Available in English for the first time, anthropologist Carlo Severi s "The Chimera Principle" breaks new theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among non-literate peoples. Setting himself against a tradition that has long seen the memory of people without writing which relies on such ephemeral records as ornaments, body painting, and masks as fundamentally disordered or doomed to failure, he argues strenuously that ritual actions in these societies pragmatically produce religious meaning and that they demonstrate what he calls a chimeric...