FROM BODY MEMORY. A CULTURAL - COMPARATIVE READING OF THE FAT/ BREAD MARRIAGE
FROM BODY MEMORY. A CULTURAL - COMPARATIVE READING OF THE FAT/ BREAD MARRIAGE

Summary/Abstract: We are the species that invented articulate language, projection into the imaginary, the story. We grow up and hang out with words. We say that a picture is worth more than a thousand words precisely because the imagination of each of us can create an infinity of stories. The red thread of the story itself becomes an identity brand. Learning to tell ourselves, but to listen to the stories of others, is the background fabric of any communication process. Thus, the doctor-patient relationship can be a model of how we use narrative in professional communication. "Reading" a patient's body involves understanding their "history". In other words, it presupposes at least a gesture of deciphering an entire archeology of being. Our project, which spans several years, is one that includes several branches related to the human body and of how, by word, through a shared story, we nourish the physical and symbolic body, creating connections between different cultures and a better understanding of the comparative models of representation of the body. This work — a fragment of the cited research — brings to attention the importance of training the cultural skills of the future doctor ready to practice in a world of fast-forward communication, open and subject to cutting-edge technology and in which the need for dialogue, confidence and closeness has become more than acute. The example we invoke, the cultural-comparative reading of the human body under two universal symbolic coordinates: fat and bread, one of those used in our anthropological practice, is based on the model proposed by Gunther D. Domenig. According to this, CCT (the cross- cultural competences), the doctor's ability to understand each person according to the norms of the cultural system in which he was born is built through: reflection, reflection in the context of accumulated personal experience and narrative empathy.

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