Video: The Spider Dance Tradition, Time, and Healing in Southern Italy

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: The Spider Dance, tradition, time, and healing in Southern Italy, November 12, 2024.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Good afternoon, and welcome to nosiologists event. My name is Giovanna Parmigiani, and I'm the host of this series organized within the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the CSWR here at Harvard Divinity School. This series focuses on ways of knowing that are often labeled as non-rational, traditionally referred to as noses in Western philosophical and religious traditions, and often understood in contraposition to science, these ways of knowing are becoming more and more influential in contemporary societies, popular culture, and academic research.

Today, I will be presenting my new book, The Spider Dance, published with Equinox Publishing within the historical and contemporary paganism series curated by Charles Clifton and Scott Simpson. I have the honor to do so with two guests whose work I admire very much, Professors Paul Stoller and Sabina Magliocco. Paul Soller is professor of anthropology at West Chester University and permanent fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the humanities and social sciences Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.

In his more than 30 years of anthropological research and writing, Stoller has focused on Songhai religion in Niger and the life of West African street traders in New York City. Stoller's work encompasses the study of economic exchange, religion, ethnographic film, and the human quest for well-being in turbulent times. In his most recent work, he investigates how Indigenous wisdom can not only enhance social well-being, but also help to heal a troubled world.

Stoller has published 16 books, including ethnographies biographies, memoirs, as well as three novels. Since 2010, he has been blogging regularly on culture, politics, and higher education for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today, and has become an advocate for a more public and engaged anthropology. Sabina Magliocco is professor of anthropology and chair of the interdisciplinary program in the study of religion at University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

A recipient of Guggenheim National Endowment for the Humanities, SSHRC, Fulbright and Hewlett, and several other prestigious fellowships, and an honorary fellow of the American Folklore Society, she has published on religion, folklore, foodways, festival, and witchcraft in Europe and North America and is a leading authority on the modern pagan movement. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Two Madonnas The Politics of Festival in a Sardinian Community, and Witching Culture, Folklore and Neo-paganism in America, among others.

With filmmaker John Bishop, she produced a documentary film series, Oss Tales on a May Day Custom in Cornwall and its Reclamation by American Pagans. Her current research is on nature and animals and the spiritual imagination. So welcome, Sabina and Paul, and thank you very much for being here with me today.

PAUL STOLLER: Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you.

SABINA MAGLIOCCO: Likewise, Giovanna. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm delighted to be invited. Thank you.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you very much for being here. So today, after my presentation of The Spider Dance, our guests will share their reflection on my book. And after that, we can open up for the Q&A. I will receive questions from my guests and from you among the audience. If you want to ask a questions, I'm very happy to include them in our conversation today. So I will start sharing a few slides with pictures and a small video to start the presentation of my book.

So The Spider dance is the result of many years of ethnographic research in a particular place that I love very much, which is Salento, the heel of the Italian boot here in the round circle. And the protagonist of this book are Southern Italian contemporary pagans and new age practitioners of the Salento area and of a particular group, the Sisters of the Cherokee whom I love very much and I thank from the bottom of my heart, really, for what they gave me, and their friends and acquaintances.

In line with the non-linear ways to experience time and temporality that I will discuss in the book and today in my presentation, what I call the expanded present historicity, this book is written mostly in the present tense, and it does not organize ethnographic data and vignettes in a linear way. While some readers might perceive this as unsettling, the rupture of the linear flow of narration and of the readers' expectations parallels the shift in the experience of time and temporality that the expanded present cultivates.

I will start by reading an excerpt from the book, the very beginning of the book, in fact, of the first chapter that I called il matto, the fool. One of the things that I learned from my fieldwork in Salento is to read tarot cards, a practice that is still cultivate. And therefore, I decided to dedicate each chapter of the book to a major arcana. And the fool seemed to be the perfect card to signal a beginning of a story whose informant I would never have anticipated.

Before I start reading, want clarification in the excerpt, you will hear me mentioning a word, pizzica. We'll talk more about it today. But for the time being, let's start from saying that pizzica is a traditional, occasionally ecstatic music and dance performed in this particular area of Italy, Salento. In the past, it was also associated with specific healing practices related to the bite of tarantula spiders, a malaise that affected mostly women in this area of Italy and that comes-- that goes by the name of tarantismo.

So this is my excerpt. I read it with you. You walk and sweat. You have been trying to dance pizzica for a good hour, and you still feel overwhelmed by the sound of tambourines pulsing through your ears, stomach, legs, and feet. You were just introduced to that pizzica a pizzica that you listen to with your feet, dance to with your mind, and comprehend in your belly. You feel overwhelmed and vulnerable, exposed, bare.

You never danced before, and you just discover the emotional intimacy of dancing its communicative power. Puzzled, you wonder what information you disclose to your dancing partners and how exactly it happened. Your mind floats. It wanders without dwelling. Your mom's chemotherapy. The eyes of your dying grandmother. Your husband and son on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The spousal and parental consequences of your planned one-year-long fieldwork.

The reasons that made this difficult choice a necessity. The night is ripe of sea mist and you follow, light-headed, the elegant and unfailing gait of your pizzica teacher, trying not to concentrate on your own uncertain steps. She invited you to the apartment of one of her friends, and you docilely follow her there through the empty, dark, and narrow streets of Otranto, the many centuries old city of Salento at the far Southeast of the Italian Peninsula.

