Il teatro degli antenati. Note su Lévi-Strauss e la mitologia kassena

Abstract

The corpus of kassena mythology (West Africa) outlines a moving and manifold universe that needs to be explored in a potentially never-ending process of knowledge building, consistently with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ approach to myths. With the formula “Theatre of the ancestors” the author refers to the whole mythological corpus, as it deals with the ancestors, as it has been passed down by the ancestors themselves, and as the performance of storytelling is the context in which the ancestors and the facts about them are still real. With regard to theoretical concerns in current anthropology, the multiverse of kassena mythology fosters reflections about the relationships between humans and non-humans, mostly through the mise-en-scene of metamorphoses. The kassena “Theatre of the ancestors” is able to transcend the rigidity of the Nature/Culture dichotomy and to cross the boundaries separating different animal species.