Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sweet Congratulations Letter

THE BRIDGE OF SAN GIACOMO

"A Piminoro, a village close to the Aspromonte Oppido Mamertina of about 400 inhabitants and the limits of subsistence mountain economy, still in the first two days of November, some women prepare a meal that is sent as a gift to other families. In 1979, during a survey, we have witnessed the preparation by the lady Immaculate Barillaro of this ritual meal, consisting of pasta with meat sauce (for a total of 4 pounds) and meatballs (4 pounds), the lunch was sent , sometimes with a bottle of wine, half of the children, families neighbors and even some villagers patrons of a bar, which last year had made an explicit request to Barillaro.Tale ritual offering is made, as we explicitly said the lady, for the souls of the dead.

also the entire research team (composed of 5 persons) was insistently offered the same room with the same motivation.

A Piminoro was not found in the belief, widespread in the same area Aspromonte, the return of the dead in the night between 1 and 2 or for the entire month of November in their homes to consume the food and wine prepared them. The custom of the dining ritual was in the years previous widespread in the country. Mrs. Barillaro acquired this practice in his own family, now emigrated to Australia, his mother, in fact, the specific practices.

In this case, the other without further specification represents the dead, is dead in its capacity as recipient of an action pledge and affectionate.

The other, as such, is constitutionally survivor passes and through him the opportunity to recover a relationship with the dead. The affection may well articulated in language and to find partners and form an area of \u200b\u200bcontinued symbolic.

The call is part of the team especially in the cultural figure of the "foreigner", which, as it is not known by definition, can equate with the dead and the absence of stable roles recognized in the country allow give the stranger the function of representing the dead vicariously.

A Strongoli in the province of Catanzaro, November 2, 1978, a "foreigner" who was in a shop to buy bread, that was offered by a local customer, causally in this workshop, in the souls of their dead.

The stranger reminiscent of the cultural framework of the pilgrim and guest, so was taken as the person in need, and then in this particular respect, comparable to the poor and, correspondingly, to the dead. "
---

The song was just played verbatim excerpt from" The Bridge of San Giacomo - The ideology of death in the peasant society of the South ", essay published in 1982 for the types of Rizzoli and co-written by two academics from Calabria, Luigi Maria Lombardi Satriani (in addition to its well-known anthropologist, also grandson of the great folklorist Raffaele Lombardi Satriani) and Mariano Meligrana, in which the same explore concepts and behaviors, respectively, formed and led by a curious mixture of superstition and religious dictates of traditional matrix, observable, especially in the past, in the southern working class with reference to exitus vitae supremum.

In particular, the phenomenology of death folk Bridge of San Giacomo is unique, narrow (specifically, " rope as thin as a hair ") transition between this life el'aldità, whose journey is granted only to the deceased, and prevented the living.

We wanted to offer to visitors of the blog a step in the volume, the result of a representative of the many research on the subject conducted by the authors, both for its purely national interest (since kept to a survey conducted by researchers at Piminoro) as well as brought before us, southern Calabria and the present time, we have lost in the current globalized our cultural roots, a particular modus , of \u200b\u200bwhich our ancestors were convinced, to entertain a relationship with the deceased (and which, however, went even track the behaviors of various contemporaries, often zealous in the state - as it will ever observed in more than one - to make a donation, however modest, in favor of a stranger " 'eg the animeja dead ").

We believe the summons a small suggestion to give a deeper meaning, the more genuinely "Calabrian" than religious or consumer, but not universal in scope, in these days of commemoration of the dead and who knows, maybe even better to spend the conviction that, as taught by the fathers and of course regardless of the observance of certain rituals Passat, November 2 the wall between life and death is weakened and the Bridge of San Giacomo, rather than symbolizing a one-way trip, can be really trait d'union between every living and their loved ones ...

0 comments:

Post a Comment