Today here at Albion
Calling I am honoured to present an interview with Sabina Magliocco,
Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Northridge. A trained
folklorist, Professor Magliocco is internationally known for producing some of
the most important research on contemporary Paganism in the United States
published to date. Her research has also delved into the politics of festival
in rural Sardinia, Italian vernacular magic, and the May Day customs of
Cornwall. In this insightful interview, she discusses the many projects that
she has undertaken over the course of her career, enlightens us on her
formative influences, and tackles the “insider/outsider” divide in
anthropology.
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Magliocco in Monghidoro, Emilia-Romagna in 2005. Image by Giorgio Polmoni. |
EDW: Having attained a BA
in Anthropology from Brown University in 1980, you went on to obtain an MA in
Folklore at Indiana University and then a PhD from that same institution in
1988. The following year you obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct
post-doctoral research in Italy before obtaining a teaching position at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1990 to 1994, and then at University of
California, Los Angeles (1994), University of California, Santa Barbara (1995),
and University of California, Berkeley (1995–96) before finally arriving at
California State University, Northridge in 1997, where you have remained ever
since. At want point did you decide that you wanted to pursue an academic
career and what were the formative influences that made you decide that you
wanted to devote yourself to the related fields of anthropology and
folkloristics?
SM:
Without a doubt, the greatest formative influence on my personal development
was growing up between two cultures: those of Italy and the United States. Unlike
the typical immigrant experience, which is one of loss of the home language and
culture, my family shuttled back and forth in a yearly seasonal migration,
spending the school year in the American Midwest and summers in Italy. This
pattern allowed us to maintain strong bonds with our culture of origin; we
children essentially grew up bilingual and bicultural. But belonging to two
cultures and shuttling between them also creates feelings of disjuncture, of
always being marginal and temporary, of belonging at once to both cultures and
fully to neither. My aunt used to call me her little platypus: I was an odd
child who was neither one thing nor another. I grew to be very observant and
extremely adaptable; I learned to identify the markers of being a cultural
insider and imitate them in order to not be excluded by the other children.
Sometimes it worked; many times, it did not, and especially in the context of
my American schooling, I grew up feeling marginalized and liminal. Eventually I
came to feel comfortable in the margins, sympathetic to other cultural, ethnic,
and racial outsiders as well as towards anything that was excluded or
stigmatized by the dominant paradigm.
Going into academia seems
a logical choice in hindsight, but it was not a foregone conclusion for me. I
come from a family of physicians, and my father’s wish was that I follow him
into that noble profession. From a young age, he trained me in the methods of
scientific observation: every weekend, we would look at slides of various
materials under my great-grandfather’s old brass microscope. Some were slides
his grandfather had made as a young field veterinarian in Sicily which my
father had kept and brought to the United States; others we made ourselves,
looking at onion skin, pond water, cork, and other things from the natural
world. My father taught me to keep a field journal with meticulous notes,
commenting on each aspect from the collection of materials to the nature of the
cells we looked at. When I was a little older, he introduced me to the library
at the university where he taught, and I began to do research there for my
school papers.
But much as I loved
science and the natural world, my mother’s love of literature also transferred
itself to me. She was trained in Classical languages and literature, and named
us all out of the Latin authors. From the time I was small, she read me
children’s versions of Classical Greek and Roman myths, folktales, and stories
of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Her mother, my maternal grandmother,
was a gifted storyteller who would spin fantastic tales that blended elements
from popular romances with details from our own lives, making it seem that the
heroes and heroines were children just like us. These stories, plus the family
legends recounting my parents’ survival during the Second World War and the
deeds of distinguished ancestors, created a kind of connective tissue that
bridged the gaps of culture and geography in my life. My love of stories was
reflected in my childhood games, in which I created elaborate cultures and
folktale-like scripts for my troll dolls, or acted out stories I read in books,
such as Emilio Salgari’s novels of pirate adventures in distant corners of the
world.
While I began university
with the idea that I would study medicine, it quickly became apparent that I
had more of an aptitude for humanistic disciplines. I wanted to write fiction
and poetry, but as a college student, I had little life experience to draw on,
and I was better at expository writing, anyway. In my anthropology and folklore
classes, I discovered a vocabulary for expressing the cultural disjunction I
felt growing up bicultural, as well as methods of analysis that made use of my
scientific skills. I was also strongly influenced in my career choice by an
aunt by marriage who was a cultural anthropologist at the University of
Bologna, and by Margaret Mead, a close family friend – she and my father had
met when he was working at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where Mead
was a frequent lecturer. I was powerfully drawn to the idea of fieldwork –
living for long periods of time in unfamiliar cultures and engaging in
participant-observation. In the end, I chose to specialize in folkloristics
because I was more interested in European cultures and traditions than in those
of Third World peoples, and because I was deeply invested in so many of the
genres within its purview, including supernatural legends, foodways, folk
crafts and architecture, and folksongs (I enjoyed a stint as an amateur
folksinger from my teens to my mid-thirties). I loved the methodology of
cultural anthropology, and folkloristics seemed to unite all of my various
passions under a single discipline.
