Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Alessandro Testa
(Charles University)
Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University)
Mariann Vaczi (University of Nevada, Reno)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Politics and Social Movements
- Location:
- Aula 29
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 April, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Since the Transition, collective gatherings, public events, and festive rituals have proliferated in Catalonia. We invite historical "tracking" of such events across the democratic period as well as ethnographic investigations of the "traces" of history in current public expressions.
Long Abstract:
Catalonia's participation in the Spanish transition to democracy in the 1970s found a potent resource in traditional festival: conceptual, gestural, and tactical. With the Franco regime's tight restrictions on public assembly, "going out to the street" became an act of democratic self-assertion, so that the high-risk confrontations of strike and protest were bolstered by lower-stakes, more multivocal forms of appearing in public. Rooted festival and associative traditions, Spain's incorporation into international youth culture and European consumerism, the lifting of restrictions on assembly and expression after Franco's death, and the eventual restoration of full democracy all encouraged a fervent reclamation of public space. Since the Transition, public gatherings and rituals have proliferated in Catalonia: new and old festivities attached to communal identities, youth and LGBT sociability, commemorative rituals, international arts and sports events, social movement revindications, strikes and protests, rallies and referenda. Public actions of diverse tendencies provided rhetorical evidence for the convivència claimed as foundational to both Spanish and Catalan democracy, and, later, for claims of convivència's breakdown. Today the public arena and the now-contested concept of convivència have become increasingly polarized around the issue of Catalan sovereignty.
We invite historical "tracking" of such events across the democratic period and, conversely, ethnographic investigations of the "traces" of history in current public expressions. How have the powers of performance and the inertias of genre, interacting with radical transformation and pluralization in the social base of public expressions, contributed to the current situation?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 April, 2019, -Mariann Vaczi (University of Nevada, Reno)
Paper short abstract:
Spain is facing the greatest challenge in the post-Franco era to the nation's constitutional unity. The Catalonian independence movement helped build support by using a 200-year-old cultural performance, the building of human towers (castells), to rally disparate social groups behind independence.
Paper long abstract:
Spain is facing the greatest challenge in the post-Franco era to the nation's constitutional unity, as the Catalonian independence movement has come to dominate regional politics over the past ten years. The independence movement helped build support by using a 200-year-old cultural performance, the building of human towers (castells). The movement discarded other cultural performances (soccer, the sardana dance, and fire festivals), drawing from the human towers' performative iconicity, associational culture, affective dimensions, and operative values to rally disparate social groups behind independence. In using human towers, the movement envisioned a solution to the ideological divisions of nationalist politics, but the instrumentalization of culture has a contradictory effect on politics. As European secessionist movements intensify, cultural performances reveal the objectives and risks of nationalist constructions.
Alessandro Testa (Charles University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper intends to explore the dimensions of social transformations, identity representations, and political and religious tensions developing within and around the carnival of Solsona, in central Catalonia (Spain), which can actually help understand the current situation of Catalonia as a whole.
Paper long abstract:
This paper intends to explore the dimensions of social transformations, identity representations, and political and religious tensions developing within and around the carnival of Solsona, in central Catalonia (Spain).
A particular emphasis will be put on how and why this public ritual - the most important festivity in the town and its entire comarca - has become a means by which the local communities shape and express a variety of concerns and claims, also structuring their very social configuration in the process. In fact, the networks of informal, political, religious, and ethnic articulations that the local social fabric is composed of are in part shaped, reproduced, and performed through the carnival, its ritual acts, and agglutinative/grouping aspects.
These dynamics do not run too smoothly: rather at odds with the traditional functionalistic interpretation of rural festivals, this carnival seems to represent one of the driving forces in the political polarisation that has followed the failed Catalan attempt at gaining independence in 2017. Moreover, it is also characterised by two competing perspectives: on the one hand, it can foster the socialisation of external individuals; on the other, it can also establish a rather sharp "us vs them" distinction not only vis-à-vis external communities and groups, but also within the very borders of the little town of Solsona.
These and other unresolved tensions have determined a situation of disrupted and unachieved transformation, a state of "pseudo-transition" which, embedded and ethnographically observable at the micro-level, actually reflects the current situation of Catalonia as a whole.
Camila del Mármol (Universitat de Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes contemporary uses of the Cathar past in the Catalan Pyrenees. A local interpretation of Cathar's history took shape since the 1980s on, connecting it with the national origins of Catalonia and projecting a wide imaginary on national identity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses contemporary uses of the Cathar past in the Catalan Pyrenees. A local interpretation of Occitan medieval history has taken shape since the 1980s onward, building an alternative reading of the inquisitorial massacres occurred during the Albigensian Crusades. It has been connected with the national origins of Catalonia projecting a wide imaginary on national identity; stressing and revalorizing the role of the Pyrenees and its people in the inception of a Catalan nation. This romantic spin that contributes to the understanding of the Catalan history as a path of martyrdom (together with the tragic defeat of 1714 celebrated on the Diada), is delineated in novels and contemporary celebrations in the Catalan Pyrenees, specifically in the Alt Urgell.
As observed in France, the history of the Cathars have worked as a mirror in which several interpretations of the present have been built upon. Likewise, this disputed history of inquisitional rage has worked in the Catalan Pyrenees as a canvass on which to express alternative interpretations of Catalan history, identity and a way to project regional and independentist imaginaries. In 2018, the celebration of the Cathar market turned into a moving tribute to the recently imprisoned political leaders, as has happened with other local and popular celebrations throughout the country. In this presentation, I analyze the origins and development of the Pyrenean discourses regarding the Albigensian past, the Cathar festivities in Josa de Cadí and Castellbó, and, finally, the expression of current imaginaries of independence within these processes.
Miguel Javier Aramburu Otazu (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
The ethnic boundary between Catalan and Castilian speakers has been strengthened not only as a result of the political conflict but also by the strategy used by the pro-independence movement to attract working-class Castilian speakers, as shown by the analysis of the public discourse of Súmate
Paper long abstract:
The independence process that has emerged in Catalonia since 2012 has challenged the catalanist consensus about ethnic indistinction, first of all because until now the political conflict has been built upon an ethnic basis that is difficult to ignore, but also -less obviously- because the strategy of the independence movement concerning working-class Castilian speakers implied an ethnic recognition with few precedents in Catalan politics. I examine the performance of Súmate, an association promoted by the independence movement to approach working-class Castilian speakers and which, in its particular way, has attempted to legitimate independence by appealing to people's migratory origin. The analysis is based on Súmate's 'public discourse', its messages and the performance it has displayed in its public events, be they rallies in working-class neighbourhoods, interviews with journalists in the media or the opinions of other actors arising in social media and other media. The analysis shows that the two dimensions of an ethnic boundary, both categorical and behavioral (Wimmer 2013), are strengthened not only as a result of the political conflict but also by the strategy used by the pro-independence movement to attract working-class Castilian speakers.