Necromancers, Visionaries, Ethnologists

Ernesto De Martino and the Experience of Dysregulation between Poetry and Ethnology

Abstract

In The End of the World De Martino recognizes that literature and visual arts of the twentieth century can be considered as symptoms of a widespread and deep-rooted malaise that affects many aspects of contemporary consciousness. Art is a tool for immersing oneself in the depths of the artist’s personal unconscious and the collective unconscious of society, thus representing a “journey to the underworld” facilitated by the artist’s voluntary choice to renounce form, their own cultural perspective, and their own personality, even embracing the allure of the exotic, the primitive, and "otherness" in a broad sense. In my contribution, I would like to attempt to interpret the artist’s “catabasis” by highlighting the category of dérèglement, which De Martino derives from the reading of the French poet Rimbaud, and to show how the practice of dérèglement is not only related to the dialectic of contemporary artistic production. Ethnological practice, with its movement of questioning and reclaiming cultural heritages, is also a form of intentional and controlled dérèglement.