You know at a certain level that this might be a delicate first encounter with some of the women you decided to follow for your research. But you are surprised to find out that you do not really care about your work in that precise moment and about the possible consequences of a bad start. You taste the air that smells of the sea, of a harbor, of a place without winters. While the mid-October wind caresses your skin and soothes your disquiet, you follow your pizzica teacher and your thoughts, knowing that the only way to deal with both is through acknowledging the presence and your own presence in the present, in your present.

This is your one certainty when everything else feels like spinning. You follow your pizzica teacher and knock at the door of a stranger. Seconds later, you are welcomed by a warm smile, a pair of vivid eyes, and by the elegant moves of a drusus's hands. This is my story, a story that I own. While it is not every story, it is also a story, a tale that might speak to its readers about some aspects of their own stories of our common being in the world, of our common presence, our common staying, dwelling across times.

In Salento, the heel of the Italian boot and the place where this story unfolds, locals wisely use staying as a synonym of being. Staying does not imply passivity, stillness, or lack of change here. Rather, it entails movement, transformation, action, a particular form of action, sensorial, aesthetic, temporal. This active staying for this Valentinians met lies a key to inhabiting history, to well-being, and to specific political engagements.

This is the way to experience time and temporality, one that is at the core of their understanding of who they are and of how to live a happy life. This presence or expanded presence is the door to access while being, a door that, thanks to them, I learned to open to. If I had to summarize some of the main themes of this book in the 30 minutes of this presentation, I would mention three.

First, my presence in the text, ethnographic practice, and writing as spaces of vulnerability. The second is the practice of a particular dance called pizzica as a spiritual practice. And the third is a claim about the importance of historicities, that is to say, ways to experience and understand time and temporality, to reframe magic and well-being. I will try to sell a bit more about all this today.

This ethnography is very autobiographical, although I'm not sure I will consider it an auto ethnography. My voice, my experience, my journey, and to quote the tarot cards imagery again, "my fool's journey" is very present in this book, but always in relationship with-- in relationship with the human, but also with the more than human and other than human persons that I encountered in my fieldwork. Spoiler alert, This formulation clearly speaks about one of the main threads of this story, that of an anthropologist who went native.

As much as I don't like this expression still quite imbued with colonialist points of view, it is still quite used, often in inverted commas by anthropologists and others as a way to judge and evaluate a researcher's work. Here I am using it also in inverted commas to make a quite opposite claim. In fact, at a certain point in my fieldwork, I thought that allowing myself to go native was the only genuine, ethical, and productive way for me to inhabit my research space.

I entered the field without any particular attraction to spirituality in general and to alternative spirituality in particular. Nonetheless, as a good ethnographer, I wanted to do what my interlocutors did. And since they were going at great lengths to try to teach me how to meditate, dance pizzica, encounter and recognize more than human presences, et cetera, I thought to put into brackets, so to speak, my personal agnosticism and to try hard to follow their guidance.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, in this process, I discovered an access to a way to inhabit the world that I had not experienced in the past. The magical world, what Ernesto De Martino would call il mondo magico. Not only I experienced it, this is a necessary but not sufficient motivation. Many anthropologists did experience the magic world without feeling the necessity to integrate it into their lives. So I experience it and eventually chose it. I chose to let it define together with very many other things who am.

I believe that the magical world is accessible to all, hence my incipit in the second person singular, but explicitly stating this as an ethnographer is a political move in today's world and academic spaces. Well, this is linked to the ethical dimensions of vulnerability that I was mentioning before. First, my presence in the text does not set me apart from my interlocutors. I am like them. Moreover, it openly situates my positionality in reference to the readers of the book.

I am an ethnographer gone native, and this is clear right from the beginning. Finally, it allows me to overtly use myself in my relations with my interlocutors-- again, this is not a memoir-- as an instrument of knowledge. I also use the non-rational aspects of my learning to produce knowledge. After all, I believe this is what anthropology is also about. So how did I learn to access this magical world?

Through dancing pizzica. Pizzica is a traditional, occasionally ecstatic music and dance performed in this particular area of Italy, Salento. In the past, it was also associated with specific healing practices related to the bite of tarantula spiders, a malaise that affected mostly women in this area of Italy, and that went by the name of tarantismo. Tarantismo is a widely studied phenomenon that has been controversial since the Middle Ages, with pre-Roman origins.

According to some, it apparently lasted well into the 1960s, and according to some, '70s and '80s even. It is believed to have been affecting mostly, but not only women, and it has been described in the form of mental and physical suffering, sometimes also as a form of possession thought to be provoked by the bite of tarantula spiders and cured through various private rituals, usually at the home of the tarantata, the spider-possessed woman, and a public one in the town of Galatina.

This rituals involved the performance of pizzica music used as a cure or antidote, and were associated with a rowdy, ecstatic dance that could last for hours. The most influential study on this phenomenon is still the one conducted in June of 1959 by the Italian ethnologist Ernesto De Martino and his equip that resulted in the book, the Terra del Rimorso. Ernesto de Martino's interpretation was groundbreaking and had extremely important political implications.

According to him, tarantate, the women who were possessed by the spider or bit by the spider, belonged to what could be called the subaltern class. This term, reminiscent of the political analysis of Antonio Gramsci, usually refers to the politically, socially, economically, and geographically subordinate position part of the population, including the tarantate women vis a vis the Italian state in this case. This peculiar positionality was understood as being both the cause underlying tarantismo, and importantly, the horizon of its cure.

