Tele-pathos

Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Bronfen’s trajectory in crossmapping the gestures of the cultural imaginary, the essay concentrates on the linkages between mourning and hysteria. Against the background also of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, we investigate the particular case of the studies of death and lamentation presented by Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino who, beginning in the 1950s, studied the funerary rituals of Southern Italy as incarnations of pathos formulas that recur from the most ancient times and in the most varied formats. The expressive resources of the specifically female mourners were documented in de Martino’s own figurative “Atlas”, and they form a poetic repertoire of bodily poses and movements that at one and the same time evoke the resistance of the hysteric to her alienation and recall the iconography of the Hollywood diva.