The land of remorse: a study of southern Italian tarantism

Abstract

The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism. By Ernesto De Martino. Translated and annotated by Dorothy Louise Zinn. Foreword by Vincent Crapanzano. (London: Free Association Books, 2005. Pp. xxiii + 322, foreword, translator's note, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, tables, musical notation, appendices, notes, bibliography, indices. $34.50 paper). Several years ago I learned of the late Italian ethnographer Ernesto De Martino (1908-1965) through citations in Paolo Apolito's Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra (1998) and in Michael P. Carroll's Madonnas That Maim (1992) and Veiled Threats (1996). The De Martino titles-Il mondo magico (1997 [1948]), Sud e magia (1959), and La terra del rimorso (1961)-were immensely attractive to me. The last of these, a thorough account of the phenomenon of Southern Italian tarantism-an ecstaticpossession cult of the spider, snake, or tarantula, sometimes identified with St. Paul, with a family resemblance (African parallels [177]) to Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santeria and Brazilian Candomble-is now beautifully translated and meticulously annotated by Dorothy Louise Zinn as The Land of Remorse. One cannot hope to cover the breadth of this work in a short review, for Ernesto De Martino takes a complex interdisciplinary approach to the study of religion that engages the ideas of (among others) Hegel, Heidegger, Croce, and Gramsci. As for the ideas inspired in De Martino by these philosophers, the central one, with which ethnographic researchers must grapple today, is his notion of the of which, as Vincent Crapanzano explains in the book's foreword, refers to a sense of not being there (esserci, Dasein, in Heidegger's sense), yes, of death, but also of loss, loss of subjectivity, vulnerability, alienation, dissociation, being out of control-overwhelmed, if you will, to the point of extinction (ix). De Martino sees tarantism as the crux of the crisis of presence, a problem that prevented his informants from reintegrating the crisis-struck presence into history as full participants in the modern world (129 note c). (The translator provides valuable contextualization for the concept of crisis of presence [3, note d].) But considered in light of recent developments in anthropology, particularly the anthropology of consciousness, might the crisis of presence be viewed as a positive value rather than a negative one? The negative value, as DeMartino constructs it (Appendix 5, Problems of Intervention) might be made positive as an alternative to the hegemony of the post-Enlightenment worldview, in which reason, science and objectivity prevail over non-ordinary states of embodied awareness. Positive approaches to tarantism can in fact be found in several recent treatments of the phenomenon-an excellent anthology edited by Luisa Del Giudice and Nancy van Deusen, Performing Ecstasies (2005); Giovanni Pizza's essay Tarantism and the Politics of Tradition in Contemporary Salento (2004); and Morton Klass's Mind Over Mind (2003). Klass addresses what is negatively referred to by many social scientists as dissociative states, suggesting that the real crisis of presence is to be found not in a sense of not being there, but rather of being there too much, trapped in a scientific worldview similar to Max Weber's iron cage of rationality and offering a culturally relative context for understanding the ecstatic states associated with Southern Italian tarantism (Klass 57-92, 117). A similar discussion is provided in The Land of Remorse (Appendix 2, Problems in Psychology in the Study of Tarantism, by Letizia Jervis-Comba). Ernesto De Martino played an important role in the development of anthropological practice in Italy. …