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Magliocco with an orphaned possum she hand reared, 1980. Photograph by E. Bruno Magliocco |
EDW: Your early published
research focused on a pastoral highland community in Sardinia, looking in
particular at their Catholic festivals and highlighting the socio-economic
pressures that they were experiencing as a result of globalisation. Your
research was published as The Two Madonnas: The Politics of Festival in a
Sardinian Community (Peter Lang, 1993; second ed., Waveland Press, 2005), with
an Italian translation also published in 1995. What made you decide to head all
the way over to Europe to undertake this research and what did you see as this
project’s struggles and achievements?
SM:
I grew up partly in Italy, spending most of my childhood summers with my
grandmothers in Rome, or with cousins at various seaside villas along the
Mediterranean coast; so doing fieldwork in Europe seemed like a natural
extension of my early life. I originally wanted to work in Ireland or one of
the Celtic countries, and in fact studied Gaelic for a time; but my graduate
advisor Linda Dégh, who came from the Hungarian school of European ethnology,
persuaded me that it would be best to work in my own country, with a culture
with which I was already more or less familiar. I chose Sardinia because of a
woman who had worked as a domestic for my grandmother, and to whom I had grown
much attached. Bettina, as she was called, looked after me during those summers
I spent in Italy, and regaled me with stories of her village in the Sardinian
highlands. I imbued it with romantic, pastoral ideals that were intensified by
the general scorn with which the region was regarded by my urban, bourgeois
family; already drawn to the marginal and rejected, it only made me more
determined to go there one day. After my grandmother’s death, Bettina retired
to her village, where I visited her in the summer of 1983. I like to say that Sardinia
got into my blood that summer: I knew then, with a strange feeling of destiny,
that I would do my doctoral fieldwork there.
Yet even spending part of
my childhood in Italy could not have prepared me for the culture shock I
experienced when I first went to live in the village of Bessude with my old
nanny and her family. There were all sorts of tensions and struggles, beginning
with those of social class and extending to gender expectations and political
conflicts. I grew up in a bourgeois, cosmopolitan, urban family, with a father
who treated me as a son; Bessude was a peasant village, and I was both resented
and regarded as an outsider by most of its inhabitants. What I knew about rural
Mediterranean life came from academic books. I had a lot to learn. I eventually
forged very strong bonds with a group of young women also in their twenties,
who lived at home in the village and either attended the university in Sassari
or worked at various jobs. Through them, I gained access to other village
networks, as well as the organizing committees of the festivals that I was
studying. I also became aware of local political tensions and how they came to
be expressed through the festivals. The results were reflected in my
ethnography The Two Madonnas: the Politics of Festival in a Sardinian
Community, a book that is quite sensitive to tensions between the
categories of “tradition” and “modernity” as they were expressed in the margins
of Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s. Because of my gender and position as a
fieldworker, it offers unprecedented insights into the dreams, ideals, and
struggles of village women, showing them as cultural and political agents in
the context of globalization.
EDW: Your interest in the
folklore of Italy has continued into recent years, as is evidenced by some of
your important research into Italian folk beliefs regarding magic and the
preternatural; you have penned papers on Italian “cunning folk” as well as on
the folk figure of Aradia, in which you put together a compelling case that the
latter had genuine folkloric antecedents and was not the creation of American
folklorist Charles Leland for his Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
(1899). What led to these particular areas of exploration and is Italian folk
magic a topic that you hope to delve into further in future?
SM:
When I was living in Bessude, folk magic and the preternatural were all around
me. Even though I was studying festivals and economic change, I collected a
great deal of supernatural legends, charms, healing, and magic, partly because
it was interwoven with material about saints and their festivals, but also
because I was trained as an anthropologist to pay attention to everything that
was going on around me. I had the opportunity to interview several traditional
healers, and while I did not write about them in my first publications, it was
always my intention to return to that material and do something with it.
