Pensieri selvaggi

Abstract

Poetry and anthropology: what do they have to do with each other? More and more often this pairing is invoked in the cultural chronicles, and even more often it is practised in the their actual performance: by poets less so, probably, but certainly by anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnographers or whatever you want to call them. Not without irritation in the academic establishment, always ready to defend traditional disciplinary fences, it happens - with an insistence that has become a trend - that much anthropological research acquires a tone and language, and therefore evidently contents, that overflow into the poetic, or that at least recall passages, styles and sensations that poetry has sometimes produced in the course of its long history.