1 Women and Children / 5.6.2 Animals and Men
6. The Proliferation of the Dead: 6.1 No Deposit, No Return / 6.2 Cultural Works in Progress: 6.2.1 Les laveuses / 6.2.2 Chi more secca chi resta si rinfresca / 6.2.3 The Last Appearance / 6.2.4 When the Habit Must Make the Monk / 6.2.5 Argent de poche / 6.2.6 Metaphysical Tollbooths / 6.2.7 Do ut des / 2.8 Hand Luggage

Volume II:

7. One Must Depart: 7.1 Shoes: An Eschatological Dilemma / 7.2 The Dead Person's Room / 7.3 The Dead Person's Bed / 7.4 Everybody Stop / 7.5 Chi more se sottora chi vive se ristora / 7.6 Pulvis es / 7.7 A Night That Never Ends
8. The Funeral: Transport and Accompaniment: 8.1 The Transport / 8.2 The Accompaniment / 8.3 The Farewell / 8.4 Mind the Cross / 8.5 One-Way Streets / 8.6 Sturm und Wind / 8.7 Sit tibi terra / 8.8 What We Talk About When We Talk About Weeping / 8.9 The Language of Grief / 8.10 The Consequences of Grief
9. The Decanting of Death: 9.1 Ritual Inertias / 9.2 Hushed Engines Throb in the Night / 9.3 la bonfinita / 9.4 The Law Is Equal for All / 9.5 Nessun dorma! / 9.6 No Traffic Allowed

Volume III:

10. Mourning: Social Obligations and Individual Dispositions: 10.1 Mourning by Class: 10.1.1 Meticulous Etiquette and Sumptuous Trappings / 10.1.2 A Romantic Religion of Memory / 10.1.3 The Prompt, Displayed and Compact Mobilization of Kin / 10.2 Ma l lutto quela volta era proprio na cosa seria / 10.3. End of Mourning: Never
11. The Presence of the Dead: 11.1 Do Not Disturb! / 11.2 En rêve venants / 11.3 Extra Time / 11.4 House Arrest / 11.5 Tell Me Who You Are / 11.6 Bain-marie / 11.7 Todos caballeros / 11.8 Revenants / 11.9 Stowaways in the Night: Shadows and Fears / 11.10 De profundis / 11.11 Nightmares and Goblins / 11.12 Holy Souls / 11.12.1 Appendix: Texts of Alms-Begging Songs
12. Return to the Dead: Return of the Dead: 12.1 Fiant luces / 2 Bed and breakfast / 12.3 The Charity of the Dead: 12.3.1 Appendix: Popular Texts of the Dies irae / 12.4 The Inheritance of the Dead / 12.5 The Beans of the Dead: 12.5.1 Food of the Saints and Food of the Dead / 12.5.2 Food of the Dead, Food of the Living
13. Bibliography
14. Research Dossier

Giovanni Pizza teaches Medical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Perugia, where he directs the School of Specialization in Demo-Ethno-Anthropological Heritage (Castiglione del Lago).