Favole
Adriano Favole
Adriano Favole is a researcher in Cultural Anthropology at Turin University where he teaches History of Pacific Anthropology and Ethnology. After gaining his Ph.D. in 1999, Favole has been a contract professor at the universities of Milan, Bologna, Genoa, and East Piedmont. He also was Visiting professor at the University of New Caledonia between 2004 and 2007. He conducted most of his field research in the Pacific (Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia) and has studied Museum Ethnography in the Western Alps. His chief research interests are political anthropology, the anthropology of the body and death, the anthropology of patrimonial assets. He has written Resti di umanità. Vita sociale del corpo dopo la morte (Laterza 2003), and Oceania. Isole di creatività culturale (Laterza 2010). He also edited the book Isole nella corrente (La Ricerca Folklorica 2007).
What happens to our bodies after death? Why do cultural manipulations of the body continue long after biological death? The immediate care of the corpse, the choice of the way to dispose of it (burial, cremation etc.), the recovery and worship of some remains (e.g. Christian relics) show that the body is the object of much social and ritual attention even after its death. So how to explain the collections of skulls, skeletons and other body parts held and exhibited at ethnography, anatomy and natural history museums? Requests by native peoples to return such remains raise the question: who do dead bodies belong to—to scientific or religious communities? Or are they private remains belonging to descendants? Are they just bones, or are they relics? Are they research materials, or ancestors? The role that human remains have played in different eras and cultures will be addressed from the anthropologist’s standpoint.
Adriano Favole is a researcher in Cultural Anthropology at Turin University where he teaches History of Pacific Anthropology and Ethnology. After gaining his Ph.D. in 1999, Favole has been a contract professor at the universities of Milan, Bologna, Genoa, and East Piedmont. He also was Visiting professor at the University of New Caledonia between 2004 and 2007. He conducted most of his field research in the Pacific (Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia) and has studied Museum Ethnography in the Western Alps. His chief research interests are political anthropology, the anthropology of the body and death, the anthropology of patrimonial assets. He has written Resti di umanità. Vita sociale del corpo dopo la morte (Laterza 2003), and Oceania. Isole di creatività culturale (Laterza 2010). He also edited the book Isole nella corrente (La Ricerca Folklorica 2007).