Fire in the Plaça
Fire in the Plaça
Catalan Festival Politics After Franco
Dorothy Noyes
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Philadelphia
Publication of this volume was assisted by grants from the College of Humanities of The Ohio State University and from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture and United States Universities.
Copyright © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Noyes, Dorothy.
Fire in the plaça: Catalan festival politics after Franco / Dorothy Noyes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3729-3 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8122-1849-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Corpus Christi Festival—Spain—Berga. 2. Festivals—Political aspects—Spain—Berga. 3. Berga (Spain)—Social life and customs. 4. Spain—Social conditions—1975–. 5. Spain—Politics and government—1975–. I. Title.
GT4995.C6N68 2003
| 394.26'0946'72—dc21 | 2003051232 |
To the people of Berga, with love and thanks, and in special memory of Ricard Cuadra and Pepito Tañá
Contents
A NOTE ON CATALONIA AND THE CATALAN LANGUAGE
PART I. REPRESENTING THE FESTIVAL
1. BETWEEN REPRESENTATION AND PRESENCE: THE ONLOOKER PROBLEM
2. THE PATUM AND THE BODY POLITIC
PART II. PERSONIFICATION AND INCORPORATION
3. THE GAZE AND THE TOUCH: PERSONHOOD AND BELONGING IN EVERYDAY LIFE
4. THE PATUM EFFIGIES: ATTITUDES PERSONIFIED
5. THE TECHNIQUES OF INCORPORATION
PART III. UNDER FRANCO: THE OEDIPAL PATUM
PART IV. THE MASS AND THE OUTSIDE: “THE PATUM WILL BE OURS NO LONGER”
9. CONSUMPTION AND THE LIMITS OF METAPHOR
10. REPRODUCTION AND REDUCTION
11. THE PATUM IN SPAIN AND THE WORLD
A Note on Catalonia and the Catalan Language
ALTHOUGH BERGA IS WITHIN THE BORDERS of the state called Spain, it is linguistically and culturally part of Catalonia, which I am going to call a nation because the Berguedans do: it is an experiential unity felt as “home” of which a political expression is generally desired. The language of Catalonia is Catalan, a Romance language with a long literary tradition. Dialects of Catalan are spoken in Catalonia, the region of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, a fringe of Aragon along the Catalan border, the coprincipality of Andorra, the Department of the Pyrénées-Orientales in France (where more effective centralization has largely degraded the language to a patois), and the city of Alghero (Alguer) in Sardinia. These regions are collectively known as the Països Catalans. Catalonia proper—a triangle with the Pyrenees as one side, the Mediterranean as another, the Noguera Ribagorçana and Ebre rivers approximately marking the third, and Barcelona, the capital, in the middle—is now an autonomous region of the Spanish state. Catalan is its co-official language.
Catalonia has been fortunate in its native and foreign scholars, particularly in history and anthropology. Although I will cite several of them, I cannot do justice to the wealth of the scholarly tradition on which my own work depends. Readers interested in pursuing the subject have several fine collections in English with which to begin: McDonogh (1986), Llobera (1990), Azevedo (1991), and, in a more literary vein, Sobrer (1992).
I ask the reader’s patience with the Catalan words and phrases I have included. Many Berguedan things and practices do not translate gracefully into English—the plens, for example—and I imagine that the reader with some knowledge of Romance languages will like to see the real names and portions of original texts. I should note for readers of Catalan that I am following the Berguedan vernacular rather than the norms of Fabra: hence the presence of dialectal words such as àliga and Castilianisms such as petardos or Pepito.
Readers who are familiar with the much-documented sociolinguistic situation of Barcelona should be aware that the Catalan interior tends far more to monolingualism in Catalan. All of the current local media in Berga use Catalan; the language of administration is Catalan; the language of the street and of the home is Catalan. Castilian Spanish serves as a domestic language among first-generation immigrants, the language of literacy for working-class people educated under the dictatorship, and the primary language of access to the world outside Catalonia. All conversations reported or translated in this book are in Catalan; for the original language of translated texts, see the citations.
Introduction
THERE IS NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD, they insisted, and by the end of my stay I believed them, almost enough to stay for good. Inside the whirling mass in the burning plaça, there is nothing else: the crowd has shaped