Constructing Otherness and Past through Creative Mistakes: Ancient Initiation Wars and Contemporary Human Sacrifices (Paragrafo scritto da Elena Franchi: “Ancient Initiation Wars", 237-51)

Creative misunderstandings and creative misinterpretations are two different kinds of creative mistakes. They are widespread phenomena which can be found both in scholarship and in various cultural encounters. Creative misunderstandings are mutual and occur between different cultures; creative misinterpretations are not mutual and can occur within the same cultural context. Both misunderstandings and misinterpretations can be double. The examination of two different and emblematic cases of double creative mistakes shows that they are the way by which in many situations people are constructing otherness and past. In the first case, Australia’s Indigenous peoples creatively misunderstood some Christian religious concepts (first level mistake), and these creative misunderstandings were creatively misunderstood as simple misunderstandings by the missionaries (second level mistake); in the second case, ancient storytellers and/or ancient historians creatively misinterpreted ancient Greek frontier wars as initiation wars (first level mistake), while modern scholars emphasized this interpretation exaggerating its implications (second level mistake). In both cases the chain of creative mistakes can be understood only through the analysis of the first and of the second level mistake, because the latter depends on the former. Hence, it can be argued that looking for creative mistakes may be an essential component of studying history.