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  • Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity, and Celebration in Southern Italy
  • Herman Tak
Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity, and Celebration in Southern Italy. By Karen Lüdtke. [Epistemologies of Healing, Vol. 4.] (New York: Berghahn Books. 2009. Pp. xviii, 254. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-845-45445-6.)

A wide variety of local and regional rituals characterize southern Italy. Modernization and global processes have influenced their shape, form, and meaning, as well as their very existence. While many have vanished, others have changed markedly in form and/or content. The history of the Tarantism ritual—from a fifteenth-century means of survival into a twenty-first-century means of coping with personal, local, and regional struggles and identities—illustrates this change.

The ancient ritual's evolution from a dance believed to cure victims of a spider bite into a modern-day performance that serves economic and psychological ends is the focus of Karen Lüdtke's clear and compelling study. Lüdtke's work draws from and extends Ernesto De Martino's seminal study of Tarantism among peasants of the Salentine peninsula, The Land of Remorse:A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (London, 2005). People bitten, or believed to be bitten, by a tarantula originally performed the ritual. The spider's poisonous venom manifested itself in symptoms defined by modern-day medicine as depression. Lüdtke extensively describes one of the last tarantate, Evelina, a peasant woman who was bitten twice since 1953 and [End Page 756] "Every May and June, ever since, she has succumbed to the crisis the tarantula evokes: fainting spells, nausea, stomach pains" (pp. 3-4). The cure for the depression was a dance called the pizzica (the Apulian Tarantella) that lasted for days on end. Victims of the spider bite also had to perform the ritual annually during the festival of St. Paul. According to Clifford Geertz, the webs of the tarantula are webs of meaning, and Lüdtke analyzes these meanings from a holistic perspective. She studies social, economic, political, and cultural systems through religion, music, and dance, which results in a rich and fascinating book.

Today, the traditional praxis of Tarantism has nearly disappeared. Indeed, the dance and music that defined the ancient ritual are popular among young people. The ritual also has become commodified. Professional dancers perform it, for example, during yearly festivals in the Salento, on television, and on the Internet. According to Lüdtke, the performances are important tourist attractions and expressions of regional identity. Her close analysis of performance and perception reveals that despite changes in the ritual, in terms of place and practice, there are striking continuities between the peasant tradition and the postmodern stage- and television-directed performances. These are seen, for example, in the links between performance and the self.

Departing from De Martino's earlier work, Lüdtke studies the ways performing the dance influences the dancer's well-being by researching (over the course of years of fieldwork) the lives of the women, mostly in their forties, who perform the pizzica. This study reveals three significant points. First, the dancers embody the dance. Second, partaking in the performance influences the life of the dancer. Third, performing pizzica brings relief to ailments not caused by a spider bite, ranging from the ability to cope with daily problems to deeper struggles with depression.

In sum, Lüdtke's Dances with Spiders sheds clear and compelling light on how (and why) ancient rituals change over time and serve contemporary needs. Well written and engaging, the author weaves wit—in her reflections on her own performance and the suggestion that researchers conducting participant observations seem to outnumber the few who still practice the traditional cult on St. Paul's day—into her work. Undermined only by the tendency to treat all data as equally relevant, her study of the general socio-cultural and performative transformations of Tarantism provides an excellent sequel to De Martino's seminal work. It also points the way for future research by focusing on the real people that postmodern anthropology tends to overlook. Finally, it raises questions that merit further study, such as the role of age and gender in the evolutions of...

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