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Introduction

THERE IS NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD, they insisted, and by the end of my stay I believed them, almost enough to stay for good. Inside the whirling mass in the burning plaça, there is nothing else: the crowd has shaped the axis mundi there on the hard stones, a wheel of smoke and sweating bodies rubbing against the crumbling facades of a provincial capital in the Pyrenees, where most of the factories have closed.

Performed annually for nearly four hundred years, the Patum of Berga has simultaneously celebrated and refused the political order at every turn. Its dancing effigies—giants and dwarfs, Turks and Christian knights, devils and angels, a crowned eagle and two flaming mule-dragons—serve as vehicles for a multitude of allegories. But the festival obscures its own apparent messages through techniques of the body cultivated with special intensity since the last years of the Franco regime: strong rhythms and constant motion, vertigo, heavy drinking, sleep deprivation, and the smoke and dense falling sparks of firecrackers at close range. After five days, symbolic combat ends in physical consensus and the incorporation of both individuals and social categories into a felt totality: metaphorically, a social body. In the 1970s, this body was a proposed democratic Catalonia, and the festival served as rehearsal for the massive demonstrations in Barcelona. In the 1980s, industrial decline and factionalism in this small mountain capital turned the festival into an end in itself, a passionate creation of an immanent unity recognized as ephemeral from the outset. This book, an ethnography based on several periods of fieldwork since 1989 as well as historical research, explores festival as a primary instrument and framework of action—social, political, economic, religious, and intellectual—for a community with limited resources.

The first half of the book describes the synchronic experience of Patum participants, taking as its ethnographic present the years from 1989 to 1992, the main period of my fieldwork and perhaps the zenith of Berguedan public life in the early years of democracy. The second half historicizes that powerful moment, examining how it emerged from the Franco regime on one side and how the liberalism resulting from European integration and globalization is dissolving it on the other.

In Part I, I present the community’s takeover of my field research as a way of opening up the tensions between representation and presence in the festival. These tensions take shape in a factionalized community with a history of civil war and a present of economic threat—a story that the community tells itself in the festival and then refuses to hear. Today, as I will illustrate, the incorporation of individuals into active community membership is the primary goal of the Patum, and the history that militates against that incorporation must be overtly silenced and covertly transformed. The second chapter briefly lays out the Patum’s condensation of this history, and shows how the festival elements articulate Berga’s body politic in the present.

Part II examines social interaction in the Patum, showing how social distance is both semiotically and physically compressed in order to transform an experience of individuation and interpretation into one of incorporation and immanence. Chapter 3 presents the Berguedan model of everyday social interactions as structured along a continuum of respect and solidarity, personhood and belonging. Chapter 4 shows how the festival effigies are, through interaction with participants, brought to life as sacred persons who epitomize the two polarities of the everyday continuum. In Chapter 5, I describe the Patum’s manipulations of participant bodies, including crowding, strong rhythms, repetition, drink, continuous dancing, centripetal movement, and intense pyrotechnics, as well as a gradual acceleration toward vertigo during the course of the five days of the festival. These techniques of incorporation disable everyday critical faculties and transform the festival from a representation of social divisions into a forcible communion between them.

Parts III and IV describe the recent history of the Patum, in which Berguedans of all classes treated the event as a deliberate instrument of community reproduction, despite intense disagreement about the nature of the community in question. Part III examines the shift in key metaphors under the Franco regime from the social body to the Oedipal family, a more suitable vehicle for negotiating conflict and change over time. Chapter 6 describes the metaphors of maternity used in the past thirty years to characterize the Patum’s role in the local community. These metaphors are related in chapter 7 to the patriarchal discourses of the Franco regime, and the constraints these discourses placed upon local cultural reproduction. All factions associated the Patum with a vernacular sacrality and especially with the local Madonna, whereas the Franco regime resurrected the disembodied, hieratic religion of the Corpus Christi procession. Chapter 8 describes how the Patum became a national focus of resistance and a school of Catalanist democratic mobilization, in which the language of origins was used to reconstruct the primal scene of the new generation. The Patum’s nonverbal techniques of incorporation provided a means both of reconciling Catalanists across ideological differences and enabling the participation of the immigrant population: the Patum became a much-copied template and was appropriated not only into other festivals but into all genres of Catalan collective performance. It offered, I argue, the experiential basis for the now hegemonic Catalan theory of identity as the embodied memory of performance.

