and the cave. As for me, you can draw your own conclusions.
Of course I had my theoretical reasons too. The festival was proving resistant to the ethnography-of-communication approach then dominant in folklore studies, not only because so many actors were involved but also because of its continuity over time: though the context of the moment affected it, it tended rather to make its own context, subduing participants to its own rules instead of vice-versa. The creative individual agent, beloved of folklorists since the 1960s, here submitted shamelessly to tradition, the collective, and the inarticulate, reckless of all the trouble we had taken to dismande survivalist and superorganic assumptions.
In designing my field research I hadn’t yet gotten that far: I intended only to get beyond semiotic approaches locating meaning in the fixed program of the festival and was confident of finding self-conscious, heterogeneous actors if I looked hard enough. To begin with, I was preoccupied with the problem of observation. The ethnographer can attain a kind of omniscience through collecting and collating data from many sources: a good seat in the balcony, local documentation, and multiple reports of what is happening elsewhere. But we had become more interested in the “aura” of proximity to the center: what it’s like to be up close, what the participant is feeling. How do people understand their cultural performances? How do symbols convince their makers and beholders? In short, how do cultural forms and the mind of the native work upon each other?
We cannot get inside the native’s head, said the symbolic anthropologists I had been reading. We are no longer so naive or ethnocentric as to suppose that they think like we do; we are not so presumptuous as to claim to understand. What we can do is hermeneutics: we can read the texts they have made. The “stories they tell themselves about themselves”—to use a key phrase of the school—are framed performances of which the outsider may quietly join the audience (Geertz 1973).
Having come to folklore from literary studies, I was reassured by this “interpretive turn.” But my department at the University of Pennsylvania, having a strong sociolinguistic bent, had also discovered practice. Our teachers never let us forget that our informants were not just culturally constructed intellects reflecting on themselves for the pleasure of it: they were constrained by the struggle to sustain bodily existence in more or less difficult material and political conditions. Moreover, they were individuals with whom we engaged in real relationships, implying mutual obligations and real-world consequences.
I had two concerns, then, in my project of reading texts. The first was to remember that texts have authors and readers with purposes (folklore had to assert this before it could begin to deconstruct it). The second was to spare myself and my informants as far as possible the dreadful weight of mutual obligations and real-world consequences.
The Patum itself could not be treated as a text, I decided. It had no author—although many nineteenth-century commentators had attempted to create one for it. It had no puppeteer pulling the strings from above and coordinating the action; there was no one consciousness that could perceive, much less direct, the whole. It was a genuinely collective and emergent creation, too shifting and evanescent to pin down. Each participating individual would not merely interpret the whole from his or her own position—on a balcony, inside an effigy, and so on—but would have to imagine the whole as well: interpretation would entail the creation of a text.
So I devised a study of the multiple “texts” of the Patum that exist in public and semipublic space. From Mossèn Armengou’s book and other readings, I knew about festival programs, monographs, sermons, poems, children’s drawings, videos, souvenirs, photographs, civic decor, proverbs, musical compositions, conversations in bars, newspaper articles, cartoons, advertising, liturgical objects, house decoration, costume, impromptu performances, miniature and neighborhood performances, festivals modeled on the Patum, and festivals created in antithesis to and parody of the Patum. Through these inscriptions, which I could examine more or less at my leisure, I could map local interpretation according to historical period, social class, gender, political affiliation, age, native and outsider identity, or whatever other social categories emerged from the study. And there was surely a contest of interpretations: I could look at the rhetorical tactics used to gain adherents to a particular interpretive community and the influence of power relations on interpretive hegemony. Finally, by comparing interpretations at a deep-structural level, I could perhaps understand something about the constraints placed on interpretation by the form of the event.
This strategy, I realized, would be biased toward elite productions, and I would have to take that into account; popular interpretation of the Patum was no doubt found in the performance itself. For this I would observe styles of participation and perhaps collect taped narratives of festival experience. But I would be dealing primarily with information in the public domain, things that anyone could discover merely by looking. I would not be intruding in anyone’s life. Nor would I presume, I thought, to say what the Patum itself was or meant; I would not risk oversimplifying. I would address the event only through its inscriptions.
But turn it around: I would enter into their thoughts without entering into their feelings. It sounds heartless and superficial—even if it had been possible. I would attend not to the central event but to the texts that were its epiphenomena. Is not aura more than this? The Berguedans thought so: when I expected them to speak of symbols in the Patum, they spoke of bodily states and emotions. “It’s a feeling—a brotherhood—” said Rossendo of the devils when I asked what they did down there under City Hall all that time. “How can I express it?” “I can’t explain the Patum to you,” said Ramon Forés, the bartender at the Casino, where I lived that first year. “When you do a salt de plens, and they kneel you down to dress you, it’s a feeling like, a feeling—I can’t explain it to you.”
Mossèn Armengou’s assertions had seemed overblown. “The Patum is the baptism of our citizenship …”; “The Patum is the miracle which Berga has known how to make and perpetuate …”; and on and on. But it came from all sides: the Patum was considered not only with humor, pride, and possessiveness but with passion. University students postponed their exams by a year when they coincided with Corpus Christi: there are always exams, but only one Patum. One man told me of a friend who had gone AWOL from his military service so that he could say he’d never missed a Patum. Another one spoke of a Berguedan scientist who’d gone to live in America. She made great efforts to return every year, but on the few occasions when it was not possible she called up friends at City Hall and made them hang the telephone out of the window for an hour at a time, long-distance from the West Coast. Another story was told when I turned off the tape recorder: a man who had cancer and expected to die before another Patum came. He had had a colostomy two weeks before Corpus Christi and was still in the hospital in Barcelona. Could he leave to go up to Berga for the Patum? Out of the question: it would kill him. But sooner that than missing his last Patum. He made himself so miserable, virtually going on a hunger strike, that the hospital and his family found a way: he was borne up to Berga in an ambulance and carried to the balcony of a house on the plaça. There he pulled himself up by the railings to see the dancing and collapsed back on the bed during the breaks (the Patum seems to have cured him, for he subsequendy recovered and is now alive and well and dressing the plens).
The Patum was ineffable: there was no one who did not say this. What it signified was something about Moors and local history—the stories varied and few cared very much—but the important thing was the way it made them feel. The Patum has to be lived. Some people encouraged me to live it; a few politely informed me that my project was useless, for, without having grown up in Berga and lived the Patum all my life, I was incapable of understanding anything about it. The more intellectual allowed that my work could have some utility in clarifying the Patum’s history, but the frankest speakers insisted that I was overlooking the heart of things in order to tinker with trivialities.
How was I to get inside the festival, then? My advisor, Roger D. Abrahams, had said to me, “It’s Corpus Christi, you know. Isn’t the body important?” No, it didn’t seem so. And in any case, I thought but did
