PREFACE

Periodically the international community launches on great matters concerning the difference among the various cultures, the vital necessity of their survival, the legitimacy of the etnocentrism. These waves of attention toward the Other a lot of times are not neither casual neither dictated by philanthropic inspirations but they are relatable to well determined historical and social events that consists in movements, for the most part supranational that they risen to oppose, to rebel or to destroy the culture that appears dominant in this or in that other region of the terrestrial globe and that the demand they make pressing to understand above all “of what nature is” the adversary. Instead, the internal protests are more often neglected since when they are not warned as a true menace to the maintenance of the status quo. Yes, because the inside paradox to every cultural potentate is that the change is conceived only in the world of the other! On a different level it places the aesthetical appreciation for the folklore, the popular traditions and the local customs in mixture with the curiosity, that turns toward all that appears naïf, and with the love for the roots in which the people want to identify itself to consolidate the bases of own belonging and to recover the cultural matrixes by me called Historical Self. Milestones are the symbols, together to the myths and the narrations, through which every culture condenses and hand on itself. The widening of the space “moral emotional and intellectual” (Wittgenstein) in which we live it draws food from the ability to identify ourselves with the world of the Other in its horizontal and vertical historical dimension. Transposing this thought in the delicate matter of the dense tangle between nature and culture, the lived reality could be conceived as a “multidimensional entity” or “field” whose inside some essential aspects to the social construction as the abilities to become and to codify a historical memory, appears fruit of potentiality bound to the specific characteristics of the organs of sense and the brain by the whole the individuals composing the aforesaid “transpersonal field”. They would be the neurons to contain the imprinting of precedents experiences, shared and uniting, on the high group significance (in the sense of culture and belonging) according to a trace (“computerized” in the neuronal codes) that it is ordered, proceeding from the primordial time and archetype to that actual, in stratifications of structure (from the archipallium to the neopallium). Probably it is because of such structuring that we are barred from the hazardous going on there and back in the time unlike the bustles that are allowed in the space (both that it is an astronautic voyage that it is the jump from a tile to the other of a paved road), even if it appears suggestive a theory that the possibility foresees to find us in an A or B or C time, in relationship to a hypothetical to vary dynamic of the “form” of the time, for instance trapezoidal, rectangular, helical or circular; and all of this could agree with the Brahmanism about the circularity of the time and the possibility of the “reincarnation.” In lack of a time-machine that can realize our dreams to reach a past-future, it can satisfy us a seductive experiences as the Itinerant Seminar “The Symbolic Imaginary” that it represents an unrepeatable model of a group journey able to short-circuit the contemporary social world with the cultural matrixes of which every participant is in the unconscious holder/representative. And since in our culture we have accustomed more and more to associate the needs of the soul with the reasons for the good management and the type economic-budgetary evaluations it is not here unhappy to evidence as a model ideal for the construction of a specific setting to analyse (anthrop-analysis) the cultural matrixes of the Historical Self, could result very interesting also for a good city-manager that realizes the enormous return, in terms of image and economic, for a territory that qualify itself through specific prototypal experiences able to valorise the native magic of the place and the value of the cultures that have imbued it. To the operational scientific search and the theoretical elaborations, originating from the experience “on the field”, it is necessary to mainly place side by theoretical research with the assignment to bring nourishment to the world of the ideas, from which the new thought and the scientific progress spring. The Raffaella Anania’s doctoral thesis*, fascinating titled “Cultural Matrixes and Community Transformations”, it is marked by the constant references to the prestigious groupanalysis school, that recognized in the Palermo University teachers - Franco Di Maria, Girolamo Lo Verso and Gioacchino Lavanco (Supervisor of the dissertation) as true school-leaders, but in her elaboration the author spaces very beyond, in a rich protean interlacement that doesn't fear to articulate prestigious contributions - various scientific and cultural extraction - with a series of as many stimulated sources of clear literary brand. The small one “sweet” experimental of the thesis is a work on the field conducted in two territories enough circumscribed, to allow a limited research in terms of time that of resources operational, but extremely meaningful because of place typicality and for geographical allocation: the island Marettimo (in Sicily) and Castelpizzuto (in Molise). The adopted model is that of the interview structured that it can constitute an important formula for the development of a more systematic operativeness - useful to cover a space until now left empty by the research at various levels: university, enterprise, local government unity - that ranks between the techniques of the extensive interview (or of survey) and the action-research.

Alfredo Anania

*University of the Studies in Palermo, Faculty of Sciences of the Formation, Degree in Psychology, Academic Year 2000-2001.