This time, however, I would like to insist on lightness, rather than comedy, with that look that Italo Calvino taught us in his memorable American Lesson. There is a question that is never mentioned, constantly denied even though it is one of the very few things that all humans have in common, and this question is DEATH.
The Feast of All Saints and the Catholic celebration on 2 November are the only public glimmer of our relationship with the dead in Italy. Halloween no, it is no longer, as we know. But there were always feasts of the dead in Italy, even semi-pagan occasions, in which the dead appeared and the children learned fear. From my parts, we ate "dead bones", dry biscuits, and "the beans of the dead", macaroon species. Shortly thereafter St. Martin arrived, which was in fact a very similar thing to Halloween given that the kids went around making noise by banging drums made with cans of detergent and singing a Venetian nursery rhyme about San Martino and getting some sweets from the ladies of the neighborhood.
The last thing I care about is "tradition". I am often bored by tradition, I am definitely in favor of innovation if the tradition is meaningless or pretends to be older than it is and maybe it was introduced by the Municipality for turists. But the relationship with the dead, no, is not a tradition, it is a human necessity: together with the fire to cook and to the taboo of incest, it is one of the milestones of the appearance of humans as cultural animals.
We no longer know what to do with our dead, because they speak a lost language, that we no longer want to listen (even if Tiziano Scarpa told us that we speak thanks to the words we inherit from the dead), we are too busy pretending we live to have still the courage to talk to the dead. This reduction of dead to empty sacks, this total inability to relate to them is the lowest point of the moral crisis of our world.
And anthropology cannot make it all up in the analysis; if it does not become a practice, at least in my opinion, it is not good anthropology.
So, October 31st arrives, the world pretends to be cheerfully frightened, our children, obviously, go trick-or-treating in the block but we still have a sense of emptiness, an incompleteness of the kind you wrote a letter but you left in the drawer, never sent.
In a special corner it will be possible to do, through an app developed by the kids of LaPE (the Laboratory of Ethnographic Practice without which all this could never even have been conceived), to take a photo turned sepia to be posted on a virtual plaque with your words carved on marble.
When we have eaten and drunk well, after telling each other the many stories of our dead, we will conclude the evening with a small collective ritual. Everyone can write a message on a piece of paper to a loved one, and burn it on the fire that we have lit in the garden, trying, therefore, to talk to the dead after so many years of silence.
Like all rituals, the community is needed to make them true. Come and be a community, we look forward to welcoming you.
