Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. T. S. Eliot, 1942
THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER HALF OF ITALY 3/5
Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio
In 1948 Marxist ethnologist Ernesto De Martino set out through Levi’s Lucania on a mission to investigate the peasants’ religious/ magic practices and rituals, in an attempt to document the complexity of their beliefs, and thus to contribute to a historicization of these cultures and customs. All of De Martino’s missions were documented with photographs, the earliest of which were provided by Franco Pinna and Ando Gilardi. Moreover, some of these anthropological studies were, in fact, specifically initiated by photographs documenting archaic rituals.Photography was a tool for De Martino in the fight against what he calls a “crisis of presence” for southern Italian peasants—the seeming inaccessibility of participation in contemporary society— a tool with which to catch them as they were struggling against history, to help them to record their own cultural memory and enter history “breaking the borders of Eboli.” For De Martino, the importance of a vernacular folklore laid in the possibility it provided to turn those people into protagonists of their own world, allowing them to write their own autobiography, to become conscious of the culture they engendered. What De Martino calls “progressive folklore” is a cultural entity that neither idealizes the peasant world nor fosters the growth of irrationalist mythology. Instead, it documents a culture and a system of beliefs that upset a bourgeois tendency to erase what is thought of as an “inferior social condition, one which allowed the anachronistic perpetuation of relics of archaic cultures.”
In the fifties, such attention to popular cultures was part of the program that was to unify the country; Gramsci and the Italian Communist party had proposed a “cultura nazionale” that was to eradicate the distinction between alta (high) culture and popular, bassa (low) culture. Ethnologists and photographers turned to the South for documentation of older cultures, primitive magic rituals, and a whole cultural system, for future foundations of the new “national-popular culture” that would help unite two struggling peoples: the southern peasants and the industrial working class in Northern Italy.
Despite the romantic haze surrounding this political project for peasants’ emancipation from historical obscurity, the publication of De Martino’s studies spurred a number of young photographers to look south and explore inland territories down at the bottom of the Italian peninsula, in a series of explorations into folkloric costumes and religious ceremony, along with the daily life of rituals with no mythology.
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