Was Halloween born in Calabria? If so, the trip to the US has changed a lot

That in many cultures there is an ancestral nexus between the world of the dead and the world of the living is a fact. That this connection has (been) celebrated in different ways, including holidays, is also a fact. I think of night battles, the Sabbath, all that for example Carlo Ginzburg he explained to us with his incredible genius. And I also remember a very authoritative intervention by Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, interviewed by Marco Benoît Coal about the ancient feasts of the dead in southern Italy – that Lombardi Satriani who dedicated (with Mariano Meligrana) a famous and icastically titled book The bridge of San Giacomo. Of this relationship between the world of the dead and the world of the living, and of the transit between these two worlds, there is also a trace in literary, popular, cinematographic culture, which drew on that pool of traditions, rituals, myths. Consider Pinocchio, or Cenerentola, or most recently the film Coco of Disney. What's at the bottom Pinocchio if not a book in which the dead are constantly present (one need only think, among the many, of the figure of the dog Melampus, which means ‘black foot’, where monosandalism is the typical stigma of those who have returned from the journey into the world of the dead), as Manganelli of Pinocchio: a parallel book? And Cinderella, who loses her shoe just on her return from the dance, like someone who was offended at the foot when returning from the underworld (Amirani the Caucasian or Sbadilon the Mantuan)?

But yet. And yet those various celebrations, that way of thinking, the passage and communication between the living and the dead are not all the same: Halloween is not tout court the feast of the dead in the countries of the South, is not the day of the Mexican dead, etc. It is an "imported" party. We cannot try to dilute the importation and make it less 'scary', less 'threatening' for the so-called European and Italian 'values' by saying that it is so much the same as our traditional festivals. It is necessary, in the critique of phenomena, to first establish their precise contours, their specificities. Saying "imported" does not mean rejecting it. In class I often read a funny step by Ralph Linton on the many things that the so-called western civilization has imported from other cultures: the cigar from the Antilles, the steel from south India, the terracotta for the first time made in China, and so on.

Lombardi Satriani argues that a Nicotera, in Calabria, on the day of the dead "the children went to the houses, carrying a gourd emptied and worked like a skull, inside which a candle was lit. With this death mask they asked: "Given the blessed dead? receiving food in exchange and more rarely money "(The bridge of San Giacomo, pp. 150-151). And, in the interview mentioned, he says that "in America Halloween had previously been taken (…) by our southern emigrants (in addition to those of other nationalities). And therefore the alleged import of America is a trip back to the party, while the forward one is presumably the one that goes from southern Italy to the United States ”.

I have strong doubts (it has to do rather perhaps with the Samhain party), but here I am interested in elaborating the idea of ​​a "return trip", since it is not a neutral path. Every journey, whether it is outward or return, leaves something at home and when it arrives, it takes on, borrows, transforms, sometimes even cannibalize, digestes and evacuates what it started from, what it found and what it collected during the journey. The journey is transformative because in between is history, there are communities and people. Therefore, even if it is a question of "return", the feast celebrating the dead would no longer be the same as when it started from the South, but another thing, once arrived there, and another once again returned to Italy.

Today Halloween is a typically American party, that in the "return" – if it comes back – it is loaded with a lot of junk: the merchandising now dominates it. If the sense of begging was a sort of redistribution of goods between the rich and the poor, today it has lost that meaning. If therefore does not exist a continuum trans-historical in which everything is equal, being part of a single very long story that goes from Scizia to Ireland to the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, we can say that there are some common things, which however "travel" and are transformed. The Cuban anthropologist Fernardo Ortiz he spoke of "transculturation" to indicate this transformation of rituals and phenomena. If Halloween has traveled, it's back here like a different party. Ahinoi more commercial, less ‘spiritual’.

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