If structural dimensions such as patriarchy, extreme poverty, and social invisibility influence the onset of tarantismo, its ritual cure was not dismissed as an ineffective superstition or a relic of the past by Ernesto de Martino. Rather, against biomedical interpretation of the phenomenon popular at the time it is in his analysis of tarantismo that healing effects of pizzica were validated and considered culturally specific strategies to cope with structural oppression, inequality, and the consequent hardship that people experience at an individual level.

The ritual practice described by de Martino disappeared from the public scene at the beginning of the century with the modernization of the region, and tarantismo ceased to be performed as a predominantly healing practice while re-emerging mainly as a popular cultural music or phenomenon. Other aspects associated with pizzica music have been stressed, the one associated with courtship, for example, or the connection with the land of Salento and its history. An example of this is the yearly festival La Notte Della Taranta, the night of the tarantula spider, that takes place in Salento since the beginning of the century.

As my fieldwork among the sister of the Cherokee and another pagan groups in Salento shows, tarantismo and the performance of pizzica today are also reappropriated in their spiritual dimensions outside the Catholic Church in a form of what could be called spiritual neo-tarantismo or spiritual pizzica. My pagan interlocutors, as a matter of fact, associate pizzica with their spiritual practices. They do so through an understanding and experience of self as unbounded and within a neo-animist relational framework through which they experience and understand the world and their presence in it.

Pizzica is the phyllo, the thread, the guiding light, and practice of the church. Pizzica is its common ground, language, and medicine. What do these spiritual pizzica rituals look like today? So I will show you a couple of pictures from my own archive. So in May 2016, my mother died. I was in the field and my mother died just about a month after her mother, my grandmother, had died.

And so my sister organized for for my grief to accompany my mother in her transition, a ritual in this beautiful place South of Otranto, on the Adriatic Sea Coast close to Torre del Serpe, for those of you who know Salento. We prepared this altar, as you can see. And I had to get into this vagina-like entrance in the sea to leave this little meccaba, this, you know, vehicle, this vehicle that would accompany my mother in her transition symbolically.

And then there was some pizzica dancing. So this is me dancing pizzica in this very meaningful ritual that my sisters organized for me. I never had ballerina fantasies, of course. But again, this talks about-- speaks about the vulnerability of being an ethnographer and wanting to inhabit this vulnerable space. Since the faces and bodies are shown and their stories are told, so is mine and are mine.

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GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: There we go. So what possibility does a spiritual pizzica open up? Accessing the expanded present historicity. The filter that I use in this book to frame pizzica, tarantismo, and all that I have observed and experimented in Salento is that of local historicities, always to understand and experience time and temporality. Through my participant observation with my pagan interlocutors, I first witnessed and then learned a specific way to live temporarily that I called expanded present or presence.

This peculiar historicity is at the center of this book, and I claim it is not only a useful descriptive device to narrate the experiences of Southern Italian pagans. It also, and more importantly, is an analytical filter that allows to shed some light on unexplored dimensions within and beyond contemporary paganisms of the study of magic, the connection between historicities and well-being and of the epistemological implications of particular ontologies.

In the contemporary world, and in the academic one especially, it is often assumed that all human beings experience by default time as flowing linearly. Within such a historicity, the past, present, and future are perceived as separated but contiguous and placed on an imaginary line. During my ethnographic work, I noticed that my interlocutors experience time also as an expanded present or presence.

This particular way to live and embody time and space focuses on the coevality of past, present, and future within the flow of linear and sometimes cyclical times. Charge of past and future events, the expanded present goes beyond linear patterns of causes and effects, comprising all three temporalities at the same time. The past on the future, so to speak, are in the present and can be accessed in the present. The future, for example, can be a cause to an effect that we experience in the present or a way to reframe the past.

I am sure that those among us who practice divination, access the Akashic records, participate to family constellations or past life progressions, for example, won't have any trouble understanding what I'm referring to. This growing awareness that witnessed ethnographically is the result of many body mind practices. Just a tarot reading, for example, meditations they use of pendula and various magical elements that they are usually recognized as belonging to a global Wiccan and contemporary pagan community.

Mostly, though, this presence among my Salentine interlocutors is achieved through singing, plays, playing, and dancing pizzica. What do I mean with expanded present concretely? And what are the implications of accessing the expanded present? In what follows, another excerpt from the book will try to clarify what I mean. I will read it with you. I learned to dance pizzica in a small dance studio with four other persons and the guide of Viola.

It was late September when I saw a post on Facebook that was advertising a pizzica course run by Viola, and I immediately signed up. I try not to overthink my decision, but I confess, I joined the course not without some personal hesitation. Dancing was definitively something out of my comfort zone. Nonetheless, I really believed that I could not study pizzica without trying to dance it first. As the weeks passed, I started dancing pizzica more and more without really putting too much thought into it.

I shared my life with the lives of the sisters and I followed them to local festivals. I danced with them in the ronde. I participated in their informal gatherings, and I started to listen to pizzica music more often. By the time spring arrived, I was ready. It's April in Salento. The flowers are blooming and the fields are starting to blush with hundreds of poppies. The [? Sanjana ?] as it doles out its warmth to humans and plants, animals, and rocks, I thankfully take in what I can afford to, sending blessings of gratitude.

