Studying the Academic Side of Halloween

November 1, 2006 Edition > Section: New York > Printer-Friendly Version

Studying the Academic Side of Halloween

BY GARY SHAPIRO - Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 1, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/42700

While many people were celebrating Halloween yesterday, a small group was studying it.

A two-day international conference hosted by Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland examines "all aspects of Halloween as a social, cultural and economic phenomenon," according to the conference's Web site. "Halloween remains a surprisingly under-researched and under-theorized topic in academic writing."

"There aren't a lot of books on the history of Halloween," an attorney in Bergen County, N.J., Stuart Schneider, who wrote the books "Halloween in America" and "Halloween: Costumes and Other Treats," said. He said it's a fun holiday in which people can engage "in a little mischief."

Asked about the conference, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, Andrew Ross, said Halloween is a "huge industry." Anything that consumes a lot of people's time, energy, creativity, and money, he said, "is going to attract scholarly attention."

The conference explores how the pagan holiday, widely held to be of Celtic origin, came to America in the 19th century and then was rekindled in Europe toward the close of the last century.

A professor of European Literatures at Queens College, Thomas Bird, said Halloween can be traced to "Samhain Eve," Gaelic for "summer's end." In medieval times, he said, the Church attempted to Christianize the holiday, which became known as "All Hallows' Eve." (The Western liturgical churches celebrate November 1 as All Saints' Day, or the Feast of All Saints.)

"Halloween is like the accumulation of different holidays," Mr. Schneider, who has designed a graveyard in his front yard to feature 26 tombstones and various skeletons, said.

Topics listed for discussion yesterday at the conference included how Halloween was a powerful imaginative source for Scottish poets such as Robert Burns; American radio dramas from the 1930s and 1940s with Halloween themes, and the Halloween concerts of musician Frank Zappa.

Some Halloween talks appear more theoretical. Malcolm Foley and Gayle McPherson of Glasgow Caledonia University use an approach influenced by French philosopher Michel Foucault. They find Halloween to be "a site of some considerable discursive ‘struggle' between, amongst other things, national identity and globalization, childhood independence and moral panic, carnival and asceticism."

Some lectures deal with more concrete issues, such as tourism. Des Brogan of Mercat Tours Ltd. will speak today on the increase in interest of "Dark Tourism" in Scotland, namely: "the gruesome, the grisly, the gory, and the ghastly." Duncan Light of Liverpool Hope University discusses English-speaking tourists who visited Transylvania in 2004 and whose trip included a Halloween Ball at "Castle Dracula." In the abstract of his talk, Mr. Light describes the disappointment many felt. He notes that the significance of Halloween tourism is "something constructed in the culture of origin of the tourists themselves rather than in the attributes of the destination, the more so in that Halloween itself is largely unknown and uncelebrated in Romania."

A talk by Larisa Prokhorova of Kemerovo State University in Russia argues that Halloween became a mass phenomenon in Russia after "an American-Armenian owner of one of the popular nightclubs arranged a fancy-dress party featuring the most common Halloween characters such as vampires and witches."

Mr. Ross said Halloween is a very popular phenomenon that is not recognized by the state, or by the church, but comes "from below." In some cases, there has been civic involvement. Mr. Schneider said a town in Wisconsin around the turn of the century organized a Halloween parade and carnival. Why? "To keep tabs on the kids," he said.

November 1, 2006 Edition > Section: New York > Printer-Friendly Version