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Halloween Films, Music & More From Amazon.com
Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
Boasting a rich, complex history rooted in Celtic and Christian ritual, Halloween has evolved from ethnic celebration to a blend of street festival, fright night, and vast commercial enterprise. In this colorful history, Nicholas Rogers takes a lively, entertaining look at the cultural origins
and development of one of the most popular holidays of the year.
Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, from classical history to Hollywood films, Rogers traces Halloween as it emerged from the Celtic festival of Samhain (summer's end), picked up elements of the Christian Hallowtide (All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day), arrived in North America as an
Irish and Scottish festival, and evolved into an unofficial but large-scale holiday by the early 20th century. He examines the 1970s and '80s phenomena of Halloween sadism (razor blades in apples) and inner-city violence (arson in Detroit), as well as the immense influence of the horror film genre
on the reinvention of Halloween as a terror-fest. Throughout his vivid account, Rogers shows how Halloween remains, at its core, a night of inversion, when social norms are turned upside down, and a temporary freedom of expression reigns supreme. He examines how this very license has prompted
censure by the religious Right, occasional outrage from law enforcement officials, and appropriation by Left-leaning political groups.
Engagingly written and based on extensive research, Halloween is the definitive history of the most bewitching day of the year, illuminating the intricate history and shifting cultural forces behind this enduring trick-or-treat holiday.
Customer Review: A serious cultural history of Halloween
Single-subject histories on the likes of salt, codfish and even the color red have become a fashionable lately, and this book is a fine specimen of the genre. It traces the history of the celebration of October 31 from Samhain, the year cycle rite observed by the pagan Celts in Britain, to the many ways it is marked in North America at the time of the new millennium. His central thesis, supported by myriad examples and illustrations, is that Halloween has always been a liminal time, a boundary between autumn and winter, this world and the other world, life and death. Drawing from the theory of anthropologist Victor Turner, he argues that liminal times are also periods of ritual inversion in which the obverse of cultural values, however they are construed, are temporarily allowed to emerge into public consciousness and celebrated before being relegated once again to the cultural closet. Whether these oppositional symbols are spiritual otherworlds, as they were for the ancient Celts, or consist instead of what is disavowed by the dominant cultural paradigm, Halloween provides a framework during which they can be publicly explored and performed. This central feature of Halloween, more than any individual rite or symbol, constitutes the core of the holiday that has endured for over a thousand years.
Rogers begins by examining the practices of the ancient Celts, for whom Samhain was a year cycle rite that marked the passage from autumn into winter, a time out of time when the boundaries between the world of humans and that of otherworldly creatures - be they ancestors, deities or other kinds of spirits - were thought to be thin, and the "reverse world" was allowed to briefly overlap with the everyday world. Carrying this metaphor forward into history, Rogers shows how Halloween's supernatural connotations continued in medieval and early modern festivities associated with All Saints' and All Souls' Days, from which we get many of the rituals still associated with the holiday today, including jack-o'-lanterns, pranking behavior and petty vandalism. He traces the migration of these customs to the New World with two groups of immigrants: English Catholics and liberal Protestants (the Puritans disdained the observance as too popish), and the Irish.
