Photo essays on Halloween (2): bringing nature to culture

Jack Santino (1983: 15) writes on ideas that shape Halloween decorations, as I briefly stated in my last post. I am here taking the issue up and will illustrate one of his points. My material comes from West Los Angeles.

Santino touches on issues that have been concerning folklorists and anthropologists and on which they have been observing and publishing their works. One such issue refers to nature and culture. Santino talks about decorations picked from a natural environment and then carried to a built environment, such as pumkins, apples and vegetables. He talks about journeys that people make- or used to make- to the countryside in order to buy  fruits and vegetables and then display them:
 

"What has happened, then, is the following: people from a built en vironment travel into a relatively natural environment, return with a physical embodiment of that natural environment, and display it as part of their built environment. We can see here a dichotomy of rural and urban, natural and built, and, ultimately, of nature versus culture. Bringing the pumpkins and the corn back into the city represents a movement to bring nature into, and display it as part of, culture.The tasteful, aesthetic arranging and displaying of these fruits and vegetables is in itself a cultural act ."

 

Walking around West Los Angeles and observing Halloween decorations, I could not but notice an additional object of decoration which is not mentioned in Santino's text. Scarecrows are very rare and as such they can attract attention. I would here like to add another view of nature brought to culture within the context of Halloween seen as harvest time and perhaps question the clear dichotomies that Santino sees. Scarecrows are also symbols of and for a safe harvest, they are symbols of and for peoples' struggle against nature, they are peoples' emotional investments in their sustenance. Bringing such  man- made objects for display into an urban environment is also  a cultural act, one which includes negotiated relationships between nature and culture....