In Part IV, the consequences for the Patum itself emerge: it became a festival of mass physical participation, both intensifying and extensifying in performance, and exceeding the control of its local mobilizers, who increasingly define it as a kind of “addiction.” Chapter 9 describes the transformation of the Patum when Berga’s primary relationship with the outside world became one of consumption rather than production. Chapter 10 explores the contemporary Berguedan debate between “networkers” and integristes. Networkers are proponents of economic, political, and cultural linkages with the outside world: they therefore favor preserving distinctions between persons as individuals, but dissolving the member/outsider boundary. The skeptical integristes cite a history as old as the Patum in which such linkages have produced nothing but political domination, economic exploitation, and local division. They are ready to make members of outsiders, but tolerate neither spectators nor relations at a distance: for them, you are either incorporated or nonexistent. This contest of survival strategies is conducted largely through divergent styles of reproducing and appropriating the Patum. Chapter 11 draws back to give a more general account of the fate of local culture between transition and globalization, showing how the forms of compromise that provided a model for accommodation in the democratic transition leave the community vulnerable in less equal negotiations with global capital. At the same time, they continue to sustain Berga’s and Catalonia’s refusal of violent separatism.

Organic Solidarity in the Provinces

Like the people of Berga in the Patum, I attempt to construct in this book a coherent totality out of heterogeneous and resistant matter. The Berguedans have the advantage of me by four hundred years and several thousand more minds on the job, yet even they have not been able to master their social experience by modeling it. Naturally, I have not come close, but a principal object of this book is to show the parallels between their project and mine. The compressed theoretical introduction that follows should not alarm the reader, though it may initially bewilder. I simply want to show with a synoptic glance how much is packed into traditional collective performance. The book that follows will unpack a good deal of it; no scholar knows enough to unpack all of it.

Festival has been an important topic in folklore, history, and anthropology for some years, and what it accomplishes at the symbolic and discursive levels is now beginning to be understood. It dramatizes actual or proposed social arrangements, especially collective identities and hierarchies, in order to win consent, force acquiescence, or destabilize other such representations. However, a view of collective performance as an arena of contesting utterances in the present fails to take seriously the widespread native insistence that some identities are not constructed, but real, that some performances are “imposed” and some are “in the blood.” Attending to the diachronic experience of bodies in the festival, this book shows that such distinctions are neither the false consciousness resulting from successful naturalization nor interest-based allegiance disguising itself as attachment. Rather, they point to a sophisticated native awareness of how repeated performance, grounded in everyday material relations, can gradually transmute experience into something like essence.

I will describe the “techniques of incorporation” exercised upon me as a potential new Berguedan, and the first-person voice sheds light not merely on this ethnographic encounter, but on the general process of socializing outsiders and creating local loyalties in a world of transnational individuals and global forces. Poor communities cannot afford to ignore outsiders, high or low: outsiders must be converted into social persons and thus made useful. Concluding from historical experience that even the autonomy of personhood poses risks to the general good, Berguedans go further. Through the Patum’s aggressive communion, they force newcomers as well as themselves to become members of a single social body. They acknowledge, however, the costs thus imposed on individuals, and the Patum’s constraints are both desired and resented by all concerned.

During the 1970s, the Patum became a means of mobilizing a larger Catalan social body and a widely appropriated model for collective action. Its controlled violence to individual selves enabled viable collective action to emerge from the aftermath of civil war, dictatorship, and mass immigration. The emotional impact of participation in the Patum suggested a formulation of Catalan identity that could overcome those historical divisions: identity is not found in ethnic or ideological lineage, but in the embodied memory of performance. This performative model has profoundly influenced the practice of the regional government since 1979. It is not free of ambivalence. My informants fear the consequences of a strong collective identity even as they cultivate it, and sometimes when they sing their own music they hear the echo of the Francoist anthem.