When I began to study
contemporary Paganism, and especially as I became interested in ethnic
varietals such as Stregheria, I was curious about the alleged connection
between Old World and newer, reclaimed forms of magic. Many Italian American
streghe told stories of inheriting their tradition from a grandmother or other
relative, and while some of these could easily be dismissed as typical
“grandmother stories,” a form of invented tradition or “fakelore,” others were
more compelling and not so easily dismissed, especially because I had seen
practitioners of Italian folk magic first-hand. This interest led me to
collaborate with two Italian scholars, Augusto Ferraiuolo of the University of
Caserta and Boston University, and Placida Staro, an independent scholar
affiliated with the University of Bologna, to examine vernacular magical
traditions in Campania and Emilia-Romagna in 2005-06. Our work showed that
there was some continuity between the beliefs and practices of revival
practitioners in the U.S. and folk magical traditions in Italy. In some cases,
Italian American streghe were re-contextualizing and elaborating on healing
traditions that existed in many families, such as the removal of the evil eye,
which is still ubiquitous in many regions.
I was also aware of Charles
Godfrey Leland’s claims in Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, and
while there, too, I suspected a great deal of embroidery and invention, I had a
niggling suspicion that some core of the work might bear a relationship to
actual practice. It was by bringing together historical research with some of
my earlier work on legends and magic in Sardinia that I unraveled the puzzle of
the name “Aradia,” linking her to a Sardinian folk character known as “S’Araja
Justa” or “Sa Rejusta.” We know this character goes back as far as the 13th
century in Sardinia, and that her presence coincides with the influence of
Pisan and Genoese clerics, who brought Italian inquisitorial ideas to the
island; therefore, it is quite likely that a character with the name “Aradia”
existed in Italian folklore at that time. Whether this character exactly
corresponds to Leland’s Aradia is another matter; since folklore changes
constantly in response to changes in the socio-cultural context, by the time
Leland arrived in Florence in the late 19th century, Aradia’s story might have
undergone a number of further changes. I did not find evidence to support
Leland’s claims of witchcraft as a religion with an unbroken chain going back
to Etruscan times; that is highly unlikely and impossible to prove.
I still have a great deal
of material on Italian vernacular magic that I would like to publish someday,
but in the current economic climate, it’s been difficult to find a publisher
interested in this material or grants to support the writing of the project.
This one may have to wait until I retire from teaching and can dedicate myself
more fully to research and writing.
EDW: After your research
in Sardinia, you re-focused your research in order to explore the contemporary
Pagan community of the United States, resulting in your books Neo-Pagan
Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole (University Press of
Mississippi, 2002) and the more detailed Witching Culture: Folklore and
Neo-Paganism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). You were
probably the first trained folklorist to explore this subject matter, thus
bringing an important new perspective to the study of Paganism. What was it
that inspired you to delve into this new area of research, particularly one
that was potentially quite controversial among academic anthropologists and
folklorists at the time?
SM:
After I left the field in 1986, the political situation in Bessude became quite
volatile, so much so that my efforts to publish The Two Madonnas in
Italian got caught up in the internecine conflict. The local administration,
which at first had supported my project, felt that the results did not portray
their community as they would have liked; they thought my book made them look
backwards and old-fashioned. The mayor took out her anger and disappointment on
Bettina and her family, because they had hosted me, by taking away a part of
their land in order to build a road – a road to nowhere, as it turned out. They
had relied on this land to grow vegetables and pasture sheep, so the loss hurt
them economically. I was mortified by this outcome. As an anthropologist, I am
bound by a professional code of ethics to put the good of the people I work
with before my own, and I felt responsible. The last thing I had ever wanted
was to cause lasting harm to the very person who had nurtured me like a second
mother, and who had made possible my doctoral dissertation research and the
career I hoped would come from that. I took it as a personal failure on my
part, and for a time, I did not want to return to Sardinia for fear that more
harm would come to the people I loved as a result of my presence. This
coincided with a period of instability in my professional and domestic life in
which I had neither the funds nor the possibility to return to Italy, so I
began to cast about for a new research topic. Since I had examined women’s
roles in ritual and politics, I hoped to find another venue in which to explore
that theme closer to home. I was also keenly aware that American academic
publishing was becoming less interested in European ethnography; several
colleagues advised me to find something more relevant and significant to study.
At the time, I was
teaching a course I had developed called “The Supernatural in the Modern World”
(a course I still teach today). It looks at vernacular traditions that make
reference to magic and the preternatural against the context of an
Enlightenment construction of modernity. Among the topics I covered was modern
Paganism; I used Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, which had just
come out in 1989. I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and
I became aware of a woman called Selena Fox who claimed to be a Witch and was a
graduate student in the School of Social Work on campus. I invited her to come
speak to my class about her traditions, and she, in turn, invited me and my
students to an Earth Day ritual at Circle Sanctuary, a nature preserve she ran
with her husband, Dennis Carpenter, out near Mt. Horeb. On a sunny, cold
Saturday, I rented a van from the uni and drove down there with a passel of
students from the class. The ritual was like nothing I had experienced before.
