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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• prehistory
• history of communication
• sociology of culture
• political communication
• public opinion