This book sets the period of democratic transition into a longer history of the Patum’s use by Berguedans as a model for articulating the relationship of individuals, the community, and the larger world. When the Patum emerged from the church feast of Corpus Christi, the hierarchy of members in the sacralized body politic was contested, but the local linkages to larger social and cosmic orders were clear. Later, as Catalonia experienced violent industrial and nationalist conflict, the Oedipal family became a more productive metaphor than the social body, and the Patum became at once maternal refuge and primal scene. Democratization and European integration raised the fear of a mass with no center or edges, figured in a Patum ever longer, more crowded, and more intense. Most recently, Berguedans have responded to the challenge of reproducing the community in a global economy by attempting to impose two new models. Many make a virtue of necessity by reconceiving Berga as a nexus in a constantly refigured network and the Patum as an object of exchange. Those unwilling to surrender sacrality and stability revert to the idea of the Patum as Berga’s Corpus Mysticum, now a more literal social body no longer capable of shifting between microcosm and macrocosm. Standing for nothing but itself, the Patum of these skeptics, who have been “burned” once too often, declares the end of representation.

Through all of these variations, dating from early modernity to modernity’s apparent end, Berguedans have used the Patum to address the quintessentially modern task of constructing a totality out of diverse social elements. Their reliance on the social body as metaphor for this purpose is of course common to a long tradition of European social theories as well as the collective performances influencing them and influenced by them: the medieval theology of the Corpus Mysticum, nationalism’s construction of the nation-state as an organic individual, Fascist corporatism, and the neocorporatism of the welfare state and the new Europe.¹ But the strategies of Berguedans and their immediate situation—the industrial community—resonate most strongly with Durkheim and his concept of “organic solidarity.” As defined by Durkheim, this is the form of integration proper to societies with a strong division of labor, a valuing of complementarity as a result of mutual dependence; it stands in opposition to the “mechanical solidarity” of simple societies in which all members are animated by a common consciousness ([1893]1984).

In practice, as even Durkheim was compelled to admit, the division of labor fosters conflict, and where forms of organic solidarity exist, they have generally been engineered by social elites as mitigation. The Patum offers the “folk” or grassroots equivalent of such elite engineering, typical of small communities in which it is generally accepted that difference and inequality must be lived with, because both radical social change and individual exit are impractical (cf. Hirschman 1970). Several European festival genres, indeed, address this problem. Perhaps most familiar to scholars is Carnival, a space of licence and inversion in which criticism may take place, resentment may be vented, and alternatives may be imagined.² The Patum participates in a rather less well-examined class of performances: folk dramas of encounter and combat ending in some mode of reconciliation.³ These performances theatricalize social divisions in ways indirect enough to be denied if necessary, but legible enough to be understood by community members. Integrating social struggles into founding narratives, they show difference as the base of community. They acknowledge the pains of coexistence and supersede them, in part, through the shared experience of participation.

This latter effect is intensified in the Patum by the presence of other ritual forms—those of communion and those of civic display.⁴ In this way, many of Durkheim’s contradictions find potential resolution. In practice, the only alleviation Durkheim could suggest for the pains of a class society was the cultivation of mechanical solidarity in subgroups or crosscutting identifications.⁵ The Patum, however, cultivates both organic and mechanical solidarity by differential use of two levels of the festival, which Durkheim later distinguished as “representative ritual” and “collective recreation” ([1912]1960, 543). The former lays out the differences and groupings in Berguedan life for all to examine. Not only does it construct them as complementary parts of a whole, it presents each element as an object of desire, promising and in some cases delivering attainment. Here the Patum recalls Durkheim’s suggestion that heterosexual desire provides the deep model for organic solidarity.⁶ The lower level of the festival, intense and uncontrolled bodily performance in which difference is lost, relieves the concentration on symbols and creates the “collective effervescence” that is the corporeal basis for mechanical solidarity.

