Steve Siporin

A Venetian Island: Environment, History, and Change in Burano (review)

Burano is a small island in the northern reaches of the Venetian lagoon, a forty-five-minute ride from Venice by vaporetto (water-bus). Its population in 1982, the year Oxford anthropologist (and native Venetian) Lidia Sciama began her fieldwork, was about 5,000, although it is considerably smaller today because of outmigration and a declining birthrate. Buranelli (the natives of Burano) have always been fishermen, but the lagoon and the Adriatic are now polluted and decreasingly productive. For those who had to leave, “what they longed for the most was having a boat near the front door, and their lagoon where they could go fishing and rowing” (p. 17). Thus, the situation in which Burano finds itself today is one familiar to anthropologists and folklorists: a small traditional society threatened by environmental destruction, confronted with the mixed blessings of modernization, tourism, and a changing economy. Buranelli want to improve their living conditions, yet they love their island and want to retain their culture. Indeed, as with all of Venice, it has become a challenge just to remain on the island. Sciama’s ethnography is rich in fascinating details, paying a great deal of attention to Burano’s folklore. She describes funeral customs and death beliefs, nicknames and naming traditions, proverbs, vernacular housing, fishing techniques, weather and fishing lore, narratives, and more—not for their own sake but always as part of her portrayal and analysis of life in Burano. Sciama’s study is also rich in ideas—far too many to summarize in a short review. But for this reader, the theme bringing ideas, folklore, and data together is Burano as “the island of lace.” The word “lace” (Italian merletto or pizzo) does not appear in the title, but the photograph on the book’s cover shows a middle-aged woman sitting outdoors on a chair by a doorway, bent over, intent on her needlework, creating punto in aria (“stitch in the air”—the Italian term for lacework, which almost existentially describes the creation of complex beauty from nothing but cotton thread and cloth). Such a sight—a woman, or a group of women, sitting outdoors, stitching lace—is still familiar in Burano today. In one of the photograph sections (pp. 186–90), we also can see Burano fishermen repairing nets, bent over in the same posture and with the same intensity as their lacemaking wives, sisters, and daughters. One of the most delicate stitches is called rete, or (fishing) net (p. 179). Sciama is particularly concerned with the lacemaking because it is women’s work, because it is an important social and economic barometer, and because it has a history—an excellent way to discover a great deal about women’s lives and about Burano. We learn, for instance, that the women of Burano feel a profound ambivalence about lacemaking. It releases their creative artistry and so is fulfilling, but it also has been a major means of controlling them. Lacemaking gave women an economic tool, but it also allowed them to be exploited; contemporary older women, especially, have bitter memories of such exploitation, and Sciama has recorded their testimony. Lacemaking brings in money, albeit not very much, and the cost (in eyesight, for instance) can be great. Lacemakers have traditionally been trained to specialize in one or two stitches, so their creativity is constrained, but, because finished pieces of lacework are the composite creations of informal chains of women who pass merletti from one to another, each adding her specialty stitches in the appropriate places, making lace actually creates a

The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (review)

that comes from skepticism. Granted, all religions appear gawky in their adolescence, but sometimes disciplinary agnosticism permits us to discount desired but undeserved self-presentations. While no researcher should scorn the belief system of a group that she encounters, neither is it necessary to nuzzle. This attachment may cause Magliocco to downplay sexuality, drug use, and posturing in the community. These seekers often appear in her telling to be, frankly, rather puritanical. For some young people, their witchy beliefs may serve as an inyour-faith dogma, sparking familial drama at Thanksgiving. Resistance may appear as bullying to one’s intimates. As scholars, let us recognize Neo-Paganism in all its forms as simultaneously silly and profound, subversive and moral, liberating and harassing. A more distanced view would emphasize the struggles over political correctness that challenge the movement as it staggers toward a consensual theology. One illuminating instance is the problematic usage of American Indian lore in Neo-Paganism. Do these white, middleclass, well-educated Americans have the right to appropriate native traditions? Do these beliefs belong to their tribes or do they belong to the divine? As Magliocco explains, West Coast Pagans are more prudent in avoiding tribal complaints, whereas East Coast Pagans, less attuned to American Indian politics (or at least to the objections of tribal leaders) are more willing to embrace these cross-cultural borrowings. If European Americans cannot borrow Indian traditions, can Italian Americans borrow Celtic traditions, can Sicilians borrow traditions from Lombardy? Put another way, are traditions linked to an ethnic identity that springs from the soil? This is a matter that reverberates with the concerns of Johann Herder as well as with those troubling Nordic Pagans who demand a purity of Aryan magic. While Neo-Paganism may be a religion aborning, no single authority has yet emerged. Numerous strains of Neo-Paganism—Wicca, the Golden Dawn, the Reclaiming tradition— compete for adherents in a creedal marketplace. Within each of these traditions, one’s own worship group matters deeply. In a faith that lacks set dogma and ritual authority, actors set the terms of their own faith. This may be legitimate spiritually, but it accords great power to local practice. Each group establishes its own divinity, creating an idioculture of belief. As an account of the folkloric practices of a burgeoning social scene, Witching Culture deserves high praise. Yet, this is a volume whose goal is to apply folkloristics to explain NeoPaganism. In sharp contrast to Tanya Luhrmann’s treatise on cognitive anthropology, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Harvard University Press, 1989), that uses a similar (British) scene to explain the ambiguity of belief under conditions of modernity, Magliocco’s volume does not include a theory of traditional practice. While one sympathizes with Magliocco’s desire to get Neo-Paganism right, she might have thought more deeply about concepts such as group, gender, cultural politics, and faith to better understand how the insistent striving for authenticity and ecstatic imagining of NeoPagans apply beyond their circles of magic. How, we might ask, does the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn enlighten the traditions of Pentecostals, pensioners, and pencil pushers alike?