Centuries ago, it was said that Benevento was a gathering place for the occult. Today, superstitions still run deep Stepping off the train in the southern Italian city of Benevento is not a particularly haunting experience, in the sense that the air on a brisk October day yields nothing other than cloud cover and fog. That this is the so-called “city of witches,” the site where women from all over the country might have flown in the middle of the night to dance around a famous walnut tree and to learn, effectively, how to be a witch, is not immediately apparent. Where the witchiness of Benevento, a city of over 55,000 with a Roman theater and Arch of Trajan from ancient times, may be most felt is in the traditions of its residents, many of whom still hold close these passed-down superstitions. Depending on whom you ask, a curse of the evil eye must still be warded off with a specific ritual involving oil and water and a traditional prayer. Leaving a broom at your door is a good way to ensure the local witches, known as the Janare, won’t sneak under the threshold—they’ll be too distracted counting the strands of straw. And if you wake to find that your horse’s mane has been braided, a Janara must have taken it for a late-night ride. Even now, when Maria Scarinzi, an anthropologist and head of education programs at Janua, Benevento’s Museum of Witches, interviews older residents about their beliefs, she finds that they hesitate to share everything for fear of retribution. “They still believe that if you name the Janara, she will come to your house at night and she will harm you in some way,” Scarinzi says. “They still believe that if I tell you that I know the formula for getting rid of maggots, you will think that I am a Janara and you’ll distance me from society.” How Benevento became the city of witches Some researchers argue that this southern Italian town, a little more than two hours by train from Rome, became known for its witches because of its unique political position. But to understand the root of the myth, we have to go back to 1428. The hunting and persecution of so-called witches was a practice that began to take root in Italy in the late 1300s, supervised and carried out in many ways by the Catholic Church. By 1542, Pope Paul III had created the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which tasked the church with criminalizing those who would speak against the faith. It was an amorphous crime, because any misfortune to befall a person or town could be attributed to a witch—around 80 percent of the people charged with witchcraft in early-modern Europe were women. Academics estimate that 22,000 to 33,000 witchcraft trials took place in Italy, with very few of these ending in capital punishment. Witch hunting appeared to largely come to an end by the 18th century. The first reference to Benevento as a place where witches gather dates to 1428. It comes from the transcriptions of the trial of Matteuccia di Francesco, a 40-year-old woman who was eventually sentenced to death and burned at the stake for witchcraft by the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena in the Umbrian town of Todi. From Matteuccia, we receive the famous formula, or incantation, that has since become inextricably associated with Benevento: “Unguento, unguento / mandame a la noce de Benivento, / supra aqua et supra ad vento / et supra ad omne maltempo.” Translation: “Ointment, ointment/ send me to the walnut tree of Benevento/ over water and over wind/ and over all bad weather.” During the trial, Matteuccia confesses that she spreads a cream on herself and chants to be sent to the walnut tree of Benevento, which had demonic associations and was thought to be near the river Sabato. “From that moment on, the inquisitors try to make the witches confess that they went to Benevento, because it becomes a sort of indictment,” says Paola Caruso, who has published books on the folklore of Benevento. “If they went to Benevento, then that means they’re witches.” In fact, according to Caruso, after Matteuccia’s confession, nearly all the Italian witch trials of the 15th and 16th centuries reference, in some way, Benevento as a gathering place for witches. No records exist, however, of witch trials in Benevento itself, though this could be attributed to the World War II bombing of the city’s central cathedral that destroyed much of the ecclesiastical archives, Scarinzi says. By 1640, local medical examiner Pietro Piperno penned his historical treatise on, among other things, the walnut tree of Benevento, explaining the origins of its supernatural powers. He claimed, according to Caruso, that it is not those from Benevento who participate in the late-night gathering of witches around the walnut tree—but people coming from elsewhere. In many ways, this only reinforced the link between Benevento and the witches. Caruso’s research is built on the idea that Benevento became the “city of witches” because of its political isolation. Even when surrounded by the Romans, up until the third century B.C.E., the city once called Maleventum was ruled by the Samnites. It was eventually subsumed into the Romans’ dominion, but after the fall of the Empire, by the sixth century C.E., the Lombards arrived, establishing Spoleto in Umbria and Benevento as their two southern duchies. What made Benevento unique is that, despite its association with the Lombards, it managed to remain in large part independent from centralized control until the late 11th century C.E., when it was taken over by the papacy and largely stayed under papal control until becoming part of Italy in 1860. The fact that it had retained some sense of governing autonomy for so long sowed insecurity in the political leaders of the time. “We must imagine Benevento as a very rich city, a papal city, an obligatory halfway point—you had to pass through Benevento,” Scarinzi says. “We have to imagine it also as a kind of island in what was the Kingdom of Naples—difficult to conquer with all this wealth. So how can I discredit someone? It’s what we still do today: I speak ill of that person.” The targets of this abuse