Spirito e materia. Sacro e cultura materiale nel mondo religioso e secolare.

The research focus is the sacred in religious and secular world. General objectives of research are: to define the meaning of “the sacred”, clarify its fundamental dimensions and trace a map of social and individual areas, both religious and secular, in which it appears; specific objective is to identify some typical dimensions of sacred material culture, specifically related to its visual dimensions. There are two assumptions underlying this research: 1) the sacred phenomena, both religious and secular, share an elemental cultural structure; 2) at the material culture level, it exists a cultural code that uses aesthetic signs to signify the sacred. To reach the research goals, it is analysed and theoretically elaborated the sociological and anthropological literature on the subject, with the aim to develop a theoretical framework. This theoretical framework allows to select the religious and secular, both collective and individual, research cases in which sacred phenomenon seems to appear, and then, it is applied to analyse the empirical data, focusing particularly on the visual dimensions of sacred material culture. The research is broad, explorative, and is conducted with ethnographic approach, using participant observations (during rites, in temples, in other sacred spaces and re-ligious festivals), and interviews with devotees, both face-to-face and online, but also “netnographic” observations in “sacred web-communities”, analysis of sacred texts, other official documentations and scientific literature. Among the main results of the research, it can be cited the contribution to clarify some fundamental categories and structures of the sacred phenomenon, and the general meaning of the “religious” – in the broad sense of the word – culture and behaviour, with the elaboration of synthetic typologies and a “semiotic square” (Greimas’s square) of the category of “sacred”; a second main contribution of the research is the identification of some typical visual dimensions of sacred material culture, that opens a research field that could be studied more in-depth.