Historian Carlo Ginzburg Research Articles

The Text beyond Itself: Romani Social Construction in Romanian Secret Police Files

Romanian State Secret Police (Securitate) files produced before 1989 can be accessed today through a lengthy process that requires official research authorization through a government office, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității - CNSAS). The CNSAS General Document Fund includes large issue-related files under the umbrella of “The Gypsy Problem,” with thousands of pages of both national and county-level reports and recommendations. This paper teases out the granular documentary clues (spie, as Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg describes them) in some of the Securitate files to explore the way in which a pattern of documentary communication is built to frame Romani identity as idiosyncratically marginal, oriental, and parasitic. A particularly interesting aspect of the knowledge production imposed through these files is reflected by anecdotes that purportedly illustrate the character of the Roma. This study analyzes the relations of power built through hermeneutic devices and language choices which build “truth formulae” (Weir) that reify a particular view of Romani ethnicity, class, and gender. This archival (de)construction has implications for a long view of policy, political memory, and exclusionary societal attitudes today and in the future.

Correspondence on Freud (1971–1995)

In this correspondence, philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro and historian Carlo Ginzburg discuss the role of Freud’s work. The letters provide an important source for the Italian reception of psychoanalysis in its relation to the emergence of microhistory, by opening a window on to the political-intellectual microcosm of the 1970s and on an epistemological debate crucial to the understanding of psychoanalysis and the human sciences at large.

O MÉTODO DA AIA COMO PROCEDIMENTO: SINAIS DE UM PARADIGMA INDICIÁRIO E DE UMA ESCRITA ASSASSINA NO ROMANCE MEU NOME É VERMELHO

O artigo discute o método da aia submerso na diegese do romance Meu nome é vermelho do escritor Orhan Pamuk, e sua relação com o paradigma indiciário abordado pelo historiador Carlo Ginzburg em sua obra histórica. Abordamos como esse método auxilia na revelação da identidade do assassino nos interstícios desse romance, a partir dos sinais, vestígios e rastros deixados na diegese pelo autor dos dois crimes: a morte do miniaturista Elegante Efêndi e do Tio Efêndi. Empenhamos em demonstrar também, como a partir desse método, é possível uma leitura sobre o funcionamento formal dessa obra. Trabalhamos com a seguinte hipótese: a inserção de um estilo historiográfico que faz parte da prática metódica da escrita da história na diegese do romance apresenta-se como uma ironia moderna e como perspicácia do escritor para indicar ao leitor (semiótico) uma maneira dele se aproximar daquele lugar em que a escritura romanesca deposita a sua forma: o discurso narrativo. Abordaremos ainda o que estamos chamando de escrita assassina, a partir das leituras de Roland Barthes e Maurice Blanchot, que argumentam que o escritor escreve para morrer em sua obra, e assim validar sua permanência na memória de literatura.

La notion de paradigme indiciaire dans l’élaboration de la psychanalyse par Sigmund Freud

ObjectivesThe objective of this article is to question the comments of historian Carlo Ginzburg concerning the influence of Giovanni Morelli's theory of attribution in art on the establishment of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, as well as the relevance of the bringing together of these two authors within a very specific epistemological paradigm that Ginzburg calls the evidential paradigm. MethodThe article first presents the general problem; it then exposes Ginzburg's theory of the evidential paradigm and Morelli's theory of attribution in art. This allows us to directly address the influence that Morelli could have had on Freud in the early stages of the development of psychoanalysis, particularly around the issue of overdetermination. ResultsWe can find the influence of Morelli's method on psychoanalysis in the way Freud approaches the problem of overdetermination of the symptom, and in the way he considers the overabundance of clinical material offered by patients in their speech as a valuable tool of analysis rather than as an obstacle. We can, indeed, find the principles of the evidential paradigm in psychoanalysis, because the latter seeks to uncover a reality that is inaccessible at first, i.e., the reality of the unconscious, from traces of this unconscious emerging in the patient's speech. DiscussionWe then wanted to question the limits of Ginzburg's convocation of Morelli and Freud, and thus determine whether psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it is indeed an adaptation of Morelli's principles to another object, or whether he only drew inspiration from the latter's theoretical and practical contributions, in order to conceive of psychoanalysis as a method going beyond the principles of the evidential paradigm. ConclusionWe are thus able to show that psychoanalysis is not limited only to the principles of the evidential paradigm in its approach to the unconscious, by looking, for instance, at the evolution of the Freudian conception of interpretation.

