Ethnology in Italian

The twenty-second entry is il presente etnografico, and what makes it sound the way it does is a point of Italian grammar rather than a habit of the discipline. English forces a choice in every sentence about now. « The rite marks the end of childhood » states a standing fact; « the rite is marking the end of childhood » reports something under way at this moment. Simple and continuous are two tenses, and one of them has to be picked before the sentence can be finished. Italian has no such obligation. Il rito segna la fine dell’infanzia carries both readings on its own, and the language reaches for stare with the gerund — sta segnando — only when the fact of being under way is itself the point. Leave that out, as a description does page after page, and every sentence settles into the wider reading: this is how it is, always, for everybody. So the motionlessness the term complains about is built into the default setting. In English that effect has to be chosen sentence by sentence; in Italian it arrives unless the writer does something to stop it.