No human society has ever left the body just the way that it was in nature. We all manipulate our bodies in some way—by drawing on them, coloring them, carving them, covering up parts of them—almost as though we were never satisfied with them. We do all sorts of things in order to distance our bodies from their natural state, to make them ever more ‘human,’ i.e. cultural. And in so doing, every society expresses its aesthetic norms and its aspirations. From haircuts to tattoos, from scratching to plastic surgery, from body paintings to cosmetics, human imagination and creativity offer us many opportunities to manipulate the body. Such practices have become a field of investigation by cultural anthropology as they represent a form of writing that humans try to imprint—in more or less high color, with more or less deep signs—in that blank page, their body.
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Marco Aime is professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Genoa. He has conducted research on the Alps and in West Africa. Aime has authored a number of books: Le radici nella sabbia(EDT, 1999); Il primo libro di antropologia(2008), Il dono al tempo di Internet(with A. Cossetta, 2010), L’altro e l’altrove(with D. Papotti 2012), Contro il razzismo (with G. Barbujani, C. Bartoli, F. Faloppa, 2016) published by Einaudi; Verdi tribù del Nord (Laterza, 2012); Gli specchi di Gulliver(2006), Timbuctu(2008), Il diverso come icona del male(with Emanuele Severino, 2009), Gli uccelli della solitudine(2010), Cultura(2013), L'isola del non arrivo. Voci da Lampedusa (2018) published by Bollati Boringhieri; All’Avogadro si cominciava a ottobre (Agenzia X, 2014); La macchia della razza (2012), Etnografia del quotidiano(2014) published by elèuthera; La fatica di diventare grandi. La scomparsa dei riti di passaggio (Einaudi, 2014); Tra i castagni dell'Appennino. Conversazione con Francesco Guccini (2014); Senza sponda (2015) published by Utet. He transleted Atlante delle frotiere by Bruno Tertrais e Delphine Papin (2018, ADD editore); He's going to publish Comunità (il Mulino, 2019).
Marco Aime & i Dialoghi
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