The importance of Ernesto De Martino’s work for Italian ethnography can hardly be overestimated. Trained as a philosopher, De Martino revolutionised the study of folklore by challenging the compilative and ‘naturalist’ approach of the 1940s and 1950s. Before him, apparently irrational beliefs and rituals of peasants of the South were presented as obsolete remains of an ancient world, soon to be wiped out by progress. In his first book, Naturalismo e storicismo nell’etnografia (1941), De Martino argued that to describe these practices without trying to understand their survival in the present was like imitating the moves of a swimmer out of the water, casting ridicule on informants and missing the purpose of ethnography.

De Martino aimed to ‘bring back into history’ the traditional culture of Italy’s most impoverished regions. As Carlo Levi showed in his 1945 account of life in a remote village in Basilicata, Christ Stopped at Eboli, some of these areas were virtually terra incognita for Italian intellectuals. Yet the dominant historical paradigm of the time, based on Benedetto Croce’s idealist philosophy, considered any irrational belief an area of darkness that the light of reason was called upon to disperse. The persistence of magic among the poorest sectors of a developing nation like post-war Italy represented a ‘scandal’ (in De Martino’s words), which called into question the hegemonic culture itself and its positive faith in progress. De Martino was a political organiser first for the Socialist then for the Communist Party; his project of writing a ‘religious history of the South’ drew on a Gramscian perspective of understanding the dialectical relationship between hegemonic and subaltern culture. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of religion led him to contextualise the social facts he observed within a wider historical frame, while the theory he developed to explain their survival is rooted in philosophical existentialism.

Magic rituals, for De Martino, are symbolic and performative responses to the crisi della presenza – his most important concept. ‘Presence’ is an elaboration of Heidegger’s Dasein, but more oriented towards action; an ‘acting-in-the-world’, not far from what is today termed ‘agency’. In the context of the harsh precariousness and economic dependency in which Southern Italian peasants were forced to live, the very possibility of acting was not given once and for all. Individuals were constantly exposed to the risk of a pathological collapse, a loss of meaning and sense that inhibited the possibility for action, making them feel dominated by invisible forces. He documented rituals, which aimed to restore ‘presence’, such as ritual mourning in Lucania (Basilicata) in Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico (1958), or the taranta possession cult of Apulia, in his masterwork The Land of Remorse (1961). His expeditions involved a cross-disciplinary team of some of the most brilliant professionals of the time, from psychiatrist Giovanni Jervis to ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella and photographer Franco Pinna.

Sud e magia, the second book in De Martino’s ‘Southern trilogy’, is now available in English thanks to Dorothy Louise Zinn’s scrupulous work and to the farsightedness of HAU’s editors. Originally published in 1959, it presents the findings of two fieldwork visits conducted in Lucania in 1952 and 1957. In the first part (Chapters 1 to 7), De Martino expounds in detail on the magical practices of Lucanian fascino (‘binding’), transcribing and translating dozens of spells and formulae intended to unbind invisible ‘ties’ of domination. How they ‘work’ in practice is explained in the first chapters of the second part (8 and 9): according to De Martino, these rituals manage to ‘de-historicise the negative’, i.e. insert the specific individual problem into a wider range of shared cultural possibilities, to restore for individuals, at least symbolically, the possibility to act.

In Chapters 10 to 15, the magical world of the peasantry is put into relation with the wider context in which it had developed: in particular, with the persistence of magic in Southern Italian Catholicism, the ambiguous forms assumed by the Enlightenment in the pre-unification Kingdom of Naples, and with the Protestant polemic against Catholicism in Romantic literature. The chapter on Neapolitan jettatura (the belief in the power of certain individuals to bring bad luck) is a brilliant ‘thick’ description of the dialectic between hegemonic and subaltern culture: individuals negotiate their beliefs according to their different social and economic positions, but within a common framework of meaning. Thus rural practitioners of fascino in Lucania and rationalist intellectuals who inspired the ethnologist himself, are not two worlds in conflict, but different articulations of a single ever-evolving history.

Zinn’s precise translation and annotations infuse new life into a text published more than half a century ago, but which still surprises with its modern flavour. Her translation of the book’s original title as Magic: a theory from the South seems to allude to postcolonial theory: the word ‘Sud’ for De Martino referred only to Southern Italy, in the context of the questione meridionale; here it hints at the multiple ‘Souths’ to which anthropology directs its scrutiny, and to the gap between mainstream and alternative interpretations of social facts. In fact, De Martino recognised the irruption of the masses in history both in the takeover of rural lands in Southern Italy, and in the decolonisation of Africa and Asia. In Italy, the book was republished in 2015 for the fiftieth anniversary of De Martino’s passing, enriched by the ethnologist’s notes from the field. The same year, anthropologist Amalia Signorelli – who accompanied De Martino on his 1959 field trip to Apulia – systematised the legacy of De Martino into a work that draws on De Martino’s writings to define a ‘style’ of doing ethnography, both in theory and methodology. Zinn’s translation of Magic: a Theory from the South is likely to stimulate a fruitful collaboration between two rather different anthropological traditions – Anglo-Saxon cultural anthropology and Italian ethnography – which today suffer an imbalance similar to the one Northern Italy intellectuals once faced in relation to the Italian South.