It was held on a tall mound encircled by birth and oak trees, with a view of
the valley below. Selena, a powerful woman with flowing dark hair and a strong,
deep voice, called on the four directions, invoked the names of goddesses and
ancestors, and advocated for a spiritual connection to the land and political
action to protect it. It seemed to me then that I had found a possible topic –
that modern Paganism might be another way for me to explore the connections
between gender, power, and ritual in a new context.
I thought my new topic
was timely and more interesting to American academic publishers than peasant
culture in rural Italy; in fact I was encouraged to pursue it by several senior
colleagues. I did not at first realize how controversial this new area would be
among academics; but even if I had known, I don’t think I would have made a
different decision. As in the case of Sardinia, I felt a sense that fate was
drawing me towards this project. I have always followed my heart and intuition
in research; I honestly don’t think I can work any other way.
At first, one of the
things that drew me to study modern Paganism was, paradoxically, a longing for
my land of lost content in Sardinia. I
missed the friendships I had formed there with other girls my age; I longed for
the sense of community, the connectedness of things, and the rhythm of the year
cycle scanned in festivals and celebrations. In modern Pagan festivals, I could
experience some of the same feelings – jumping over a midsummer bonfire, for
example, at the same time that I knew my friends in a village half a world away
were doing the same thing. Eventually, I formed the same kinds of close bonds
with my Pagan interlocutors that I had with my Sardinian ones, and the new
project took on a life of its own. When, at a ritual in 1995, I experienced a
vision of the goddess Brigid melting my heart in her forge and shaping it into
a new one, when she put it into my chest while saying, “This is your heart, and
fire shall make it whole,” I interpreted it as a confirmation that my field
methodology, my particular way of working, was valid, and would heal the wounds
I still felt as a result of what had happened in Sardinia.
EDW: In Witching Culture,
you explained that although not raised a Pagan, in coming to study the
community you went through an initiatory process and found yourself having
genuine spiritual experiences as a member of a Wiccan coven. Thus, you bridged
the traditional anthropological divide between the insider and outsider. Given
that the issues surrounding insider-outside standpoints within Pagan studies
have been reignited fairly recently by Markus Altena Davidsen, could you
provide us with an overview of your own perspective on this issue? More
specifically, I’d be interested to learn more about how you have reconciled
being an academic anthropologist and folklorist with being a practising Pagan
given the sometimes hostile attitude toward the latter in the academy?
SM:
So much has been written about this issue in anthropology in the last 20 years
that it still amazes me when it comes up. Aren’t we done with it yet? I guess
not, so here goes.
First of all, as a
folklorist/anthropologist, my job is to access other cultures to try to
understand them, and bring those insights back to my own culture so we can
learn more about others and ourselves. My methodology involves
participant-observation – note the “participant” part. You can’t learn much
about another culture or religion if you’re not willing to participate, and
religious rites require some basic level of participation as a show of respect.
When I was studying festivals in Sardinia, I attended dozens of celebratory
masses, as well as weekly Sunday mass, where I did what I had to do to blend
in: I learned to stand when other congregants stood, kneel when they knelt, and
cross myself when they did, even though I was not Catholic or even Christian. I
did not take communion or go to confession – but then, neither did most people
my age. As Jone Salomonsen noted, modern Pagan rituals are highly participatory
events; there is no outside from which an observer can watch, undetected, to
discover what’s going on. This is especially true of mystery traditions such as
Wicca. So I did what any anthropologist or folklorist worth her salt should do:
I found a group with which I felt comfortable, which felt comfortable with me
and my research project; I attended their rituals for a year, and eventually I
underwent initiation. I also attended dozens of rituals from other Pagan
traditions. In some of these contexts, I had extraordinary experiences – and
thank goodness I did, because had I not had them, I would have missed the whole
point of what my interlocutors were experiencing: I would have failed to
understand one of the primary reasons why they found their religions
compelling, powerful, and important. In other words, I would have failed at my
job.
I am hardly the first
anthropologist or folklorist to have had these experiences. Scholars studying a
number of mystery traditions have undergone initiation to better understand
them – for example, Karen McCarthy Brown, who studied Vodou among Haitian
immigrants in Brooklyn, was initiated as a practitioner and “married” to the lwa
Dambala as part of her work. Paul Stoller underwent initiation as a sorcerer
among the Songhay of Niger. Jeanne Favret-Saada, studying witchcraft in rural
France, found herself having to participate in the world of magic to some
degree, because, as she found, when it comes to magic, there is no “outside;”
either you’re an insider, or you won’t learn anything at all. Now, when you get
involved with magic and ritual, you are inevitably going to have some unusual,
even extraordinary experiences; that’s the whole point of these events as art
forms. Again, many anthropologists before me have had these experiences, and
some have written about them. The best-known is probably Edie Turner, who saw a
spirit in the shape of a dark cloud rise from the body of a patient who was
undergoing a healing ritual among the Ndembu; but others include Bruce Grindal,
Raymond Lee, David Young, and Jean-Guy Goulet.