were generally local women known as healers, “almost women of science,” Scarinzi says, or practitioners of what would today be called herbal medicine. These were women who knew the medicinal value of herbs like St. John’s wort, lavender and dandelion, gleaned from information passed down to them through generations. “The negativity around these women was linked to the fact that people were afraid,” Scarinzi says, “because they were women who had a power, which, in many cases, was medicine.” The modern-day legacy The Museum of Witches, located in the Palazzo Paolo V off the city’s pedestrian Corso Garibaldi, is a testament to how the customs survive in the daily lives of its residents. For a couple of decades, anthropologists have been interviewing people about the history and customs of the larger province of Benevento. Part of this effort has been to talk with the elderly—mostly those 70 years and older—to preserve the superstitions and legends of the witches before they disappear. About 10 years ago, they had enough to open a museum. “Our goal was to recount the figure of the Benevento witch—that is, who the Janara is—for the people of Benevento,” Scarinzi says. “What is this magical world today, for older people, more than anything else, who continue to perform certain practices and certain rituals?” The museum opens with a short video punctuated by the voices of residents describing how the legend of the Janare has seeped into their way of life. Artifacts show the roots of rituals. A pair of small coffee cups tells the story of how a woman could entice the man of her dreams by serving a drop of her menstrual blood in his coffee. “The belief was that, in the moment in which the woman made her proposal of love, the man had to, naturally, accept, otherwise he would die,” Scarinzi says. “It was the Janara who gave the blood and the object a power.” A woman proposing rather than a man went against the customs of the time, but therein lay the power of the witch: She could rewrite the social order. A 19th-century prayer handwritten by a young child to protect her from any potential enemies is on display. At the time, children would have donned amulets and charms to ward off evil. Another display explains how laundry hung outside to dry should be taken in by dusk for fear that evil spirits might be present after the setting of the sun. The oral histories the museum has collected shed more light on the behaviors that have grown out of these beliefs. Scarinzi learned that some local women have never been to a hairdresser, concerned that their hair would be kept and used against them in a spell. Keeping the legend alive Outside of the customs and superstitions ingrained in the culture of Benevento, there’s a capitalist reason why the legend has survived: the Liquore Strega, founded in 1860 by Giuseppe Alberti, who opened his bar in the center of Benevento. “He decided to name the product after the legend of the city where it was born,” says Kenia Palma, marketing manager for Strega Alberti, the company that produces the liquor. Strega means “witch” in Italian. It didn’t take long for Strega to become a symbol of Benevento—the marketing of the yellow-colored liqueur, made in part with saffron, juniper and mint and bearing a slightly sweet yet smooth taste, was indelibly linked to the city and its witches. The label bears an illustration of witches dancing around a walnut tree. Today, its store is the first thing you see when descending from the train station. Palma notes that, on bottles of the liqueur, the location is even written as “near the train station,” because Benevento has long been considered an important junction that connected north and south. The Alberti family worked to make Liquore Strega a symbol of Italy itself. In the 1920s, the brand enlisted well-known Futurist artist Fortunato Depero to create stylized advertisements. After the war, Guido Alberti helped to start the country’s famous literary prize, Premio Strega, named in the brand’s honor. Source of the article

How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state? —Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being The Popular University for Gaza encampment at the University of Chicago was raided on May 7, 2024. Following a week of connection, building, and generativity, police officers invaded the physical and figurative structures we had built, ripping organizers out of tents and tearing down the protective walls surrounding them. Just hours afterward, we convened together to make sense of it all—to begin the processes of recovery and rebuilding. Through circles that met in-person and virtually in the weeks to come, my peers brought care to the forefront of our work, inviting rage, grief, hopelessness, longing, intimacy, and joy into the relationships forged during the encampment. Our encampment existed in its physical form for only eight days, but the work of caring for one another has extended far past the date on which our physical structures were destroyed by the police. Care work that was seeded within the walls of our Popular University has sprung up from the ashes of the camp. This foundation of care continues to shape the way we organize against all forms of state violence. As we collectively pursued divestment from arms manufacturers that directly facilitate settler colonial violence in occupied Palestine, we also developed and deployed principled care tactics. The history and politics of care work are inextricable from the tentacles of empire. For example, the gendered and racialized modes of commodified care that we often think of when we hear the word “caregiver” have roots in legacies of colonial and imperial exploitation. The long legacy of slavery, sharecropping, and domestic laboring in the United States is inextricably linked to the subjugation of Black American women. Caregivers in home health-care settings, nursing homes, and childcare facilities are often precariously employed and underpaid immigrant women or women of color. In this model of caregiving, marginalized care workers tend to the bodies of those insulated from economic and social