I will describe the “techniques of incorporation” exercised upon me as a potential new Berguedan, and the first-person voice sheds light not merely on this ethnographic encounter, but on the general process of socializing outsiders and creating local loyalties in a world of transnational individuals and global forces. Poor communities cannot afford to ignore outsiders, high or low: outsiders must be converted into social persons and thus made useful. Concluding from historical experience that even the autonomy of personhood poses risks to the general good, Berguedans go further. Through the Patum’s aggressive communion, they force newcomers as well as themselves to become members of a single social body. They acknowledge, however, the costs thus imposed on individuals, and the Patum’s constraints are both desired and resented by all concerned.
During the 1970s, the Patum became a means of mobilizing a larger Catalan social body and a widely appropriated model for collective action. Its controlled violence to individual selves enabled viable collective action to emerge from the aftermath of civil war, dictatorship, and mass immigration. The emotional impact of participation in the Patum suggested a formulation of Catalan identity that could overcome those historical divisions: identity is not found in ethnic or ideological lineage, but in the embodied memory of performance. This performative model has profoundly influenced the practice of the regional government since 1979. It is not free of ambivalence. My informants fear the consequences of a strong collective identity even as they cultivate it, and sometimes when they sing their own music they hear the echo of the Francoist anthem.
This book sets the period of democratic transition into a longer history of the Patum’s use by Berguedans as a model for articulating the relationship of individuals, the community, and the larger world. When the Patum emerged from the church feast of Corpus Christi, the hierarchy of members in the sacralized body politic was contested, but the local linkages to larger social and cosmic orders were clear. Later, as Catalonia experienced violent industrial and nationalist conflict, the Oedipal family became a more productive metaphor than the social body, and the Patum became at once maternal refuge and primal scene. Democratization and European integration raised the fear of a mass with no center or edges, figured in a Patum ever longer, more crowded, and more intense. Most recently, Berguedans have responded to the challenge of reproducing the community in a global economy by attempting to impose two new models. Many make a virtue of necessity by reconceiving Berga as a nexus in a constantly refigured network and the Patum as an object of exchange. Those unwilling to surrender sacrality and stability revert to the idea of the Patum as Berga’s Corpus Mysticum, now a more literal social body no longer capable of shifting between microcosm and macrocosm. Standing for nothing but itself, the Patum of these skeptics, who have been “burned” once too often, declares the end of representation.
Through all of these variations, dating from early modernity to modernity’s apparent end, Berguedans have used the Patum to address the quintessentially modern task of constructing a totality out of diverse social elements. Their reliance on the social body as metaphor for this purpose is of course common to a long tradition of European social theories as well as the collective performances influencing them and influenced by them: the medieval theology of the Corpus Mysticum, nationalism’s construction of the nation-state as an organic individual, Fascist corporatism, and the neocorporatism of the welfare state and the new Europe.1 But the strategies of Berguedans and their immediate situation—the industrial community—resonate most strongly with Durkheim and his concept of “organic solidarity.” As defined by Durkheim, this is the form of integration proper to societies with a strong division of labor, a valuing of complementarity as a result of mutual dependence; it stands in opposition to the “mechanical solidarity” of simple societies in which all members are animated by a common consciousness ([1893]1984).
In practice, as even Durkheim was compelled to admit, the division of labor fosters conflict, and where forms of organic solidarity exist, they have generally been engineered by social elites as mitigation. The Patum offers the “folk” or grassroots equivalent of such elite engineering, typical of small communities in which it is generally accepted that difference and inequality must be lived with, because both radical social change and individual exit are impractical (cf. Hirschman 1970). Several European festival genres, indeed, address this problem. Perhaps most familiar to scholars is Carnival, a space of licence and inversion in which criticism may take place, resentment may be vented, and alternatives may be imagined.2 The Patum participates in a rather less well-examined class of performances: folk dramas of encounter and combat ending in some mode of reconciliation.3 These performances theatricalize social divisions in ways indirect enough to be denied if necessary, but legible enough to be understood by community members. Integrating social struggles into founding narratives, they show difference as the base of community. They acknowledge the pains of coexistence and supersede them, in part, through the shared experience of participation.
This latter effect is intensified in the Patum by the presence of other ritual forms—those of communion and those of civic display.4 In this way, many of Durkheim’s contradictions find potential resolution. In practice, the only alleviation Durkheim could suggest for the pains of a class society was the cultivation of mechanical solidarity in subgroups or crosscutting identifications.5 The Patum, however, cultivates both organic and mechanical solidarity by differential use of two levels of the festival, which Durkheim later distinguished as “representative ritual” and “collective recreation” ([1912]1960, 543). The former lays out the differences and groupings in Berguedan life for all to examine. Not only does it construct them as complementary parts of a whole, it presents each element as an object of desire, promising and in some cases delivering attainment. Here the Patum recalls Durkheim’s suggestion that heterosexual desire provides the deep model for organic solidarity.6 The lower level of the festival, intense and uncontrolled bodily performance in which difference is lost, relieves the concentration on symbols and creates the “collective effervescence” that is the corporeal basis for mechanical solidarity.
I refer often to Durkheim and Freud in this book, not as explanatory frameworks but as high-theory analogues of the “sensuous thought” of the Patum.7 The theories and the festival share not only core concerns and metaphors, but core ambivalences and contradictions in their attempts to address modernity.8 One justification for the Durkheimian parallel is genealogical: Durkheim’s organic solidarity ultimately derives from the same theology of the Corpus Mysticum that gave birth to the Patum.9 Further, like Durkheim and his school, Berguedans are highly sensitive to the cognitive and emotional power of bodily experience and recognize the importance of “natural symbols” (Douglas [1973]1982) for creating social facts. Finally, like Durkheim, Berguedans are willful functionalists in an unpropitious historical situation, insisting against all the evidence on the foundational, normal, and systemic character of collective expressions that are in fact visibly reactive, compensatory, and maintained by powerful social controls (cf. Lukes 1985, 173–74; Coser 1984, xxiii). This last similarity is not unrelated to the others. Durkheim declared sociology the historical successor to religion: both are efforts to conceptualize society (Lukes 1985, 467, 476). Given Catholic Europe as our context, we might suggest that both festival participants and social theorists partake of a sacramental habit of thought in which representations are credited with a direct relationship to reality, and to act on one is to act on the other. In this way, for example, the body as metaphor suggests the body as instrument. Berguedans manipulate the Patum—and themselves in it—in the hope of transforming Berga. Scholars are sometimes given to similar confidence that the refinement of their models will enable them to reshape society.10
The Patum is a genuine “collective representation,” incorporating Berguedan diversity both in symbol and in performance. Generated out of everyday social interactions, it has become the matrix through which all social relations are understood.