It’s quite mind-boggling how the most toxic scholars of the past in the academic study of religion(s) have escaped unscathed the BLM movement’s criticism or the fury of cancel culture. How come statues like those dedicated to Churchill, Washington, Columbus, Confederates, slave traders, and racists all the world over were defaced or toppled down last year while the busts of Mircea Eliade are still standing? How is it possible that a chair at the University of Chicago is still entitled to Eliade while cancel culture is reclaiming so many academic and intellectual victims almost on a daily basis?
Read moreWe are eminently social primates highly susceptible to power dynamics, individual status, and social hierarchies, to the point that we spend a considerable amount of our time and resources in obtaining prestige goods, following charismatic individuals, and accessing or owning places deemed special, sacred, or relevant by our in-group. If you don’t believe me, just have a look at all the pop items auctioned for jaw-dropping sums of money, from vintage comic books to sport and cinema paraphernalia. In 2003, for instance, comic book artist and creator Todd McFarlane bought baseball player Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball from 1998 for $3 million. Today, Golden Era comic books in good conditions are worth millions of dollars.
Read moreWhen I was very young, and already a history buff, I loved to devour books about the history of dinosaur paleontology and play two groundbreaking MS-DOS turn-based strategy videogames on a clunky INTEL 80286, Centurion: Defender of Rome (Bits of Magic, 1990) and Sid Meier’s Civilization (MicroProse, 1991). Both videogames were early examples of what would have become known as “4X” empire-building strategy games, i.e., videogames that involved the exploration of a virtual map, expansion of territory with the conquest or annexation of provinces, exploitation of the resources available on the map, and extermination of (or diplomatic alliance with) enemy factions (Ghita and Andrikopulos 2009). As their names suggest, Centurion allowed the player to take active part in Roman military history as an army officer, while Civilization offered the exhilarating possibility of replaying history with several civilizations on ever-different scenarios and maps.
Read moreIn 1905, Italian novelist and future Nobel prize laureate Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) published a short story entitled L’eresia catara (“The Cathar Heresy”). In his novella, Pirandello follows the pitiful personal and professional misadventures of Bernardino Lamis, a shy and modest Full Professor of History of Religions (professore ordinario di storia delle religioni) in an unnamed Italian University.
Read moreHuman cultures are neural environments extended throughout time and space. Cultures reach out to the ancestors. They explain the origins of everything. Thunders, earthquakes, life, death. They connect the most remote past with the future. And in the process, they provide meaning. Cultures make sense of all that happens. In the skies up above, on earth down below. Within us, between us, among us. Our similarities, our differences, our emotions, our thoughts. Everything is culture, and culture is everything.
Read more... quiet… quiet … BANG! Darryl Jones has recently suggested to label unhorror the blockbuster, mainstream “marketization” of the post-millennial horror, which compensates for its depoliticized and polished nature by the implementation of the now “dominant aesthetic technique” called scare-jumps or “jump-shocks”.
Read moreIn his On Deep History and the Brain, historian Daniel L. Smail suggested that technologies and dedicated socio-economic systems develop around specific psychotropic practices, that is, practices which piggyback our neuroendocrine system to deliver a rewarding, addictive experience (Smail 2008). According to Smail, the period that ranges from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the imperial coda of the French Revolution (1815) stands out as a pivotal moment in the “invention” of a distinctly modern mass economy of psychotropic products and practices.
Read moreLast November – which in the current predicament seems like a lifetime away – my wife and I went to the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The temporary exhibition, which closed on 12 January 2020, “include[d] about 300 objects loaned by Naples and Pompeii, many of which have never left Italy before” (Brown 2019). The exhibition gave us the unprecedented opportunity to see in person some of the most breathtaking remains ever discovered in the history of Roman archaeology.
However, during our visit we spotted a baffling passage in the caption of one terra sigillata pottery showcase (8.1).
Read moreYou know the drill. You went to the movies to watch the latest installment or the much talked about reboot of your favourite horror/thriller series. You read the interviews, you heard the podcasts, you checked some quite promising non-spoiler reviews. This time it really looked like the new movie could be a lot of fun. All you hoped for was a breath of fresh air, and then… meh. Nothing. Been there, done that. Déjà vu. Just more of the same.
Read moreCinema provides a virtual environment specifically engineered to stimulate our cognitive and sensorial inclinations – for our own entertainment. The cinematic experience itself is an embodied simulation based on illusory stimuli able to elicit the mirror neurons of our brains – putting us effortlessly in the characters’ shoes and making us feel what they feel (Gallese and Guerra 2012; Gallese and Guerra 2015). The illusion does not stop at emotionally connecting to the characters’ adventures. We intuitively transform opaque cinematic techniques into flawless narratives (e.g., converting an illogical jump cut into the natural blink of an eye).
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