Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic
Title
Fire in the Plaça is the first full-length study in
English of the Patum, a Corpus Christi fire festival unique to
Berga, Catalonia, Spain, celebrated annually since the seventeenth
century. Participants in the festival are transformed through
drink, sleep deprivation, crowding, constant motion, and the smoke
and sparks of close-range firecrackers into passionate members of a
precarious body politic. Combining richly layered symbolism with
intense bodily expression, the Patum has long served as a
grassroots equivalent of grand social theory; it moves from a
representation of social divisions to a forcible communion among
them.
The Patum's dancing effigies-giants, dwarves, Turks and Christian
knights, devils and angels, a crowned eagle, and two flaming
mule-dragons-have provided local allegories for a long series of
political conflicts, but the festival obscures its own messages in
smoke and motion to enable a temporary merging of opposites.
Activists in the 1970s transition to democracy in Spain took the
Patum as a model of how old adversaries might collaborate: it
helped to shape the mix of assertiveness in performance and
compromise in practice that is typical of contemporary Catalan
nationalism. The Patum became a focus of resistance to the Franco
regime and drew visitors from all over Catalonia, serving as a
rehearsal for the mass protests in Barcelona. Later, it provided
the newly autonomous region with a vehicle for integrating
immigrants and a vocabulary of belonging, culminating in the
Patum-derived devils of the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic
games.
Today, as mines and factories have closed in Berga, the Patum
serves as an arena in which provincial Catalans model their
relationship to Barcelona, Europe, and the world, and reflects
their ambivalence about the choices open to them. Seeking a third
way between tourism and terrorism, provincial towns like Berga show
us the future of all local communities under globalization.
In collective performances such as the Patum, tensions between
cultural and political representation are made visible, and the gap
between aspiration and possibility is both bridged and
acknowledged. In this exceptionally rich ethnographic study,
Dorothy Noyes explores the predicament of provincial communities
striving to overcome internal conflict and participate in a wider
world.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0299-1
Subjects: Anthropology
Table of Contents
You are viewing the table of contents
You do not have access to this
book
on JSTOR. Try logging in through your institution for access.