Some reviewers of Witching
Culture have criticized me for writing about these experiences, perhaps
even for having them, assuming that they had somehow changed my beliefs and
clouded my ability to be objective about modern Paganisms. This point of view
is mistaken on a number of counts. The first error – assuming that my beliefs
changed as a result of initiation and participation – is understandable,
because coming from a Christocentric perspective, as most Westerners
unconsciously do, belief is seen as the central feature of religion. But like
the majority of world religions, modern Paganisms are not primarily religions of
belief; they are religions of practice and experience. My beliefs have not
fundamentally changed as a result of the experiences I had during my Pagan
fieldwork. Instead, I have a deepened, enriched understanding of a religious
culture and its performative art forms that helped me portray it in a more
holistic way. In fact, had I not had the experiences, the picture I would have
been able to paint would have been incomplete. No one would bat an eye if a
folklorist studying a potter apprenticed herself to that craft in order to
better understand how pots are produced, or if an ethnomusicologist studying
Irish folk music learned to play the fiddle or (gods help us) the bódhran. But
because we’re dealing here with religions, a co-religionist is assumed to try to
convert others rather than to give an unbiased account. Once again, this
misconception is based on an evangelical model of religion that does not apply
to any of the modern Paganisms.
The second way that the
critics are mistaken is in assuming that it is possible to give an objective
account of a different culture. The postcolonial, postmodern critique of the
social sciences has pretty much eliminated the idea of objective research – the
notion that the researcher operates as a completely neutral observer who can
deliver the “Truth” about another society. As James Clifford stated so
eloquently, all ethnographies are only partial truths, because we all bring
unique points of view and prejudices with us wherever we go. Those viewpoints
and prejudices influence what we see, how we see it, what we think is
important, and how we convey it. In that sense, as Clifford wrote, all
ethnographies are “fictions,” in the sense of carefully constructed documents,
rather than pure, unadulterated facts. The important thing is to admit to
ourselves and our readers where our blind spots might lie, so they can better
evaluate the texts we produce.
In the Introduction to Witching
Culture, I tried to lay out for readers exactly what my biases were. As you
say, I was not raised as a Pagan. However, I was raised in a non-religious
household by parents who had been schooled in Italy in the 1930s, with a national
curriculum that celebrated the glories of Classical Rome as a Golden Age to
which modern Italians should aspire. While neither of my parents’ families were
politically Fascist, it would be nearly impossible not to be influenced on some
level by the rhetoric that predominated at the time. In turn, their viewpoint
influenced my own education: I studied Latin for eight years, and Ancient Greek
for two; I spent summers exploring Italian archaeological sites and museums; I
steeped myself in Classical literature as well as young adult fiction that
reconstructed that period for a modern audience – I loved the works of Mary
Renault, Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Stewart. As I grew older, my interests
extended to the Iron Age cultures and literatures of the Celts; in addition to The
Mabinogion and The Táin, I read the works of Lloyd Alexander and
Evangeline Walton, and of course, the fantasy literature of J.R.R. Tolkien and
Ursula K. LeGuin, to name just a few of my favorite authors from that time. My
literary passions were reflected in my activities: I joined my high school’s
Classics Club, which put on plays re-enacting scenes from Classical mythology,
and I continued to elaborate on the make-believe world I had created for the
trolls, producing books of troll epic poetry, elaborate genealogies, and
histories of the troll world. All the while, I was also very engaged with the
natural world: whether along the Italian maremma or in the hills and hollows of
the Ohio valley, I spent long afternoons in the woods observing nature,
watching animals and often caring for orphaned wildlife. I developed a
worldview that was deeply informed by both my reading of the Classics and my
participation in the natural world. Among modern Pagans, I found people whose
worldview was quite similar to mine, influenced by many of the same books and
pursuits. It shouldn’t be surprising that even after my field research was
over, I found myself continuing to enjoy their company and participating in
their rituals.
Pagan scholars are not
the only ones who experience a sense of split allegiances in scholarship.
Feminist scholars, minority scholars, and scholars who are what Lila Abu-Lughod
calls “halfies” of one sort or another all face this dilemma, and must
carefully negotiate between their belonging to a community and their study of
it. Yet the very act of studying something forces us to distance ourselves from
it, to be reflexive about our participation in it, and thus changes our
relationship with it. There is really no such thing as a “native ethnographer.”
