It is more than spectacular. The giant bubbling pan of an arrossada on the ground, stirred by a team of cooks; the fiery river of a correfoc passing through a narrow street; the triumph of a tiny child raising her hand at the top of a swaying human tower. No foreigner leaves Catalonia unimpressed by the vitality and pervasiveness of traditional popular culture. The camera can capture the splendid forms, but the atmosphere is what matters most, overwhelming the body and then incorporated. The simmering rice begins as sound and aroma; it becomes savor and inner warmth. The fire, mediated by smoke and sparks, startles the breath and marks skin and clothing. The tower is felt underneath as an enveloping tissue of pressures, even rising up from the paving stones, that linger in joints and muscles. Always the boundaries of the self must yield, in exhilaration and terror, to powerful stimuli and the agency of others.

COLLECTIVE CREATION

Contemporary innovation is often contrasted to modern invention as a distributed, cumulative effort. It depends on networked, mutually visible actors who exchange ideas and compete to outdo one another; it progresses by iteration and negotiation.

The persistent, vernacular, collective forms we call “tradition” or “folklore” also take shape through distributed invention, but their social base is different. To be sure, open-source technologies, music scenes, and social movements do not come from nowhere; indeed, they typically emerge from less focused vernacular practice. Nonetheless, they depend on the voluntary engagement of a self-selected group. It is different with the creations of scarce-resource, non-liberal societies – a category that includes Catalonia and most of the world during most of its history. Eating is not optional, and cuisines develop from both the material resources and the social arrangements at hand. Social interaction in shared space is not optional, and is rife with conflict and contradiction. Festival and ritual practice build on everyday sociability, just as cuisine builds on everyday commensality, to formalize, stylize, reflect upon, and reshape the realities on which they depend. In this sense, participation in folk culture is general, but the reverse of homogeneous. Escudella and carnival both make use of what there is. In reciprocity, escudella and carnival make themselves available to anyone who can make use of them.

The complexity of festival, ritual, and cuisine requires them to be sustained by continual practice.