Science, Natural Magic, and the Subaltern Worldview in Postwar Italian Historiography

Focusing on the work of the historians of early modern science and philosophy Eugenio Garin and Paolo Rossi, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and the historian Carlo Ginzburg, this essay aims to frame the relationship between science and magic in postwar Italian historiography within the context of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Garin and Rossi investigated the seventeenth-century science’s roots in Renaissance authors. In the same years, De Martino carried out fieldwork on the magical worldview of farmers of southern Italy, aiming to explain how such doctrines had been connected and somehow shaped by the culture of the elites since the Renaissance. Some years later, Ginzburg, explicitly inspired by De Martino’s work, investigated the popular magic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friulan peasants and its relationship with the culture of the elites. This essay aims to show how the ideas of these historians was influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s ideas and how they were connected with the cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party, which indirectly affected the view of historians on science, magic, popular culture and the culture of the elites, and modernity in postwar Italy. This essay also highlights the differences between contemporary Italian, British, and US historians in light of their different cultural agendas.

A contribuição do educador Jan Amos Comenius para a Primeira infância

O educador Jan Amos Comenius foi um dos importantes pensadores que ajudaram a modificar esta imagem de infncia dirigindo-lhe um olhar dedicado. Opondo-se a prticas educacionais presentes em seu tempo, mas seguindo o pensamento metdico da cincia moderna, props uma Didtica que tinha por objetivo central formar o bom cristo, ter f verdadeira em Deus, praticar aes virtuosas e preparar-se para uma outra vida, estendendo esse objetivo a todos: os pobres, ricos, deficientes e mulheres. Este trabalho reconstri as caractersticas do olhar comeniano para a primeira infncia, na tentativa de observar as modificaes em seu pensamento a respeito desta etapa da vida em trs de suas obras. Como exemplo dessas modificaes, apontamos aqui a diviso da primeira infncia em quatro etapas na obra Didtica Magna, e em seis etapas na Pampaedia, obra escrita cerca de vinte anos depois. Como o primeiro o texto de maior circulao no Brasil entre os pesquisadores da Histria da Educao e da Didtica, essa fase da primavera para Comenius tende a ser compreendida sem o aprofundamento necessrio oriundo da anlise das mudanas do pensamento do autor ao longo da vida. O dilogo entre estes dois textos confrontado com uma terceira obra, intermediria, que foi recentemente traduzida para o portugus (2011), a Escola da Infncia. Por perceber importantes diferenas entre as idades, Comenius fez propostas originais para a lide pedaggica, ao destacar a necessidade de uma ateno s crianas entre zero a seis anos, muito maior do que aquela que lhe pode dar um professor com uma grande turma de crianas. Alm disso, mostrou que cada idade nesse perodo requer um cuidado especfico que deve ser oferecido pela famlia para preparar adequadamente as crianas antes de mand-las para a escola. Para analisar as trs obras comeninanas citadas, este trabalho parte de uma inspirao metodolgica na obra do historiador italiano Carlo Ginzburg (1989, 2001, 2006).

