14. IMAGINING THE WORLD: MYTHOLOGY IN HUMAN CULTURES IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Panel Convenors
Giovanni Casadio (University of Salerno) [giovannicasadio@libero.it]
Paola Corrente (Universidad del Pacífico, Lima- Perú) [p.corrente@up.edu.pe]
Mythology has a long and rich history: vital for ancient societies, myth has been produced by virtually all cultures and has been studied since antiquity. Nevertheless, in modern times it seems to have declined or to emerge in other forms (“The modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals”: M. Eliade, and see, mutatis mutandis, Roland Barthes' theory of myth.)
Aiming at revitalizing the interest in this fascinating manifestation of the human mind and promoting cross cultural comparison through an interdisciplinary debate, this panel encourages proposals of researchers from various fields of study. Myth has, indeed, a symbolic and all-encompassing nature. Hence, it can be analyzed at various levels and, ultimately, better understood if approached by different points of view.
The panel will develop three lines of discussion:
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Historiography and Theory. A kind of status quaestionis that can be the starting point to review fundamental issues (definitions, main schools of thought, relations with other literary or religious phenomena etc), but, especially, to open new avenues for investigation.
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Interpretation. Through the presentation of concrete cases, the idea is to offer original readings of myths from the perspective of a variety of disciplines (e.g., law, economics, philosophy, sociology, politics, biology, and cognitive science) and approaches (e.g., cultural translatability of myth, esp. deities, in recent theorizing by J. Assmann, M. S. Smith and D. Miano).
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Reception. The analysis of the re-use and re-elaboration of mythological topics (in music, cinema, literature, art) can be useful to comprehend the modality of its endurance.
Although the main focus of the panel will be on ancient Mediterranean cultures, considered the widespread (in time and space) production of myths, and the broad objective of the panel, proposals of contributions dealing with other cultures will be carefully considered.
The accepted languages for the panel are English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The presentation will last 20 min.
We invite abstracts of up to 250 words. The deadline for submission of proposals is September 30, 2020.
For any queries, please contact Ms. Alexandra Chung at the e-mail mitoscoimbra.boli@gmail.com. Ms Chung will receive the abstracts as well.
Abstracts should have:
- Title of communication
- University
- Abstracts (max 250 words)
- Keywords (5 to 10 words)