vulnerability. Simultaneously, most psychotherapists and medical doctors—those who are treated as care experts—are white, hailing from socioeconomic backgrounds that allow them to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for their training. The cost to access this kind of expertise makes it extremely difficult for most of us to afford comprehensive health care and psychotherapy in the US. This is why a repositioning of care was necessary in the context of an anti-imperial encampment focused on demanding that the University of Chicago disclose investments in war, divest from genocide, and repair injustices perpetrated from Gaza to the South Side of Chicago. Far too often, care means that autonomy gets taken away from someone in need. The state’s violent role in stripping vulnerable people of their autonomy is often labeled “care” or “welfare.” The active repositioning of care as intramural at the Popular University for Gaza created opportunities for peers to care laterally for one another, rather than relying upon individuals positioned as experts or as care workers. Rather than devaluing care or maintaining the power relations that keep it financially inaccessible, our care for one another within the walls of our Popular University created a structure of mutuality and sustainability. Repositioning care as a tool available to all of us was a means of decommodifying it, of taking it out of the imperialist context in which it is normally encountered. This repositioning allowed us to deploy care as a direct and oppositional response to violence targeted at Palestinians and those who act in solidarity with them. Intramural care—care within the figurative walls of our popular university—generated new ways of relating to risk and relating to one another. As a tool for building political power, care allowed encampment members to negotiate risk together, to workshop and (re)develop strategies for sustainable organizing, and to inhabit a community with a shared commitment to mutual aid and protection. Encampments are not a new organizing tactic, nor is thinking about how to provide collective, non-hierarchal, and lateral forms of care. As the Care Collective underscores in their book The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, treaty camps (such as the one erected at Standing Rock in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline) also welcomed anyone who adhered to camp values, offering care that was “designed according to need, not profit”—food, education, health care, housing—for everyone in the community. Following this legacy, the Popular University for Gaza developed a robust care team. At the Popular University for Gaza, our care team comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, neighbors, faculty, and staff. We contributed to encampment operations as medics, group facilitators, mental health workers, conflict mediators, and food and water distributors. As critical as collecting and distributing vital resources was to the encampment, our care work went beyond mere resource provision. As a social worker, I realized that developing a peer support guide might be a wise way to help campers develop strategies for maintaining the mental and emotional resources needed to keep the encampment running. This guide offered some individual-level tools for emotional regulation and grounding, and it also provided an outline for running processing/decompression circles. These circles were the first opportunity that many of us had to get to know individuals from outside of our programs, student organizations, or housing situations at the encampment. Through this peer support guide, organizers who were not experienced in professionalized care provision were invited into a relational practice, a space of connection rather than a mystified series of expert techniques. These circles were also the first space where we were able to convene after our encampment was violently raided by the University of Chicago Police Department. I also developed a therapy referral network and the launch of a 24/7 on-call peer mental health line for organizers. To have built this infrastructure outside of the confines of health insurance or state surveillance feels exciting; when we think of care laterally, we realize our own capacity to provide for one another instead of risking increased involvement with a violent state apparatus. Our collective approach to care, drawing from practices of peer support and mutual aid, was a risk-responsive approach grounded in interdependence. Among the mental health workers on our care team, it was our philosophy that anyone who wanted to run a decompression circle should be able to do so—rather than requiring a license or degree to offer support to peers at the encampment, the only requirement for running a decompression circle was to have first attended one as a participant. With this structure, mental health work was taken up by encampment community members with a wide range of ages, varied prior experiences with mental health care, and a vast array of academic and personal backgrounds. This diversity of experience among decompression group facilitators also allowed us to run affinity spaces for decompression, attending to the more specific needs that might arise among community members of color or disabled community members, for example. Collective approaches to care at the Popular University for Gaza allowed us to use risk negotiation as a core organizing strategy. When determining our collective courses of action, conversations about arrest risk were central to our strategizing. An arrest obviously has different consequences depending on things like one’s citizenship status, prior criminal-legal contact, race. In the lead-up to any anticipated police presence at the camp, we spoke to one another frankly about who among us would be able to take on more risk, and we made safety plans for those of us who were unable to risk arrest. Lateral forms of care are also what allowed organizers to sustain over a week of encampment operations; by using a safety planning worksheet (from the Peer Support Guide) in mental health