I refer often to Durkheim and Freud in this book, not as explanatory frameworks but as high-theory analogues of the “sensuous thought” of the Patum.⁷ The theories and the festival share not only core concerns and metaphors, but core ambivalences and contradictions in their attempts to address modernity.⁸ One justification for the Durkheimian parallel is genealogical: Durkheim’s organic solidarity ultimately derives from the same theology of the Corpus Mysticum that gave birth to the Patum.⁹ Further, like Durkheim and his school, Berguedans are highly sensitive to the cognitive and emotional power of bodily experience and recognize the importance of “natural symbols” (Douglas [1973]1982) for creating social facts. Finally, like Durkheim, Berguedans are willful functionalists in an unpropitious historical situation, insisting against all the evidence on the foundational, normal, and systemic character of collective expressions that are in fact visibly reactive, compensatory, and maintained by powerful social controls (cf. Lukes 1985, 173–74; Coser 1984, xxiii). This last similarity is not unrelated to the others. Durkheim declared sociology the historical successor to religion: both are efforts to conceptualize society (Lukes 1985, 467, 476). Given Catholic Europe as our context, we might suggest that both festival participants and social theorists partake of a sacramental habit of thought in which representations are credited with a direct relationship to reality, and to act on one is to act on the other. In this way, for example, the body as metaphor suggests the body as instrument. Berguedans manipulate the Patum—and themselves in it—in the hope of transforming Berga. Scholars are sometimes given to similar confidence that the refinement of their models will enable them to reshape society.¹⁰

The Patum is a genuine “collective representation,” incorporating Berguedan diversity both in symbol and in performance. Generated out of everyday social interactions, it has become the matrix through which all social relations are understood. But having created this powerful “total social fact” (Mauss 1967, 1), Berguedans find themselves trapped in it. A language as all-encompassing as the Patum allows only the partial freedoms of revoicing, revision, or parody; no statements make sense outside of it. Drawing everything into itself, the Patum also serves to maintain all the social memory on which it has fed: nothing in Berga ever goes away. In this sense, Berguedans feel themselves primordially determined. And here they find themselves in company with Freud. Though his determinism is different, they share his language of the sexual body: ostensibly literal for him, metaphorical for them. Like Freud’s subjects and Freud himself, Berguedans obsessively elaborate and rework this body metaphor, using it both to speak and to deny speech. Although they resist direct exegesis of the sacred they have made, metacommentaries at a distance from the Patum spell out its implications, endlessly demystifying what will once again be mystified in next year’s performance. Berguedans share Freud’s pessimism and his ambivalence about symbolic processes, ultimately seeing them as offering the only freedom of maneuver in a closed system.

Here we come to a third great theorist of modernity, for the symbolic determinism with which the Patum is generally credited is acknowledged by Berguedans to be a mask for a different kind of determinism. The cardboard-and-plaster figures of the festival dance on the hard ground of political economy. Berguedans are practical Durkheimians, because history has left them disenchanted with revolutions and (they say) without the courage to undertake one. But when pressed, they agree with Marx instead (and of course this industrial region has a long familiarity with socialist thought). Marx is particularly resonant today in the post-Transition Patum. Whereas Durkheim writes inside the moment when collective representations emerge, Marx writes of their decay, when the social facts have come unmoored from the structures that generated them and taken on an autonomous and increasingly automatic life.

I am at once a sympathetic Durkheimian participant, a self-doubting Freudian, and a skeptical Marxist outsider. Although this triple identification has made for confusion in my text as well as my sense of self, it is better acknowledged than evaded.¹¹ Trained as a folklorist, I am obliged to take my Berguedan interlocutors at least as seriously as I do the theorists and to carry out a “hermeneutics of completion” as the basis for any later “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 20–36). I begin, then, by attempting to enter and recreate the Patum from within, drawing on my own experience of participation and on community metacommentaries. My first task is to reconstruct the world the Patum makes in a more systematic and explicit language than participants require. More than that, I am reproducing as well as representing the Berguedan project: I try to create at the textual level the same kind of integrated whole that the Patum makes out of Berga. For this work, the tools of symbolic anthropology are apt: they are essentially Durkheimian.¹²

But the ethnographer’s work does not end in translating from a restricted to an elaborated code (Bernstein 1971) or in creating a scholarly equivalent to folk poiesis. The next task is to draw back and, in dialogue with the Berguedans, contextualize the construction they have made, looking at the materials they had to work with, the goals they sought, and the environment they hoped to transform. At this distance, both the Berguedans and I have mixed feelings about the power of symbolic communication and, in particular, of performance: the setting into motion of symbols by bodies (cf. Fernandez 1986). Like Bakhtin, I am enthralled by the capacity of repetition to modify but also to perpetuate older messages (1981); Berguedans are similarly preoccupied with certain inertias in their performance forms. Like James Scott, I see symbolic performance as the space of maneuver in which those who cannot speak freely conduct their politics (1990). But Berguedans continue to use the Patum even after democracy has been restored and a Habermasian public sphere of rational-instrumental communication has been made available (Habermas 1989). They worry about this: are they “folklorizing” themselves, and would they do better to spend their time on “serious” things? They worry, too, about the toll taken by performance. In the Patum, the “natural symbol” of the body is the primary expressive resource (Douglas [1973]1982), and this entails an expenditure of the self not demanded by more alienated codes. The intensity of bodily performance in many subaltern settings suggests that the power subjects cannot exercise on their surroundings is turned back on the self, the only domain they may control. Repressed aggression can turn performance into outright self-destruction.¹³

