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

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.’

Michaela Schäuble is professor for social anthropology with a focus on media anthropology at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She is also founding co-director of EMB-Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern, a creative space that invites students and staff to experiment with audiovisual media and to employ non-text-based forms of knowledge generation and knowledge transfer for teaching and research.

Schäuble is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose research explores apparatuses of belief, specifically the role of embodiment and the senses, mediality and remediation in contexts of religious practice and experience. In recent years a central focus of her work has been on ecological perception and the question of what it means to deal with regimes of in/visibility and the marginalization of subaltern voices, grounded in fieldwork in Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Her interest in iconographies of ecstasy and affliction has mainly evolved around the study of tarantism, a spider possession cult endemic to Southern Italy.

Before joining the University of Bern, Schäuble was lecturer at the University of Manchester and research and teaching fellow at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, a EURIAS Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Bologna, a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, a Baden-Württemberg Exchange Fellowship at Yale University as well as a Paul-Lazarsfeld Visiting Professorship at the University of Vienna.