circles and conversations, organizers developed a sense of who they might reach out to in crises, in moments of overwhelm, and in moments of exhaustion. By prompting one another to concretely identify the human infrastructures of caregiving surrounding us, we were better equipped to tap in and rotate out as we struggled to meet the round-the-clock practical demands associated with maintaining and protecting our Popular University. Finally, a lateral approach to caregiving allowed us to extend our community beyond the parameters of the institutionally defined University of Chicago. A community member without a student, staff, or faculty affiliation was present in the early days of the encampment, helping with construction and encampment operations. He was targeted by university police, and in response, encampment organizers mobilized jail support and a care package for him upon his return. This exchange of care—in the form of care for the encampment’s physical infrastructure and in the form of care for a community member—exemplifies a decommodified mutual aid relationship built upon respect and recognition rather than charity. In writing about the role of care at the Popular University for Gaza, I do not want to lose sight of the way that these experiments were made possible because we were not under siege. We were not subject to snipers, airstrikes, famine, or water shortages. We had the resources and safety that so many Palestinians have not had access to for months or years. As I foreground my own experiences of care, healing, and building power, I do so with the recognition that this encampment was a political formation designed to disrupt one university’s ongoing investment in genocide. But the care tactics at the Popular University for Gaza have created an infrastructure for ongoing disruption. Without care, our anti-imperial movements run the risk of replicating the dynamics of colonialism and empire, pushing feminized and non-white individuals into unrecognized care roles and reifying the expertise of the so-called “helping professionals” for those organizers financially stable enough to access them. This experiment in caring laterally for one another is a mechanism to shift the dominant culture surrounding caregiving, turning care into a central organizing approach rather than an adjunctive resource for burnt-out organizers. Despite the successes of this experiment, there were also moments of failure: we failed to develop a robust set of norms for responding to harassment within the encampment, and we failed to sustain the level of security needed to protect ourselves from an armed police raid in the middle of the night. Although this was an imperfect experiment, it is one that connected me to people I would have otherwise never known, despite our overlapping involvement in the corporate entity known as the University of Chicago. It gave me a laboratory to think and rethink intramural care. On the morning of May 7, hours after riot police destroyed the tents, art, library, mental health space, medic area, and prayer spaces of our Popular University, I defended my dissertation proposal. After watching videos of my friends and loved ones getting dragged and shoved outside of the walls we had built within the academy—walls designed to foster different ways of relating to one another here—I stepped back into the walls of the University of Chicago. As a developing scholar of the welfare state, I began my proposal hearing with an additional citation, recognizing the learning that I had done in the prior several weeks as uniquely valuable to the work I hope to do in and outside of the academy. I study care provision within and around the walls of jails and prisons, but my approach to my work is forever changed by the relations of care that I witnessed and participated in during the encampment. After my proposal defense, I walked through the quad, noticing that new patches of grass had been rolled out almost immediately in the hours after police officers invaded and destroyed the Popular University. I paused to take a photo of one patch of yellowed grass in the rectangular shape of a tent; despite their best efforts, a trace of the encampment persisted past the violent attempts to remove it all. As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating—the various forms of intellectualization, silencing, and disengagement that I associate with neoliberalized higher education—the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid. It persists in the form of spray bottles and goggles that are distributed at actions this autumn, in the debriefing circles and therapy referrals that have continued for months since the encampment was torn down. As a means of protest and critique, this evidence of care has persisted despite the university’s attempts to exterminate it. This evidence of care demonstrates the ongoing commitment of my fellow encampment organizers: to continue using care as a tactic in our work against state violence, against empire. Source of the article

The rise of mills and factories drew an influx of people to cities—and placed new demand on urban infrastructures. The period of rapid technological advancement in the United States known as the Industrial Revolution may have taken place during parts of the 18th and 19th centuries, but its impact resonated for decades and influenced everything from food, clothing, travel and housing—particularly in cities. While U.S. cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Baltimore certainly existed prior to the start of the Industrial Revolution, newly established mills, factories and other sites of mass production fueled their growth, as people flooded urban areas to take advantage of job opportunities. But that’s only part of the story. As the populations of cities continued to increase, these municipalities were faced with the challenge of how to handle the influx of people. Problems like the availability of housing, overcrowding and the spread of infectious disease had to be addressed as quickly as possible, or the newly industrialized cities risked losing their citizens and the