Naven/Potlatch
Permanent seminar on the contemporary
1. The age of transitions (A.A. 2024/2025)
Within the scope of the teaching of “Legal institutions, security and social change”, this course inaugurates "Naven/Potlatch. Permanent seminar on the contemporary" dedicated to a critical reading of contemporary society from a sociological and anthropological perspective that will find development and continuation in the coming years. The two terms Naven and Potlach refer to two famous rituals studied by anthropology assumed here as metaphors and indices of "other" forms of social life destroyed by Western civilization, capitalism and technoscience. Their knowledge seems to be a possible, necessary and adequate premise to the attempt to understand the more general process of "metamorphosis" of the contemporary world (Beck 2016). On the one hand, these rituals demonstrate, for everlasting memory and warning for the time to come, that an alternative to the dominant order and the state of things is always possible as long as one knows history and the past, what can also be called tradition, and, in the horizon of the contemporary, one walks with courage and awareness, far from the sirens of cultural fashions, the paths of utopian thought; on the other, the Naven and the Potlatch invite us to think in a critical, anti-naturalistic and politically aware sense about the multiple ideological forms that have always covered all social phenomena in the centuries-old capitalist regime of which globalist transitions are today the widest, fiercest and most infesting expression perhaps ever to appear on Earth. The background of the reflection will always be constituted on the one hand by capitalism understood as a totalitarian matrix of forms of life (biological and sociological); and on the other hand by technoscience whose immense transformative power, the true armed wing of capitalist domination, is now completely free from any form of ethical, political, legal and social control to manifest itself without restraint as a true delirium of omnipotence.
This year's course offers a sociologically and anthropologically aware review of the transitions underway, avoiding easy and banal, as well as false, "politically correct", progressive and mainstream representations, referring to past authors such as Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille, closer in time such as Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and Ulrich Beck, and contemporaries such as David Graeber, David Lyon and Frank Furedi, to name but a few of those who will be presented and discussed, together with the vivid historical reconstructions of documentary makers such as Adam Curtis, verifying their theoretical assumptions and socio-anthropological theses on case studies taken from the seething national and international news. Particular attention will be given to the political-legal and sociological-criminological implications determined and connected to the transformative processes underway at the national and international level with a focus on the concepts of “institution”, “security”, “risk”, “fear”, “culture war” and “socio-cultural change”.

Naven/Potlatch
Permanent Seminar on Contemporary
1. The Age of Transitions (A.A. 2024/2025)

In his last work "The Metamorphosis of the World", published posthumously in 2016 by his wife Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, the theorist and sociologist Ulrich Beck tried "to understand, and explain, why we no longer understand the world". A world that he defined as "unhinged": "out of joint" like the title of a famous novel by Philip Dick (Time Out of Joint, 1959), in turn a quote from a famous line from Shakespeare's "Hamlet". A disjointed world entangled in a process of dismemberment of social and cultural structures, and of uprooting and transformation of fundamental anthropological assumptions in a globalized movement of overall "metamorphosis" that spares no sphere or domain.
In the preface, Beck pointed out to our attention the many phenomena of destabilization that are gripping humanity in a gigantic, accelerated and continuous grip as capable of generating «a fundamental shock, a turning point that blows up what until that moment were the anthropological constants of our life and our conception of the world. The “metamorphosis”, thus understood, simply means that what until yesterday was unthinkable is today real and possible».
Ulrich Beck's sociological theory, which had given ample proof of itself in the masterpiece still unsurpassed, as much as misunderstood and “domesticated” by many of his readers, dedicated to "Risikogesellschaft" (1986), was not only capable of an extraordinary diagnosis of ongoing phenomena, but also offered numerous elements of prognosis as cultural criticism that seem to be more important and useful than ever for the understanding of an era of transitions such as the one we live in. Transitions that can be observed today in every area of ​​individual and social life: anthropological and biological, demographic, energetic and food, political and legal, social and economic, technoscientific and digital.
There is practically no sector or "sphere" of social life that is spared from what appears to be a global transformative fury promoted throughout the world by unscrupulous globalist elites and which sees the West as the terrain in which they are mostly exercised, experimented and imposed.
There are numerous points of attention for sociological reflection. Immense problems arise regarding the legitimacy of such transitions where they completely lack democratic participation to the point of registering the censorship of dissenting voices and the repression of initiatives and actions contrary to them. Even more serious and major problems arise when these transitions directly attack human and collective life, on the one hand by destructuring the human being in a bio-anthropological sense, even through a senseless bio-engineering spread and imposed at a planetary level by any means, and on the other by building forms of "hive society" that are increasingly automated, monitored and digitalized according to wicked social engineering projects that recall and even surpass the darkest dystopias.