Along the same vein, anthropological notions of “going native” are based on
old-fashioned ideas that served to separate Western anthropologists from the
colonized peoples they studied. They also assume that identity is fixed and
unchanging. We now understand the fluid, evolving, and contextual nature of
identity, such that who we are and how we choose to identify depends on many
different factors, including whom we are with. That means that either-or
constructions of identity are inaccurate and unhelpful.
The key to doing
anthropology or folklore research effectively lies in successfully negotiating
between the cultures you are studying and the culture of the academy. It is a
form of “walking between the worlds,” as Pagans like to say, only in this case,
I’m not talking about the spirit world, but about cultures that belong very
much to the material world. You must learn to move between them with grace and
reflection. You go deep, participate, get close to people, feel what it’s like
to be one of them – then pull away and reflect on what just happened, using
analysis and theoretical language to frame your thoughts. Then you go back and
do it all over again. Because I grew up shuttling between two cultures, this
process is second nature to me; I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t doing
it. But anyone can learn it.
You ask how I’ve
reconciled being an academic anthropologist and folklorist with being a
practicing Pagan. I find this an odd question, because it presumes these two
worlds are somehow impossible to reconcile, while I don’t see much of a
contradiction between them. Academic research in folklore, anthropology and
archaeology made possible the reclamation of tradition that is at the root of
modern Paganisms; it’s not something apart from Paganisms. I think it was
Ronald Hutton who observed that academia is a three-degree initiatory system
with robes even more splendid than those of most modern Pagan traditions. The
truth is that the academic world and the Pagan world are both “homes” in which
I feel comfortable. They have different rules, to be sure, but then, most of us
belong simultaneously to various subcultures that have different conventions,
styles of dress, and modes of behavior, and we move seamlessly among them. If you
play a sport, you wouldn’t dress, behave, or speak on the pitch the same way
you would with your boss at work. It’s no more complicated than that.
It probably helps that I
am not a very religious person. My strengths lie in research, organization,
planning, and creating an environment in which other people can experience
enchantment and express creativity. Those administrative skills make me a good
teacher and department head as well as an effective priestess. I am lucky in
that I have experienced very little prejudice or discrimination on the job
because of my religious practice. I teach at a regional comprehensive
university in Los Angeles, one of the most diverse cities in the world. The
presence of that diversity makes my Paganism kind of a non-issue: I have
colleagues and students who are Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Druid,
agnostic, and atheist, as well as just about every variety of Christian you can
think of. When I teach courses in the anthropology of religion, they are very
much about active pluralism: preparing students to interact and negotiate with
people of other religious traditions, including modern Paganisms, with mutual
respect and appreciation.
EDW: One aspect of the
American contemporary Pagan community which you have examined in closer depth
is Stregheria, a variant of Wicca that adopts elements from Italian folklore
and which has proved popular with some members of the Italian-American
community. Indeed, your work on the subject, included as a chapter in Michael
F. Strmiska's edited volume Modern Paganism in World Cultures (ABC-CLIO,
2006) is the foremost academic study of the topic. What inspired you to explore
this particular area and how do you feel practitioners of Stregheria have
reacted to your work?
SM:
I wrote above about my research on Italian vernacular magical traditions.
Another research area in which I have published is Italian American folklore. I
was immediately interested in Stregheria because it united these two interests
of mine. I saw Stregheria as a creative way some Italian Americans were
choosing to craft identities that re-connected them with some of the traditions
of their ancestors, albeit, of course, in a form that suited their contemporary
identities. As a folklorist, I see tradition as a process that involves
constant adaptation, variation, and innovation; Stregheria typifies that
process. It is certainly not an exact reproduction of Italian vernacular
practices as they existed in rural Italy, but it reformulates them, inserts
them into a modern Wiccan framework, and creates a narrative around them which
makes them appealing to second-, third-, and fourth generation Italian
Americans, as well as to members of other ethnic groups.
Some practitioners of
Stregheria and other modern Italian-based Pagan traditions at first reacted
with hostility to my publications, which they interpreted as trying to
de-legitimize their practices. I’ve even gotten threats and hate mail. However,
the majority of respondents have actually been very positive and helpful.
