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- Convenors:
-
Mariann Vaczi
(University of Nevada, Reno)
Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract:
This roundtable will focus on the anthropology of Catalan popular culture, identity constructions, and cultural heritage in light of recent political pro-independence transformations, inviting comparative reference to the Scottish independence movement and its politics of culture.
Long Abstract:
This roundtable focuses on the anthropology of Catalan identity, cultural heritage, and politics in light of recent political transformations, inviting comparative reference to the Scottish independence movement and its politics of culture. It will first briefly present three recent ethnographic works in the Catalan context, and will then open up to comparative discussions. Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia (2019) by Venetia Johannes provides an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, quotidian object of consumption: food. The volume Popular Culture, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Catalonia (2023) edited by Alessandro Testa and Mariann Vaczi draws from various cultural manifestations including festivals, bull runs, and the politics of the Cathar past. It discusses how civil mobilization, women's participation, gentrification and heritagization intertwined with national constructions, and how sociability responded to COVID-19 lockdowns. Finally, Mariann Vaczi’s ethnography Catalonia’s Human Towers: Castells, Cultural Politics, and the Struggle Toward the Heights (2023) reveals how this unique sport provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the independence movement, capturing the subtle processes by which the body becomes politicized and ideology becomes embodied. The roundtable will review the development of anthropological research into the politics of culture since Dorothy Noyes’s seminal Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (2003). It will problematize the politicization of culture, nation-building, inclusion-exclusion, authenticity, belonging, nationhood, and identity, among others. The panel invites comparative input from research in the Scottish cultural and political context.