Rogers really shines in describing the growth of Halloween in New World soil. He addresses the development of trick-or-treating in the 20th century not only as a form of social inversion in which children demand candy from strangers, in a reversal of the usual cautions, but as a rite that prepared children to become consumers of sweets and other paraphernalia associated with the holiday, such as costumes and decorations. But the dangers of the otherworld could not be tamed by conspicuous consumption; they re-emerged in the 1960s and 70s as fear of contaminated treats - the infamous razor blade in the apple. The very symbol of harvest home, the fruit of the Celtic otherworld, the Isle of Apples, was transformed into an instrument of danger - not, this time, from otherworldly beings, but from other human beings. Human beings similarly were the source of other Halloween dangers, such as the arson and vandalism of "Devil's Night" in Detroit and other North American cities. Meantime, Hollywood horror films picked up Halloween's association with the supernatural, darkness, death and decay, often weaving in themes associated with contemporary legends and rumor panics. The resulting mix blurred the lines between reality and the imaginary in a way that was new in the history of Halloween, emphasizing gory hyperrealism over the spiritual or supernatural frights that predominated in earlier centuries. At the same time that parents began to be afraid of allowing children to trick-or-treat on Halloween for fear of candy contamination and crime, Halloween emerged as a party night for adults, when those who had enjoyed costuming and rites of reversal as children wanted to experience them in a new, grown-up context. It reached its apotheosis in street parades of large North American cities such as Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, where it has become an occasion for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities to publicly celebrate identities usually relegated to the margins of society by the dominant culture. As in much of Halloween behavior, this is done through play, humor and parody, hallmarks of symbolic inversion at the core of Halloween. Rogers also treats the holiday's globalization: both the spread throughout North America of the analogous Mexican holiday El Dưa de los Muertos on the heels of Latino immigration, and the global diffusion of the commercialized Halloween to Europe and other markets. He provocatively asks whether the transformation of the holiday into a mass-marketed occasion for conspicuous consumption will eventually trump its subversive qualities, or whether individuals' creativity and sense of play will ultimately reclaim Halloween as a site of contestation.
Regardless of the cultural changes this holiday undergoes, Halloween seems to attract to it the oppositional and the carnivalesque. No wonder, then, that is has become a popular target for the invectives of conservative Christian ministers and their congregations, who label it "Satanic" and call for its suppression. But the suppression of culturally contested symbols never successfully eliminates the ideas behind them. In fact, as Turner and French cultural historian Michel Foucault argue, these oppositional images are fertile ground for cultural renewal, and provide alternative ways of envisioning reality: they are cultural countersites where social mores and pretensions can be mocked, parodied, and lampooned with impunity, and an alternative universe can temporarily be imagined.
Rogers does not address at any length the reclamation of Halloween by Neopagan groups in Europe and North America - a pity, because this trend fits well with his overarching theoretical approach. And he seems ignorant of the considerable work done on the holiday by American folklorists. Still, this excellent book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It reads fluidly and easily, is theoretically well-informed without being jargon-ridden or using theory as a bludgeon, and could easily be adopted for use in large undergraduate courses on cultural history, folkloristics and anthropology.
Customer Review: Oops, wrong kind of book
I can honestly say that I have almost always finished reading a book that I start. This is the exception.
It's my fault, really. I was looking for a book that would discuss the origins and development of Halloween. I had in mind the sort that would discuss Charlie Brown and The Great Pumpkin and other Americana. You know, a nostalgic trip down Memory Lane in rural/suburban America.
Oops.
This is actually an academic treatise where the author wants to discuss social inversion, gender identity, and queer politics. No offense to the author, but most people don't regularly use the term "social inversion", let alone bring it up constantly in conversation. If you are a cultural transgressor looking to be affirmed in your okayness, this is perhaps a good book for you. I was looking to be affirmed in my nostalgia, so I am out of luck.
(Normally I don't review books down because I disagree with the author; however, I feel that this is marketed deceptively. Normal people don't talk like this guy writes, so I can only imagine that he is one of those people that must rework every concept to fit his sociological theories. Or maybe I'm just a jerk - you decide).
Although All Souls Day is the most favorite time of year to get any type of costume today more and more people (especially kids and teens) and enjoying costumes any time of year. One popular way to do just that is to throught costume parties. Costume parties are fun not only for the kids but for parents as well. College students also have been known to get caught up in costume fun.
Although a good amount of folks prefer to find their fun costumes online, possibly this season you rather create your own "homemade" halloween costume instead. At Halloween-Blog.com we say "That's the spirit! Building your own outfit is fun, creative and will often yield a costume that is less expensive than a store purchased version. Remember to start early, often times people try to create their own costume far too late. I often start the process by coming up with three "costume ideas" that I would enjoy each year. Then you can shop your local flea markets with those ideas in mind as you search for items that will work well for your costume.