“The Befana is returning” sing the participants in a rural Tuscan festival custom called the Befanata, a house-visit and performance tradition similar to mumming and other such “itinerant begging” customs that occur during the winter/early spring seasons in many parts of Europe. The Befana, the old woman figure who brings gifts on Epiphany eve in much of Italy, returns not only in the seasonal round of the cyclical year, but also in the tenacity (and sometimes adaptation or reinvention) of the house-visit/performance custom as documented in Steve Siporin’s fieldwork, conducted during several visits between 1999 and 2010, and then in a return visit in 2019 to observe changes and continuities in the almost twenty years since his original field visits. Siporin’s engaging work does a masterful job inviting us to think deeply about the functions and meanings of expressive cultural forms, as well as the ongoing tensions of tradition and change, as he analyzes the Befanata in one rural town, Pitigliano, in Tuscany. He shows us how this custom is embedded in, and responsive to, local social, economic, and historic contexts, as well as embodying a variety of symbolic resonances from the past to the present. He makes an eloquent argument for more detailed ethnographic fieldwork on this (and other similar) customary behavior, especially if it seems to be in decline; the detailed records of its images and poetic expressions, along with the analyses we make as folklorists, Siporin argues, can serve not only archival purposes, but also as resources for new cultural expressions. The vernacular artistry of the Befanata is “the gift of a particular society to itself. The future needs such models, if it is to be a human future” (215).
Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas which marks the conclusion of the liminal festal season of the holidays, continues to be important in many countries; most of us are familiar with cultures in which the gift bringers of the season are the Three Kings who visit on Epiphany. In Italy the figure who brings gifts to good children (and warnings to bad children) is La Befana, often portrayed as an old peasant woman or as a witch (she is old and often carries a broom, after all), and whose name is derived from the holiday. One legend tells that the three wise men, looking for the Christ child, came upon La Befana as she was sweeping and cleaning her house, and asked her for directions. They invited her to go along with them, and she said she would once her housework was done. Since she never did catch up with them, every year she brings gifts to all children, hoping to find the Christ child she missed. However, this neatly packaged tale does not encompass all the figure of Befana is, nor the meanings and customs associated with her.
The preface sets up Siporin’s initial encounter with the tradition, with a brief ethnographic description, noting the similarities to other such European festal traditions such as Irish mumming documented in Henry Glassie’s All Silver, No Brass (1975)—a festival that had not endured—and then outlines his initial question: was this a continuous custom, or a revival of some kind? In his introduction, Siporin puts us squarely in the midst of a Befanata, describing how a performer “squad” arrives in cars, made up of costumed figures, mostly, but not exclusively, men ranging in age from their twenties to middle-aged. The characters portrayed include a man dressed as an old peasant woman (La Befana) in a mask, carrying a spindle and cane, and a young woman dressed as an old man, masked and with a cane (the Befano, Befana’s husband), their Daughter to Be Married Off (also usually portrayed by a man, in sexualized gender stereotypical ways), sometimes a Morrocan she might marry, plus other participants (musicians, masqueraders–the befanotti) dressed in work-type clothes. As the group assembles outside a local house, an accordionist leads them in a song about the Befana returning. The householders invite them in, and are treated to more music, some mutual dancing, and sometimes a folk play about the Befana and her Marriageable Daughter. It’s a bit rowdy, a bit bawdy, and the befanotti might make remarks about the behavior of the family during the past year. In return, the householders feed the performers with savory and sweet treats, wine, and then give them more food and wine to take with them when they go on their way, on the night before Epiphany at the end of the Christmas season. Siporin invites us to consider the audience in the household as “performers” as well as the Befanata squad–their specialized food preparation, and their participation in the experience is an intrinsic part of the custom, and the audience is just as familiar with its expected role as the performers in the Befanata squad. He goes on to outline the basics of the custom and the aspects of it he will be analyzing, raising questions about its function and meanings, and its continuity and future, all while trying to communicate the sense of connection and joy this custom gives to both performers and householders who participate in the regional tradition.
