Cassandra Leah Quave and Andrea Pieroni

Ritual Healing in Arbëreshë Albanian and Italian Communities of Lucania, Southern Italy / 57

Abstract: This article describes the traditional healing and magical practices of three Arbëreshë and three Italian communities in the northern part of the Region Basilicata (Lucania), Southern Italy. Data include several folk illnesses not previously discussed in the literature on south Italian nosology, such as cigli alla testa (migraine), acqua nel pipi (penile inflammation), and acqua dalla bocca (water on the mouth). In addition, the article offers comparative information on magico-religious symbolic agents, spiritual restrictions, and the oral formulas used to invoke holy entities in these rites.

Rosemary V. Hathaway

“Life in the TV”: The Visual Nature of 9/11 Lore and Its Impact on Vernacular Response / 33

Abstract: After the events of September 11, 2001, numerous folk responses appeared in narrative, customary, and material form. Much of the response was electronic, including exchanges on websites and listservs as well as myriad jokes, legends, and JPEG images that circulated among individual email correspondents. These responses share a common iconography that draws on the overwhelming visual impact of the events. This essay draws connections between these responses and explores the implications that the visual nature of the materials has on their meaning in cross-cultural contexts. (Please see associated multimedia feature.)

Timothy H. Evans

A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft / 99

Abstract: American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was dedicated to the concept of tradition, including its documentation, preservation, use in literature, and reinvention as an adaptation to changing times. He spent much of his adult life traveling through eastern North America, researching and writing about the folklore and material culture of “colonial” sites and advocating historic preservation. This essay places Lovecraft in the context of folklorists and historic preservationists who sought “authentic” American traditions in the early twentieth century, and it examines Lovecraft’s use and creation of “folklore” and the influence of travel writing in his fiction. Lovecraft was motivated by a fear of cultural loss in the face of growing moral, racial, and scientific chaos, but his racist, anti-modernist ideology transformed during his lifetime into an exploration of biological, cultural, and aesthetic hybridity. His changing attitude toward tradition presaged the broader twentieth-century transformation of this concept, from a static and vanishing embodiment of the past to a dynamic phenomenon that must be self-consciously manipulated to give meaning to the present. Although in some ways profoundly conservative, Lovecraft’s ideas and writings continue to influence such twentieth-century phenomena as heavy metal music and Neo-Paganism.

Veronica E. Aplenc

The Architecture of Vernacular Subjectivities: North American and Slovenian Perspectives / 1

Abstract: This article examines the construction of North American and Slovenian vernacular architecture studies and points to assumptions that guide researchers, including unofficial political beliefs held by scholars. Vernacular architecture studies in North America exhibit a concern for the contemporary everyday, which derives in part from widespread belief in the nation as flexible and incorporative, as well as a concomitant understanding that modernity is fluid and centered in the present. In contrast, Slovenian folkloristics and Slovenian architecture studies insist on “traditional” forms as vernacular architecture, a focus that stems from disciplinary continuities predating the socialist period, from folk myths of the nation that draw on nineteenth-century folkloristic constructions, and from an associated, temporally fixed notion of modernity. The striking differences between views of “folk” architecture in North America and Slovenia underscore the spatio-temporal specificity of modernity, as well as the need to acknowledge situated, not universal, subjectivities and disciplinary concepts.