Ordine corporeo, disordine mediterraneo. Per una essay-review di Christian Bromberger

Christian Bromberger, Emeritus of ethnology at the University of Aix-Marseille, from his extensive and prolonged ethnographic inquiries between Iran and the coasts of the Mediterranean, develops theories on the treatment of hairiness, on the Mediterranean societies, and on the ‘popular passion’ for football. Reading a sample of his production – over 200 essays and volumes – it is possible to get an idea of his ‘scale approach’ which may indicate new paths and hermeneutical solutions. Inspired by Leroi-Gourhan, Lévi-Strauss and Germaine Tillion, he aspires to understand past and future from a ‘narrow observation point’, which however contains a horizontal opening, considering the interactions between countries and cities, between regions and nations, between time and generations, between changing lifestyles, houses and means of locomotion, ways of presenting oneself in public and in private. The observation is given through a multiplicity of data and mixed descriptions (emic and ethic), which represent the cultural complexity in a broad and stratified way. As folklorists do, Bromberger examines the ‘ordinary passions’ (superstitions, body and food regimes, forms of living, festive modes); but, unlike the folklorists, the dimension considered by Bromberger is wide, and realizes an anthropology of contemporary worlds.