The Myth, the Ritual, and the Wild Being

A Dialogue between De Martino and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This article proposes to establish a dialogue between Ernesto De Martino’s anthropology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, on the assumption that this comparison is as fruitful as it is unexplored. De Martino takes up Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the body in a dense chapter of the posthumously published volume La fine del mondo. Contributo alle analisi delle apocalissi culturali, referring to The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. For both of them, what lies beyond the communitarian fruition of reality, beyond the automatisms of everyday life, is not things themselves, but the non-world, chaos, nothingness – Wild Being, to quote The Visible and the Invisible. This undomesticated foundation exposes us to the anguish of meaninglessness and the complete disarticulation of experience. The foundation can only be represented through a mythical-ritual language that has a protective individual and social function. The metahistorical models of myth and ritual provide a safeguard against both the proliferation of becoming and the blind repetition of disturbing elements from the past. In myth-ritual, closed symbols, i.e. symptoms, are re-moulded into open symbols, images: a dynamic that can be compared with Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology.