Absent Souls

This book is a sort of journey to discover the female body, beginning in the Ancient Greece. This is the place where some categories of the western culture had their anthropological incubation. This is the place where the myths represent the ethical and mimetic status of a community based on a “primary oral tradition”, which was the only vehicle for transmitting knowledge in a non literate society.

Mythical women and historical mothers, victims and vestals, Greek women are explored through the metaphor of a body evoking the themes of birth, feeding, eros, silence and voice; in this backwards journey between myth and history, the stories of these women are told in a game of symbiosis between past and present; they remind us that “at the beginning there was the present day”, which means that the past constantly re-emerges, feeds and regenerates the present, indicating new ways for investing in the future to those who can understand its significance.

Laura Faranda is professor of Ethno-anthropology at “La Sapienza” University in Rome.