Not just since the dissemination of Donna Haraway’s concept of “tentacular thinking” (Haraway 2016) and the publication of Feral Atlas (Tsing et. al. 2020) it is apparent that human exceptionalism and the mono-perspectivism that often accompanies it, have become inadequate knowledge practices. In media anthropology as well as in artistic research, tentacularity is often conceptualised in terms of entanglements and layerings, and the tentacular is imagined as spreading through nets and networks.

In my presentation, I am taking Haraway’s proposition of “tentacular thinking” quite literal: I am drawing on long-term multimodal ethnographic research on Apulian tarantism, a spider possession cult that is endemic to Southern Italy and intrinsically linked to Saint Paul, the patron saint of those bitten by venomous animals. I argue that several more-than-human agents – venomous critters, Catholic saints and eventually landscape itself – continue to shape social relations that are grounded in a principle of shared corporeality open to suffering.

I will screen passages from my ethnographic documentary film “Tarantism Revisited” (together with Anja Dreschke) to discuss principles of essayistic montage, layering and leveraging the (multimodal) archive in relation to “tentacular thinking.” I maintain that spiders ARE good to think with when it comes to generating other forms of knowledge and/or connecting seemingly unrelated phenomena that challenge culture/nature dichotomies.