Covid-19 has profoundly altered festive practices all around the world. Public health regulations have imposed restrictions on public celebrations, compromising social rhythm and community relationships, and calling the real and symbolic objects connected with the lockdown period into question (Appadurai 1996). The “normality” of mass public rituals has had to be suspended due to restrictions connected with lockdown, social distancing, and new forms of social control (Mansilla 2020). This has translated into feelings of social frustration and community mourning caused by the suspension of festivities (Bindi 2021). Faced with the impossibility of performing their collective practices, communities have reacted in different ways, from cancelling festivals to holding them using alternative smaller or digital formulas, and in some cases conflicts of greater or lesser intensity have appeared. One could even say that the pandemic has resulted in many communities reacting with an attitude of resilience with new forms of use and negotiation of intangible heritage, stressing its political nature.

This chapter examines the social effects, debates, and conflicts experienced in festivals in Catalonia through ethnographic research performed from a dual perspective: on the one hand, online analysis of the debates and alternatives used to hold festivities; and, on the other hand, an ethnographic analysis of some cases studies in Catalonia through participant observation and interviews with people connected with these celebrations. Examination of the public actions performed during this short period of time is fertile ground to analyze the changes made to the concept of festivities, through a process of reconfiguration of traditions (Testa and Isnart 2020).

Our objective is to use the case of Catalonia to set out the theoretical scope and importance of processes to recreate heritage in relation to festive practices. We aim to show how festive practices are changeable and how human activities establish and manipulate their own differentiations and purposes in a ritual context (Bell 2007). From this point of view, we have formulated the hypothesis that the processes of change in festivals adopted in the past year have come at the expense of conflicts between the logic of lockdown and the logic of festivities. In this sense, festive practices have sometimes been stages not just for cohesion and solidarity but also the dramatization of social tensions.

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON FESTIVITIES: FROM ALTERING COMMUNITY RHYTHMS TO FORMULATING NEW RITUAL PRACTICES

All festivals undergo constant processes of change and adaptation.