Magic: a Theory from the South

MAGIC Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com Magic A THEORY FROM THE SOUTH Ernesto de Martino Translated and Annotated by Dorothy Louise Zinn Hau Books Chicago © 2001 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano (First Edition, 1959). English translation © 2015 Hau Books and Dorothy Louise Zinn. All rights reserved. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9905050-9-9 LCCN: 2014953636 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Contents Translator’s Note vii Preface xi PART ONE: LUcanian Magic 1. Binding 3 2. Binding and eros 9 3. The magical representation of illness 15 4. Childhood and binding 29 5. Binding and mother’s milk 43 6. Storms 51 7. Magical life in Albano 55 PART TWO: Magic, CATHOliciSM, AND HIGH CUltUre 8. The crisis of presence and magical protection 85 9. The horizon of the crisis 97 vi MAGIC: A THEORY FROM THE SOUTH 10. De-historifying the negative 103 11. Lucanian magic and magic in general 109 12. Lucanian magic and Southern Italian Catholicism 119 13. Magic and the Neapolitan Enlightenment: The phenomenon of jettatura 133 14. Romantic sensibility, Protestant polemic, and jettatura 161 15. The Kingdom of Naples and jettatura 175 Epilogue 185 Appendix: On Apulian tarantism 189 References 195 Index 201 Translator’s Note Magic: A theory from the South is the second work in Ernesto de Martino’s great “Southern trilogy” of ethnographic monographs, and following my previous translation of The land of remorse ([1961] 2005), I am pleased to make it available in an English edition. Whether in Italian or another language, a reader approaching the scholarly thought of de Martino for the first time is faced with no easy feat, and here as in the preceding volume I have attempted to guide the reader with annotations that help contextualize de Martino’s concepts and terminology. Only occasionally do I suggest further sources; the literature of de Martino studies is dauntingly vast, but it is predominantly in Italian, so I have mostly chosen to limit such suggestions to what is available in English rather than provide an exhaustive referenced commentary to the text. Other than The land of remorse, the only monograph by de Martino cur- rently available in English is his first treatise on magic, Il Mondo magico (1948, translated as Primitive magic [1972]), but due to some serious reservations I have about the approach utilized in that translation, I can- not endorse its usefulness. This translation and its publication would not have been possible without the support of a number of friends and colleagues. Charles Stewart of University College London (UCL), a fellow anthropologist and translator of de Martino, helped get the ball rolling by mentioning this project to Giovanni da Col, Editor of Hau Books, who immediately took it on with the greatest enthusiasm. I consulted other colleagues to discuss issues of content in the translation: Sabina Magliocco and Fabio viii MAGIC: A THEORY FROM THE SOUTH Dei for hoary questions of magical terminology, and Ferdinando Mirizzi for references to Southern folklore. Lucanian scholar Angelo Tataranno, whose assistance proved invaluable for The land of remorse, continued to help me here with the utmost patience and generosity. Tony Molino and Luigi Zoja provided some specific indications with regard to psychiatric and psychoanalytic terminology. Preparation of the translation and annotations made use of research and exegeses of de Martino’s corpus by Clara Gallini, George Saunders, Marcello Massenzio, Pietro Angelini, and a host of other colleagues too numerous to mention here. Pietro Clemente and Maria Minicuci have very kindly expressed their appre- ciation for my efforts in making such a sterling representative of Ital- ian anthropology better known in the English-speaking world. Lia de Martino, Vera de Martino, and Vittoria de Palma have all encouraged this endeavor, as has Marcello Massenzio, President of the Associazione Internazionale Ernesto de Martino. I would also like to thank the Hau staff who have collaborated most closely with me in the publication process: Stéphane Gros, Michelle Beckett, and Sean Dowdy. A special word of acknowledgement goes to the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and numerous colleagues there for providing a sound base for my work and an occasional pat on the back, and to Elisabeth Tauber for her fruitful anthropological exchanges. The University’s freundlich und übereffizient Library system was instrumental in helping me obtain some existing English translations for various works cited by de Martino. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my mother-in-law, who still remembers the days in Lucania when “people thought everything was caused by magic,” other parenti here in Italy and in the United States, my husband Antonio, and our daughters Odile and Pauline, perfect heirs to a very Demartinian rational-magic compromise. Magic: A theory from the South presents ethnographic research from the Italian region of Lucania/Basilicata, an area that has been a home to me for over twenty years and holds a special place in the Italian anthropological tradition, in part due to this very book. Today’s visitor will find a world that is entirely different from the one described by de Martino. Nonetheless, some of the cultural forms that de Martino discusses are certainly still present, at times quite recognizable but frequently also visible in new configurations, be they syncretisms embracing “esoteric TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ix operators” and New Age discourses, apotropaic and religious practices addressing moments of crisis, or cultural revivals such as the one cur- rently turning the magical misfortune of an unnamable, witch-infested Lucanian village into a touristic destination. These are matters for further anthropological inquiry in order to clarify the extent to which there are still some continuities between magic and religion as discussed here and the mechanisms by which we face “crises of presence” in our modern society. I dedicate this translation to Antonio, who introduced me to the magic of the South half a lifetime ago. Dorothy Louise Zinn Bressanone/Brixen April 22, 2014 Preface The choice between “magic” and “rationality” is one of the great themes that gave rise to modern civilization. First signs of this choice appeared in certain motifs of Greek thought and Evangelical preaching, but it came to form the dramatic core of modern civilization with the passage from demonological magic to Renaissance natural magic, with the Prot- estant polemic against Catholic ritual, with the founding of the natural sciences and their methods, with the Enlightenment and its faith in a reforming human reason, and with the various currents of thought tied to the discovery of historical dialectic and reason. Within this frame- work, even the bloody era of the witch trials, as much as it might seem to have been a return to the demonological conception of medieval magic, indirectly refers to this underlying antimagic polemic that runs through the entire course of Western civilization. The modern nations making up the West are “modern” to the extent that they have participated earnestly in this multifaceted process. It is a process in which we are still involved, at least to the extent that—alongside our scientific techniques and an awareness of the human origin and destination of cultural values—we still place a spontaneous importance on the sphere of mythical-ritual techniques and the “magical” power or word and gesture. This volume has undertaken a very modest and circumscribed task: it aims to offer a few indicative and programmatic suggestions for determining the degree and limits to which Southern Italian cultural life has consciously participated in this great option of modern civilization. In the pair “magic and the South,” the term “South” obviously does not xii MAGIC: A THEORY FROM THE SOUTH represent a merely geographical designation, but rather one that is also political and social. In their differences in cultural history, the city-states and lordships of the North and the Center, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples all present shades and nuances of a religious life connected to their respective social and political histories. In this sense, one may legitimately speak of a religious history of the South as a religious history of the Kingdom of Naples—of a socially and politically defined formation, geographically demarcated between holy water and saltwater, between the Papal States and the sea. As a formation in a religious sense, too, it entails certain specificities: Southern Catholicism, for example, with its notes of gaudiness and exteriority and with its particular ceremonial and ritualistic flourishes, has repeatedly been an object of observation and has constituted one of the preferred targets of Protes- tant writers’ anti-Catholic polemics. As for its concrete execution, this study opens with an ethnographic exploration of some Lucanian survivals1 of the crudest practices of ceremonial magic, with the intention of determining the structure of magical techniques, their psychological function, and the regime of existence that favors their continuation in one of the most backward areas of the South. The attention subsequently shifts to the relationship between these survivals and the hegemonic form of religious life: Catholicism with its particular magical and Southern cast. We will observe numerous links, passages, syncretisms, and compromises that connect extracanoni- cal low magic with the modes of popular devotion and the liturgy’s own official forms.

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