Beauty surrounds me and all feels very relieving and incredibly soothing. I took care of my ill mother in the North for a few weeks 24/7, and I returned to Salento a few days ago for another 20, profoundly sad and physically exhausted. Overwhelmed by the cancer of my mother, by hospitals, doctors, lab tests, medical prophylaxis by the recent death of my beloved grandmother at the beginning of the month, by the funeral arrangements and by the uncertainty of the near future, my return to Salento feels like coming home and restoring a connection with myself.

After some energy draining, sleepless, emotionally intense, and physically challenging weeks, I need this break to find some more grounding, to process my sadness, to be nurtured. I need it for me and especially to be able to take better care of my mom and of the situation in my birth town where I'm going to fly shortly. I feel overwhelmed by my thoughts and worries and I look forward to meeting Viola at the pizzica class. I had a strange dream some nights ago.

I was at Viola's house, which looked like a boat's deck. My mother was on it. She was younger, wearing a light Raincoat. She was standing with a suitcase in her hands. She was looking away at the horizon in the sailing direction. My sister and I were a few meters at her back. Following the sister's indications, I wrote the dream down in my journal and narrated it to some of them to Viola, first of all, one of its protagonists.

Images of fragments of the dream fluctuate in my mind, but it's mostly its emotional signature that is still lingering in me. I know that the dream had to do with an impending farewell from my mother, something I'm really not prepared for. I gather up all the energies that I have left and I dress up before the pizzica class. I put on a silk, blue green dress that I have never worn before, some dangle earrings and necklace and also some makeup. This is not at all what I would normally do before a pizzica class.

Dressing up is definitely an unusual choice on my part, but I feel it is the right one today. It is a special occasion in my heart. I feel that I need to dance pizzica today in honor of my mom as a way to connect with her, to thank her, to send her energy and love. I need it also as a way to connect with myself and with my dream and to prepare for her departure whenever it's meant to take place. I arrived the dance school with eyes full of tears and slightly nauseated. I greet Viola and ask her if she can make sure that I dance alone during the class.

She immediately understands that I need a healing of some sort. She nods and hugs me without saying a word. The pizzica class starts and I'm lost in the music and in my thoughts. While I whirl, jump, and pant, images of my mother and me emerge from within. They blend with the nature of Salento that she has never had the chance to visit and with the sound of the drums. I cry and pant and jump again over and over. Images of my dream come to my mind and a deep sadness comes out from under my skin, blending with my sweat.

My feet hit the ground with a fury that comes from a sense of impotence and helplessness. And I whirl and spin to lose track of the borders of my body as if I could melt and disappear into the air around me, as if I could merge with it. I delved deep into my overwhelming emotions. I feel as if my flesh were torn apart by the pain. After this label, then an idea gently comes through in my mind, the liberating experience of a sudden delivery. The music stops, and I do too, dizzy and even more nauseated.

Everything spins around me and my eyesight is blurred. I breathe deeply and I enjoy the feeling of gradually reconnecting to my vision, to my body, to my images in the mirror. Everything looks and feels different now. The sudden and unanticipated awareness of a line of action arrived as unexpected gift. I look at the floor. I see one of my earrings lying close to my bare feet. I pick it up and I realize that it broke during my dance, as if neatly shorn by an invisible shear.

My cell phone rings. It's my mom. The pizzica class is still on, but I take the call. I ignore that this would have been our last relatively high hearted-- lighthearted chat. Viola, I need to ask you a favor, I utter, while changing clothes in the locker room at the end of the pizzica class. Do you remember my dream, the boat, [INAUDIBLE] the sea, your wooden room? I had this feeling tonight while I was dancing that I have to ask you to organize a farewell for my mother here in Salento if she dies.

I will have to ask to my sister Catalina to come here and to attend the ritual too. Of course, I'm honored, Viola replies, without asking questions. Dreams, pizzica dance-- sorry-- the dream, the pizzica, the pain, the sudden breakthrough, the acknowledgment of an unanticipated line of action and the emotional lightness and freedom that came with it, all new experiences for me. The dream, the broken earring, and my mother's call, random occurrences or synchronicities.

Exactly two weeks later, my mom died. A sudden and unexpected worsening of her physical conditions took her away, leaving the doctors with whom I had spoken about her situation on the phone just a couple of days before puzzled. Dreams, pizzica dance, synchronicities, insights, meditations, these are some of the ways in which my interlocutors and I access the awareness that they call expanded present or presence. I do not consider them as extraordinary experiences.

I find them instead quite ordinary in their ubiquity and in their everyday occurrences. Only this type of participatory experiences that I would-- Susan Greenwood-- call magic are not necessarily often thought to be ways in which we engage with time and temporality and the type of knowledge that comes from this. What are the implications of accessing the expanded present and of using this analytical filter to study spirituality?

There are a number, but today I would like to briefly focus on two, a better understanding of magic and its connections with well-being. As we all know, magic is a very contested topic. Much has been written on the history of magic in anthropology and beyond. While articulated differently, there are two main ways to understand magic in the anthropological tradition, magic as a way of knowing and magic as a psychological, self-centered tool.

Clearly, both dimensions could be and are present at the same time. In my work, I follow anthropologist Susan Greenwood's understanding of magic as a non-scientific, nonetheless epistemologically sound aspect of human consciousness, based on a participatory experience of the world, what she calls participatory consciousness. When neglected by Western modernity. She claims magic is a universal form of knowledge and as well attested in the West as elsewhere, one that is a perfectly legitimate way to inhabit the world.

