Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy (review)

Each year at the end of August, thousands of local people and tourists meet in Melpignano, a small town near Lecce in southern Italy, to attend "La notte della taranta" (the Night of the Tarantula). It is the final event in a music festival that takes place in many towns in this area of Apulia. Participants spend the whole night dancing the pizzica and listening to the combination of its rhythms with those of world and symphonic music, rock, and jazz. The event, held for the last fifteen years, is probably the best-known case of a phenomenon called "neo-tarantism," which Karen Lüdtke explores in her recent book. The pizzica, defined here as the Apulian tarantella, though a more precise definition could be "the version of the Apulian tarantella danced in Salento (the area around Lecce)," is a music and dance genre practiced by small family groups or entire communities. In the past it was also used as a cure in the rite of tarantism.

As is known from historical traces left over many centuries, the victims, mostly women (the tarantate), who claimed to have been bitten by a spider (tarantula), had to dance the pizzica for days in order to expel the poison and recover. Despite the visible symptoms (cramps, convulsions, nausea, stomach pains) most cases of tarantism never involved an actual spider bite. This phenomenon has been investigated from a number of different perspectives and with different tools, from anthropology to sociology, from medical studies to psychology, at least since the eighteenth century. For several decades the most authoritative study among many has been La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse), written in 1961 by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. ¹ The book became a major point of reference in folklore studies and cultural anthropology in Italy, where tarantism was a key theme.

Dances with Spiders is the result of a dozen years of fieldwork and research in Apulia (1996-2008), and more specifically in a little town, Galatina, the core of the spider cult during the annual St. Peter and Paul's feast. Lüdtke doesn't claim to explain the tarantate's rituals or the contemporary scene; rather, she aims to give an impressionistic picture of the many faces of everyday life within which the pizzica existed in the past and continues to exist today. Lüdtke attended many events of neo-tarantism and learned to dance the pizzica, but she never witnessed a rite of tarantism. She collected fresh data regarding the personal experiences of past and present participants, basing her work solely on their memories. This aspect of her research, while engaging, could have been more fully theorized.

Lüdtke's geographical focus is the Salento area, although she refers to similar cases documented in other places in Italy (including Sardinia, Calabria, and Campania) and also in Spain. Her project started in the wake of a strong revival of historical research and academic debates on tarantism, marked by the re-issue of De Martino's book in 1994. In Salento, this period was also characterized by the emergence of neo-tarantism, nourished by the nostalgic memory of the local population.

Most traditional approaches to tarantism and neo-tarantism are informed by the myth of a vanished peasant society, a critique of modernity, and an identification of the cultural heritage of Salento with the memory framed by the work of De Martino. Lüdtke contextualizes and deconstructs most of these approaches, then focuses on the shift from the use of the pizzica as a way to confront life crises to its more recent uses for the promotion and celebration of a local sense of identity. This new dimension is strictly related to a larger investment in cultural production that considers the pizzica an "intangible heritage" integrated into the local economies of tourism. In this regard Lüdtke doesn't fully acknowledge the role of the Italian anthropologist...