Acknowledgments
The communion with others populates our past and reaches, in our memory, only a few faces of the people closest to us. It renews itself continuously in the presence of a need, also physical, to maintain old relationships and weave together new ones: Friendly conversations, the joy of a nice dinner amongst friends in an osteria outside of town, the miscellaneous encounters of everyday life, the feelings of a celebration experienced together. [All these] do not just bear witness of ourselves to ourselves and get us used to the humility that comes with a continuous confrontation of our ideas and of our emotions. They also form our self, pulling it back, again and again, from the edge of the abyss that is the moi haïssable; pushing it, again and again, back to the green fields of life with growing courage and certainty.
Ernesto de Martino, La Fine del Mondo
∵
It is impossible to write a book without the support of others. This is particularly true of the first book in an author’s career. Although my scholarship grew into a strong tree, with the pages you are about to read being the most prominent fruit, it would have never come into being without the seed that was planted fifteen years ago. It was during my time as a student at the University of Lausanne that I was introduced to Ernesto de Martino and the Roman School of History of Religions by Silvia Mancini. She was not only, to borrow a term from the distant Himalayan world, a “lineage holder” of this scholarly tradition, but also a passionate, generous, and demanding mentor. Later, as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, I not only had the opportunity of whetting my intellectual curiosity in sheer endless directions, but my perspective on de Martino was enriched through my exchanges with a series of interlocutors from various disciplinary backgrounds, particularly Allan Megill, Richard Handler, Roy Wagner, George Mentore, Kurtis Schaeffer, David Germano, Larry Bouchard, Peter Ochs, Jalane Schmidt, Timothy Wilson, Bruce Greyson, and Edward Kelly. I would like to express my particular gratefulness to Asher Biemann, whose quiet, pragmatic, and realistic mindset offered an invaluable force of stabilization to the dispositions of both myself and that of this book’s protagonist. Although he told me, during one of our first meetings, that books are generally more accomplished teachers than people, I would still choose our conversations over access to any library in the world.
The Swiss National Science Foundation generously supported an extended stay in Rome, where I not only conducted the principal archival research for this project, but also spent blissful afternoons writing on various benches throughout the Villa Borghese gardens. I would like to thank the many scholars in Italy (and beyond), who have offered their time and energy to engage me and my thinking during this period, particularly Giovanni Casadio, Marcello Massenzio, Ulrich van Loyen, Massimo Marraffa, Sergio Berardini, Adelina Talamonti, Alessandro Testa, Fabrizio Ferrari, Valerio Severino, Pietro Angelini, Emilia Andri, Fabio Dei, Nicola Gasbarro, Natale Spineto, and Michaela Schäuble. I am also indebted to Carlo Ginzburg, who has not only mobilized the full range of his impressive acumen to critically examine my thinking, but has also served as an inspiration for what it means to be an intellectual in a globalized world. Sitting in front of him in his home, surrounded by towering stacks of books, was both one of the most intimidating and exhilarating moments of my journey as an academic so far.
I also want to acknowledge my time at the University of Bern, where I defended the thesis out of which this book was developed. Besides the Dr. Josephine de Karman Foundation, which provided me with the funds to complete my dissertation, I am particularly grateful to Jens Schlieter and Marco Pasi, who have been so enthusiastic about my work that they carefully evaluated a dissertation that reached biblical proportions. Jens has been much more than a Doktorvater for me, supporting my career even in the years after I finished my Ph.D. In the spring semester of 2019, when he encouraged me to teach a course on the life and work of de Martino, I had the good fortune to initiate bright and open-minded students into the Italian ways of thinking about religion. I fondly remember the many hours we spent at the Länggass-Tee shop, with me pitching them chapter after chapter, and them, in turn, responding curiously and critically to what they had read.
I would also like to express my thanks to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Khyentse Foundation, and the Lady Davis Foundation, who have provided me with yet another home away from home as a postdoctoral researcher over the past year. I am especially appreciative of Eviatar Shulman, who has helped me grow on professional and personal levels over what has been a challenging period for many of us. There is no doubt that the outbreak of the pandemic, coupled with the stimulating environment of Israel—with its rich histories and persistent contradictions—created a field of energy that reverberated into my manuscript during the final revisions. At Brill Publishers, my thanks go to Tessa Schild, who has accompanied me and my book through the publication process with a lot of patience and grace. I also thank the anonymous readers, who devoted their time and wisdom to my study.
One of these reviewers critically observed that I often tend to quote secondary scholarship to say things that I could have said myself and that there are moments, in which “de Martino’s work seems to drown in a sea of metatheoretical speculation.” While there is much truth to this, I decided—perhaps to your chagrin—not to change my style of writing. On the contrary, the mixture of voices in the book reflects the times during which it was written, as well as the spirit of the book itself. Just like de Martino, who once self-reflectively described himself as an “intellectual of transition,” this book embodies my own transformations. When I started this study, I was a fledgling student in Switzerland, who would absorb any new information like a sponge; as I finish this book, I hold two Ph.D. degrees and teach my own university courses on three continents. Accordingly, the various voices found in the book reflect my own journey from what Jonathan Z. Smith once called a writer of a “dissertation,” marked by an “inability to argue and to accept responsibility for decisions of inclusion and exclusion, […] a bland nodding to authority,” to the writer of a “thesis,” characterized by a “combative and assertive” disposition and “painful and argued decisions of choice” (Smith 2012, 39).
Looking back, it becomes apparent that I wrote this biographical study of de Martino precisely because my research has always been entangled in the fabric of my own life’s trajectory. As the German idealist philosopher Johann Fichte once put it, the kind of philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man he is. There is no doubt that my departure from Switzerland as a young man has profoundly marked my identity. It is as if the drive to escape the Kantönligeist, which stifled my creativity as a teenager, acted as the most productive catalyst over the past decade of my life. In the United States, I learned what it means to be free, Rome has taught me how to enjoy life, and Israel showed me how to find peace in contradiction.
Although I never suffered the bouts of famous Swiss nostalgia for mothers’ soups and Alpine folk tunes, my identity is nonetheless rooted in my family. Thematically, for instance, the articulation of an Italian perspective on the apocalypse can also be seen as an expedition into my own family’s history. As they left Italy two generations ago to settle across the alps, it was a conscious choice to end one world in order to restart another. In terms of my way of thinking, I was shaped by my parents. From my father, I inherited a deep love for the construction of ideas, the laying out of arguments, the journeying into the world of thoughts. My mother, by contrast, instilled in me a curiosity for living cultures, a capacity for vision, as well as a commitment to practical resolve and courageous decision based on intuition. There is no doubt that this project, like many others in my life, would have never been completed without her support.
Writing a book on the dialectical nature of de Martino’s thought for an Anglophone audience also reflects the future trajectory of my family. I thank Katie, who has been a wonderful mother to our children and a human being with whom I’ve grown tremendously over the past fifteen years. Finally, although they once asked me to write about things that are relevant to them—specifying that they would read anything about unicorns and LEGO cars—this book evokes a spirit that I hope to instill in my three children: Loyal recovery of an old heritage and a transcendent assertion of one’s own place within this larger tradition. Of course, I expect neither myself nor my children to ever achieve such a complete coincidenta oppositorum. On the contrary, just like Benedetto Croce, the Italian idealist teacher of de Martino, I see this way of living as an ongoing project of world-building, always incomplete and continuously inviting for new construction. In this spirit, I would amend Fichte’s previously invoked adage and state that the kind of philosophy a man chooses depends not upon the kind of man he is, but rather upon the kind of man he wants to become.