Please join us for a conversation between Dorothy Zinn and Jasmine Pisapia about the translation of Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino’s last work, La fine del mondo. Famed for his writings on the southern question, and on the ethnography of belief, ritual and his critique of the civic religions of fascism, de Martino’s last unfinished opus has eluded translators until recently. But it remains an enigmatic text at the limits of translatability. Our guests engage the task of rendering La fine del mondo into English. Moderated by Rosalind Morris, with Naor Ben Yehoyada and Maria José de Abreu.

Dorothy Zinn is Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. In her addition to her writings on patronage-clientelism (Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy, 2019), and migration (Migrants as Metaphor, 2018) she has published two annotated translations in English of de Martino’s monographs (The Land of Remorse [2005] and Magic: A Theory from the South [2015]).

Jasmine Pisapia (Columbia PhD 2022), is the author of several essays on de Martino, and is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. She is also a media artist and dramaturg. Currently, she is working with playwright Richard Maxwell and director Katiana Gonçales Rangel on the creation of new documentary theater plays about migrancy in New York.