Information provided by my readers helped me more substantively connect
vernacular Italian magical traditions with Stregheria. I have warm, supportive
relationships with Lori Bruno, one of the co-founders (along with the late Leo
Martello) of the Trinacrian Rose tradition in New York, and Raven Grimassi, the
architect of Stregheria. Lori hosted me in high style when I visited New York
in 1999; Raven and I have presented together at Pantheacon, the largest
American Pagan conference, and over time our views have come closer together. I
see him as a creative innovator and preservationist of Italian American
vernacular magic.
|
Magliocco at Stonehenge, 2005. Photograph by Jaynie Rabb Aydin. |
EDW: One of your more
recent projects has been in examining the ‘Obby ‘Oss tradition that takes place
every May Day in Padstow, Cornwall, as well as the manner in which it has been
adopted by a Wiccan group, the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn,
in Berkeley, California. On the basis of this research you and John Bishop
produced the short documentary film Oss Tales (2007), which is available
on DVD. What led you to explore this particular folk practice and will you be
delving further into Cornish folklore and the manner in which it has been
appropriated and re-used in future?SM:
I am interested in how academic research feeds back into communities,
influencing how people understand and practice tradition. American folklorist
and film-maker Alan Lomax had a tremendous impact on our understanding of
folklore today. John Bishop, who is Alan’s nephew, and I were curious about how
Lomax’s film “Oss Oss, Wee Oss” (1953) affected two communities: Padstow, a
Cornish town with a May Day hobby horse where Lomax had shot “Oss Oss” in 1951;
and a group of Pagans in Berkeley, California who were inspired to re-create
certain aspects of the Cornish custom as part of their Beltane celebration,
directly as a result of Lomax’s film. We went to Berkeley to interview members
of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD) as they
rehearsed and performed the Beltane rite. We were able to get a small grant to
travel to Padstow with two students to film the May Day custom fifty years
after Lomax’s expedition. We also interviewed a number of film-makers who were
involved with that project, including the late English folklorist Peter Kennedy.
The DVD set, which includes the original Lomax film, digitally remastered, is a
study of the effects of folklore scholarship on the process of tradition.
While I would love to
delve further into Cornish folklore and its revival and appropriation, I have a
number of very capable colleagues, such as Amy Hale, who are already doing that
much better than I could. I continue to examine the intersections of academic
knowledge and modern Paganisms, most recently the reburial issue and English
Heritage, in an essay entitled “Intangible Rites: Heritage Sites, the Reburial
Issue, and Modern Pagan Religions in Britain,” in Cultural Heritage in
Transit (2014).
EDW: From 2004 to 2009
you served as the editor for Western Folklore, a peer-reviewed journal
devoted to the folklore of the Western United States. How did you come to take
on this position and what do you see as the importance of regionally-focused
journals such as this one?
SM:
Although Western Folklore started out as the Journal of the
California Folklore Society in 1942, its focus is now international, as is
that of the other major American folklore journals, Journal of American
Folklore and Journal of Folklore Research. It is the highest-rated
and longest continuously-running of the regional folklore journals in the
United States. In a large country such as the United States, regional folklore
journals are important because they often focus on issues that are specific to
one part of the country; they may have to do with a regional culture, ethnic minority,
occupational group, or social movement that is local, although globalization
and the advent of the Internet are increasingly deterritorializing all these
issues. Regional journals can sometimes take more risks and publish more
cutting-edge, innovative research than flagship journals, which are under a
different kind of pressure to establish and maintain disciplinary norms. When
Editor Barre Toelken of Utah State University suffered a stroke in 2003, the
journal’s managing editor was searching for someone to take his place. Ours is
a small field; so many regional journals had already succumbed to the economic
pressures facing academic publishing that I didn’t want the same fate to befall
WF. The loss of even one journal would mean significantly fewer venues for the
publication of works in folkloristics. With the support of my university, I
decided to step up, because I believe in the journal’s mission and wanted to
make a contribution. It was an interesting and valuable experience for me and
for the students who served as my editorial assistants during the five years of
my tenure as editor.
EDW: What projects have
you got on the horizon which we should be keeping our eyes out for?
SM:
The project I’m working on now is called “Animals and the Spiritual
Imagination.” It grows out of my lifelong love of animals as part of the
natural world. I began by investigating how modern Pagans conceptualize animals
as spiritual beings and make use of them in religious practice, but as a result
of my students’ research, the project has now expanded to include mainstream
religions. We know that most Pagan cosmologies have an important place for
animals, but one of the surprises (I love the way research always surprises me)
has been the discovery of how members of mainstream religions create vernacular
cosmologies that give animals, especially household pets, important spiritual
dimensions that are often neglected or denied by formal religious teachings. We
also looked at how spiritual beliefs about animals affect behavior. Here, too,
there have been some surprises: it seems that while Pagans are much more likely
to attribute spiritual qualities to animals and work with them in spiritual
practice, they don’t differ significantly from members of mainstream religions
in terms of how they have modified their behavior towards animal and
environmental causes. So perhaps belief is not as important in motivating
behavioral change as we previously thought. I’m working on publishing some
preliminary articles based on this data, but eventually hope to gather it all
into another book that will be filled with wonderful stories my respondents
have told me about their experiences with animals in both material and
spiritual realms.