But what do presence, magic, and the focus on the expanded presence bring to this conversation? In spite of the differences between traditional anthropological approaches to the study of magic, what all these frameworks have in common is a framing of magic within our mainstream modern way to understand the categories of space and time, a uni-linear one. Much of past and contemporary understandings of magic, as a matter of fact, have to do with the role of purpose, causality, knowledge, sympathy, cause and effect, and will in the description of magic.

All these terms, I argue, are intertwined with the adoption of a linear understanding of time, typical of motor hegemonic discourses, the same ones that traditionally shape academic research. What a focus on the expanded present history brings to the academic and non-academic conversations on magic are, one, an alternative description of how participation or magic can work and of the type of knowledge, performative effects, and aesthetic forms magic can bring about beyond positivist interpretations.

Two, an alternative epistemology in the study of magic, one that, for example, by challenging the researchers' acritical assumptions around the linearity of time better explains phenomena as divination noses and deja vu, to name only a few examples. Three, in my particular case, such an understanding of magic better explain its connections between magic, healing, and well-being. What I call presence magic in my book is the result of putting the expanded present history city in conversation with Greenwood's ideas about magic and with Ernesto de Martino's notion of presence.

According to de Martino, what we call magic could be considered as a cultural form, aiming at establishing presence in history and at coping with the angst that derives from the possibility of not being in a cultural world, the so-called crisis of presence. This crisis is not only the result of a personal struggle, rather, it's a universal one, an everlasting psychic structure that plays out in specific historical conditions and situations.

An example of this is precisely linked to the turandot of the past, whose malaise was understood as a manifestation of a lack of presence triggered by the subaltern existences. The musical therapeutic rituals and the yearly appointment in galatina at the Chapel of Saint Paul then were considered culturally determined forms that allowed for the re-established point of presence in the world. The function of inhabiting an expanded present historicity stems precisely from the necessity to handle presence, its crisis, and its represented vocation.

These are common experiences in the contemporary world as well, stemming from global, social, and personal conditions of struggle. In this sense, the expanded present historicity is magic. It is a way to secure and re-establish presence in the world. Through one's active staying, one can reestablish wholeness, meaning, and a sense of community in the face of a precariousness, struggle, and trauma. It is worth noting and also talk about this at length in the book, that the communitarian aspect of healing is central here.

As the Salentine adage goes, if one dances alone, they cannot be healed. It would be clear by now how and why magic, presence magic, and the expanded present historicity are so linked to healing and being in my work. What is the relationship between healing than an alternative historicities, and with the expanded presence in particular? I was having a conversation on the phone with one of my interlocutors once. We were talking about a spiritual work that we had done a few days before.

And I remember, she used a particularly useful story as a metaphor to explain to me the efficacy of that work, one that can be easily and purposely transferred also to presence magic and the expanded presence historicity. Imagine you are very much in love with a person with whom you are in a romantic relationship, she said. They are your best friend and lover, and you want to spend your life with them. Now, imagine that as it sometimes happens, this relationship comes to an end, and not by your choice.

They decide to break up, and you feel broken and in pain. She briefly paused and then continued. Now, imagine that a couple of days after the end of your relationship find a picture of the two of you together, happy, smiling, and hugging each other. That particular picture that was taken in a moment of joy as a memento of your happiness is now a thorn in your heart, right? It feels incredibly painful. It measures the distance between what you had and now have not, or who you were, and now you're not.

Time passes, and now, two years later, find yourself in another moment of your life. You change cities and jobs, perhaps, and you are in another relationship. You feel content and look at the future with positivity and hope. You find the same old picture. What do you do now? How do you feel? You probably look at it and smile. You look at a younger version of yourself with compassion and tenderness, and in what feels like a hug to your former self are able to see and feel all the emotions that were attached to that photo, the bliss, the anger, the sorrow, the law, the sadness, the passion, et cetera, as different layers without wearing any particular one of them.

You only feel compassionate and loving. And kind hearted, you look at your image and that of your previous partner and see a part of you that taught you lessons and that does not hurt anymore. This, my friend, concludes, is what happens during rituals. They allow us to make the two years jump of the story I just told you but in the space of a couple of hours. Rituals do not erase memories. They just help infuse them with different and more empowering emotional flavors.

This is a good metaphor to understand how presence magic and the expanded present can work as a cure, a particular healing gaze that favors one's well-being. By allowing us to access different dimensions of time coevally, it encourages us to look at and experience our lives, pains, and challenges differently in ways that heal, that make us whole. Thank you. That's it for me. Sorry It was a bit long, but I thought I had to share with you some passages from the book.

Hi, Paul. Hi, Sabina.

PAUL STOLLER:

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you for--

PAUL STOLLER: Who should start? Should I go first or Sabina?

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yes, Paul, please.

PAUL STOLLER: OK. So reading the book and listening to your-- listening to your presentation of it reminded me of something I call weaving the world. And it's a technique that one can use in non-fiction writing, where you blend narrative with academic discourse. And the way I came upon that I was working on a book called Money Has No Smell, and I was stuck. I could not figure out how to proceed.

And a healer-- well, not a healer-- a merchant said, well, why don't you write the book as if you are a weaver? And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, weavers weave very many strands of things together. And then when the blanket is complete, then the blanket tells the story. So the blanket tells the story. And so weavers convey something, not in words, but in patterns and metaphors.

And so weavers are storytellers, and storytellers always blend the personal with-- academic storytellers blend the personal with the professional. So in academic discourse, we have long had the dream of objectivity expressed in plain style, a centuries old pattern of academic writing, which has very little, which is desensitized, not many adjectives, just the facts.

