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.