Nicoletta Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza. Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell'Europa fin de siècle (Anthropologists at the court of beauty. Decadence and symbolic economy in fin de siècle Europe), Verona, Edizioni Fiorini, 2002; 479 p. (with index and bibliography); series « mneme » n. 3; 37 Euros; ISBN 88-87082-16-2.
Antropologi alla corte della bellezza is a study of the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. In particular, this volume explores the largely unnoticed connections between, on the one hand, the purposeless and ephemeral beauty in the "art for art's sake" doctrine, and, on the other hand, the disinterestedness and the spontaneity ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of "primitive" civilizations.
Pireddu highlights how, in those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of instrumentality and profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness a source of beauty.
The book is composed of two parts.
The first part, with an original comparative and interdisciplinary approach, reconstructs what Pireddu presents as a homology between aesthetic activity and gift-economy in fin de siècle European culture at large.
Within that framework, the second part offers an innovative reading of a rich series of English, French, and Italian texts, inspired by ceremonial expenditure. It hence rethinks the poetics of renowned writers like Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, and reaffirms the centrality of unjustly neglected authors like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee.
Each chapter represents a logical and chronological step in a progressive analysis mapping the transition from decadence to modernism, and showing how a study of the connections between aesthetics and anthropology in late 19th-century Europe can not only enrich the debate on the relationships between decadence and modernism, but also raise new questions on the anti-modernity of culture at the outset of the 20th century.
Antropologi alla corte della bellezza thus underlines crucial aesthetic and philosophical implications for a theoretical reflection on art and symbolic economy that traverses more than one century, from Mauss and Bataille to Cixous, Bourdieu and Derrida, among many others.
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