And in The Spider Dance, Parmigiani blends beautifully, I would say, narrative with academic discourse. And in my view of things, nothing is more difficult in nonfiction writing to blend the two registers, narrative and academic discourse storytelling. So the book is filled with storytelling. It's filled with the author's implication in the lives of the women that she's experiencing and writing about, and leads us to her notion of the expanded presence.

And it demonstrates the power of narrative to encompass the world's complexity. I'm going to read a little something that I wrote about the ethical implications of doing this kind of anthropology. In the history of anthropology, there have been many head spinning turns. But when the spinning stops and the air clears of dust, do we not stand on the ground of ethnography, which for me is anthropology's imperfect gift to the world?

This dust-clearing realization begs the question, what constitutes an ethical ethnography in our turbulent times? In my experience, an ethical ethnography is shaped by love and loss, one in which ethnographers are emotionally implicated in the lives of the people they are attempting to describe. If ethnographers have felt the joy of love with all of its personal, social, and political implications, and if they have felt the sorrow of loss with its deep well of palpable memory, then as scholars and as human beings, they are emotionally and philosophically well positioned to take up the ethical burden, to convey carefully, faithfully, and artfully the ethnographically inspired wisdom of others, a wisdom that can make the world a better place.

So Parmigiani is implicated in the lives of the women of the circle. She lives with them over time. She dances with them. She sensuously experiences, their world, which means that there are many beautifully rendered, sensuous descriptions. Right from the very beginning of the book, she read one. I'll read it again because I like it so much. You walk and sweat. This is how the book begins. It grabbed my attention. If a writer grabs the attention of the reader right from the beginning, you turn the page continue to turn the page.

You walk and sweat. You have been trying to dance pizzica for a good hour, and you still feel overwhelmed by the sound of the tambourines pulsing through your ears, stomach, legs, and feet. This is sensuous description, something that I myself have advocated for a very, very long time, sensuous description. It also opens up the whole notion that Giovanna mentioned before of vulnerability.

And as a writer, if you express vulnerability, what it does is it connects you and your experience to the reader. And so if you expose your vulnerability, your doubts, your experiences, your emotions on the page, which is a risky kind of thing to do, it immediately connects you to the reader. And when you're connected to the reader through the prism of vulnerability, what the reader is compelled to do is to turn the page.

And that is our greatest challenge as writers, how do we get people to turn the page? How do we get them to take something away from what we've written? She also mentions in the book, to me, it speaks to the power of apprenticeship. An apprentice, you know, I've been an apprentice. I don't know if I could characterize your involvement with the women of the circle as a kind of an apprenticeship. You know nothing when you start. You're an open book. People tell you and you assume you can't bring to bear all of your anthropological training to the apprenticeship.

And apprenticeship involves slow learning. It involves acceptance of mentors and having mentors showing you the way. And it also implicates your kind of vulnerability as well. Apprenticeship also means collaboration. So you approach your research by collaborating with others, not an individual thing. It's a sort of lack of mastery. It also involves unlearning. So when I was an apprentice to Songhai healers or when Giovanna was apprentice to--

Was working with these women and learning how to dance to pizzica, you have to unlearn certain things and you have to put things to a side and sort of immerse yourself in the experience. So that's a very difficult thing for us in the West to do that. It also involves modesty. So it involves accepting the fact that there are limits to our comprehension of things and keeping a sort of open mind about that.

And not really sort of suggesting that I have the answers to this, that I-- and it's a difficult thing for academics to involve with that. It also involves embodied learning. So if you dance to learn, you're engaged in embodied learning. In other forms of apprenticeship from which I'm familiar, the embodied learning has to do with becoming sick and overcoming your illness.

But dancing is also very embodied way of learning. And so it's not like reading a text. And it's involving your being in the process of research. And these are involved-- all of these kinds of notions are involved in what-- there's a wonderful book by Martinez di Puppo and Fredrikson called Peripheral Methods, in which they talk about unlearning, modesty, and understanding the limits of the-- potential of your comprehension.

And so when you engage in this kind of research and this orientation to research, you realize if you're doing any kind of healing or you're focusing on healing or this kind of-- the women of the circle and dancing pizzica is that healing is fundamentally a communal kind of thing. And so when we realize that-- this is the notion that I like to call embodied-- I'm sorry-- indigenous wisdom.

So healing the world. How do we, not only just heal ourselves, but how do we heal the world? And there are a lot of indigenous healers who have a really good sense about how you can extend what they use to heal themselves and heal their communities beyond that to the world. And it involves collaboration. It involves modesty. It involves living fully, but understanding some of the limits that are imposed upon us.

And all of this brings us, ultimately, to the goal that is expressed beautifully in the spider dance of well-being. It's a quest for well-being. It's a way of healing ourselves, but also a way of confronting some of the multiple problems of the world. And hopefully, that can make life a bit sweeter for all of us. Thank you.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Paul, for your comments. Thank you very much. I will gather Sabina's and then reply.

SABINA MAGLIOCCO: Thank you, Paul, for your comments. They are beautiful and they echo some of the things that I want to say as well. First of all, I want to call attention to the importance of this work that Giovanna has written because it is one of the first, if not the first ethnography of Italian neo-pagans. And Italian neopagans have been kind of understudied vis a vis pagans in other parts of the world, for example, in North America and in Great Britain, even in Australia and New Zealand.