To be sure, Berguedans cannot be called subaltern from any global perspective: the proper adjective is provincial. But in this setting, the Patum’s physical intensity is unexpected. The festival is a public assault on the clothes and skins and backs and livers of people who in everyday life are greatly concerned with appearances and respectability. We might ask whether this visibly self-damaging performance is not itself metaphorical. Berguedans characterize these aspects of the Patum as “primitive” and “of the poor,” sometimes even as wasteful and degrading. This periodic self-abjection dramatizes their strong sense of “relative deprivation”: inferiority to the Barcelonans and, a fortiori, the Europeans with whom they compare themselves (Runciman [1966]1971). More, it suggests a deep ambivalence toward performance that we might see as characteristically provincial.

Scholars have not theorized the provincial very much: our best approximation is found in Bourdieu, whose work takes for granted the homologies between the field of social class and the field of the nation-state (1984, 1990a). The provincial occupies the same uneasy middle ground in the latter that the petit bourgeois occupies in the former. Both are socially ambiguous, and both aspire to incorporation in higher status categories. We can therefore extend to the provincial Bourdieu’s characterization of the petit bourgeois. Investing extraordinary effort in a performance of self that is intended to win external recognition and consequent reward, he is ultimately “haunted by appearances” (1984, 253) and the uncertain reality of his achievement.

The real anatomy of the provincial condition is found in the nineteenth-century novel, and there we can clearly see its radical ambivalence, torn between local attachments and metropolitan ambitions. The ideal subjects of organic solidarity, provincials feel their own lack and seek completion in contact with the outside world. The provincial novel thus reproduces the fairy tale plot, with the hero leaving home to seek his fortune in a world of wider possibilities. But in the novel, the hero may or may not succeed.¹⁴ One who does win sexual and economic incorporation pays for it affectively with the loss of home and community. However, the ambitious provincial who stays in place receives, at best, token metropolitan encouragement, at a high cost to others and with no elevation for the province as a whole.¹⁵

The provincial is the maker of the modern.¹⁶ In part, it is a question of energy: the provincial is at once well-fed enough and hungry enough for the struggle. But more importantly, whether they fail or succeed, whether they leave or stay, provincials are “committed to the symbolic” (Bourdieu 1984, 253): they are performers, dreamers, and theorists. Unsatisfied with their position in a world which, if ideal, would see them better placed, they aspire to more perfect unions. The sacramental consciousness of a Berguedan is open to transmutation into the engineer’s faith in her blueprint.¹⁷

Berguedans have occasionally nurtured such aspirations, imagining the Patum as the foundation of a native modernity. But just as the provincial novels repeatedly show us characters whose imaginings are destructive of others and the self, so Berguedans have innumerable instances in their collective memory of provincial projects going awry.¹⁸ The three Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century provide local examples. More recently they have experienced the high human costs of Francoism (quintessentially provincial in its resentful oscillations between autarky and emulation); and since the Transition they have had the negative exemplar of the terrorist group ETA in the Basque country, now more than ever relentless in its assault on the ideological center as well as the local infrastructure. These disasters and more modest failures of local administration and personal ambition have fostered a certain humility among Berguedans, along with a feeling that the half-acknowledged, willful self-delusion of sacramental thinking is not so dangerous as the modern’s conviction of his ability to control reality. The Patum offers at least the compensation of communion in exchange for its renunciation of mastery.

The Patum’s giants, dwarfs, and mules dance out an eternal debate between irreconcilable postures toward the central power of the moment: aspiration to inclusion, self-mockery of pretensions to inclusion, and rejection of the terms by which inclusion can be won. And the Patum as a whole is a reluctant obsession in local conversation, standing for all Berguedan self-fashioning: endlessly celebrated as the capital by which Berga’s fortune will be made, endlessly dismissed as a self-destructive waste of time and resources.

