South Italian Festivals: A Local History of Ritual and Change. (Reviews).

South Italian Festivals: A Local History of Ritual and Change. By Herman Tak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. 272pp. $32.50/paperback).

Rituals in a traditional society change glacially, if at all; yet, the advent of modernism has often spelt doom for them and their functions. So the conventional wisdom has it. Herman Tak disagrees with this simplistic interpretation of the anthropology of rituals, and demonstrates in a finely crafted and detailed book that runs back and forth from the Middle Ages to today how utterly complex and protean rituals and their functions can be. In this microhistory of the ritual religious processions and festivals in the small southern Italian town of Calvello, Tak opens up a mental window into how the Calvellesi structured their festival year and how these rituals defined time and space for them. Moreover, he explains why the Calvellesi structured--and restructured--them so. They did this as willing actors, but actors reacting to internal and external events and pressures. Where once the needs and dictates of a traditional agricultural lifestyle acted as a stimulus for this process, after about 1800 modernism (st ate formation, the development of Nationalism, and the decline of agriculture) prompted more changes and reactions. While many festivals, especially after 1950, became marginal or even fell away, others became strengthened and renewed in reaction to and for protection from modem society. For Tak, continuity and change are thus both sides of the same story of the ritual festivals in this small southern Italian town.

Tak, an anthropologist, combines the anthropologist's insights from field research (he was in Calvello to witness the ritual festivals and processions in 1989 and again from 1990 to 1991) with the historian's eye for past accounts and details. In combining these two approaches into what he calls historical anthropology, Tak is very much answering the call early Annaliste historians, like March Bloch and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, made for total history, where history and the social sciences would marry and then perform a more profound examination of the human condition and character. By looking first at the present day ritual festivals and then unearthing their archaeological and evolutionary layers via city archives, iconography, and topography, he is following in the methodological footsteps Bloch set out years ago in his French Rural History. By giving historical context to his anthropological observations, Tak is able to create a deeper cultural understanding of ritual practice, its origins, its development , and its current significance and place in Calvellesi society. He enriches what he saw in the 1980s and 1990s with the material he read about from the earlier centuries.

After providing a description of modern day Calvello and its festivals, thirty-five feast days and nineteen processions divided into five separate cycles, Tak takes us back to the beginning, to 1087, when the Benedictines arrived in Calvello. Thus began a local dialectic between official Roman Catholicism and its representatives and the Calvellesi, who localized most of their program. In other words, like a too powerful electric current, universal religion was stepped down once it arrived at Calvello. For instance, St. Nicholas, a popular patron saint of merchants and sailors became an agricultural saint in land-locked and non-bourgeois Calvello. Madonnas quickly became local girls, identified with places near and dear to the Calvellesi. During the Counter-Reformation, the Church made further attempts at conformity, but Calvello's rituals and interpretations of the saints remained fiercely local and fiercely tied to the ebb and flow of their particular agricultural lifestyle. For instance, St. Joseph, a popul ar Counter-Reformation saint also became an agricultural saint. Nevertheless, the Church did add onto the religious calendar: by 1748 there were fifty feast days with twenty-eight processions divided into two separate seasons, winter and summer, reflecting the dictates of the agricultural year. Throughout this first section of the book, Tak also provides detailed demographic evidence about Calvello based on the surviving tax registers.

The second section of his book begins with a good description of Italian politics and economic policy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The rise of nationalism and the decline of agriculture swept Calvello up in their wake. And these events had a massive and dramatic effect on Calvello's rituals and processions. For instance, our friend St. Joseph now became a proletarian; and many of Calvello's saints and processions suffered a proletarianization and reflected modern class conflict, and the class-consciousness of rituals and processions declined as well. Moreover, many of Calvello's processions became symbolic of the coming and going of the late nineteenth-century emigrants. It is here that Tak's book really provides considerable support for his thesis that internal and external events affected the development of the ritual cycle and the processions and festivals.

Tak continues with this convincing line of argument as he examines Calvello and its ritual processions and festivals in the twentieth century. Fascism introduced new festivals in support of the regime but accidentally marginalized old ones by trying to structure leisure time, to make it more Fascist; this left less time to participate in the old rituals. Moreover, Fascism, by being more secular or less Christian, diminished the value of these religious festivals. In addition, other modern innovations marginalized the old festivals. Electric street lighting made night less threatening and less symbolic of death, which meant no need for rituals to protect the Calvellesi from these. Further, Fascism's failed economic policy further diminished Calvello's place as an agricultural area; and after World War II further emigration and the dilapidated houses of Calvello's elite provided stark evidence of how Calvello had moved from a traditional economy into a postindustrial service-oriented one, when industry even by- passed Calvello. With these economic and social events occurring, there was less a need for agricultural rituals and processions. But, as Tak points out and demonstrates, there is still a need for rituals and processions in present-day Calvello--just not traditional agricultural ones. Continuity and change.

A frequent criticism of annaliste history was that it never made explicit the connections between structures, and conjunctures, and events. Tak's finely detailed analysis of the effects modernism had on the rituals of a small Italian town provides ample evidence of these connections. This is microhistory at its best. In addition, Tak demonstrates well that simplistic models of ritual and modernization need considerable fine-tuning, especially at the village level.