Clues, Evidence, Detection: Law Stories

This essay raises questions about ways in which law and the interpretive humanities might intersect in such manner as to offer real insight one to another. Specifically, it addresses the use of narrative in the law, and its analytic study. Stories, I argue, are not events in the world, but the way we tell events, a crucial distinction sometimes unrecognized in legal opinions. Examples analyzed include the doctrine of “inevitable discovery” articulated by the Supreme Court in Nix v. Williams , juxtaposed to the creation of a seeming inevitability in the stories of Sherlock Holmes. These issues are further clarified through a discussion of historian Carlo Ginzburg’s reflections on the “huntsman’s paradigm” and the workings of “retrospective prophecy.” The essay then turns more closely to the analysis of narrative, particularly the end-determined nature of narrative meaning, and to the one Supreme Court case I am aware of that discusses narrative in an analytic way: Justice Souter’s opinion in Old Chief v. U.S . Further examples are drawn from rape adjudication ( Rusk v. Maryland) and post-conviction petitions for relief ( Mickens v. Taylor ). If narrative, telling the facts, plays so important a role in law, shouldn’t the law arm itself with more tools in the analysis of narrative? The notion of law as language, including its grammar and its rhetoric, deserves a place in legal study.

‘At the crossroad of Magic and Positivism’. Roots of an Evidential Paradigm through Benjamin and Adorno

The article focuses on an apparently secondary aspect of Adorno’s argumentation in the Positivist Debate: social physiognomy. Physiognomy forms part of what the historian Carlo Ginzburg called an ‘evidential paradigm’. Based specifically on semiotics, it began to assert itself in the human sciences in the late nineteenth century. The art connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud showed how through its application, information considered marginal could enable understanding a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality. Benjamin and Adorno also set physiognomy at the centre of their complex, anti-reductionist theory of culture, which focuses on aspects neglected by conventional approaches. While traditional ‘rationalistic’ historical and sociological approaches generally focus on overt aspects of ‘culture’, such as language or words, physiognomy seeks more far-reaching significance through the conviction that mental abilities are reflected in the corporeal nature of human beings. Physiognomy thus considers those aspects of culture that are neither rational nor logical and not explicitly revealed. For this reason, physiognomic practice generally focuses on analysing myths, dream states, and covert aspects of the mind and body – cultural expressions that are not produced by the conscious, logical mind, but are involuntary and repressed. Today, more than half a century after the Positivist Debate, the topicality of Adorno’s sociological thinking can be seen to lie more in his efforts to unify abstract theorising, object, and aesthetic representation, than in his explanatory analysis of capitalist society.

Nočni bojevniki: Kmečke herezije in čarovništvo na Slovenskem in v Furlaniji<br>Night Warriors: Peasant Heresies and Witchcraft in Slovenia and in Friuli</br>

The author discusses records of the documents of two inquisition processes from the years 1583 and 1596 against a Friulian miller who was condemned as a member of the sect of banandanti, discovered by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg and published in his famous book Cheese and Worms (1976). The Benandanti claimed that they were secretly gathering “in spirit” and fighting four times a year with sorcerers and witches in night battles. He compares them with Slovenian oral tradition about the kresniki and their opponents, the vedomci.

Surveillance history and the history of new media: An evidential paradigm

New media are often addressed within the growing field of surveillance studies, but technologies predating the late twentieth century are rarely considered. This essay challenges conventional histories of modern surveillance by highlighting the cultural impact of three ‘old’ new media: photography, the phonograph, and the telephone. Drawing upon the work of historian Carlo Ginzburg (1990) , I argue that new media produce new evidence and that late nineteenth-century media contributed to an emergent ‘evidential paradigm’. From this perspective, the intensification of contemporary surveillance can be seen as an elaboration of late nineteenth-century new media and the proliferation of evidence-producing communication technologies.

Abra esta carta após minha morte: escrita como testamento na correspondência entre Jan Hus e seu discípulo

The priest and educator Jan Hus, who was killed by fire in 1415 the Council of Constance, wrote two letters to his disciple Martin of Volyne, in which left a set of instructions for distribution of their material possessions and an list of spiritual teachings. The letters were similar, and the first should only be opened if Martin received from a reliable source news of the death of Hus. This paper examines the context and content of these letters for clues (concept based on historian Carlo Ginzburg) from an educational activity on the part of the sender and the transmission of his place of master to his disciple

Modalidades disciplinarias en el colegio de calidad de la ciudad de Medellín "Institución Educativa Francisco Miranda" en los grados séptimo y octavo. : Una perspectiva psicoanalítica

