Event #17

“The end of the world has always been there. What else do you imagine the Incas or the Aztecs thought when they first saw the Spanish conquistadores, those aliens who had rained in from who knows where? But what is the end of the world, if not the end of one’s world?” These words by the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino came as a revelation to Ascanio Celestini when, as a university student, he discovered that “anthropology was not the profession of a group of gentlemen in bow ties who would travel to Africa to measure the skull of its inhabitants. It was that, too, and it invented a modern, scientific form of racism. But in the 20th century, anthropology became a view of the world, a way to understand how individuals can consider the world their own. So when someone asks me how stories are born, I don’t know. All I know is that we need stories, for stories are our way of being in the world. The world may not end as long as we have words to describe it. If words come to an end, we will no longer know how to relate to reality”.