Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 208 pages
• Published by: Oxford University Press, USA October 31, 2003
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0195168968
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195168969
• Book Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Weighs: 5.9 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
If America is a melting pot, then Halloween is the stew that simmers in our national cauldron. In this fascinating study, Rogers shows how the holiday is a hodgepodge of ancient European pagan traditions, 19th-century Irish and Scottish celebrations, Western Christian interpretations of All Souls' Day and thoroughly modern American consumer ideals. At its heart, he says, Halloween is a celebration of the inversion of social codes-children have power over adults, marauders can make demands of established homeowners and anyone may assume a temporary disguise. Canadian professor Rogers is a fine cultural historian, who carefully sifts through complex social and religious data to tease out meanings and trajectories. One great chapter illuminates Halloween and Hollywood, while a chapter entitled Border Crossings discusses Halloween observance among non-Anglo populations in North America, including Mexico's "Dia de los Muertos." Rogers's is the best study to date of the history and growing significance of Halloween.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Review

"The best work so far on this increasingly important holiday."--Publishers Weekly
"Performs the heroic service of taking all the stuff in stores seriously, as instruments in the creation of a new unreligious holiday of some significance, if the retailers are to be believed. They say that the devil is in the details, and Rogers is a connoisseur of delicious tidbits of macabre."--New York Times Book Review
"Halloween is a rich mix of historical detail and keen cultural observation about the holiday in North America. He reaches far back to the festival's pagan roots and follows its development into a unique celebration of liminality, cultural borrowing, and outrageous invention. Halloween is surely an important contribution to a growing literature that takes seriously our moments of play."--Penne Restad, author of Christmas in America: A History
"This book paints its subject in very broad strokes, giving us a glimpse of an increasingly significant holiday over a vast expanse of space and time. How delightful, too, to read about an event through a North American, rather than strictly American perspective."--Jack Kugelmass, author of Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade


Reader Reviews
When the time came to read this year's Halloween book, I chose Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers. I was looking for an interesting, scholarly treatment of the holiday. I didn't find it. That's not to say that I didn't learn anything. According to Rogers, Halloween, as it is celebrated in the United States and Canada, was basically brought to the New World by Scottish and Irish immigrants. In those countries, Halloween apparently grew out of Pagan autumn festivals and the Christian holidays of All Saints and All Souls days. The Day of the Dead had a similar origin in Mexico. What began in the US and Canada as a celebration of Celtic pride evolved into a night of teen and adult rowdiness, which was in turn tamed into "trick-or-treating." In the last few decades, the commercial engines have behaved like a positive-feedback loop: Because Halloween is popular, there is money to be made, so it needs to be hyped and marketed to make it more popular, so more money can be made, and so on. See? That didn't take 170 pages. The remaining space is occupied by the author supporting his conclusions with data and argumentation. The data generally amounts to lists of single sentence anecdotes gleaned from various Canadian and American newspaper editions published in late October and early November over a wide range of years. There are also a number of illustrations, including festive holiday snapshots taken by the author. The author's argumentation is based on induction from these published data points -- as well as stories from his colleagues and dentist -- to explain their significance as only an academic could. For example, this gem is put forth as part of the discussion of the relevance of the Halloween movies by John Carpenter to the actual holiday (p. 121): "For it could be argued that Myer's murderous interventions are facilitated by the collapse of Halloween as an inclusive family holiday and its transformation into a set of generational consumer rites in which family mutualities are neglected." What?! The plots of the six Halloween "films" are discussed and their commentary on the holiday is "explored." It is hard to take this kind of scholarship seriously when it takes slasher-flix so seriously.