factories that employed them. Here’s what happened. Origins of the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid-1700s: a few decades after the first steam-powered engines in the country were produced. The textile industry was the first to benefit from the emerging technology, like Richard Arkwright’s “water frame” (patented in 1769), James Hargreaves’ “spinning jenny” (patented in 1770) and Edmund Cartwright’s power loom (patented in 1786). Factories capable of mass-producing cotton fabric sprung up around the country. It didn’t take long for British industrialists to take advantage of the opportunities for manufacturing in the fledgling United States, and in 1793, Englishman Samuel Slater opened a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Using technology developed in England, as well as new additions, like Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (patented in 1794), the industrialization of America continued. Urbanization Begins in the United States What is referred to as the American (or Second) Industrial Revolution started in the second-half of the 19th century, as the country was rebuilding following the Civil War, its bloodiest conflict to date. At the same time, waves of immigrants from Europe started arriving in America in search of jobs—a large proportion of which were in factories in industrial cities. “After the Civil War, the United States gradually transformed from a largely rural agrarian society to one dominated by cities where large factories replaced small shop production,” says Alan Singer, a historian at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, and the author of New York's Grand Emancipation Jubilee. “Cities grew because industrial factories required large workforces and workers and their families needed places to live near their jobs. Factories and cities attracted millions of immigrants looking for work and a better life in the United States.” But the domination of cities didn’t happen overnight, according to Daniel Hammel, professor in the University of Toledo’s Department of Geography and Planning, and associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “Even during the Industrial Revolution, most Americans lived in the countryside,” he explains. “We were essentially a rural nation until about 1920.” Indeed, the 1920 U.S. Census was the first in which more than 50 percent of the population lived in urban areas. Even then, Hammel says, “we're not talking about massive cities; we're talking about small settlements, in many cases of 2,5000 or 3,000 people.” The 1870s also saw a rapid expansion of the country’s railroad system. Prior to that period, in order for a city to be a manufacturing center, it had to be located somewhere with access to water, like an East Coast port (like New York City or Boston), one of the Great Lakes (like Buffalo or Cleveland), a canal (like Albany or Akron) or a river (like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh). But thanks to the continued growth of the railroad, places without developed water access, like Scranton, Indianapolis and Dayton had the means to ship and receive supplies and goods. The Industrialization of Agriculture One of the byproducts of the Industrial Revolution was a shift in American farming methods, and, in turn, the amount of labor needed to work the land. “At one point, you needed a large family to be able to farm your land,” Hammel explains. “But with industrialization—particularly in the early 20th century—agricultural production became more mechanized, and we didn't need as much labor in rural areas.” That prompted (or in some cases, allowed) young adults who were no longer required on the family farm to seek opportunities in urban factories. The industrialization of agriculture also affected African American tenant farmers living in the southern states, Hammel says. “All of a sudden, landowners didn't need as many people working on their land anymore, so they moved [the tenant farmers] off of it,” he notes. “And that was, in essence, the beginning of the Great Migration. From then through the World War II era, African Americans moved in huge numbers out of the Mississippi Delta, in particular, to the Midwestern cities.” Some of the most common urban destinations included Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and New York. More People, More Problems The Industrial Revolution caused towns to turn into cities, and existing cities to swell, both in terms of population—with new arrivals from Europe and rural areas of the United States—as well as their geographic footprint, now that they were home to factories and other buildings required in manufacturing. And while job opportunities were the main draw for most newly minted urbanites, that left them with the problem of having to find somewhere to live. For many, this meant moving into cramped, dark tenement buildings: some of which were already considered old, while others (particularly in Chicago), were hastily thrown together and of exceptionally low quality, Hammel notes. But at the same time, Hammel stresses that population density itself isn’t a problem. “There were very wealthy, very healthy people living in extremely high density,” he explains. “But if you don't have much money, the density combined with the lack of light and lack of airflow in some of these tenements was a major issue.” Specifically, as Singer points out, it was a public health issue. “Rapid, unregulated, urbanization meant overcrowding, substandard housing for working people, inadequate infrastructure (including water and sewage systems) and the spread of epidemic diseases like tuberculosis,” he notes. Gradually, as there was wider understanding of how people got sick, cities created public health departments dedicated to reducing preventable illnesses and deaths through improved sanitation, hygiene, infrastructure, housing, food and water quality and workplace safety. Though many of these areas still remain works-in-progress, these societal advancements originally grew out of necessity, when the Industrial Revolution fueled the growth of American cities. Source of the article