Spiritual Pizzica
A Southern Italian Perspective on Contemporary Paganism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.37787Keywords:
Contemporary Paganism, Italy, Historicity, tarantismo, Catholic CountriesAbstract
In this article, the result of an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among a contemporary Pagan group in the Salento area of Italy, I research the peculiar expression of contemporary Pagan spiritualities centered on the interpretation of a “traditional” local dance called pizzica. I focus on the specific way of understanding and living time and temporality among this group that happens through the performance of this dance. In particular, by presenting the particular historicity—i.e. the way in which time and temporality are understood and experienced—of the Salentine group I studied that I refer to as “expanded present” or “presence,” I argue for a re-articulation of the relationships between contemporary Paganism and “history,” “tradition,” and the “reconstructionist/eclectic” spectrum in understanding contemporary Paganisms.
References
Apolito, Paolo. “Tarantismo, identità locale, postmanernità.” In Quarant’ anni dopo De Martino: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi sul tarantismo, edited by Gino. L. Di Mitri, 137–46. Nardò: Besa, 2000.
——. “I Beni DEA e il ‘fare’ le tradizioni.” Antropologia Museale 17 (2007): 12–17.
Ben-Yehoyada, Naor. The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12803
Biagi, Laura. Spider Dreams: Ritual and Performance in Apulian Tarantismo and Tarantella. PhD dissertation, New York University, 2004.
Daboo, Jerri. Ritual, Rapture and Remorse: a Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento. Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587x.2012.683586
Dave, Naisargi. “Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming.” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 3 (2014): 433–56. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.3.01
Del Giudice, Luisa. “The Folk Music Revival and the Culture of Tarantismo in the Salento.” In Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean, edited by Luisa del Giudice and Nancy E. Van Deusen, 217–72. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1179/flk.2007.46.1.165
——. “Healing the Spider’s Bite: Ballad Therapy and Tarantismo.” In The Flowering Thorn: International Ballad Studies, edited by Thomas Mckean, 23–34. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nrm0.5
De Martino, Ernesto. La terra del rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud. Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1976 [1961]. https://doi.org/10.1086/485703
Fedele, Anna. Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199898404.001.0001
Greenwood, Susan. The Anthropology of Magic. Oxford: Berg, 2009.
Hodges, Matt. “The Time of the Interval: Historicity, Modernity, and Epoch in Rural France.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (2010): 115–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01245.x
——. “Reinventing History?” History and Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2015): 515–27.
Howell, Francesca C. Food, Festival, and Religion: Materiality and Place in Italy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
——. “The Goddess Returns to Italy: Paganism and Wicca Reborn as a New Religious and Social Movement.” The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v10i1.5
——. “Sense of Place, Heterotopia, and Community: Performing Land and Folding Time in the Badalisc Festival of Northern Italy.” Folklore 124 (2013): 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587x.2013.731155
Ibrahim, Awad. The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity and the Politics of Becoming. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.
Inserra, Incoronata Nadia. Global Tarantella: Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252041297.001.0001
Lambek, Michael. “The Interpretation of Lives or Life as Interpretation: Cohabiting with Spirits in the Malagasy World.” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (2014): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12089
Lanternari, Vittorio. “Tarantismo: dal medico neopositivista all’antropologo, alla etnopsichiatria di oggi.” Storia, antropologia, e scienze del linguaggio 3 (1995): 67–92.
——. “Tarantismo: vecchie teorie, saperi nuovi.” In Quarant’anni dopo De Martino, edited by Di Mitri. 119–134. Besa: Nardò, 2000.
Lapassade, Georges. Intervista sul tarantismo. Maglie: Madona Oriente, 1994.
Laviosa, Flavia. “The Frontier Apulia and its Filmmakers after 1989.” California Italian Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–9.
——. “Tarantula Myths and Music: Popular Culture and Ancient Rituals in Italian Cinema.” In Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society, edited by Flavia Brizio-Skov, 153–88. London: I.B.Tauris, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3765
Lüdtke, Karen. “Dancing towards Well-Being: Reflections on the Pizzica in the Contemporary Salento, Italy.” In Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean, edited by Luisa del Giudice and Nancy E. Van Deusen, 37–53. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2005.
——. Dances With Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. https://doi.org/10.5406/danceresearchj.43.1.0110
——. “’We’ve Got This Rhythm In Our Blood’: Dancing Identities In Southern Italy.” In Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance, edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner, 60–74. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12138_7
Magliocco, Sabina. “Witchcraft, Healing and Vernacular Magic in Italy.” In Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe, edited by Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies, 51–173. New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.9760/mupoa/9780719066580
——. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1086/589795
Mapril, José, and Ruy Llera Blanes, eds. Sites And Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe: The Best of all Gods. Leiden: Brill, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721x.2015.1076306
Mina, Gabriele, and Sergio Torsello. La Tela Infinita: Bibliografia degli Studi sul Trantismo Mediterraneo 1945–2006. Nardò: Besa, 2006.
