The Body of the Ancestor and Other Stories. Social Sciences and the Distant Past of Communication

Partecipazione e Conflitto

Stefano Cristante¹ 

[1] University of Salento;

关键词: prehistory;    history of communication;    sociology of culture;    political communication;    public opinion;   

DOI  :  10.1285/i20356609v10i2p636

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The relationship between communication and society has been extensively studied in the 20th Century, following the dissemination of mass media announced already during the 19th Century (photog-raphy, cinema, comics, radio, telephone, etc.). However, communication has always been one of the key variables of the entire human history, and not only of modernity. Through a retrospective survey, the es-say analyses communication as an adaptive invention of mankind to the environment. A winning answer to the primordial struggles for survival, communication distinguishes the human species from earlier times for the structuring of a shared oral language. Starting from the extraordinary flexibility of the human body as a multi-media and multi-meaningful tool, the essay offers a communicative revisionism that involves the antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity. Sharing the idea of "the media as human extension" (McLu-han), the author proposes some examples for a new reading of single tales of the Odyssey, i.e. the sirens' and the Cyclops' episode. Eventually, five directions are proposed to run for a wide-ranging investigation of the relationship "communication-society" in the past: invention of symbols, sharing of meanings, crea-tion of networks, construction of knowledge and exercise of power.

【 授权许可】

Unknown