This research addressed the problem of disciplinary procedures in one of the quality schools in the city of Medellin: the Educational Institution Institucion Educativa Francisco Miranda. The sample was taken in the grades 7th and 8th. This school is located in the comuna 4 (Aranjuez), a district where cataloged media-low class people live. The research question was: how does the school do sanctions to students today at the quality school Institucion Educativa Francisco Miranda in Medellin City in grades 7th and 8th at the same time, this question has been done in a social context when parents and teachers wonder why the punishments to scholar children and teenagers are not effective. The research methodology was qualitative-historical-hermeneutic paradigm, with a specific focus or technique of psychoanalysis research: the evidential paradigm, an approach formalized by the historian CarloGinzburg. The results show the ways to sanction students y this educational context today. Also, they show the difficulties which teachers have to face as representations of law. © Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Sociales.

Irony, Montage, Alienation

[Ed. note: This is the first part of a two part essay.] During an exhibition opening at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in 2006, several people showed up with their shoelaces undone, stood talking to each other, and were photographed periodically. Later, Polaroids appeared under the title Resistance, identifying artist Roman Ondak as the mastermind of this intervention and providing the temporary performance with the potential for permanence. However, by retrospectively calling this performance Resistance, the artist intervened not only in the ritualized situation of the opening, but also in a much broader field. He relates this slight disturbance of everyday gestures to an important artistic and critical tradition that presents disturbances of language and interruptions of convention as acts of political resistance; hence. Ondak inscribed his work within this tradition. By using the museum and a public meeting of art connoisseurs for his intervention, he highlighted the judgment of such a process as resistant, but at the same time he revealed that such a judgment might also become the subject of questioning and reflection. Seen this way, this artwork creates a kind of pictorial equivalent of the starting position of a research enterprise (1) also designed to investigate this particular artistic, political, and critical tradition--that sees aesthetic tactics of irregularity and disturbance (such as montage, alienation, parody, or irony) as resistant or subversive, and thereby contrasts them to conventional or dominant aesthetic and political formations. Similar to Ondak's artwork, this project was determined to question such a binary division of the aesthetic-political world that ascribes a quasi-essentialist political effect to certain aesthetic tactics regardless of how they are used and the reactions they trigger, not by criticizing from a bird's-eye view, but by working through the arguments brought up by this tradition. The method I have chosen to analyze and question this is that of a plural genealogy--a critical and multilayered history of handing down concepts, judgments, and practices. By tracing the emergence or invention of this tradition of regarding certain aesthetic tactics as 'resistant'' or subversive, we can better understand the historical contexts these tactics respond to and the kind of reception histories they trigger, and recognize whether they were always performed in the same way. Can there be a way to escape such a division of the aesthetic (and political) worlds and, if so, how might this be conceptualized? ART, EMANCIPATION, AND THE EVENT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION With Dadaism, surrealism. Situationism, the Expanded Cinema. Bertolt Brecht's Alienation Effect, and other avant-garde practices since the 1950s, the twentieth century Overflows with aesthetic provocation of various kinds. Despite such a recent. accumulation, use of aesthetic tactics like alienation, parody, irony, and montage to de-legitimate, question, and provoke dates back to ancient times. The historian Carlo Ginzburg (2) traced the tactic of alienation back to the second century, to Marcus Aurelius's stoic self-education toward a distanced perception of things. For the Roman emperor, matters had to be alienated as if they were riddles in order to question erring beliefs, seemingly self-evident postulates, and frozen attitudes. This method, recommended by Aurelius, was handed down through copying, narrative, duplications, and reading experiences. For instance, a sixteenth-century monk, Antonio de Guevara, wrote an imitation of Aurelius's self-contemplation in which he pointed out the gaze of the savage, the peasant, or the animal as possible alterative views of the world. From this, a connection can be drawn to Michel de Montaigne; to the French seventeenth-century moralists, especially Voltaire; and later to Leo Tolstoy and theories of Russian formalism in the first half of the twentieth century. …