EDW: I like to round off
every interview here at Albion Calling by asking my interviewees where they
think that their respective field(s) are heading in the coming decades. In your
case, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the future prospects
for both folkloristics and Pagan studies, and in particular what you see as the
potential for further intersection between the two areas?
SM:
Let me start by answering your second question first. I see many exciting
possibilities for fruitful intersections between Folklore and Pagan Studies.
Folklore is the study of traditional expressive culture and informal knowledge
in complex societies, and its remit coincides perfectly with many aspects of
modern Paganism, as my work has demonstrated. But my research has barely
scratched the surface of all the different ways these subjects could be
approached; I would love to see a new generation of scholars applying
interdisciplinary approaches informed by the study of folklore to a variety of
issues in modern Paganisms. There are, however, some serious obstacles to this.
Both folkloristics and
Pagan studies occupy marginal positions in the academy today. To my knowledge,
there is no official academic program in Pagan Studies at any American,
European, or British university. There are a number of scholars who have
written about Paganism from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, but most of
us are not at research universities where we can train Ph.D. students. There is
only one institution in the United States that grants a Ph.D. specifically in
Folklore: Indiana University. Folklore Ph.D.s are available at a few other
institutions, including Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin –
Madison, University of Oregon, the University of California at Berkeley, and
Utah State University, but at all of these, Folklore is an interdisciplinary
program, and the student’s primary degree is in another discipline, such as
English Literature or Anthropology. While I am entirely in favor of
interdisciplinarity, the administrative realities of interdisciplinary programs
are that they are invariably dependent on a number of variables they cannot control
for funding and staffing, putting them in a very vulnerable position in today’s
corporatized universities. This creates a situation that is not sustainable for
long-term growth in either of these specializations.
For Pagan Studies and
Folklore to thrive in the academy, there would need to be active Ph.D. programs
at research universities in both fields. These programs would produce trained
experts who would, in turn, be hired by viable departments and programs. That
isn’t happening, and unfortunately, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. The
problem isn’t necessarily with these areas of study – although that is not to
say that Folklore and Pagan Studies don’t have their challenges; they do. The
trouble lies in the changing model of academia as it increasingly loses public
funding and becomes more corporatized, and as our national values (I’m talking
here about the U.S. specifically, but much of what I say also applies to
universities in Canada, Europe and Great Britain) move further and further away
from the humanities, and more towards viewing colleges and universities as job
training programs. In this climate, any discipline that does not have an
immediate practical application is vulnerable. Folklore has to a certain extent
been able to insert itself into, or reinvent itself as, “heritage management”
or “cultural resource management.” The challenge for Pagan Studies, if it is to
survive and thrive, is how to make itself relevant in the new economy. While
the purview of Folklore is expanding as scholars reimagine it as “traditional
knowledge” and “heritage,” the purview of Pagan Studies is being challenged by
struggles to define “Paganism,” both within the movement itself, and by
scholars who study it.
I think one of the
greatest risks for Pagan Studies is the same thing that beleaguers other area
studies programs: becoming a ghetto to which anyone working on Paganism is
relegated, by virtue of a focus on that particular subject. The way around this
is to come at the subject from a strong disciplinary focus. My advice to young
people who want to “do” Pagan Studies is to choose a discipline and get the
best disciplinary training they can in that field: become historians,
anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, literary or language scholars,
and so forth, and approach issues within modern Paganism from the perspective
of that discipline. Disciplinary rigor doesn’t mean we can’t be
interdisciplinary, but it forces us to learn methodology and theory through
which we frame research. Strong disciplinary training can circumvent some of
the flaws that Markus A. Davidsen points out in his critical essay. In an ideal
world, Pagan Studies programs would emerge at research universities after a
number of scholars who study Pagan subjects have already established themselves
in a variety of disciplinary niches.
The good news is that
courses on Folklore and Pagan topics are increasingly part of the curriculum at
a variety of institutions, from community colleges to research universities, in
departments of Anthropology, English, Religious Studies, and Communication.
That means undergraduates are being exposed to both bodies of knowledge,
creating a new generation educated about folklore and Paganisms. My hope is
that this will eventually lead to a new generation of folklorists and Pagan
Studies scholars working in traditional academic disciplines, who can come
together in strength to form new kinds of interdisciplinary learning
environments that will thrive in the marketplace of higher education.
EDW: Professor Magliocco,
thank you so much for talking to Albion Calling today. You've given me and my
readers much to think about; I wish you all the best in future!