In the first three chapters, Siporin uses extensive research to place the Befanata in various specific contexts: historical, seasonal, and socioeconomic. Chapter 1, “History,” relies heavily on works of Italian folklorists and historians, citing sources beginning in the Napoleonic era when the custom began to be documented (and including Sir James Frazer, who wrote about his visit to a Roman Befana fair). However, he gives a large amount of credit to Italian folklorists Roberto Ferretti, who wrote about the Befanata songs and encouraged a revival of the custom in the 1970s–1980s, and Nevia Grazzini, who wrote her master’s thesis on the Befanata. Their work forms a large part of the base upon which Siporin builds. In chapter 2, he discusses the seasonal importance of Epiphany and its customs, as the end of the liminal Christmas season, and the beginning of the Carnevale season, at the end of winter and beginning of spring. Some of the other Epiphany customs he connects include “Burn the Old Woman” and “Saw the Old Woman,” both of which seem to symbolically get rid of the Old Woman of winter, and he mentions a past tradition of May house visits (Maggiolata), which is no longer practiced. In chapter 3, Siporin delves into the mezzadria agricultural system, the socioeconomic context which gave rise to the Befanata. The paradox of a fertile farm region inhabited by poverty-stricken residents was mitigated by customs such as the Befanata, which allowed a dignity-saving redistribution of resources during the hard winter season, reminiscent of Carl Lindahl’s explanation of rural Cajun Mardi Gras, and as seen in Pat Mire’s film Dance for a Chicken (1993). Mezzadria is a bit like sharecropping—the tenant farmers keep half of what they grow, and give half to the landlord. The system lasted for more than six hundred years in Tuscany, and rather than living together in towns and going out to farm outlying fields, this system had dispersed and isolated farms—hence the attraction of house visit customs.
In the next three chapters, Siporin goes deep into an analysis of the elements of exchange (food and song), as well as the primary figure of the Befanata–La Befana herself. In chapter 4, he discusses the juxtaposition of abundant food and hunger, referencing the preponderance of food abundance in Italian folktales as well as the literature of the “land of Cuccagna,” while emphasizing the types of foods expected to be offered to the Befanata squads in exchange for their ritualized performance. Chapter 5 focuses on the songs performed–a key differentiator from many other mumming traditions. Rather than skits, the songs are key to this tradition (one “sings” the Befana). Siporin discusses stable and innovative aspects of the songs, along with regional variations, and also covers the other types of song and dance music performed during a Befanata, often consisting of songs of courting or of love of place. It is in chapter 6 that Siporin delves into the many symbolic meanings of the “Old Woman” herself, La Befana, whom he says everyone agrees is “old, old” (146). He shows us the various aspects of La Befana–the vestigial goddess, the powerful figure who can bless or curse, the children’s gift-bringer, the scary or evil Befana, and the old woman by the fireside, plus the dual identity of the masked/guised figure. Connecting Befana to La Vecchia who is burned or sawn in two at some Epiphany celebrations, Siporin brings in the suffering or “hostage/victim” Befana who is revealed in some of the songs and festal rites, and invites us to see her as a powerful figure embodying dualities such as winter/spring, life/death, giving/taking, etc.
Chapter 7 examines the return of the Befana–not only the yearly return, but the efforts to revive the tradition, which arose in response to the government’s eradication of Epiphany as a national holiday in the late 1970s. At this time, a modified, modernized version of the Befanata was created, which in some places has replaced but in others exists alongside of the original tradition–a revue of sorts, performed by many local squads for an audience in an auditorium, which showcases the traditional songs, but does not truly contain the essential reciprocity of the original tradition. In chapter 8, Siporin focuses on this key element of the Befanata–the exchange of performance for food/hospitality, externalizing and reasserting the sometimes tenuous connections among a rural small community, emphasizing the importance of the overlapping (and at times conflicting) identities of family, individual, and community. The epilogue gives us Siporin’s thoughts on the changes he found in the twenty years since his first fieldwork encounter. There are far fewer squads each year, perhaps due to the lack of local musicians (he characterizes our modern access to professional music as a Trojan horse, giving us the pleasure of amazing artistry while eliminating the need to create our own music) and also the changing needs of the community (are farms as isolated as they were in the past, in winter?). He mourns the passing of this tradition, while acknowledging that new folklore is always arising, and closes with an eloquent plea for conscientious ethnographic fieldwork to capture these cultural creations. “In old, out-of-the-way places among people who are often overlooked, we will continue to find worthy, marvelous, compelling knowledge that delights and instructs in ways we surely need” (208). This book would be an excellent choice for courses on festival, on regional identities, on rural communities, on expressive culture in general (or Italian folklore in particular), and perhaps especially on fieldwork, since Siporin’s research (both archival and ethnographic), his use of “thick description,” his deep analysis, and the inclusion of extracts from his field notes and reflections in the appendix could serve as excellent models of the type of fieldwork we hope students will work towards.
Works Cited
Glassie, Henry. 1975. All Silver, No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lindahl, Carl. 2004. “’That’s My Day’: Cajun Country Mardi Gras in Basile, Louisiana, USA.” In Carnival!, edited by Barbara Mauldin, 120-143. Santa Fe: Museum of International Folk Art in association with the University of Washington Press.
Mire, Pat, director. 1993. Dance for a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras.
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[Review length: 1902 words • Review posted on November 22, 2024]