Decolonizing and/or Re-appropriating De Martino’s ‘Scattered’ Multimodal Archive?

Abstract

Ernesto De Martino had initially intended to create a systematically prepared «cinematographic encyclopedia» – and the first entry was to be a three-minute film clip called Lamento funebre by Michele Gandin from 1954. This encyclopedia was never realized, but I argue that De Martino’s expeditions to southern Italy were part of his project later coined as umanesimo etnografico (2002 [1977]) in the context of which he intended to use the media film and photography to propagate his «critical ethnocentrism» and to foster the understanding of Southern Italian magic-religious rituals – such as Lucanian funerary lament and Apulian tarantism – as cultural embankments of marginalized rural population in the face of existential crises. In the reception of the multimodal proceedings of De Martino’s ‘expeditions’, this approach has been misconstrued as an extractivist practice that led to misrepresentations – as either demonizing or romanticizing images of people’s misery in the Mezzogiorno. Today, local artists (re)appropriate the traces of the ‘scattered’ archive in attempts to contest it or, to incorporate it into quasi-identitarian discourses about being southern Italian. In my contribution I take a closer look at the works of photographer Alessia Rollo in particular, who aims to decolonize the Demartinian archive by manipulating material visual objects. The British Journal of Photography asserts that «[t]hrough this heightened aesthetic, Rollo valorises the magical and establishes an alternative visual language to the clinical documents of the archives.”  In contrast, I argue that De Martino’s ethnographic practice was far from producing “clinical documents” and rather exposed the progressive, emancipative, and forward-looking potential of magic-ritual practices on the one hand, and the use of multimodal media as research tools and modes of engagement on the other.