La comunità, dai miti al diritto: un confronto tra Gemeinschaft e Comunidad

The article shows a comparison between two ideas or ‘models’ of community, Tönnies Gemeinschaft, reworked by Schmitt, and the Latin American indigenous peoples’ Comunidad. A comparison that starts from the respective origin myths (the biblical Genesis on one hand, and the Maya cosmogony narrated in the Popol Vuh on the other) and arrives at the reflections on the subject of rights and freedoms that these narratives still produce today, in contemporary intercultural societies. The study focuses in particular on how the element of identity and belonging to a community can be used to motivate policies and laws oriented to the exclusion or inclusion, to discrimination or emancipation.