Ginzburg in Harlem: History, Structure and the Politics of Primitivism

The historian Carlo Ginzburg is renowned for his critique of modern, scientific reason and his articulation of an alternative form of knowledge which he labels ‘conjectural’. This form of knowledge, supposedly more attuned to the historian’s interest in the singular and specific fragment, as opposed to the abstract and universal concept, is so rooted in the practices of the prehistoric hunter that Ginzburg sometimes describes it as a ‘venatic’ form of deduction, binding ‘the human animal closely to other animal species’. In this essay, I explore the ramifications of this alternative form of knowledge, attending especially to its relationship to the modernist theme of ‘primitivism’. I do so by juxtaposing Ginzburg’s critical appraisal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, and Rudolph Fisher’s own literary invention, John Archer, the physician who sometimes aids criminal investigations in African American Harlem. I argue that the differences between Archer and Holmes draw attention to some troubling implications of Ginzburg’s historiographical argument. Folding this analysis on itself, however, I also suggest that what might be at stake, when Ginzburg insists so troublingly on the importance of the singular, venatic trace, is the evocation of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the historical ‘event’.

Arthur and Oscar (and Sherlock): The Reconstructive Trial and the 'Hermeneutics of Suspicion'

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a significant contribution to the campaign to free Oscar Slater, wrongly convicted of murder in 1909, and imprisoned for eighteen and a half years. This paper examines the trial of Oscar Slater in the light of the argument made by the historian Carlo Ginzburg that the nineteenth century saw the development of a new evidential paradigm as exemplified by the method of Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes. This is discussed in the context of the development of the `reconstructive' trial in the late nineteenth-century, by looking at changes in the types of evidence admitted to trials, at the changes in the law of evidence and at the relation between the detective and legal counsel. It argues that, like detective fiction, the trial was structured around a `hermeneutics of suspicion' that was institutionalised in certain features of the reconstructive trial. This encouraged jurors and other observers to distrust appearances and to make judgments based on their interpretation of the evidence and the appearance of the accused. Ironically, this contributed to the miscarriage of justice in the case of Oscar Slater that Conan Doyle later sought to challenge by use of the same method.

Mario Cresci's

‘Any claim to systematic knowledge appears as a flight of foolish fancy. To acknowledge this is not to abandon the idea of totality .... Reality is opaque; but there are certain points — clues, symptoms — which allow us to decipher it’.1 Searching for an epistemological model, or paradigm in the social sciences, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote these words in an essay published in 1979 under the title ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’. Ginzburg was able to weave into his essay many threads in an interdisciplinary discussion on the research method used, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by an Italian art connoisseur (Giovanni Morelli), a physician in Vienna (Sigmund Freud), and a British writer of detective stories (Arthur Conan Doyle). What unified their method was the attention paid to ‘marginal and irrelevant details as revealing clues’,2 for the attribution of a painting, the analysis of a symptom, and the discovery of a criminal. In his own work, Ginzburg considered this paradigm as an effective research method for the study of obscure fields of human culture, such as witchcraft and popular beliefs.3

The judge and the historian: marginal notes on a late-twentieth-century miscarriage of justice

A bomb, an anarchist's 'accidental death', the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportunism and dishonesty. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the Historian and the judge.

Sporsøgeren Carlo Ginzburg

The article gives an introduction to the wotk of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, known worldwide specially for the books The Cheese and the Worms, The Night Battles and Ecstasies. Deciphering hte Witches' Sabbath. Working on source material from the archives of the Inquisition, Ginzburg has tried to recover the authentic popular beliefs from the distortions they have been subjected to in the official interrogations of the Inquisition. A main theme in his research has been a continuous effort to explain the phenomenon benandanti, those "good wanderers" who fought nightly battles against the witches in sixteenth century Friuli in norther Italy - according to what the peasants told the Inquisition. In his latest book, on the origens of the witches' sabbath, Ginzburg sees the phenomenon in a tradition of Euro-Asiatic shamanism. That has been much debated, and although Ginzburg's theories only partly explain the with-persecutions of early nmodern Europe, they certainly throw new light on popular beliefs, and therefore they can not be ignored.