And this book shows how significantly different neopaganism is in Italy, the significantly different forms that it takes in Italy vis a vis some of these other areas of the world where it has been more studied. In my book, Witching Culture, which is a study of pagans in North America, in the United States, largely, I talk about paganism being like tofu, in that it takes on the flavor of surrounding ingredients.

And when I read this book, I was struck by how much that is also true in this particular case. Giovanna shows us how Salentine pagans construct meaning based on local understandings of things like time and the land, the year cycle, and traditions, especially the pizzica. And they are part of a larger movement that is reclaiming and reviving the pizzica, interpreting it in different ways.

At the same time, the pizzica is exquisitely Salentine. This tradition is not found in any other part of Italy. It's not. There are other drumming traditions. There's the torre murata, which is more characteristic of campania. There are many other dance traditions, but the pizzica is exquisitely Salentine. And so what struck me is the reclamation of tradition, something that I think characterizes all forms of modern paganism.

But how the tradition that is being reclaimed in this case, is exquisitely local, and that's what gives an exquisitely Salentine flavor to the [INAUDIBLE] and to this particular form of reclamation. Like Paul, I found the book lyrically written, alternating these reflexive passages that tell your story. Giovanna, with really theoretical and analytical passages, things that make our brains really stretch, that pioneer new ways of analyzing and thinking about the concept of magic.

And this is where I want to talk about this concept of the expanded present that you introduced to us and that I find so very interesting. As you say, it's a way of understanding time that is nonlinear. It focuses on being in the present, but at the same time, echoes of the past and images of the future can coexist, can be visible to us in the present through ritual, through divination, through alternate states of consciousness that can occur often in ritual contexts.

And this is very interesting because it's something that I found, to some extent, also among the pagans that I worked with but that I didn't really recognize for what it is. I mean, this is a unique insight that you brought to it by combining de Martino's idea of the crisis of presence with Greenwood's idea of participation. I would even say that the crisis of presence is the thing that kind of cracks people open into a state of participation.

I think that participation-- the participatory way of experiencing the world, is something that happens in what de Martino calls il memento magico, and which I translate as the numinous moment, that moment in which we are confronted with a crisis as you were confronted, Giovanna, with the impending loss and then the death of your mother, the loss of your grandmother. I mean, these things challenge us as human beings.

They create a rift in the way that we understand ourselves and our ability to have agency to affect our world, what de Martino calls the [ITALIAN], which, I think, as you say, is not just something that is characteristic of Southern Italian peasants in the middle of the 20th century and earlier. But we are all affected by these crises of presence at different times of our lives.

So in that numinous moment when people are experiencing a crisis of presence, the world becomes participatory, the world shifts, and we then have access to, first of all, this idea that everything in the world is connected, that there is a greater meaning to things, that there are synchronicities, the dream of your mother, for example, and the lesson in the pizzica and your dancing and Viola's promise are all somehow connected.

They're all part of the same thing. But that couldn't happen, that participatory-- I mean, there are ways of accessing participation when we're not in crisis. But that crisis of presence is often the thing that makes the world more participatory for us and that opens us to the possibility of this expanded present, of this past, present, future, existing all in a moment or in this moment, giving us access to these other timelines. So that, I think, is a really, really important insight.

I want to go back to what you said about going native and the necessity of going Native. And this is also something that I talked about in my own work, particularly my book, Witching Culture. I think it was Jeanne Favret-Saada who wrote that when we study magic, there is no outside from which to observe. We are either participating, we are either in it or we're completely outside it and, therefore, unable to understand what our interlocutors are doing.

And I think that this is something that you conveyed very well with your decision to go native, your decision to go ahead and let yourself get swept up in what's going on, without which you would not have had access to the theoretical insights that you then bring to the table. Because if you had just kind of sat and watched, oh, yeah, they're dancing the beats. [CHUCKLES] I mean, I can't even imagine that as another ethnographer whom, as Paul says, for me, as for you, I think, my body is my instrument.

When I teach ethnographic field methods-- and I've been taking a-- I've been taking an ethnographic field school to my original field site in Sardinia now for a number of Summers, I tell students, your body is your instrument. What you experience, your five SENSES what you think, that is the instrument through which you access the information that you then bring back to the world. And for me, I mean, I guess that there's all kinds of ways to do ethnography.

But for me, there's only one way to do that, and that is with an open heart. If you don't let your heart crack wide open when you're doing this work, if I don't let my heart crack wide open when I'm doing this work, well, I might as well just hang up my hat and quit now, Just walk away. There are other ways of doing this work. I don't mean to disparage them, but I think for some of us, for the three of us who are on the screen right now [CHUCKLES] that's the way in, right?

You let your heart crack wide open. You use your body to experience what people are experiencing, and that gives you access to a very different understanding of what's happening that you would not have access to if you had simply remained a remote observer. And I think that magic is particularly like this. The study of magic, it's a little bit like the study of music and the study of foodways. All three of those expressive traditions really require us to participate in one way or another.

My ethnomusicologist friends who have studied music all over the world all are scholar practitioners in that they then eventually pick up the instrument, use their voices, participate in the music making so that they can have insight into what their interlocutors are doing. And my colleagues who study food-- I've studied food myself. I mean, we all have to eat, right? You can't not eat this stuff as you're studying it.

