Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In 1998, my partner and I decided to leave the tricksters at our door and venture downtown to the gay quarter of Toronto..." (more)
Key Phrases: supernatural intensity, festive fare, consumer rites, Day of the Dead, New York, North America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 excellent 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.

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (October 31, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195146913
• ISBN-13: 978-0195146912
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,198,267 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beating Up the Strawman (or Scarecrow?), October 26, 2007

By	Eric (Northern Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

The negative reviews I've read so far are trashing the book because it wasn't what they expected it to be: a nostalgic, easy-reading book that tickled the toes and the spine while the reader sips hot cider. The book doesn't present itself as such and is clearly an academic and scholarly survey of the holiday, from its origins, through its break into popular North American culture, to contemporary practices. If you're not looking for that kind of treatment, don't read this book. But don't slam it because it didn't do what you wanted it to do. (If you don't get the connection between this paragraph and the title, look up "straw man argument.")

I found the book to be a slim, well-written text that still manages to cover a wide range of topics and provide tons of interesting facts and figures. Rogers' main thesis is that Halloween, a holiday that continually reinvents itself, continues to provide "a space for transgression and parody," even as it is appropriated to fit the social and political needs of the culture. Rogers explores this thesis by examining the origins of Halloween, its history in Britain and North America, its similarities to Mexico's "Day of the Dead," urban legends and popular reactions to the holiday, its representation in Hollywood, and current trends in its celebration. He ends with a few guesses and questions about the holiday's future. A thorough analysis without getting bogged down in any one aspect.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A serious cultural history of Halloween, June 30, 2005

By	S. Magliocco (Los Angeles, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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. From Celtic Samhain to globalized celebration of consumer culture, 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.
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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you want the real history!, February 7, 2009

By	kurtis primm (allen park, michigan United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Paperback)

First let me say that this book is like a history book on the history of halloween. If you are looking for a quick halloween story or costume and party information, then this book is not for you.This book deals with the actual history of this wonderful holiday,where it came from and how it adapted to what it is now.I found this book to be a great source of information on the history of my favorite holiday.I would recommend this book to anyone who wants an in depth read of the history of Halloween.