Giulio Angioni, Italian writer and anthropologist, Died at 77

  Reseacher, Writer

Giulio Angioni was born on October 28, 1939, in Guasila and died on January 12, 2017, in Cagliari.

He was an Italian writer and anthropologist.

He was a leading Italian anthropologist, the professor at the University of Cagliari and fellow of St Antony’s College of the University of Oxford.

Angioni was the author of about twenty books of fiction and a dozen volumes of essays in anthropology.

During his anthropological essays (especially in Fare, dire, sentire: l’identico e il diverso nelle culture, 2011), he places the variety of forms of the human life in a dimension of maximum amplitude of time and space, starting from the anthropophilic value of doing, saying, thinking and feeling as interrelated dimensions (although usually separate and hierarchical) of human ‘nature’, which here is understood as characterized by culture, i. e. the human ability of continuous learning.

Mostly, Angioni criticizes two western clichés: the superiority of speech as a solely human feature, and the separateness of the aesthetic dimension from the rest of life.

He was best known as a writer, Angioni is considered along with Sergio Atzeni and Salvatore Mannuzzu, to have been one of the initiators of a so-called Sardinian Literary Spring, the Sardinian narrative of today in the European arena (with the work of authors such as Salvatore Niffoi, Alberto Capitta, Giorgio Todde, Michela Murgia and many others), which followed the works of individual prominent figures such as Grazia Deledda, Emilio Lussu, Giuseppe Dessì, Gavino Ledda, Salvatore Satta.

Angioni works include Le fiamme di Toledo (Flames of Toledo), Assandira, Doppio cielo (Double sky), L’oro di Fraus (The gold of Fraus).

Angioni’s poetic works (Tempus in 2008, Oremari in 2011) in Sardinian language and Italian came later in his career.

Giulio Angioni passed away at 77 years old.