The Volcano and the Firefly: Dwelling with Disaster at Different Scales

Wherever nature is neither perceived as an idyllic condition nor as an abstract background of the everyday, the question arises how its effects can become canalized, appropriated and distributed. As anthropologists have pointed out, Italian popular culture ingeniously provides resources of ritual, religious or simply creative character to transform these effects into agency and by doing so creates entanglements of separation and unification between nature and society. This research seminar will propose a contemporary look at such practices in Taranto and around Naples, and, in a second step, try to bring them into dialogue with the longue durée of human “mastery of non-mastery” (M. Taussig), the interplay of (natural) danger, (societal) transgression and (artistic) form under the volcano.

Jasmine C. Pisapia received her PhD in Socio Cultural Anthropology at the Columbia University and is currently Researcher and Principal Investigator of the project “Ecologies of Performance: Ethnography of environmental violence and embodied resistance in Southern Italy’s Land of Fires” at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. She has also published on Ernesto de Martino’s visual anthropology and conducted extensive fieldwork on the toxic legacies in and around Taranto.

Ulrich van Loyen is guest at the Biblioteca Hertziana during Fall term 2025/26 with a special research focus on the religious anthropology of the Mediterranean.

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Scientific Organization: Anna Magnago Lampugnani, Ulrich van Loyen, Tanja Michalsky

_{Image: André Masson, Empédocle (1937) Oil and sand on canvas. George Bataille Collection. Location unknown.}