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.