Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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stones, a wheel of smoke and sweating bodies rubbing against the crumbling facades of a provincial capital in the Pyrenees, where most of the factories have closed.
Performed annually for nearly four hundred years, the Patum of Berga has simultaneously celebrated and refused the political order at every turn. Its dancing effigies—giants and dwarfs, Turks and Christian knights, devils and angels, a crowned eagle and two flaming mule-dragons—serve as vehicles for a multitude of allegories. But the festival obscures its own apparent messages through techniques of the body cultivated with special intensity since the last years of the Franco regime: strong rhythms and constant motion, vertigo, heavy drinking, sleep deprivation, and the smoke and dense falling sparks of firecrackers at close range. After five days, symbolic combat ends in physical consensus and the incorporation of both individuals and social categories into a felt totality: metaphorically, a social body. In the 1970s, this body was a proposed democratic Catalonia, and the festival served as rehearsal for the massive demonstrations in Barcelona. In the 1980s, industrial decline and factionalism in this small mountain capital turned the festival into an end in itself, a passionate creation of an immanent unity recognized as ephemeral from the outset. This book, an ethnography based on several periods of fieldwork since 1989 as well as historical research, explores festival as a primary instrument and framework of action—social, political, economic, religious, and intellectual—for a community with limited resources.
The first half of the book describes the synchronic experience of Patum participants, taking as its ethnographic present the years from 1989 to 1992, the main period of my fieldwork and perhaps the zenith of Berguedan public life in the early years of democracy. The second half historicizes that powerful moment, examining how it emerged from the Franco regime on one side and how the liberalism resulting from European integration and globalization is dissolving it on the other.
In Part I, I present the community’s takeover of my field research as a way of opening up the tensions between representation and presence in the festival. These tensions take shape in a factionalized community with a history of civil war and a present of economic threat—a story that the community tells itself in the festival and then refuses to hear. Today, as I will illustrate, 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. The second chapter briefly lays out the Patum’s condensation of this history, and shows how the festival elements articulate Berga’s body politic in the present.
Part II examines social interaction in the Patum, showing how social distance is both semiotically and physically compressed in order to transform an experience of individuation and interpretation into one of incorporation and immanence. Chapter 3 presents the Berguedan model of everyday social interactions as structured along a continuum of respect and solidarity, personhood and belonging. Chapter 4 shows how the festival effigies are, through interaction with participants, brought to life as sacred persons who epitomize the two polarities of the everyday continuum. In Chapter 5, I describe the Patum’s manipulations of participant bodies, including crowding, strong rhythms, repetition, drink, continuous dancing, centripetal movement, and intense pyrotechnics, as well as a gradual acceleration toward vertigo during the course of the five days of the festival. These techniques of incorporation disable everyday critical faculties and transform the festival from a representation of social divisions into a forcible communion between them.
Parts III and IV describe the recent history of the Patum, in which Berguedans of all classes treated the event as a deliberate instrument of community reproduction, despite intense disagreement about the nature of the community in question. Part III examines the shift in key metaphors under the Franco regime from the social body to the Oedipal family, a more suitable vehicle for negotiating conflict and change over time. Chapter 6 describes the metaphors of maternity used in the past thirty years to characterize the Patum’s role in the local community. These metaphors are related in chapter 7 to the patriarchal discourses of the Franco regime, and the constraints these discourses placed upon local cultural reproduction. All factions associated the Patum with a vernacular sacrality and especially with the local Madonna, whereas the Franco regime resurrected the disembodied, hieratic religion of the Corpus Christi procession. Chapter 8 describes how the Patum became a national focus of resistance and a school of Catalanist democratic mobilization, in which the language of origins was used to reconstruct the primal scene of the new generation. The Patum’s nonverbal techniques of incorporation provided a means both of reconciling Catalanists across ideological differences and enabling the participation of the immigrant population: the Patum became a much-copied template and was appropriated not only into other festivals but into all genres of Catalan collective performance. It offered, I argue, the experiential basis for the now hegemonic Catalan theory of identity as the embodied memory of performance.
In Part IV, the consequences for the Patum itself emerge: it became a festival of mass physical participation, both intensifying and extensifying in performance, and exceeding the control of its local mobilizers, who increasingly define it as a kind of “addiction.” Chapter 9 describes the transformation of the Patum when Berga’s primary relationship with the outside world became one of consumption rather than production. Chapter 10 explores the contemporary Berguedan debate between “networkers” and integristes. Networkers are proponents of economic, political, and cultural linkages with the outside world: they therefore favor preserving distinctions between persons as individuals, but dissolving the member/outsider boundary. The skeptical integristes cite a history as old as the Patum in which such linkages have produced nothing but political domination, economic exploitation, and local division. They are ready to make members of outsiders, but tolerate neither spectators nor relations at a distance: for them, you are either incorporated or nonexistent. This contest of survival strategies is conducted largely through divergent styles of reproducing and appropriating the Patum. Chapter 11 draws back to give a more general account of the fate of local culture between transition and globalization, showing how the forms of compromise that provided a model for accommodation in the democratic transition leave the community vulnerable in less equal negotiations with global capital. At the same time, they continue to sustain Berga’s and Catalonia’s refusal of violent separatism.
Organic Solidarity in the Provinces
Like the people of Berga in the Patum, I attempt to construct in this book a coherent totality out of heterogeneous and resistant matter. The Berguedans have the advantage of me by four hundred years and several thousand more minds on the job, yet even they have not been able to master their social experience by modeling it. Naturally, I have not come close, but a principal object of this book is to show the parallels between their project and mine. The compressed theoretical introduction that follows should not alarm the reader, though it may initially bewilder. I simply want to show with a synoptic glance how much is packed into traditional collective performance. The book that follows will unpack a good deal of it; no scholar knows enough to unpack all of it.
Festival has been an important topic in folklore, history, and anthropology for some years, and what it accomplishes at the symbolic and discursive levels is now beginning to be understood. It dramatizes actual or proposed social arrangements, especially collective identities and hierarchies, in order to win consent, force acquiescence, or destabilize other such representations. However, a view of collective performance as an arena of contesting utterances in the present