<i>Pensare gli ibridi nella cultura greca: caselle opache, animali antonomasici, metafore e atteggiamenti culturali</i>

Abstract

Thinking of hybrids also means identifying reference cultural contexts and seeing that the theoretical horizons and the techniques of representation themselves can, in time, modify notions we could think as universal. In ancient Greek language did not exist an explicit mark indicating the hybridization phenomenon. This way, the phrases "generating in common" or "generating from each other" (ex allelon gennan) seem to be generic and not dedicated; the word koinogenes itself, used by Plato to indicate the cross reproduction in the Politicus, seems to be a neologism that has had poor fortune in tradition. Therefore, debating upon cross-breading meant - to Greeks - dealing with loimos and contamination of species; indeed, where we see hybrids the ancients saw, rather than crosses, blood lines which were polluted and gene contaminated. Then, what the language accomplished was a shade line inside which human sexual crimes - as the moicheia - became good to think of animal biology.