Michaela Schäuble: Epistolary Ethnography: Accounts of a “tarantata” from Southern Italy

The presentation was given in the context of a fellowship

Between 1959 and 1965, Michela Margiotta, an Apulian farm worker who refers to herself as a 'tarantata' – a women suffering from the bite of a mythic tarantula spider– writes numerous letters to the young Roman anthropologist Annabella Rossi. In these personal letters, Michela vividly describes her affliction and thus becomes herself an ethnographer, reporting not only on her own life as a subaltern woman in postwar Southern Italy, but also given insights into the centuries-old phenomenon of “Apulian tarantism”.

In 1959 Rossi had traveled to Apulia as member of an interdisciplinary research team led by eminent anthropologist and historian of religion Ernesto de Martino. As a photographer and interviewer she documented popular religious practices and women’s healing rituals. The photographs, film and sound recordings, but also sketches, drawings and diary entries that were produced during this and ensuing research trips are currently (re)appropriated, reinterpreted and/or rewritten by local artists and art collectives in southern Italy.

In a first step, the presentation traces the unusual pen friendship between these two women in the 1960s and, in a second step, assesses the reinterpretation of the corpus of multimodal material in the context of contemporary ‘decolonization efforts.’