I will argue in the conclusion that globalization makes us all provincials, and this is certainly true of our relation to the symbolic. The proliferation of the sign in postmodernity coincides with the end of faith in representation and a loss of confidence in the ability to operate on reality directly: hence both our fantasies and our fears of the performativity of the sign. In Berga, as in many enclaves with special resources for performance, the response has been a cultivation of immanence through which body and community become their own referents. Some Berguedans have made the ontological shift, granting “firstness” to the Patum (Peirce 1991, 188–89), and dismissing all external relations and representations as inherently alienated from that core reality. There is, they insist, nothing else in the world.

There is, at any rate, nothing else going: provincial regions increasingly need to live off their symbols. Today Catalan festivals are attracting growing attention among a global public, owing primarily to the rise in tourism resulting from the 1992 Summer Olympics (which featured Patumderived devils in the closing ceremonies). In the ensuing years, the Patum itself appeared internationally in several television travel programs and numerous guidebooks internationally, along with a growing number of scholarly works in English (Harris 2003 and 2000; Gilmore 2002; Warner 1998). Exoticized and dehistoricized, it provides the setting for an erotic encounter in Colm Tóibín’s novel The South (1991). In 2004, it will be Spain’s candidate for the UNESCO designation of Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Patrimony of Humanity. As Berguedans and their fellows in peripheral communities around the world await the tour buses and resign themselves to the loss of such control as they have had over their own representation, it becomes important for an English-speaking audience to see that today’s passionate, participatory festivals are neither simple drunken revels nor mystical survivals of ancestral rites but resonant forms of collective action in response to a global crisis of local communities. More urgently, since the Spanish transition to democracy has been proposed as an answer to “Balkanization” and a model for other plural societies around the Mediterranean (cf. Linz, Stepan, Gunther 1995, 77; Morán 1991, 243–41), the long-term integrative power of that transition’s mobilizing devices is of more than local interest. Finally, when cultural representation is increasingly proffered around the world as a response to inequality, it is vital to understand both the power and the limitations of performance in modifying social arrangements.

The Setting: Berga in Catalonia

Berga is a city of roughly fifteen thousand inhabitants in the foothills of the Spanish Catalan Pyrenees, about eighty kilometers north-northwest of Barcelona (Map 1). It sits on a rocky shelf below the Serra de Queralt, a little to the west of the valley of the Llobregat River, which descends from Castellar de n’Hug, close to the French border, to meet the sea just south of Barcelona.

The Llobregat bifurcates the comarca or county of the Berguedà, of which Berga is the capital (Map 2). Above Berga is the mountainous and heavily wooded Upper Berguedà, full of almost abandoned villages and a few small towns: Bagà, seat of the old barony of Pinós; La Pobla de Lillet, in the eighteenth century an industrial rival to Berga; Castellar de n’Hug, a beautifully reconstructed tourist trap with a remaining shepherd or two. In the northwest of the comarca is the impressive twin-peaked massif Pedraforca, well known to Catalan mountaineers, with a barely functioning coal mine at its foot and mining and cattle towns on its skirts. The Berguedà is topped by the high Pyrenean ranges of Cadí and Moixeró, which were crossed mostly by smugglers, bandits, and shepherds until the opening of the Túnel del Cadí in 1984. On the other side is the plain of the Cerdanya, a comarca divided between French and Spanish Catalonia in the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees and now subsisting on tourism.

Map 1. Catalonia

Below Berga is the Lower Berguedà, hilly and calcareous but considered part of the Catalan central plain. Along the winding narrow highways to Ripoll and Vic in the east and the diocesan seat of Solsona in the west lie municipalities of dispersed farms: animal fodder is the chief crop of the rocky land, and cows and pigs are raised in fairly significant numbers. The central axis of population is the Llobregat, whose meager water supply furnished power for dozens of textile factories from the mid-nineteenth century on. The towns of Gironella and Puigreig serve as municipal centers to the industrial colonies, factories surrounded by worker housing, the owner’s summer house, a school, and a church. The great majority of these factories have closed in the past twenty years. These factories go all the way down the increasingly murky Llobregat, past the large industrial city of Manresa (ca. 100,000 inhabitants) and the strange fingery peaks of Montserrat to the delta below Barcelona—once the richest agricultural land in Catalonia, now industrial suburbs. The river’s trajectory has long directed economic flows: it is also the route followed by Berguedans for bureaucratic obligations and, increasingly, for education, leisure, and employment.

