Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi (born 1931) is an Italian anthropologist and dravidologist who has done field studies in India, mainly in the Tamil Nadu state.
[1] According to Peter Berger, in Ferro-Luzzi's view, the Naivedyam to gods should be "understood as acts of communication and function like linguistic elements, that is, through opposition, combination, and redundancy".
[7] Ferro-Luzzi's The Maze of Fantasy in Tamil Folktales (2002) was reviewed by Ülo Valk,[8] Sascha Ebeling,[9] and Herman Tieken.
Valk stated that she provided "several valuable observations" on "dyadic patterns in Tamil folktales, their didactic function and inter-generic connections with songs and proverbs, and conceptualization of the corpus of tales as a polythetic network".
Valk suggested that though she was "careful about providing the exact references to the original publications", she did not focus much on "source criticism".
According to Valk, in future, her research would "probably" be used as a tool for classifying the tales from India which was initiated by Heda Jason, Jonas Balys, Stith Thompson, and Warren E.
[12] Ramanathan and Palani stated that she explored "multifarious facets" of a village in Tamil Nadu from the aspects of anthropology and literature.