Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi

Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi (born 1931) is an Italian anthropologist and Dravidologist In 1968, she completed her Ph.D. in geography at the University of Rome with a doctoral thesis in anthropology. Sometime before 2019 (probably in March 2003), she also interacted with Tamil folklorist-author Ki. Rajanarayanan (1923-2021), who was living in the Union Territory of Puducherry.

Her research studies have been focused on the study of the culture of Hindus as viewed through the lens of Tamil literature; the mythologies and rituals of Hindus; and the "culture-specific and culture-free attitudes towards food, purity and pollution".

She worked as a teacher in Italy at the University of Venice, University of Bologna, and University of Rome between 1985 and 1991. She also served as a professor at the department of Asian Studies of the university. She is retired.

Written work Ferro-Luzzi's The Maze of Fantasy in Tamil Folktales (2002) was reviewed by Ülo Valk, Sascha Ebeling, and Herman Tieken.

Ferro-Luzzi's coauthored The Taste of Laughter: Aspects of Tamil Humour (1992) was reviewed by Jawaharlal Nehru University's Sadhana Naithani Ramanathan and Palani stated that she explored "multifarious facets" of a village in Tamil Nadu from the aspects of anthropology and literature. She threw light on the village's "cross-cultural and culturally specific" aspects in relation to Ki. Rajanarayanan's works. According to Ramanathan and Palani, she provided insights on "the attitudes of the people toward land, tradition, animals and fellow beings, as well as the ignorance, skepticism, and pragmatism among the people" and was of the view that the people of India "seem to compartmentalize contradictory ideas".

According to Laura E. Little, Ferro-Luzzi stressed that though incongruity appears very often in humor, it's not a requisite for humor. Little stated that her work presented the "most prominent challenge to incongruity's essential role in the humor process" and "humor scholars" take it "very seriously", however, they note that her research was "insufficiently theorized and insufficiently supported by examples". For example, Elliott Oring stated that her anatomization of jokes was "incomplete" and the examples provided by her were "questionable".

Works Books Some of the books authored by Ferro-Luzzi are as follows:

Selected papers