Live video: "Sacred medicine", with Massimo Centini

Tomorrow evening, Wednesday 30 November, Massimo Centini will be a guest on our YouTube channel to present his book Sacred medicine: a journey into the medical-magical practices of Italian folklore (Yume, 2020). Appointment in live streaming starting at 21:30.

LIVE VIDEO

ABSTRACT

Medicine and popular magic are often close: they are in symbiosis and give life to a series of practices that today are largely part of cultural archaeology: its practices, however, cannot be attributed only to superstition. In fact, its complex structure has coagulated millennia of experiences, traditions and beliefs born when magic, religion and science were so close as to seem a single reality. What we today define as popular medicine is above all a tool capable of symbolically recomposing, first of all, the balance between man and nature in compliance with the rules of a sort of "mythical biology". In this book the reader will find a series of experiences of Italian folk medicine, with comments and reflections that we hope will be a useful opportunity for a rational vision of the therapeutic and protective systems of the people. So it is not a list of "recipes", but a modest anthropological evaluation that can help us observe a whole series of phenomena rationally and perhaps suggest angles of interpretation not yet considered.

MASSIMO CENTINI (1955)

Graduated in Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Turin. He has worked with Italian and foreign universities and museums. Among the most recent activities: contracted in the "Ethnographic Art" section of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Bergamo; he taught Cultural Anthropology at the Design Institute of Bolzano. Professor of cultural anthropology at the Popular University Foundation of Turin, he teaches "History of criminology" at courses organized by MUA - South Tyrolean University Movement - of Bolzano. He writes for "Avvenire", "TuttoScienze" of "La Stampa" and collaborates with Radio Rai.

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