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Paper Short Abstract:

Once a year, a Spanish village celebrates a multisensory transhumance festival, enabling its participants to discover landscapes as public goods and enjoy costumes as vital ingredients for engendering alternative ways of social and spatial belonging.

Paper Abstract:

Siruela’s annual transhumance festival celebrates the village’s pastoral heritage. At the heart of the celebration lies a collective walk of inhabitants and visitors across a livestock trail of 10km length that connects Siruela with its neighbouring village. The transhumance festival holds some distinctive qualities: First, the participants of the walk join a flock of several hundred sheep and goats, turning the crowd into a more-than-human collective. Second, moving across the livestock trail between oak-layered pasture plots and attending to landscape features along the way, participants heighten their embodied and sensory perception of their surroundings. Third, walking together is a political act in which substantial dimensions of landscapes as public goods are reinvoked. Fourth, two neighbouring villages whose sense of connection is usually shaped by a car ride on the main road are now experienced as contiguous places. Staged and decorative elements play a vital role throughout the walk and in the programme framing it, such as the performance of the local dance club. The scents of scurrying sheep bodies, the sensation of tired legs after performances of hikes and exuberant dances, and the flood of colours that spring from both natural environment and the costumes for humans and horses incite a sense of social and (alternative) spatial belonging. In other words, costume revindicates custom (Hobsbawm 1983; Olwig 2008) that engenders a collective sense of entitlement to landscape’s shared usufruct.