Hybridis, differences, visions. On the study of culture.

The general aim of the book is to explore the various fields covered by the study of culture. It presents different approaches to the relationship among language, culture and society, and focuses on the importance of culture in modern and contemporary historical studies. For this purpose, it compares different disciplines and traditions, focusing on the debate about the concept of “culture”, which represents the main issue in German Kulturwissenschaften and in Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies. It aims at broadening the interest in this field through a series of complementary lines.During the conferences, questions and answers, observations and comments brought about a very interesting debate on the study of culture, which unfortunately cannot be fully reproduced in this book. The papers basically display a series of different theoretical approaches, organised in four sections, which can be compared and contrasted by the readers of this volume. Each section is introduced by an interpretation of the theoretical background of the papers which reproduces at least in part the original spirit and contents of the two conferences. These introductory papers have been written by some members of the scientific committee which organised the conferences. They are not introductions to the papers presented in the different sections; they rather try to give a general idea of the theoretical and methodological background of these papers.In the first section, introduced by Andrea Borsari connecting philosophy, anthropology and culture, the papers focus on historical and evolutionary anthropology, in particular on reflections on historical anthropology, on the difference between nature and culture and on the connections between material culture and evolution. In the second section, introduced by Claudio Baraldi, the papers focus on cross-cultural issues, taking into consideration the difficulties in comparing cultures and intercultural communication, and dealing with the contrasts between cultural variations and cultural hybridisation. In the third sections, introduced by Augusto Carli and Marina Bondi, the papers focus on the relationship between language and culture, ranging from ethnopragmatic study of the use of language as a social act, to cultural studies concerning literary and multimodal texts. In the fourth section, introduced by Michele Nani, the so-called "new culture history" is the theoretical framework for case-studies dealing with the representations of history in the light of cultural development due to social, political and identity factors. Presenting contributions of some of the most authoritative scholars in their disciplines, these four sections aim to explore the most important areas of present debate in the study of culture. The book aims neither to present an exhaustive collection of essays on the study of culture, nor to summarize the main approaches to this topic. When we asked for contributions, we did not assign a general task to the authors. We preferred to explore their most genuine and original ideas emerging from their current work. Some authors (Wulf, Nederveen Pieterse, Carbaugh, Duranti) have chosen to present general reflections about their topics, making the point of their theoretical approach through examples and cases, while others (Tomasello, Solinas, O’Regan, McGuirk, Holly, Harth, Banti, Lumley) have chosen to present specific case studies which suggest general reflections. All of them, anyway, have integrated theoretical approaches and empirical considerations. For us, this integration, in the variety of the authoritative perspectives, is the most meaningful and satisfactory result of the conferences and the volume.