So this is another way that magic is very much like music and food, foodways-- two other passions of mine-- in that it really requires that whole-hearted participation in order to understand what your interlocutors are experiencing and you convey that very, very well. I very much dislike the whole going native metaphor. We know that identity is contextual. We know that it is emergent.

And we know that it isn't one thing or another, particularly boundary crossers like us, Giovanna, right? We dwell, not in the well-tilled fields, but in the margins, in the hedgerows. We cross multiple boundaries, speak multiple languages, belong and don't belong to multiple cultures. And so the whole question of identity, who do you belong to? Where do you belong? Where are you from? You want to really confuse me, ask me, where are you from, right? [CHUCKLES]

Kind of stand there like a fish. You don't know how you're supposed to answer that question. So those of us who are boundary crossers are quite aware of the constructed nature of identity. And so that's why I find the whole going native metaphor so problematic. You have not gone Native and fundamentally changed your identity. You have opened yourself to a different way of experiencing things, which is absolutely necessary when we are studying another culture, especially when we're studying magic, music, foodways, those kinds of expressive traditions.

Yeah, I think I'm going to segue perhaps into one of my questions in terms of how this idea of presence magic, of the expanded present, how this theoretical concept can help us understand some of the political applications of magic that we're seeing today. One of the things that I'm working on, besides animals and the spiritual imagination-- one of the things that I've been observing is the use of magic by modern pagan groups to influence things like political outcomes.

And so one of my questions to you, Giovanna, is how can this particular understanding of a different way of conceptualizing time help us understand why this is such a thing among modern pagans, why we see so many pagans using magic to try to influence political outcomes today?

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Sabina, and thank you, Paul, for your remarks. I can honestly say that I would not have been able to write this book if I had not read your work, which was an inspiration for me in very many ways. Sabina, your work on paganism witchcraft, Paul, your being in the field, your writing, absolutely-- I'm so happy. This was a dream of mine. 15 years ago, I had thought, writing a book and having you two hear presenting my book, I would have been thrilled, and I am actually.

So thank you, thank you again. So, yes, thank you for this question, Sabina. So what I tried to do in this book is offer an analytical filter that adds to what have been written around magic to help us highlight different things, different dimensions of magic, the ones linked to historicity and a way to inhabit time and temporality that includes past and futures and parallel linear times and so on.

And similar to your 2020 article, I think, Sabina, the one that you wrote on the previous elections, you mentioned the crisis of presence in that article, you mentioned de Martino. And I think that your reading, how you put what I had tried to summarize in my presentation as the link between the presence magic and crisis of presence is still at the center of what happens, I think, when we think about magic through the filter of a nonlinear historicity.

In a way, the expanded presence, adds a dimension to your own understanding of the connection between magic and politics. And, shout out, is a another related article 2020 of an issue that Sabina edited on it-- yeah, there you go-- on the topic of magic and politics. Yes, I think the presence magic gives agency to magic practitioners to inhabit a place of uncertainty, a place of crisis, really, a place of fears also or anticipation, right?

And the knowledge that whatever the outcome of a spell-- and, I think, Sabina, you're mentioning-- you're thinking about if I read in your mind about the type of spells and the witchcraft actions are spelled out have been, for example, practices to words before the elections here in the US or in other continents. So when we talk about political magic or magic and politics, we, I think, about that dimension.

So knowing that somehow the future and how it develops can change the past and the present and vice versa, I think allows to inhabit a space of agency that helps us grow, grow in different directions. And you were mentioning before the going native and the critiques to going native, having this space as an expansion of the possibilities.

And I think that presence magic does exactly that on a very practical level, allows for an expansion of the perspective and on the ways in which we can engage with the world. Some within the new age space will call it multi-dimensional or manifestation. They're all aspects-- or quantum leaps or this kind of thing. They're all expressions, I think, that point towards the same or a similar way to approach time and temporality that I define expanded present.

So as you said, it happens. Sometimes things are in front of our eyes. They're put together through and starting from my ethnographic fieldwork, the literature on historicity. So Charles Stuart, Stefan Paulmier, the literature around magic, so especially Susan Greenwood's, but your own ideas about magic. You are placed within the same legacy of Lévy-Bruhl that Susan Greenwood is actually inhabiting, and de Martino's ideas of presence and crisis of presence and representation.

So not to give a long-winded answer to this question, I think that expanded presence actually works as an additional layer to better understand how within magical spaces the crisis of presence work, also today, also vis a vis contemporary magic. And if we have ideas about efficacy or questions about efficacy, I ask the audience to refer to your 2004 book, Witching Culture, [CHUCKLES] because you, I think, very clearly explain different attitude towards spell work, for example.

Some look at the form of the manifestation of something or the spell that the spell should take or the efficacy of the spells should look like and some other to the essence of the spell, allowing for spaces of growth or recalibration or reinvention also of one's place in the world. I think time is up though. I'm sorry, I love this conversation very much. Thank you for being involved. And thank you--

PAUL STOLLER: Thank you.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: --to the audience.

SABINA MAGLIOCCO: Thank you. It's--

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yeah please stay tuned with the rest of the activities for CSWR, the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative and Nosiologies, of course. And you can find all this information on the CSWR website that you can find in the chat or in your email if you are part of our newsletters. So thank you, Sabina. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, everybody, for being here.

PAUL STOLLER: A pleasure.

SABINA MAGLIOCCO: Thank you, Giovanna.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Great--

PAUL STOLLER: Thank you, Giovanna.

GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: --rest of your evening. Bye.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the president and fellows of Harvard College.