Paper short abstract:

The Catalan traditional sport of human tower building (castells) has been booming since the Transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, and has become a major symbol of Catalan cultural heritage and identity amid contemporary debates around national autonomy and secession from Spain.

Paper long abstract:

The building of human towers (castells) is a centuries-old traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of effort and overcoming, tension and release. This traditional sport has been booming since the Transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, and has become a major symbol of Catalan cultural heritage and identity amid debates around national autonomy and secession from Spain. While the main function of building castells is to grow community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive leisure activity, this traditional sport also provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the independence movement. As human tower building is often equated with nation and heritage building (fer castells es fer país), and politicians call for the construction of common foundations toward independence (fer pinya), the bottom-up constructions of castells emerge as iconic processes that independentist politics wishes to traverse. But the politicization of culture is not without its risks and dilemmas. By mobilizing body-place-value linkages, this thriving traditional sport captures the subtle processes by which the body becomes politicized, and ideology becomes embodied, with all the desires and precarities of collective constructions. The presence of castells in contemporary Catalan politics shows how and why formerly marginal social segments and body practices may become symbolically central in certain political contexts.