The Patum and the Body Politic

      A STORY THEY TELL THEMSELVES about themselves? Well, yes, but apparently they don’t listen to it. By the fifth day of dancing and drinking, after multiple repetitions of the Patum in the plaça, the plebeian mule spins into the royal eagle with no sense of disjuncture or surprise. And even at a distance from the confusions of performance, people are reluctant to talk about meaning directly.

      “What does it mean?” is, of course, the classic outsider’s question. As a rule, insiders are more immediately interested in what it does, particularly when “it” is a performance repeated annually in the same place by the same people with little scope granted to improvisation. The native Berguedan’s relation to the Patum is not typically one of reader and text or audience and performance. The child’s first contact with the Patum is not with a distant spectacle but with an enveloping realm: held up to the hand of the giantess, danced on her father’s back in the crowd, the child first knows the Patum as something tactile and kinetic, a mass in motion around her and herself in motion within it. She is encouraged to learn the steps and gestures at the same time she is learning to walk; as she grows older, she is allowed and obliged to participate in more and more of the event. It is a great blurry world which she enters by degrees; she finds increasingly familiar clearings from year to year, but she is always aware of surrounding thickets of complexity, some of which she will never penetrate. If she is of an intellectual bent, she may try to mark paths and chart a map, but even so, she knows the Patum by moving through it. It is unlikely that she will ever feel the need to draw back from the Patum, survey it from beginning to end, and declare what it means. What it means was danced into her as she became part of its history and it of hers. The Patum is less an object of analysis than of recognition: an annual return and renewal.

      Convivència and Representation

      That is the orthodox Berguedan view, and it is true in part—true as an ideal in any case. There are good practical and historical reasons to leave the Patum unexamined—not, as with everyday habit, by declaring it too trivial to merit attention, but rather by making it sacred: superorganic, eternal. In a deeply factionalized community with a history of civil war and a present of economic threat, the incorporation of individuals into active community membership is the primary goal of the Patum, and the history that militates against that incorporation must be overtly silenced and covertly transformed. “For the Patum, all are one.” “For the Patum, we Berguedans make a pinecone”—a Catalan idiom used to express solidarity or unity in diversity.

      First, the silencing. Catalonia has a language problem, of which the choice of Catalan or Castilian is only the most conspicuous dimension. Unlike, say, postwar Germany, where the Nazi regime was unambiguously defeated and had to be unequivocally repudiated, not least through a cleansing of language, the Spanish transition expelled nothing and no one. Rather, it brought opposing political elements together in a coalition by means of agreement to let bygones be bygones. No idiom was wholly discredited, but neither was any idiom sufficiently unmarked for the voicing of collective aspirations, which had to be reduced to the blandest, emptiest formulas to win assent. The formulation of meanings was relegated from the dangerous public realm to subgroups in which a vocabulary was shared.

      Thus convivència—a slogan word of the Transition meaning not simply coexistence side-by-side, but getting along together and sharing a social world—became possible. In Catalonia, the challenge of political convivència was complicated by that of native and immigrant convivència in a region where the proportions were half and half.¹

      Provincial communities such as Berga face the problem more directly: in so small a city, convivència is a matter of face-to-face relationships. The poor and the well-off are inescapably visible to each other; political enemies must pass each other daily on the Carrer Major; immigrants live for the most part not in new suburbs outside the city but next door to old Berguedan families.

      Like most Catalan mountain towns, Berga has a manufacturing tradition dating from the Middle Ages. Its economy has always been dependent on commerce and industry. It has never been self-sufficient in food production: too cold for vines and olive trees, the terrain irregular, and the soil poor. The ability to eat, for Berguedans, does not depend entirely on their own labors but on their relations with each other and with outsiders.

      Physical isolation is a second factor in interdependence. Berga had no great landowners or nobility with extralocal interests. The prosperity of the upper class depends on general Berguedan conditions, and the Berguedan elite has always been provincial with respect to larger Catalan cities. Within Berga, the classes are at no great physical remove from each other and no great cultural distance either. Patron-client and employer-employee relations are affective as well as instrumental and entail a great deal of mutual knowledge and evaluation.

      In such a place, the metaphor of the social body is not problematic. For the Berguedans, Berga as a relatively bounded and cohesive entity is not an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) but a fact of life. This distinguishes it from the hegemonic projects in the form of imagined communities long foisted on the Berguedans: the universal Catholic Church, Franco’s “imperial Spain” or the Socialists’ “new Spain,” the neomedieval Catalonia of the early twentieth century or the “Catalonia-city” of today, to name only a few. All of these require heavy investments in representation, mediatic and political, to compensate for a deficit in lived interaction and succeed in proportion to the intensity of the latter and its compatibility with the former.

      Berga’s self-representation, the Patum, is also compensatory: not for a lack of interaction but, on the contrary, for its tensions. Differentiation generates interdependence and even desire; it also creates mistrust and resentment. Convivència is at once a practical necessity and, in its deeper sense, an ideal recognized as utopian. It is strained by the fact that there is rarely enough to go around—not enough jobs, not enough prestige, not enough money. Although it would be a stretch to suggest that the “idea of limited good” or zero-sum worldview often attributed to peasant cultures holds sway in industrial Berga, it is a commonsense reality there that the gain of one is frequently the loss of another. Competition exists; it is bitter and painful. People are suspicious and factionalized.

      Public life therefore vacillates—in tandem with the self-control of Berguedans—between careful avoidances and bitter conflict. Off the Carrer Major, partisan language cultivates itself in innumerable bars, associations, periodicals, and performances. “In Berga everything is double,” they said: it has two music schools, two ski clubs, two choirs, two theater groups, two history magazines, two political parties personally opposed and ideologically identical, two of anything you can think of that might profitably be combined to accomplish something worthwhile. Thus, for them, the Patum’s contest of interpretations—for me so revelatory, so “democratic”—was so obvious as not to be worth talking about, and it obscured the festival’s supreme achievement: wholeness.

      It is nonetheless important that the Patum, formed through