Fire in the Placa. Dorothy Noyes
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were like, I had to enter the crush of the Plaça Sant Pere during the salt de plens, the final unleashing of fiery devils that is the culmination of the Patum. I had come to Berga to live for six months, of which I had been there three. I had earnestly read in the library and combed the municipal archives; I had talked to old people and requested interviews of patumaires—until I realized that the Patum comes up in half the conversations in Berga anyway and the interviews just made people self-conscious. My welcome had been enthusiastic, and so far most people in Berga seemed to approve of me, interpreting my speaking Catalan, singing with the Easter carolers, and lunching in the “popular” bars as marks of my willingness to play by their rules. But I had not expected to be invited into this particular game: I had planned to be a spectator.
La Patum s’ha de viure, they said over and over as I asked for analyses, anecdotes, and personal histories. It’s no use my trying to put it in words; the Patum has to be lived. And when the Patum came, I found that Berguedan goodwill was intent on making me live it properly. “I saw you up on that balcony!” said one woman after I’d retreated to get a better view and to rest my unaccustomed feet. “What do you think this is, theater? You can’t understand the Patum by looking at it.” During the evening passacarrers, the nightlong passage of Patum effigies through the streets, they made sure I did more than look. A bar owner I knew was jumping the maça, a club with firecrackers affixed to the top. As it burned lower, she thrust it into my hands, and I had no choice but to start skipping, bouncing the pebble-filled maça up and down to keep it lit, showering myself with sparks until my turn was over. The Guita Xica, the smaller and more mobile of the two fire-breathing mules, chased me into a corner every time it set eyes on me: I cowered with my hands over my head until it tired of shaking the flame over me and went after someone else. Agustí, the guide at the head of the beast, was unabashed when I later taxed him with his pursuit. “Daughter,” he said, “this is the baptism by fire we all have to suffer.” Through the five days of the festival, I opened my mouth to fierce alcoholic mixtures in leather flasks and glass porrons; I let children take up my arms and dance me across the plaça; I ducked inside the Eagle and the Black Giant; I was given a ride on the back of the Guita Grossa and exulted over the black waves of the crowd beneath me; I put a shoulder under the Guita Xica when the guitaires’ girlfriends carried it up the Carrer Major and shouted with the rest of them as we lowered the neck to charge; I went out to eat supper every night at five in the morning, drank champagne and sang until eight, and rose three hours later in an unsuccessful effort to get myself to Mass—so as properly to document the complete event. My much-ridiculed little notebooks became progressively less legible. I began to lose sight of the symbolic oppositions that had seemed so obvious in the written accounts and at last to attain a glimmering of what they’d been trying to tell me: the Patum is not a mere spectacle of traditional dances but a force that runs through you.
Et surt de dintre, ran their third refrain. It comes up from inside you. The Patum, with all its antiquity, all its complexity, is not fundamentally a part of the external world: it lives in the body of each Berguedan, who has heard the beat of the Tabal since infancy, danced along with the giants as a toddler, “sucked in the Patum with the mother’s milk,” as more than one person has told me. The Patum bursts out of Berguedan bodies on joyous occasions—an out-of-town reunion of Berguedans, a victory of the Barcelona Football Club—and is simply bottled up the rest of the time. Agustí Ferrer, then mayor of Berga, wrote: “At Corpus, the Patum which beats inside you all year explodes all at once” (Ferrer i Gàsol 1989, 2).
The Patum had to beat inside of me before I would be qualified to talk about it. To open myself up to this went against my whole history as a person and a scholar. I am not brave: this was the challenge of my fieldwork. The Patum brought me face to face with a reality that could not be known by reading.
I had learned Catalan in my senior year in college because there was no course in Provençal that year, and I was interested in the troubadours. In graduate school, after too many years of reading nothing written after 1914, I had studied folklore as a way of reconnecting myself with the world I lived in. However, my disinclination to engage myself with the guilt and pain of contemporary America persisted, and I looked for research projects at a certain distance. Not in Africa or Asia or Latin America, where my well-meaning liberalism, trying to forget its ancestry, again interfered with my ability to concentrate, but in continental Europe, where my retrograde cultural preferences were less out of place than at home and where people’s problems were not my fault. (I am making no generalizations here about ethnography and ethnographers: it simply happened that I approximated more closely than most a certain stereotype of the ethnographer as E. M. Forster heroine.)
I came upon a book, La Patum de Berga, by Josep Armengou i Feliu, a priest of Berga ([1968]1994). It described a Corpus Christi festival in a small city in the Pyrenees. “La Patum” was a sequence of dances by fabulous creatures in plaster and papier-maché: giants dressed as kings, little knights in horse-shaped skirts, a green monster called a mule that breathed fire like a dragon, devils covered in firecrackers that set themselves alight. The event had evidently obsessed the town for centuries, and the commentaries amassed by Mossèn Armengou included a range of contradictory origin narratives clearly shaped by the exigencies of the historical moment of narration. Elite accounts shaped a civil-religious ceremony of order and decorum. Underneath, rising in the flames of the devils and the green monster, was the threat of revolution.
What really drew me to Berga for my fieldwork was that green thing, the guita. As a child I had been much attached to a fifteenth-century painting in the Art Institute of Chicago, a Saint George and the Dragon by Bernat Martorell—who, as it turned out, was a Catalan. In my junior year abroad I collected reproductions of dragon-slayer images: Uccello, Donatello, Piero di Cosimo. In graduate school I read many versions of that most famous of folktales, Aarne-Thompson type 300, as I learned to identify it, and the related founding myths in which the conquered dragon is nature tamed by civilization. But nature’s submission, as we know, cannot be counted on for long, and the paintings make it clear that the princess, once returned to her palace and her father, must have yearned for the dragon and the cave. As for me, you can draw your own conclusions.
Of course I had my theoretical reasons too. The festival was proving resistant to the ethnography-of-communication approach then dominant in folklore studies, not only because so many actors were involved but also because of its continuity over time: though the context of the moment affected it, it tended rather to make its own context, subduing participants to its own rules instead of vice-versa. The creative individual agent, beloved of folklorists since the 1960s, here submitted shamelessly to tradition, the collective, and the inarticulate, reckless of all the trouble we had taken to dismande survivalist and superorganic assumptions.
In designing my field research I hadn’t yet gotten that far: I intended only to get beyond semiotic approaches locating meaning in the fixed program of the festival and was confident of finding self-conscious, heterogeneous actors if I looked hard enough. To begin with, I was preoccupied with the problem of observation. The ethnographer can attain a kind of omniscience through collecting and collating data from many sources: a good seat in the balcony, local documentation, and multiple reports of what is happening elsewhere. But we had become more interested in the “aura” of proximity to the center: what it’s like to be up close, what the participant is feeling. How do people understand their cultural performances? How do symbols convince their makers and beholders? In short, how do cultural forms and the mind of the native work upon each other?
We cannot get inside the native’s head, said the symbolic anthropologists I had been reading. We are no longer so naive or ethnocentric as to suppose that they think like we do; we are not so presumptuous as to claim to understand. What we can do is hermeneutics: we can read the texts they have made. The “stories they tell themselves about themselves”—to use a key phrase of the school—are framed performances of which the outsider may quietly join the audience (Geertz 1973).
Having come to folklore from literary studies, I was reassured by this “interpretive turn.” But my department at the University of Pennsylvania, having a strong sociolinguistic bent, had also discovered practice. Our teachers never let us forget that our informants were not just culturally constructed intellects reflecting