Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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a whole is a reluctant obsession in local conversation, standing for all Berguedan self-fashioning: endlessly celebrated as the capital by which Berga’s fortune will be made, endlessly dismissed as a self-destructive waste of time and resources.
I will argue in the conclusion that globalization makes us all provincials, and this is certainly true of our relation to the symbolic. The proliferation of the sign in postmodernity coincides with the end of faith in representation and a loss of confidence in the ability to operate on reality directly: hence both our fantasies and our fears of the performativity of the sign. In Berga, as in many enclaves with special resources for performance, the response has been a cultivation of immanence through which body and community become their own referents. Some Berguedans have made the ontological shift, granting “firstness” to the Patum (Peirce 1991, 188–89), and dismissing all external relations and representations as inherently alienated from that core reality. There is, they insist, nothing else in the world.
There is, at any rate, nothing else going: provincial regions increasingly need to live off their symbols. Today Catalan festivals are attracting growing attention among a global public, owing primarily to the rise in tourism resulting from the 1992 Summer Olympics (which featured Patumderived devils in the closing ceremonies). In the ensuing years, the Patum itself appeared internationally in several television travel programs and numerous guidebooks internationally, along with a growing number of scholarly works in English (Harris 2003 and 2000; Gilmore 2002; Warner 1998). Exoticized and dehistoricized, it provides the setting for an erotic encounter in Colm Tóibín’s novel The South (1991). In 2004, it will be Spain’s candidate for the UNESCO designation of Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Patrimony of Humanity. As Berguedans and their fellows in peripheral communities around the world await the tour buses and resign themselves to the loss of such control as they have had over their own representation, it becomes important for an English-speaking audience to see that today’s passionate, participatory festivals are neither simple drunken revels nor mystical survivals of ancestral rites but resonant forms of collective action in response to a global crisis of local communities. More urgently, since the Spanish transition to democracy has been proposed as an answer to “Balkanization” and a model for other plural societies around the Mediterranean (cf. Linz, Stepan, Gunther 1995, 77; Morán 1991, 243–41), the long-term integrative power of that transition’s mobilizing devices is of more than local interest. Finally, when cultural representation is increasingly proffered around the world as a response to inequality, it is vital to understand both the power and the limitations of performance in modifying social arrangements.
The Setting: Berga in Catalonia
Berga is a city of roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants in the foothills of the Spanish Catalan Pyrenees, about eighty kilometers north-northwest of Barcelona (Map 1). It sits on a rocky shelf below the Serra de Queralt, a little to the west of the valley of the Llobregat River, which descends from Castellar de n’Hug, close to the French border, to meet the sea just south of Barcelona.
The Llobregat bifurcates the comarca or county of the Berguedà, of which Berga is the capital (Map 2). Above Berga is the mountainous and heavily wooded Upper Berguedà, full of almost abandoned villages and a few small towns: Bagà, seat of the old barony of Pinós; La Pobla de Lillet, in the eighteenth century an industrial rival to Berga; Castellar de n’Hug, a beautifully reconstructed tourist trap with a remaining shepherd or two. In the northwest of the comarca is the impressive twin-peaked massif Pedraforca, well known to Catalan mountaineers, with a barely functioning coal mine at its foot and mining and cattle towns on its skirts. The Berguedà is topped by the high Pyrenean ranges of Cadí and Moixeró, which were crossed mostly by smugglers, bandits, and shepherds until the opening of the Túnel del Cadí in 1984. On the other side is the plain of the Cerdanya, a comarca divided between French and Spanish Catalonia in the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees and now subsisting on tourism.
Map 1. Catalonia
Below Berga is the Lower Berguedà, hilly and calcareous but considered part of the Catalan central plain. Along the winding narrow highways to Ripoll and Vic in the east and the diocesan seat of Solsona in the west lie municipalities of dispersed farms: animal fodder is the chief crop of the rocky land, and cows and pigs are raised in fairly significant numbers. The central axis of population is the Llobregat, whose meager water supply furnished power for dozens of textile factories from the mid-nineteenth century on. The towns of Gironella and Puigreig serve as municipal centers to the industrial colonies, factories surrounded by worker housing, the owner’s summer house, a school, and a church. The great majority of these factories have closed in the past twenty years. These factories go all the way down the increasingly murky Llobregat, past the large industrial city of Manresa (ca. 100,000 inhabitants) and the strange fingery peaks of Montserrat to the delta below Barcelona—once the richest agricultural land in Catalonia, now industrial suburbs. The river’s trajectory has long directed economic flows: it is also the route followed by Berguedans for bureaucratic obligations and, increasingly, for education, leisure, and employment.
Map 2. Berga and its hinterland
Figure 1. The city of Berga below the Queralt range. Photo by Luigi, Berga.
The city of Berga (Figure 1) offers a microcosm of its comarca: mountains behind it and plain beneath it, coal mines to the north, textile factories within the town, and a largely hypothetical tourist industry. The people, too, are set between two worlds—one eye toward the mountains’ peace and isolation, one toward Barcelona’s dynamism.
The early industrial modernization of Catalonia was not accompanied by a liberal belief in free trade: Catalonia’s traditional industries prospered best under protectionist legislation or in times of diminished foreign competition (as in the case of the World War I boom). In the Berguedà, the autarkist policies of early Francoism were in part economically beneficial (apart from the new impetus they gave to smuggling, an important local occupation): the 1940s and 1950s saw the expansion of both lignite coal mining and textile manufacture, the comarca’s principal industries (Pedrals 1990, 76). The economic expansion of the 1960s provided further stimulus to expansion, but almost immediately the invasion of international competition precipitated a long decline. Employees in the textile industry numbered 10,937 in 1962; 2, 154 in 1987 (Miralies i Guasch et al. 1990, 83); and many fewer today—the few factories remaining open are heavily mechanized. The mines had nearly 3500 employees in 1960, and 900 in 1986 (87–88). The principal mine at Fígols closed entirely in 1990, and the smaller Saldes mine reduced its operations in 1991. The agricultural sector, long plagued by low prices and small, undercapitalized farms, is beginning to develop small-production specialties, such as goat cheese, natural veal, and truffles, for metropolitan connoisseurs.
An expansion of services, public employment, and construction has offset industrial decline in the city of Berga at the expense of the rest of the comarca, which suffers the intense depopulation characteristic of the Catalan interior. Because Berga is the only large town within a wide area, families that once only shopped there are now moving there for the sake of the schools or the convenience. But Berguedan commerce relies heavily on pensioned miners and state employees, neither of whom are likely to sustain the general burden much longer, and must compete with that of much larger and now easily reached Manresa and Barcelona. Attempts to develop tourism face the challenges of deficient infrastructure, recent fierce forest fires, and more spectacular offerings on the other side of the Túnel del Cadí.
The Berguedà is la Catalunya pobra, both by objective measures and in their own self-estimation. Catalonia, of course, is rich, and the absolute poverty of the Berguedà is nothing to that of, say, Extremadura in southern Spain. But Catalans