The Party. Collecting, recognising oneself, getting lost

Men have always met to recognize each other, tell their stories and thus establish, celebrating the link between the human and the divine, their own cultural identity. Of such an encounter, the feast represents one of the fundamental and constitutive moments. It is - and this is its essential paradox - that it is a central event of human coexistence and at the same time a subversion of its rules. It is an exit from everyday life that nevertheless allows a renewing of the fundamentals of living together, regaining the very center of everyday life. Fascinating and dramatic, like any authentically human experience, the holiday is anthropologically the alternative par excellence to war, although wars often make use of it to legitimize the very conflict they unleash.

An in-depth study that helps to understand the feast as a fundamental device through which human sociality is strengthened by channeling the destructive tensions that run through it into a practice regulated by laws that gives them vent, reinforcing, rather than compromising, the social bond itself. 

The volume is the result of the third International Seminar organized in 2012 by the "Archivio Ries" Archive for Symbolic Anthropology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan campus).

Contributions by: Patrizio Alborghetti, Christine Barbier Kontler, Claudio Bernardi, Alessandra Brivio, Giorgio Buccellati, Giovanni Curatola, Paolo Dalla Sega, Pia De Simone, Fiorenzo Facchini, Stefano Martelli, Keith F. Pecklers S.J., Natale Spineto, Marina Villa.