Ernesto De Martino and Sud e magia: the anthropology of fascination
Fieldwork in Lucania, the crisis of presence and fascination: why Ernesto De Martino's Sud e magia, published in 1959, remains a classic of anthropology.
In 1959 the publisher Feltrinelli brought out Sud e magia, South and Magic, the book with which Ernesto De Martino placed the evil eye and fascination at the centre of Italian anthropological thought. It was not a collection of folkloric curiosities, but an attempt to understand why, in some areas of southern Italy, magic continued to play a vital role in people's lives. The book grew out of fieldwork carried out in Lucania in the 1950s.
The scholar
Ernesto De Martino was born in Naples in 1908 and died in Rome in 1965. Trained in the philosophical milieu of Benedetto Croce, he devoted himself to the history of religions and to ethnology, asking about the relationship between magical thought and history. As early as 1948, with Il mondo magico, The Magic World, he had proposed an original theory of magic. In the following years he chose to study southern Italy directly, with expeditions that involved photographers, musicologists, physicians and psychologists.
Among his collaborators were the photographer Franco Pinna, whose images have become an integral part of the memory of that research, and the ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella. The southern cycle also includes Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico, on death and ritual lament in the ancient world, from 1958, and La terra del rimorso, The Land of Remorse, from 1961, devoted to Apulian tarantism. Sud e magia thus sits at the heart of a research project of great breadth.
Fascination and the crisis of presence
At the centre of the book lies fascination, the term De Martino uses for a condition of impediment and domination: whoever is struck by it feels acted upon by an alien force, which may show itself as malaise, weariness or bad luck. Spells, the evil eye and envy fall within this framework. Alongside them De Martino describes the community's responses, often entrusted to expert women who kept formulas handed down orally.
To interpret these phenomena De Martino uses the concept of the crisis of presence: in conditions of poverty, precariousness and scant social protection, the individual risks losing the capacity to act in history. Magic then offers a system of protection, a way of making manageable what would otherwise be ungovernable. It is not an error to be mocked, but a cultural technique to be understood in its function.
From Lucania to Neapolitan jettatura
The final part of Sud e magia widens its view from the peasant magic of Lucania to the educated culture of Naples. De Martino analyses eighteenth-century jettatura and texts such as Nicola Valletta's Cicalata, to show how the Neapolitan Enlightenment had failed to overcome magical thinking fully. The comparison between countryside and city, between peasants and intellectuals, is one of the book's most original aspects and explains its long influence.
More than sixty years after its publication, Sud e magia is still an essential reference for anyone working on the evil eye and popular beliefs. Its main merit is to have restored historical dignity to practices often dismissed as superstitions, connecting them to the concrete living conditions of those who practised them. It is a book that teaches us to look at magic without contempt and without naivety, with the tools of history.