Map 2. Berga and its hinterland

Figure 1. The city of Berga below the Queralt range. Photo by Luigi, Berga.

The city of Berga (Figure 1) offers a microcosm of its comarca: mountains behind it and plain beneath it, coal mines to the north, textile factories within the town, and a largely hypothetical tourist industry. The people, too, are set between two worlds—one eye toward the mountains’ peace and isolation, one toward Barcelona’s dynamism.

The early industrial modernization of Catalonia was not accompanied by a liberal belief in free trade: Catalonia’s traditional industries prospered best under protectionist legislation or in times of diminished foreign competition (as in the case of the World War I boom). In the Berguedà, the autarkist policies of early Francoism were in part economically beneficial (apart from the new impetus they gave to smuggling, an important local occupation): the 1940s and 1950s saw the expansion of both lignite coal mining and textile manufacture, the comarca’s principal industries (Pedrals 1990, 76). The economic expansion of the 1960s provided further stimulus to expansion, but almost immediately the invasion of international competition precipitated a long decline. Employees in the textile industry numbered 10,937 in 1962; 2, 154 in 1987 (Miralies i Guasch et al. 1990, 83); and many fewer today—the few factories remaining open are heavily mechanized. The mines had nearly 3500 employees in 1960, and 900 in 1986 (87–88). The principal mine at Fígols closed entirely in 1990, and the smaller Saldes mine reduced its operations in 1991. The agricultural sector, long plagued by low prices and small, undercapitalized farms, is beginning to develop small-production specialties, such as goat cheese, natural veal, and truffles, for metropolitan connoisseurs.

An expansion of services, public employment, and construction has offset industrial decline in the city of Berga at the expense of the rest of the comarca, which suffers the intense depopulation characteristic of the Catalan interior. Because Berga is the only large town within a wide area, families that once only shopped there are now moving there for the sake of the schools or the convenience. But Berguedan commerce relies heavily on pensioned miners and state employees, neither of whom are likely to sustain the general burden much longer, and must compete with that of much larger and now easily reached Manresa and Barcelona. Attempts to develop tourism face the challenges of deficient infrastructure, recent fierce forest fires, and more spectacular offerings on the other side of the Túnel del Cadí.

The Berguedà is la Catalunya pobra, both by objective measures and in their own self-estimation. Catalonia, of course, is rich, and the absolute poverty of the Berguedà is nothing to that of, say, Extremadura in southern Spain. But Catalans look largely to Europe, not Spain, as their model, and in this framework, Berguedans consider themselves disadvantaged.

Berga is part of Old Catalonia, the northeastern region that was fully reconquered from the Saracens by the ninth century: it belongs to what is in many respects the most conservative part of the country. It is part of the traditionalist area that fought for God, king, and local rule in the Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century; that collaborated with Barcelona industrialists to create the turn-of-the-century Lliga Regionalista, a right-wing Catalanist party that tried to model the new order upon the old; and that now gives Convergència i Unió, the center-right Catalanist coalition that has governed Catalonia since the restoration of autonomy in 1979, the bulwark of its power. In everyday practice, Berguedans are almost monolingual in Catalan, and middle-class townspeople as well as the farmers go to Mass on Sundays; they hold fast to their festivals and to tradition for tradition’s sake. There is a substantial working-class socialist vote (local socialists are strongly Catalanist), a respectable minority supporting Catalan independentist parties, and, through the 1980s and 1990s, a growing level of political disaffection. In each case, localism—seen as realistic selflimitation to achievable or at least necessary goals—tends to override faith in any larger political entity.

