Life and Work of Ernesto De Martino

Flavio A. Geisshuesler earned Ph.D. degrees from the universities of Virginia (USA) and Bern (Switzerland). He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), where he applies the interdisciplinary perspective of the Italian School of History of Religions to contemplative practices in Indo-Tibetan tantra.

• Acknowledgments Let the Earth Shake: From Crisis-Born Hero to Master of Civilizational Crisis1 The Decline of the West (1908–1929): The Rupture of Time in Modernity and the Rise of the Prophets of Crisis1 Student Years under Fascism and the Guidance of a Spiritual Prophet of Crisis2 The Arrow of Progress and the Unification of a Ruptured Modernity in Need of Orientation3 The Crisis of the First World War and the Rise of Oswald Spengler’s Cultural Pessimism2 Civil Religion (1929–1335): The Return to Something New as Modernist Alternative to Mircea Eliade’s Politics of Nostalgia1 Rudolf Otto and the Return to Religion as Experience2 Mircea Eliade’s Politics of Nostalgia and the Rebirth of Western Civilization3 An Alternative to the Politics of Nostalgia: Modernism and the Dialectic Conception of Palingenesis as the Return to Something New4 Questioning the Rupture of Modernity from a Dialectical Perspective: The Self-Secularization of Religion and the Self-Mythicization of Politics3 The Crisis of the Presence (1936–1944): The Antifascist Sacralization of Politics and the Rise of Magical Thinking during WWII1 The Antifascist Turn in the Laterza Circle and the Continued Sacralization of Politics2 The Crisis of the Presence: Extreme States of Consciousness in Primitive Societies and the Shamanizing of Hitler in Europe3 The Dark Side of the Soul Resurfaces in Religious Studies: The Split between the Insider-Phenomenological and the Outsider-Explanatory Approaches4 The Savior of the European Sciences: The Redemption of the Presence and the Unifying Power of Magic4 De-Historification (1944–1948): Shamanic Magic and the Dialectic Movement between Mircea Eliade and Claude Lévi-Strauss1 The Integration of Eliade and Lévi-Strauss: Sacred Poles and Songs of Labor as Forms of De-Historification2 Historicizing the De-Historifying Tendencies of the Modern Magicians in the Study of Religion3 The Magic Christ of Science: Heroic Historicism and the Active Provocation of Crisis in Pursuit of Critical Thinking5 Critical Ethnocentrism (1949–1959): The Southern Period and the Articulation of a Post-Colonial Anthropology alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss1 Notoriety without Success: Controversies with the Philosopher and Intellectual Isolation within the Roman School of History of Religions2 Shaking Earth and Intellectual Transitions: Political Militancy and Ethnographic Journeys in the Italian South3 The Rise of the Cultural-Discursive Paradigm and Self-Reflexive Anthropology4 Tristes Tropiques, Critical Ethnocentrism, and the Anticipation of the Cultural-Discursive Paradigm6 Loyalty to the Cultural Homeland (1960–1965): Critical Ethnocentrism as an Anticipatory Defense against Relativism and Interpretative Anthropology1 A Critic of Interpretative Anthropology Ante Litteram: The Anthropologist of Guilt Becomes a Philosopher of the Apocalypse of Relativism2 Moving with and Beyond Antonio Gramsci: From Progressive Folklore to a More Successful Colonialization3 Nostalgia for the Lost Homeland: An Anticipatory Analysis of the Cultural Turn and the Surprising Parallels between Cultural Relativism and the Insider-Phenomenological Approach4 Science Is Not for the Stateless: An Anticipatory Critique of the Cultural Turn Based on the Ethnocentric Imperative7 The Ethos of Transcendence (1965–1977): Decision and the Moral Imperative as Anticipatory Response to Postmodernism1 The Philosophical Afterlife of The End of the World: Enzo Paci’s Existentialist Historicism and the Moral Imperative Grounded in the Contemporaneity of History2 Impossible Nostalgia and the Anticipatory Analysis of the Discursive Turn3 The Ethos of Transcendence of Life in Value as an Anticipatory Critique of the Discursive TurnConclusion: Let the Earth Shake (Again) or Why Rebirth Must Lead to a New CrisisReferencesIndex