Magic ─ A Theory from the South

The work of Ernesto de Martino is relatively unknown outside of Italian intellectual circles, but with a growing interest in his ethnographic and theoretical work, he is now widely considered to be one of the great anthropologists and historians of religion of the early twentieth century. Magic: A theory from the south (first published in Italian asSud e Magia) is de Martino’s stunning ethnography of ceremonial magic in southern Italy (Luciana/Basilicata), an intimate “other” to Western European civilization. Rigorous and detailed analyses of evil eye, possession, witchcraft, religious belief, “binding,” exorcism, and various magical practices lead de Martino to question the historical, ideological, ritual, psychological, and pragmatic grounds of the arts of enchantment. The question here is not whether magic is irrational or rational, but why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place.

De Martino’s response is contextualized within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as his politically sensitive reading of the south’s subaltern culture in its historical encounter with Western science. In addition to the ethnography, De Martino’s historical anthropology traces the development of “jettatura” in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigm of the complex dynamics between hegemonic and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, this first English edition (annotated and translated by Dorothy Louise Zinn) stands to be as relevant as ever as anthropologists (among others) continue to theorize modernity’s continued tryst with magical thinking.

1st Edition Publication Data: [1959] 2001. Sud e magia. Milano: Feltrinelli Editore. ISBN: 9788807816758.