Fanon, “Profeta del Terzo Mondo unitario”, e la “crisi” dell’antropologia

Abstract

The essay is inspired by the works of Frantz Fanon, Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary man, prematurely disappeared in 1961, who became, in Italy too, between the years 1968 and 1970, an icon of the youth protest movement, of the anti-racist organizations and of the liberation movements. His short but intense life developed between a theoretic production (on the psychiatry of the colonised subject and on racism) and his personal political commitment for the liberation of colonized countries. He supported, and became its spokesman, the Algerian National Liberation Front during the Algerian War. The recent re-printing of some of his works and the large quantity of foreign articles published have been the occasion to reflect on the matters raised by the psychiatrist on racism, on decolonisation processes and neo-capitalism, on ethnical wars, on violence and divisions which showed, and still show today, a deep malaise of the society regarding the presence of the alterity, the role played by social sciences and, particularly, the anthropological ethnography and its interest/indifference towards violence issues.