PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

Horia Corneliu Cicortas, University of Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy
Il sacro come teatro: Mircea Eliade e Jerzy Grotowski a confronto
Fin dall’adolescenza, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) è stato affascinato dal mondo del teatro, col
quale si è familiarizzato anche grazie alle sue amicizie e frequentazioni degli ambienti teatrali
della Bucarest interbellica. Il mondo del teatro, con la sua sacralità “laica” che si rivela di volta
in volta nella rappresentazione scenica, ha fornito allo storico delle religioni romeno
un’occasione non solo di riflessione teorica ma anche di produzione letteraria; basti pensare
alle pièces teatrali più note, come “Iphigenia” o “La colonna infinita”, ma anche ai racconti
degli anni ’70, come “Incognito a Buchenwald” o “Uniformi di generale”, dove il simbolismo
del teatro è visto come esercizio magico-spirituale. E’ questa l’ottica in cui il presente
contributo intende stabilire, partendo dai loro specifici contesti, parallelismi e convergenze tra
l’opera di Mircea Eliade e quella, anch’essa pionieristica nel campo teatrale, di Jerzy
Grotowski (1933-1999), grande regista polacco che ha rivoluzionato il teatro contemporaneo,
riportandolo alle sue origini rituali e alla sua essenza trasformativa.
Eugen Ciurtin, University of Bucarest, Rumania
65
Tue 15 th , 10.20, Classroom 12
Pettazzoni’s Lesson: the Increase and Decrease of a Generalist History of Religions
Fifty years after the death of Raffaele Pettazzoni, there is little doubt he incarnated “the most
universal scholar of religion of the past century at a world level”. To rewrite today some of his
finest comparative books would require the expertise and support of many scholars and
institutions across countless fields and disciplines. The autonomy, unity and integrity of the
history of religions as a comparative and universal project Pettazzoni admittedly illustrated by
the constant and careful increase of his own project, from a particular monograph to synthesis
works on crucial themes with combined sources and methods. He thus absorbed all relevant
results of his and previous generations of scholars, representing in a specific way the
embodiment of the discipline for decades. There are above all unambiguous parallelisms
between the aim and methods of a generalist history of religions and the construction of
Pettazzoni’s own work as a generalist one. From his very first contributions “conceived in so
judicious and temperate a spirit” (R. R. Marrett, review of Pettazzoni 1912, in Folklore 23
(1912), no. 3, pp. 389-391, here 391), his work traveled from “formazione” through “sviluppo”
to a certain kind of scholarly “onniscienza” impossible to envision today. In Eliade’s words, his
lesson was “what to do, not how to do it”. However, the universal generosity of a generalist
task was quickly superseded by other evolutions within the field, all of them in a way or
another connected with the increase of specialization, and the very viability of an individual
generalist project turns out to be obsolete. Despite the value of a “what-to-do” task which
consequently was praised as the best individual achievement during his days, I will argue that
Pettazzoni’s work as a whole was not the first, but the last, if not the single one possible of this
magnitude. I will then try to show that his manifold accomplishments describe the
configuration of the history of religions in a specific moment of its history even better than his
own project. Having accordingly long term consequences, which interfere with nowadays
developments and debates, his lesson of “what to do” in front of the insurmountable variety of
religious histories, sources, and themes is still decisive despite the decrease and failure of a
generalist history of religions two generations after his acme. I will concentrate my analysis,
which is a part of a larger critical study of Pettazzoni’s achievements, on the relationship