Metaphor, Metamorphosis, Mindfulness: Social change through the dispositive of “Mental Presence” = Metafora, Metamorfosi, Mindfulness: il cambiento sociale attraverso il dispositivo della “Presenza mentale”

The aim of this article is to define a new anthropological theory of social change through the case-study of mindfulness as instance of cultural transformation and sign of social change. Mindfulness meditation derives from Buddhist meditative practices reinterpreted in a clinical key by Jon Kabat-Zinn and represents what might be called ‘new cultural phenomenon’. The purpose of the article is to answer some fundamental questions: 1) is it possible to understand mindfulness as an evolution of Buddhist meditation or 2) is Mindfulness the result of a phenomenon of transculturation? And ultimately, 3) how does Mindfulness participate in the mechanisms of identity construction in modern culture? The analysis of Mindfulness proposed will use an innovative method based on Ernesto de Martino’s anthropological theory of cultural crisis and “crisis of the presence” as fundamental defense mechanism that takes part into the construction and protection of cultural identity as a fundamental dispositive of transculturation. In particular, the role of the body will be emphasized, demonstrating how an anthropology of the body in Meditation and in the subsequent Mindfulness can be understood as an anthropology of Foucault’s dispositive of subjectivation made operative by the transculturation of meditation from Buddhist psychology to the cognitive behavioral one, a socio-cultural change imposed by a change in the etho-aesthetic valorizing force that requires the shaping of docile bodies and therefore rejects the instances of de-habituation brought about by the first meditation. The investigations presented in this article obviously do not claim to provide a definitive and exhaustive answer to the question but want to initiate a possible line of studies that deal with mindfulness and similar phenomena starting from de Martino’s anthropological interpretative key. In this context, Mindfulness is presented as 1) a new cultural phenomenon that 2) is derived from the need to respond to the ‘crisis’ of the Anthropocene and, in many respects, is itself a child of the crisis, but also responds to a practical need: 3) providing an effective mechanism of subjectivation through dispotivies of organization of ‘presence’.