Mingozzi, Gianfranco. La Taranta. Film. 16mm. 1961.
Nacci, Anna. Tarantismo e neotarantismo: musica, danza, transe: bisogni di oggi, bisogni di sempre. Nardo?: Besa, 2001.
——. Neotarantismo: pizzica, transe e riti dalle campagne alle metropoli. Viterbo: Stampa Alternative, Nuovi Equilibri, 2003.
Palmié, Stephan, and Charles Stewart. “Introduction.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 207–36.
Palumbo, Berardino. “Iperluogo.” Antropologia Museale 14 (2006): 45–47.
Pandian, Anand. “The Time of Anthropology: Notes From a Field of Contemporary Experience.” Cultural Anthropology 27 no. 4 (2012): 547–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01161.x
Pandolfi, Mariella. “Boundaries Inside The Body: Women’s Sufferings in Southern Peasant Italy.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14, no. 2 (1990): 255–73.
Parmigiani, Giovanna. Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy: ”We are Witnesses, Not Victims”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvpmw4w2
Pizza, Giovanni. “Tarantism and the Politics of Tradition in Contemporary Salento.” In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe, edited by Idis Haukanes, 199–223. Munich: Lit Verlag, 2004.
——. “Tarantismi oggi: un panorama critico sulle letture contemporanee del tarantismo (1994–1998).” Panorami 7–8 (1999): 253–73.
——. Il Tarantismo Oggi. Alessano: Carocci, 2015.
Rountree, Kathryn. “Localizing Neo-Paganism: integrating Global and Indigenous Traditions in a Mediterranean Catholic Society.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2011): 846–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01722.x
Saunders, George R. “The Crisis of Presence in Italian Pentecostal Conversion.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 324–40. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00060
Scheper-Hughes, Jennifer. “Mysterium Materiae: Vital Matter and the Object as Evidence in the Study of Religion.” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 41, no. 4 (2012): 16–24. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v41i4.16
Stewart, Charles. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2012.
——. “Historicity and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (2016): 79–94.
Strmiska, Michael. “Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives.” In Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Michael Strmiska, 1–53. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0012-9
Witmore, Christopher L. “Landscape, Time, Topology: an Archaeological Account of the Southern Argolid, Greece.” In Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage, edited by Dan Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough, 194–225. Walnut Creek, Calf.: Left Coast, 2007. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315429533
——. “Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World.” Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006): 267–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068806
Ziarek, Ewa P. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1086/423347
——. Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics 0f Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
——. “I Beni DEA e il ‘fare’ le tradizioni.” Antropologia Museale 17 (2007): 12–17.
Ben-Yehoyada, Naor. The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12803
Biagi, Laura. Spider Dreams: Ritual and Performance in Apulian Tarantismo and Tarantella. PhD dissertation, New York University, 2004.
Daboo, Jerri. Ritual, Rapture and Remorse: a Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento. Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587x.2012.683586
Dave, Naisargi. “Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming.” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 3 (2014): 433–56. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.3.01
Del Giudice, Luisa. “The Folk Music Revival and the Culture of Tarantismo in the Salento.” In Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean, edited by Luisa del Giudice and Nancy E. Van Deusen, 217–72. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1179/flk.2007.46.1.165
——. “Healing the Spider’s Bite: Ballad Therapy and Tarantismo.” In The Flowering Thorn: International Ballad Studies, edited by Thomas Mckean, 23–34. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nrm0.5
De Martino, Ernesto. La terra del rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud. Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1976 [1961]. https://doi.org/10.1086/485703
Fedele, Anna. Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199898404.001.0001
Greenwood, Susan. The Anthropology of Magic. Oxford: Berg, 2009.
Hodges, Matt. “The Time of the Interval: Historicity, Modernity, and Epoch in Rural France.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (2010): 115–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01245.x
——. “Reinventing History?” History and Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2015): 515–27.
Howell, Francesca C. Food, Festival, and Religion: Materiality and Place in Italy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
——. “The Goddess Returns to Italy: Paganism and Wicca Reborn as a New Religious and Social Movement.” The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v10i1.5
——. “Sense of Place, Heterotopia, and Community: Performing Land and Folding Time in the Badalisc Festival of Northern Italy.” Folklore 124 (2013): 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587x.2013.731155
Ibrahim, Awad. The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity and the Politics of Becoming. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.
