The Ethnologist in Europe

Ernesto De Martino between Myths and the Arts

Abstract

Already in the late 1930s, the attention given to the theme of the ‘European crisis’ led De Martino to shift the focus of his investigation to the field of ethnology. According to De Martino, Europe’s confrontation with cultures alien or marginal to its own tradition reveals the utter inadequacy of Western categories to recognize the historical drama of so-called ‘inferior’ civilizations, whether ‘primitive’ or ‘subaltern’. This gap shows its stark contradictions at the moment of the greatest historical crisis of European hegemony and the bourgeois society that expressed it. Then De Martino understands that modern civilization’s fascination with the ‘primitive’ roots in a cultural removal, whose most alarming symptom is the instrumental use of myth (resulting in a rejection of history) in artistic productions. It is from this perspective that we can better understand the specificity of De Martino's view of contemporary art.