Architecturally, Berga is a typical Old Catalan city (Map 3), with a medieval core and nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions. The Casc Antic, or old city, is narrow and irregular, with small places dotting tangled streets and no buildings of special distinction. The top of the town has a stream flowing through it which provided power to several factories. Below, the long Carrer Major (Main Street) stretches between the Plaça Sant Joan, with the palace of the old lords of Peguera and the templar’s church of Saint John, and the Plaça Sant Pere, the site of the parish church of Santa Eulàlia and the city hall. Above and to the east of this plaça is the oldest part of the city and the last surviving medieval gate, the Portal de Santa Magdalena.

The first eixample (broadening) of Berga dates from the midnineteenth century: it is the long Plaça Viladomat, popularly known as the Vall, which extends into an avenue leading to factories, the cemetery, the high school, and the twentieth-century xalets (detached houses with gardens) on the little Serra de Casampons. The Vall and its extension are below and to the east of the Plaça Sant Pere.

Map 3. The city of Berga

The second eixample is the Carrer del Roser, the beginning of the highway to the episcopal seat of Solsona, built up in the late nineteenth century with the villas of Berga’s upper class. Xalets were built above it in the twentieth century, and the Plaça de la Creu was expanded into the long Passeig de la Pau, lined with banks and modern apartment blocks, which descends to the main highway. Past the Carrer del Roser and the old park is the municipal annex of La Validan, with its Romanesque church and its old roadside inn. The boundary is marked by the caserna, the Spanish army post built after the Civil War on land used during the Second Republic as a fresh-air school for poor Barcelona children. Resented as the army has been, much of the population regrets that the Ministry of Defense decided to shut down the caserna in the early 1990s: soldiers spent money in restaurants and bars.

The Casc Antic is the scene of the Patum, and the present route of the passades is close to that of the processional route documented in the early eighteenth century. The narrow gray stone streets and constricted squares give the Patum its brightness and the bang of the fuets its resonance. The Plaça Sant Pere, center of the action (Map 4), has all its features exploited.

The Plaça Sant Pere was long known as the Plassa Cremada, the Burned Square, a name taken from a 1655 French visitation that was to be repeated by Napoleon’s troops, the Carlists, and the liberals during the course of the nineteenth century. It is an indefinable polygon; in 1929 its remodelers tried to turn it into a triangle with paving stones patterned to lead to the apex of city hall, but failed to impose perfect regularity. The church is on the north side, at a rough right angle to the wall of houses on one side of the Ajuntament, with the Carrer Major opening between them. Beyond the church, the Carrer Buxadé rises along the north side of the plaça, with the stone barana to delineate it. The part of the crowd that prefers to look on or likes to fight with the Guita Grossa stands behind the barana. A space between the end of the barana and the block of houses jutting into the plaça on the east is used for scaffolds of seating in the Patum—mostly used by older people and young children; behind it, the Berruga, a wooden-beamed avenue beneath the houses, leads into more medieval streets.

The city hall is at roughly the southwest corner of the plaça; the architects of its 1929 renovation adapted the building to the corner site by covering the unassuming portal with a huge convex balcony supported by four Doric columns, suitable for presiding over the Patum and anything else. The effigies of the Patum are stored in a warehouse space on the ground floor below the balcony, and it is here that most comparses and their families tend to congregate during the Patum.

Map 4. The Plaça Sant Pere

The south wall of the plaça comprises more houses, formerly of the wealthiest citizens. The balconies are a favored site for viewing the Patum, and these families are obliged to entertain every day of the festival.

The southeast part of the plaça gives way to a smaller placeta, site of the old hospital and now of the Ateneu Berguedà (an old working-class Republican club), the museum, and the municipal police station. A narrow stair to the south at the entry to this plaça descends to the back of City Hall; it is there that the plens are dressed, so this stair is much transited. The placeta itself receives the overflow of the Patum. Below it is the Vall; to the east are the streets of the old Jewish quarter.

“We know the plaça with our feet,” one patumaire said affectionately of its dingy, irregular stones and its rises and falls in unexpected places. Since my first fieldwork, the plaça has been restored, its facades cleaned up and strengthened, the barana rebuilt, the crumbling church steps replaced and given a handicapped-access ramp, and the pavement redone (to erase its former “fascistic” tendencies, according to the architects). The architects of the Catalan Generalitat were prevented by Berguedan traditionalists from making any major changes, much to their annoyance (“why should four days have to prevent the plaça from working the rest of the year?”), but still, the texture of the Patum has been changed.