thesis

Cannibalismo, predazione, socialità: un’ipotesi sulla nascita della violenza

Abstract

In this article the main topics are the problem concerning the role of the neverending rising of the violence in the passing of time and its misterious cultural and biological origins. We start from the main cultural Greek events (the birth of tragedy, the theme of the “scapegoat”), to a deep analysis of biological human and animal behaviours. All the uplisted phenomena are marked by a constant conflict between matriarch and patriarch societies and between mainly male generations, through that mediation of the female element. We focus on the fact that the cultural and natural inextricable tangle is based on the predatory origin human kind and on the primary cannibal conflict between adult man and the progeny of the female, against which the species reacted with all kind of means. First of all modifying her own sexual behaviour (in examples overpassing the female genius and letting women become receptive for what concerns the sexual aspects towards men); secondly inventing a sort of symbolic language. The essential elements of the human antipredatory defences (sexuality, conscience, symbolic language) could be the ones, simil-sexual, based on the receptivity and on the ability of absorbing the diverse, that is the “other”, and of neutralising him. All this facing the predatory violence, coming from the internal of the species, and absorbing it through sexuality and language. In this way violence is modified and becomes almost a “son”. Summing up the connection between biology and environment was the source of the most plastic capacities of the human nature, that is the cultural ones. This mechanism concerned sexuality, sociality and its linguistic derivates. As the sexual perversions are the result of the annexation of biological predation (sexuality), the cultural codes (the sense of guilty) and war, are the annexation of the most mental antipredatory defence (conscience and language deriving from sociality). The result of defending themselves from the predation, in a more mental way, was a ritual and cultural methaphore and, at the same time, a way to push externally the familiar centre, the one which the primary predatory conflict belonged to. It was from this conflict that the human evolution took its origin and a lot of examples are given in the Bible and in the Universal Myth. Following this idea, Religions, cultural symbolic codes, sexuality are joined together in their “circuit” running with predation. This kind of running produces ambiguous antipredatory defences; in fact they absorb predation (and the “other” too) but notwithstanding, they are able to change the “other” and to generate the caracteristic, continuous change, called “culture”. So predation, that was born as the starting point of human nature, nowadays works as eternal source of culture, giving to it the capability to change and to evolute itself

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