Fire in the Placa - Dorothy Noyes

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1967, 1), Berguedans find themselves trapped in it. A language as all-encompassing as the Patum allows only the partial freedoms of revoicing, revision, or parody; no statements make sense outside of it. Drawing everything into itself, the Patum also serves to maintain all the social memory on which it has fed: nothing in Berga ever goes away. In this sense, Berguedans feel themselves primordially determined. And here they find themselves in company with Freud. Though his determinism is different, they share his language of the sexual body: ostensibly literal for him, metaphorical for them. Like Freud’s subjects and Freud himself, Berguedans obsessively elaborate and rework this body metaphor, using it both to speak and to deny speech. Although they resist direct exegesis of the sacred they have made, metacommentaries at a distance from the Patum spell out its implications, endlessly demystifying what will once again be mystified in next year’s performance. Berguedans share Freud’s pessimism and his ambivalence about symbolic processes, ultimately seeing them as offering the only freedom of maneuver in a closed system.

      Here we come to a third great theorist of modernity, for the symbolic determinism with which the Patum is generally credited is acknowledged by Berguedans to be a mask for a different kind of determinism. The cardboard-and-plaster figures of the festival dance on the hard ground of political economy. Berguedans are practical Durkheimians, because history has left them disenchanted with revolutions and (they say) without the courage to undertake one. But when pressed, they agree with Marx instead (and of course this industrial region has a long familiarity with socialist thought). Marx is particularly resonant today in the post-Transition Patum. Whereas Durkheim writes inside the moment when collective representations emerge, Marx writes of their decay, when the social facts have come unmoored from the structures that generated them and taken on an autonomous and increasingly automatic life.

      I am at once a sympathetic Durkheimian participant, a self-doubting Freudian, and a skeptical Marxist outsider. Although this triple identification has made for confusion in my text as well as my sense of self, it is better acknowledged than evaded.11 Trained as a folklorist, I am obliged to take my Berguedan interlocutors at least as seriously as I do the theorists and to carry out a “hermeneutics of completion” as the basis for any later “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 20–36). I begin, then, by attempting to enter and recreate the Patum from within, drawing on my own experience of participation and on community metacommentaries. My first task is to reconstruct the world the Patum makes in a more systematic and explicit language than participants require. More than that, I am reproducing as well as representing the Berguedan project: I try to create at the textual level the same kind of integrated whole that the Patum makes out of Berga. For this work, the tools of symbolic anthropology are apt: they are essentially Durkheimian.12

      But the ethnographer’s work does not end in translating from a restricted to an elaborated code (Bernstein 1971) or in creating a scholarly equivalent to folk poiesis. The next task is to draw back and, in dialogue with the Berguedans, contextualize the construction they have made, looking at the materials they had to work with, the goals they sought, and the environment they hoped to transform. At this distance, both the Berguedans and I have mixed feelings about the power of symbolic communication and, in particular, of performance: the setting into motion of symbols by bodies (cf. Fernandez 1986). Like Bakhtin, I am enthralled by the capacity of repetition to modify but also to perpetuate older messages (1981); Berguedans are similarly preoccupied with certain inertias in their performance forms. Like James Scott, I see symbolic performance as the space of maneuver in which those who cannot speak freely conduct their politics (1990). But Berguedans continue to use the Patum even after democracy has been restored and a Habermasian public sphere of rational-instrumental communication has been made available (Habermas 1989). They worry about this: are they “folklorizing” themselves, and would they do better to spend their time on “serious” things? They worry, too, about the toll taken by performance. In the Patum, the “natural symbol” of the body is the primary expressive resource (Douglas [1973]1982), and this entails an expenditure of the self not demanded by more alienated codes. The intensity of bodily performance in many subaltern settings suggests that the power subjects cannot exercise on their surroundings is turned back on the self, the only domain they may control. Repressed aggression can turn performance into outright self-destruction.13

      To be sure, Berguedans cannot be called subaltern from any global perspective: the proper adjective is provincial. But in this setting, the Patum’s physical intensity is unexpected. The festival is a public assault on the clothes and skins and backs and livers of people who in everyday life are greatly concerned with appearances and respectability. We might ask whether this visibly self-damaging performance is not itself metaphorical. Berguedans characterize these aspects of the Patum as “primitive” and “of the poor,” sometimes even as wasteful and degrading. This periodic self-abjection dramatizes their strong sense of “relative deprivation”: inferiority to the Barcelonans and, a fortiori, the Europeans with whom they compare themselves (Runciman [1966]1971). More, it suggests a deep ambivalence toward performance that we might see as characteristically provincial.

      Scholars have not theorized the provincial very much: our best approximation is found in Bourdieu, whose work takes for granted the homologies between the field of social class and the field of the nation-state (1984, 1990a). The provincial occupies the same uneasy middle ground in the latter that the petit bourgeois occupies in the former. Both are socially ambiguous, and both aspire to incorporation in higher status categories. We can therefore extend to the provincial Bourdieu’s characterization of the petit bourgeois. Investing extraordinary effort in a performance of self that is intended to win external recognition and consequent reward, he is ultimately “haunted by appearances” (1984, 253) and the uncertain reality of his achievement.

      The real anatomy of the provincial condition is found in the nineteenth-century novel, and there we can clearly see its radical ambivalence, torn between local attachments and metropolitan ambitions. The ideal subjects of organic solidarity, provincials feel their own lack and seek completion in contact with the outside world. The provincial novel thus reproduces the fairy tale plot, with the hero leaving home to seek his fortune in a world of wider possibilities. But in the novel, the hero may or may not succeed.14 One who does win sexual and economic incorporation pays for it affectively with the loss of home and community. However, the ambitious provincial who stays in place receives, at best, token metropolitan encouragement, at a high cost to others and with no elevation for the province as a whole.15

      The provincial is the maker of the modern.16 In part, it is a question of energy: the provincial is at once well-fed enough and hungry enough for the struggle. But more importantly, whether they fail or succeed, whether they leave or stay, provincials are “committed to the symbolic” (Bourdieu 1984, 253): they are performers, dreamers, and theorists. Unsatisfied with their position in a world which, if ideal, would see them better placed, they aspire to more perfect unions. The sacramental consciousness of a Berguedan is open to transmutation into the engineer’s faith in her blueprint.17

      Berguedans have occasionally nurtured such aspirations, imagining the Patum as the foundation of a native modernity. But just as the provincial novels repeatedly show us characters whose imaginings are destructive of others and the self, so Berguedans have innumerable instances in their collective memory of provincial projects going awry.18 The three Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century provide local examples. More recently they have experienced the high human costs of Francoism (quintessentially provincial in its resentful oscillations between autarky and emulation); and since the Transition they have had the negative exemplar of the terrorist group ETA in the Basque country, now more than ever relentless in its assault on the ideological center as well as the local infrastructure. These disasters and more modest failures of local administration and personal ambition have fostered a certain humility among Berguedans, along with a feeling that the half-acknowledged, willful self-delusion of sacramental thinking is not so dangerous as the modern’s conviction of his ability to control reality. The Patum offers at least the compensation of communion in exchange for its renunciation of mastery.

      The Patum’s giants, dwarfs, and mules dance out an eternal debate between irreconcilable postures toward the central power of the moment: aspiration to inclusion, self-mockery of pretensions to inclusion, and rejection

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