The Ritual Making of Central Catalonia: National Identity and Collective Forms of Action in Times of Political Crisis

What are the cultural devices and dynamics through which social identities are shaped and expressed, in a context characterised by an ongoing political crisis and mounting polarisation such as post-referendum (October 2017) Catalonia?  How are the expectations, concerns and claims structured and manifested therein though collective forms of action?  How are feelings of national belonging and attitudes of nationalism negotiated and crystallised through public rituality and reflected in other spheres of social life?

These and other unresolved tensions have determined a situation of unachieved transition, a state of “pseudo-transition” which, embedded and ethnographically observable at the micro-level, actually reflects largely the current situation in Catalonia as a whole.

The paper presents the main results of a long-term fieldwork (2016-2020) undertaken in the comarca of Solsonès, in central Catalonia. Said results and other broader research about Catalonia are also currently being adapted for presentation in a forthcoming volume: A. Testa and M. Vaczi (eds.), Public Rituality, Cultural Heritage-Making, and the Politics of National Identity in Contemporary Catalonia (Autumn 2021). The talk and subsequent feedback and discussion will give Dr. Testa (one of the editors and authors of the volume) many valuable insights that will certainly improve the quality of the forthcoming work.

Alessandro Testa is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University. Trained in History, Ethnology and Religious Studies, he received his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2013. He has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic fieldworks in Italy, Czech Republic, and Catalonia (Spain), has been affiliated for long terms with the Universities of Tallinn, Pardubice, Vienna, and Prague, and has also been a visiting scholar in Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Iceland. He works on a variety of topics with a regional focus on Central-Eastern and Mediterranean Europe. His research outputs include four authored books, three edited volumes, some 60 peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in volumes, several dozen other pieces of writing (reviews, reports, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.), and more than 120 talks and conference presentations in 20 countries.

Many of his publications can be retrieved here: https://cuni.academia.edu/AlessandroTesta

Contacts: alessandro.testa@fsv.cuni.cz

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