Introduzione all’edizione italiana. Un’altra antropologia è possibile

In this introduction to the Italian edition of *The Ritual Animal*, I present Harvey Whitehouse as an author who is “ethnographically credible” but, above all, as a leading advocate of an anthropology that once again asks broad questions about human diversity, builds testable theories, and engages in dialogue with psychology, behavioural economics, biology, and modelling. I begin with the ethnography of the Kivung in Papua New Guinea to show how a ritual detail (the betel taboo) becomes intelligible only when symbolic-cultural, bodily, and socio-historical levels are held together: it is a defence of consilience against disciplinary “siloing”. At the heart of the theoretical synthesis, I reconstruct the architecture proposed by Whitehouse: overimitation and causal opacity, ritual posture, the bifurcation between imagistic and doctrinal modes, the differences between episodic and semantic memory, and between identity fusion and identification (up to the “extended fusion” of large collectivities). I conclude by arguing that this approach also has political value, not “critical” in a deconstructive sense but integrative: ritual is not only a device of heteronomy; it can be a social technology of cohesion and, paradoxically, a viable path towards freedom understood as the shared discipline of “as if”.