Signs, Cures, and Witchery: Appalachian Cosmology and Belief (review)

Central West Virginia is blessed by the presence of the Augusta Heritage Center, an institution that actively promotes the state's history and folklore. The Center's main focus is a five-week folk music festival during the late summer. Tutorials, concerts, and workshops present a variety of traditions, with weekly themes that range from old time music to swing, Zydeco, and Irish folk dancing, as well as topics such as folk beliefs, healing, and basketry. Gerald Milnes, a folklorist who specializes in old-time music, is responsible for much of the festival's programming, as well as for promoting the old-time music tradition that is very much alive in this West Virginia town. Milnes also has produced several films during his time in Augusta, focusing on folk music, Appalachian crafts, and herbal lore. Signs, Cures, and Witchery is the fifth film he has produced commercially. This video focuses on Appalachian oral tradition and folklore, specifically remnants of German and European folk beliefs in Pendelton, Pocahontas, and Randolph Counties.

The film covers multiple facets of folk belief, starting with an examination of spiritual healing and then exploring topics such as witchcraft, magic squares, and producing milk from rags or axe handles. These topics are all identified immediately in the film as "folk spirituality," but the film fails to explain what exactly folk spirituality might encompass other than these specific aspects. An immediate dichotomy is also set up, with people's folk beliefs presented as being at odds with science and those who believe in these traditions depicted as torn between their experiences and "scientific knowledge."

The film presents much of its documentation of these beliefs through personal experience narratives. Many of the stories deal with events and practices that have not occurred since the informant's childhood, reflecting the idea that these traditions are dying out. Although some of the stories are acted out as they are narrated, many of them are simply related as filmed interviews. Milnes does an expert job of weaving similar interviews together into a single cohesive storyline, as well as editing interviews in a way that maintains story-flow but is not distracting. The film has more than twenty interviewees, and this number is perhaps too high for the aim and length of the film. Only the first informant is identified and given a brief biography; the rest of the "folk" are nameless storytellers. Information about the interviewees at the end of the film would have helped contextualize the informants and given them some agency and character. The interviewees also are uniformly elderly, with only two informants appearing to be younger than their seventies, further reinforcing stereotypical notions about "the folk."

Nonetheless, the film could work well in certain courses. It does a fine job of depicting a range of folk beliefs that could lead to a discussion of the possible origins and causes of these beliefs. For example, many of the beliefs presented involve witches stealing milk or food through some magical means. Several stories are told of seeing witches do this, as well as how to protect against it and even exact revenge. A discussion about how farmers were largely subsistence based, and how cows were often farmers' most prized possessions, could lead to further analysis of modern folk beliefs and what they might reflect about the dominant concerns of a particular community.

The film also has its drawbacks, primarily because of its depiction of folklore as "survivals" that are dying out with the eldest generation. For instance, the film shows a "magical square," a box of twenty-five letters that spell five words both horizontally and vertically, which is traced all the way back to Pompeii. The film does an excellent job of uncovering the roots of this tradition and others, many of which have their origins in the Old World. The use of the magic square has died out in this community, however, with only a few of the informants recalling...