La Festa. Raccogliersi, riconoscersi, smarrirsi

[Autom. eng. transl.] Men have always met to recognize each other, talk about themselves and thus establish their cultural identity by celebrating the link between the human and the divine. Of such a meeting the party represents one of the fundamental and constitutive moments. It is - here is his essential paradox of being the central event of human coexistence and at the same time subversion of its rules. It is an exit from the everyday that nevertheless allows a refurbishment of the fundamentals of living together by regaining the very center of everyday life. Fascinating and dramatic, like any authentically human experience, the festival is anthropologically the alternative par excellence to the war, although nevertheless the wars often make use of it to legitimate the conflict that they trigger. An in-depth study that helps to understand the feast as a fundamental device through which human sociality is strengthened by channeling the destructive tensions that cross it into a practice regulated by laws that give them an outlet, reinforcing, rather than compromising, the same social constraint. The volume is the fruit of the third International Seminar organized in 2012 by the "Archivio 'Julien Ries' for symbolic anthropology" at the Catholic University of Milan.