It has never been self-sufficient in food production: too cold for vines and olive trees, the terrain irregular, and the soil poor. The ability to eat, for Berguedans, does not depend entirely on their own labors but on their relations with each other and with outsiders.
Physical isolation is a second factor in interdependence. Berga had no great landowners or nobility with extralocal interests. The prosperity of the upper class depends on general Berguedan conditions, and the Berguedan elite has always been provincial with respect to larger Catalan cities. Within Berga, the classes are at no great physical remove from each other and no great cultural distance either. Patron-client and employer-employee relations are affective as well as instrumental and entail a great deal of mutual knowledge and evaluation.
In such a place, the metaphor of the social body is not problematic. For the Berguedans, Berga as a relatively bounded and cohesive entity is not an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) but a fact of life. This distinguishes it from the hegemonic projects in the form of imagined communities long foisted on the Berguedans: the universal Catholic Church, Franco’s “imperial Spain” or the Socialists’ “new Spain,” the neomedieval Catalonia of the early twentieth century or the “Catalonia-city” of today, to name only a few. All of these require heavy investments in representation, mediatic and political, to compensate for a deficit in lived interaction and succeed in proportion to the intensity of the latter and its compatibility with the former.
Berga’s self-representation, the Patum, is also compensatory: not for a lack of interaction but, on the contrary, for its tensions. Differentiation generates interdependence and even desire; it also creates mistrust and resentment. Convivència is at once a practical necessity and, in its deeper sense, an ideal recognized as utopian. It is strained by the fact that there is rarely enough to go around—not enough jobs, not enough prestige, not enough money. Although it would be a stretch to suggest that the “idea of limited good” or zero-sum worldview often attributed to peasant cultures holds sway in industrial Berga, it is a commonsense reality there that the gain of one is frequently the loss of another. Competition exists; it is bitter and painful. People are suspicious and factionalized.
Public life therefore vacillates—in tandem with the self-control of Berguedans—between careful avoidances and bitter conflict. Off the Carrer Major, partisan language cultivates itself in innumerable bars, associations, periodicals, and performances. “In Berga everything is double,” they said: it has two music schools, two ski clubs, two choirs, two theater groups, two history magazines, two political parties personally opposed and ideologically identical, two of anything you can think of that might profitably be combined to accomplish something worthwhile. Thus, for them, the Patum’s contest of interpretations—for me so revelatory, so “democratic”—was so obvious as not to be worth talking about, and it obscured the festival’s supreme achievement: wholeness.
It is nonetheless important that the Patum, formed through accretion and negotiation over several centuries, achieves wholeness by a radically different semiotic strategy than that of most political ceremonies created since the transition to democracy.2 The Patum relies on multivocal pluralism rather than abstract singularities. That is, rather than offering single collective emblems empty enough for a particular content to be projected into them, it provides a heterogeneous ensemble of concrete references allowing multiple points of entry into the whole and multiple stances within it. In Durkheim’s terms, rather than a mechanical solidarity in which everyone stands in identical and individual relation to a thinly defined collectivity, the Patum defines an organic solidarity, a true social body that reflects the sense of everyday economic and social interdependence between different positions. These links of the Patum to the lived social world are not merely semiotic but performed in modes of festival interaction that mimic and intensify everyday encounters, as Part II will show. This union of representation and interaction is what gives the Patum its intensity and Berga its reality.
The rest of the chapter will lay out the representational dimensions of the process; but a final point must be made about representation in the political sense. Berga, although geographically it can be seen as isolated, is in no way self-sufficient: it must speak downward to attract clients and upward to attract patrons. Since its emergence in the early seventeenth century, the Patum has been the language through which Berga proclaimed itself to its hinterland; since at least the eighteenth century, when the Patum began to savor of archaism, it has been its most conspicuous cultural capital for trading with the metropolis.
While the peasants who came in for the festival participated in a relatively direct and sustained way, the Patum had to be interpreted to the less accommodating outside forces of church, state, and market. This has been the task of the professional class—clergy, lawyers, and doctors—and later of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, teachers, and journalists. All of these derive their power from their intermediary position, representing the metropolis to the local and vice versa. But they are doubly dependent as much as doubly powerful. Without the constraint of force or the incentive of resources (and the latter, at least, have been scarce enough in Spain to make even the former difficult to sustain at the local level), their power to impose hegemonic languages upon their constituencies is limited. Instead they must, to some degree, adapt themselves to the population that constitutes their clientele. They can give to the metropolis only what the local has to offer—but in a voice the metropolis is willing and able to hear. They are thus professional interpreters, through whom local interests and cultural models reach the center; they translate, with greater or lesser fidelity according to their ability and the degree of distance, from the restricted code of the local to the elaborated code of the metropolis (Bernstein 1971).3 Occasionally—and later we will see a prime example in Berga’s Mossèn Armengou—a gifted interpreter can succeed in teaching a local model to the metropolis.
There is thus a rich history—dating back at least to 1725, when the bishop complained about disorder on Corpus Christi—of Berguedan explications of the Patum (Farràs i Farràs 1979; Noguera i Canal 1992; Noyes 1992). Such accounts typically provide both an allegorical interpretation of the dances and, since the nineteenth century, an origin narrative. The allegory allows the Patum’s combats to be read as the triumph of the current orthodoxy: the Church Triumphant over irrational nature, Carlists over liberals, liberals over Carlists, Catalonia over the Castilian invader, the people over feudalism, Imperial Spain over the infidel reds, democracy over repression, and so forth. The origin narrative places the Patum at the founding moment claimed in the current political master narrative: this has traditionally been medieval and, more recently, pre-Christian.
Both allegory and origin narrative serve a second purpose, especially in periods of political repression. In performing submission to the dominant order, they deflect outside interference. The emphasis on origins as determining factor was especially important during and after the Franco regime as a protective means of “denying coevalness” to the festival (Fabian 1983), which thus makes no controversial commentaries on the present nor threatens to transform it.
There are some popular origin legends too, although they reach us so much colored by their elite transcribers that not much can be made of them. But in general it can be said that elite origin narratives valorize the symbols of order in the festival and view the danced combats as the conquest of the disorderly elements, imagined as both lower-status and external to the community. Conversely, the popular narratives, many of which feature emergence from caves, celebrate these lower elements—the mules and the devils, even the Moors—as indigenous forces able to hold off impositions from above and outside the community. The fundamental story that the community tells itself about itself through the Patum has thus to do with social divisions and what each class fears in the other.
From Corpus Mysticum to Body Politic
Most historians of the Patum have been so urgently imbricated in the dialogue between local and metropolis—the latter primarily Catalanist Barcelona—that their work must be used with enormous caution: where documents have not actually been
