Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Mile Živković
I'm an anthropologist
and I was born and raised here in Palermo.
Then I left and I went to study anthropology in the States,
and then I've been practicing anthropology in many places
from Amazonia to Vietnam
to the south of France,
to the fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
But the fact that I was born here, and I was raised here,
gave me a permanent idea of a very funny thing
that I can define
as a kind of laboratory of similarities.
So, Sicily and Palermo [are places]
where people acquire an identity
trying to look like each other.
There is a strong effect that I can call a kind of 'xerocopy' effect
but it's an organic effect, so people, in order to grow up,
they need to look like someone else.
And of course, this is a process that is different for men and for women,
but you can see how the gestures that people take,
or the way in which people move and walk,
in a way move the body of people.
So, if you look at the group of young kids here in Palermo,
you always see that they try to have the same posture,
to walk in the same way
because this is a way in which,
what is, in a way, biological and physiological,
becomes physiognomy.
And this is what I have been studying in other cultures for a long time.
So, what has always struck me, is that this is in a way,
the permanent work that people do.
So, people, in order to live in a place, they have to look like another.
So it's a very funny idea
that an identity is mostly based on looking like someone else.
So, in order to be yourself, you have to be another.
It's a very funny situation, but you find the same in the Amazon forest,
you find it here in Sicily,
you find it in the community of fishermen in Ireland.
So, basically, this is what anthropology is about.
Anthropology is about studying
all the ways, all the devices,
all the skills that people develop in order to look like each other.
It's a very strange situation
that explains how society works.
Society works in a way that,
I mean, if you don't look like the people around you,
you don't feel that you have an identity.
Of course, there are individual differences,
but, basically, the most important work
is to observe other people around you
and to change your body according to the way of other people around you.
This is body language mostly,
because if you don't do that,
you cannot really express yourself in a context.
Of course, the problem is when you change context
and you have to adapt yourself, your body, to the new context.
So, what is the theory behind all that?
The theory is that—
I mean, what anthropologists call kinship,
what anthropologists call parenthood,
is nothing less than this process
of trying to look like someone else.
When I came back to Sicily after many years of studying abroad,
I was really amazed by something that I had forgotten,
how people, from the same family, look like each other,
how people, from the same family, look like twins,
but this is also true [about] people of the same village,
and this is also true [about] the people of the same region.
People of Agrigento, or people of Palermo, they look different,
because their physiognomy
has been adapted to look more like each other
and this is basic effort of each culture.
In a way,
I say that people get married and make children
in order to have people that look like them.
Kinship is one of these devices to make people look like you.
Because this is the other way.
You can look like other people but you can make people look like you.
There is a long process of back and forth.
Why is this important?
This is important because, in a way, we have forgotten
how important the body is
in the connection and communication of other people.
The basic communication that people have with other people
is not even body language but body shape.
So you communicate with another person of your same context
giving him the sensation that your body is like his body,
and in a way, you don't need words, you don't need even gestures,
in order to show that there is this kind of proximity.
Why am I still concerned about this idea of similarity?
Because, in a way, my feeling is
that the contemporary society is very scared about this process.
People are scared of looking like each other
because we are obsessed with the idea of the individual identity.
But, on the other [hand],
our society is obsessed with the idea of reproducing things,
clonation for instance.
When you clone Dolly, the sheep,
clonation is the refusal to accept
that there is a cultural process already of clonation.
The difference between a clone and a twin is that the twin is never perfect.
Our contemporary society wants in a way
to get to the perfection of making copies
but society already makes copies of bodies.
We don't need mutants, we don't need clones,
because this is already what we do.
The great thing is that this process is never perfect
because you cannot ever wipe away
the individual difference
that lies at the very bottom
of these processes of identification.
So, anyway, this is mostly my research
and I am still working, mostly on the difference between girls and kids
how they act, how they perform,
in order to change their body, in order to look like each other.
But this is basically what I am doing
and Sicily, and Palermo,
is one of the most interesting laboratory
to study this kind of things.