Inserra, Incoronata Nadia. Global Tarantella: Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252041297.001.0001
Lambek, Michael. “The Interpretation of Lives or Life as Interpretation: Cohabiting with Spirits in the Malagasy World.” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (2014): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12089
Lanternari, Vittorio. “Tarantismo: dal medico neopositivista all’antropologo, alla etnopsichiatria di oggi.” Storia, antropologia, e scienze del linguaggio 3 (1995): 67–92.
——. “Tarantismo: vecchie teorie, saperi nuovi.” In Quarant’anni dopo De Martino, edited by Di Mitri. 119–134. Besa: Nardò, 2000.
Lapassade, Georges. Intervista sul tarantismo. Maglie: Madona Oriente, 1994.
Laviosa, Flavia. “The Frontier Apulia and its Filmmakers after 1989.” California Italian Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–9.
——. “Tarantula Myths and Music: Popular Culture and Ancient Rituals in Italian Cinema.” In Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society, edited by Flavia Brizio-Skov, 153–88. London: I.B.Tauris, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3765
Lüdtke, Karen. “Dancing towards Well-Being: Reflections on the Pizzica in the Contemporary Salento, Italy.” In Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean, edited by Luisa del Giudice and Nancy E. Van Deusen, 37–53. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2005.
——. Dances With Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. https://doi.org/10.5406/danceresearchj.43.1.0110
——. “’We’ve Got This Rhythm In Our Blood’: Dancing Identities In Southern Italy.” In Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance, edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner, 60–74. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12138_7
Magliocco, Sabina. “Witchcraft, Healing and Vernacular Magic in Italy.” In Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe, edited by Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies, 51–173. New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.9760/mupoa/9780719066580
——. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1086/589795
Mapril, José, and Ruy Llera Blanes, eds. Sites And Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe: The Best of all Gods. Leiden: Brill, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721x.2015.1076306
Mina, Gabriele, and Sergio Torsello. La Tela Infinita: Bibliografia degli Studi sul Trantismo Mediterraneo 1945–2006. Nardò: Besa, 2006.
Mingozzi, Gianfranco. La Taranta. Film. 16mm. 1961.
Nacci, Anna. Tarantismo e neotarantismo: musica, danza, transe: bisogni di oggi, bisogni di sempre. Nardo?: Besa, 2001.
——. Neotarantismo: pizzica, transe e riti dalle campagne alle metropoli. Viterbo: Stampa Alternative, Nuovi Equilibri, 2003.
Palmié, Stephan, and Charles Stewart. “Introduction.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 207–36.
Palumbo, Berardino. “Iperluogo.” Antropologia Museale 14 (2006): 45–47.
Pandian, Anand. “The Time of Anthropology: Notes From a Field of Contemporary Experience.” Cultural Anthropology 27 no. 4 (2012): 547–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01161.x
Pandolfi, Mariella. “Boundaries Inside The Body: Women’s Sufferings in Southern Peasant Italy.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14, no. 2 (1990): 255–73.
Parmigiani, Giovanna. Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy: ”We are Witnesses, Not Victims”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvpmw4w2
Pizza, Giovanni. “Tarantism and the Politics of Tradition in Contemporary Salento.” In Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe, edited by Idis Haukanes, 199–223. Munich: Lit Verlag, 2004.
——. “Tarantismi oggi: un panorama critico sulle letture contemporanee del tarantismo (1994–1998).” Panorami 7–8 (1999): 253–73.
——. Il Tarantismo Oggi. Alessano: Carocci, 2015.
Rountree, Kathryn. “Localizing Neo-Paganism: integrating Global and Indigenous Traditions in a Mediterranean Catholic Society.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2011): 846–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01722.x
Saunders, George R. “The Crisis of Presence in Italian Pentecostal Conversion.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 324–40. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00060
Scheper-Hughes, Jennifer. “Mysterium Materiae: Vital Matter and the Object as Evidence in the Study of Religion.” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 41, no. 4 (2012): 16–24. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v41i4.16
Stewart, Charles. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2012.
——. “Historicity and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (2016): 79–94.
Strmiska, Michael. “Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives.” In Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Michael Strmiska, 1–53. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0012-9
Witmore, Christopher L. “Landscape, Time, Topology: an Archaeological Account of the Southern Argolid, Greece.” In Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage, edited by Dan Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough, 194–225. Walnut Creek, Calf.: Left Coast, 2007. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315429533
——. “Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World.” Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006): 267–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068806
Ziarek, Ewa P. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1086/423347
——. Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics 0f Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Published
2019-11-08
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Parmigiani, G. (2019). Spiritual Pizzica: A Southern Italian Perspective on Contemporary Paganism. Pomegranate, 21(1), 53-75. https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.37787
