Why You Transform at Local Festivals

Every August, thousands of towns and cities across Spain pause for a few days to celebrate what they’ve been celebrating for generations. And during those days, something changes in the way their residents think and act.

You don’t need a huge festival to notice it: the square of a two-hundred-person village during its August verbena is enough, where people who have known each other all their lives behave in a way that isn’t quite their usual one.

This isn’t a vague impression. Sociology and anthropology have been describing the phenomenon for more than a century, and what follows brings together five of their classic authors.

What’s happening in Spain this month

August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, is the date most Spanish towns choose for their patron saint festivals, the cycle of open-air dances, processions and bull runs that fills the August calendar from one end of the country to the other.

• In Buñol (Valencia), the last Wednesday of August brings La Tomatina: a full-scale tomato fight born in 1945 from a spontaneous scuffle during the giants-and-big-heads parade of the town’s patron saint festival. Young people repeated it on purpose in the following years, it survived being banned in the 1950s, and it was eventually declared a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest in 2002.
• In Bilbao, mid-August brings Aste Nagusia (Great Week), born in 1978 from a city council ideas competition to turn the festivities into a truly popular event, a format they hadn’t had until then, and organized ever since together with the neighborhood festival groups known as comparsas.
• The same month also brings the Great Weeks of Santander and Gijón, dozens of Moors and Christians festivals, and hundreds of local patron saint celebrations with their own opening proclamations, bonfires and bull runs.

None of this is exclusive to Spain or to August. What follows is the same psychological and social mechanism that explains any popular festival, in any culture and at any time of year.

The mind that only exists in a group

French physician and sociologist Gustave Le Bon devoted The Crowd (1895) to what happens to a person when they stop being alone and become part of a crowd. His answer comes down to three drivers, anonymity, contagion and suggestibility, which supposedly give rise to a kind of transitory collective mind. We tell that story with his own quotes, alongside Freud and Durkheim, in why winning a World Cup moves us so much.

For a festival, the most useful part is the correction social psychology later made to Le Bon. Stephen Reicher (1984) showed that in a crowd a person doesn’t lose their identity, but starts acting from the identity they share with the group, with its norms. That’s why a village dance doesn’t turn into just anything: it turns into whatever that town understands a fiesta to be. This doesn’t turn anyone into someone else; it changes, for a while, the frame in which that person acts.

The effervescence only a gathered group produces

Sociologist Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), described something similar from another angle: not what gets lost in the crowd, but what the gathered group can create that no isolated individual could produce alone.

Durkheim studied it through the night ceremonies of the Warramunga people of central Australia: chants, fires and dances that build for hours toward a pitch of collective excitement.

• He called this phenomenon collective effervescence: a state of emotional exaltation that only appears when people gather and act together, and that none of those present would feel with the same intensity alone.
• His now-classic line in the sociology of religion: “it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments, and out of this very effervescence, that the religious idea seems to be born.”
• Durkheim also documents that in those same ceremonies everyday norms (including sexual ones) were suspended for the duration of the rite, something we’ll come back to with Mary Douglas.

Durkheim’s underlying point is that the sacred doesn’t live in the object, be it a god, an image or a tomato. It lives in the energy the group generates by gathering around something.

A festival is also a rite of passage, but for time, not for a person

Ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, in The Rites of Passage (1909), is famous for describing the structure of weddings, funerals and initiations in three phases: rites of separation, rites of transition (the threshold, neither inside the previous state nor the next) and rites of incorporation.

Less well known is that he applied the same scheme to seasonal festivals: solstices, the turn of the year, the passage from winter to summer.

• A patron saint festival has, in this scheme, its own rite of separation: the opening proclamation, the starting rocket, the bang that marks the town’s official entry into festival time.
• It has its transition: the festival days themselves, a suspended time with its own rules, set apart from the rest of the calendar.
• And it has its incorporation: the return to normal life, often marked by its own closing rite, such as the burning of a figure or the symbolic “burial” of the festival.

Van Gennep noted that this seasonal scheme has a logic of its own: farming and herding communities needed to mark, together, when one economic cycle ended and another began.

The festival doesn’t only mark one person’s passage through life. It marks a whole town’s passage through the calendar.

Disorder with permission

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger (1966), studied how societies organize the world into categories of pure and impure, of what is in order and what is “out of place.”

Her central idea, in her own words: eliminating dirt “is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment.”

For Douglas, order and disorder are two sides of the same activity of classifying.

Seen in this light, a popular festival can be read as disorder with permission:

1. Throwing food, as at La Tomatina, is exactly the kind of “out of place” act that would be frowned upon the rest of the year.
2. Staying up with no curfew, shouting in the street or mixing with strangers breaks social categories that stay firmly in place the rest of the year.
3. That disorder, however, happens within very specific limits: a place, a few days and unspoken rules the whole town knows.

Durkheim had already observed the same pattern in the Australian rite: the temporary suspension of a norm, within a ritual frame, doesn’t weaken social order. It almost always reinforces it, because it marks more clearly where normal life begins and ends.

The “age-old” tradition that’s actually 48 years old

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, in The Invention of Tradition (1983), pointed out something uncomfortable: much of what a community experiences as an ancestral custom was in fact created or formalized relatively recently.

Hobsbawm defines an “invented tradition” as a set of practices of a symbolic or ritual nature that seek to instill values through repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past, even when that continuity is largely fictitious.

Bilbao’s Aste Nagusia is almost a textbook case:

• It was created in 1978, not in some distant past, through a municipal ideas competition and the proposal to organize it with neighborhood comparsas.
• Its best-known symbol, Marijaia (the giant doll who opens and closes the festival and is burned at the end as a farewell), was created by artist Mari Puri Herrero in 1978, racing against the clock, for that first edition.
• Today, less than fifty years later, Marijaia works like a centuries-old ritual effigy: she marks the beginning and end of festival time, and her burning symbolically closes the incorporation phase Van Gennep described.

Something similar happened with La Tomatina: an improvised incident in 1945 that, repeated and defended by the townspeople, took on the symbolic weight of a centuries-old tradition in little more than a generation.

For Hobsbawm, this doesn’t make the festival worth any less. On the contrary: it shows that a community can manufacture continuity with the past almost out of nothing, as long as the practice serves a real symbolic function for the people who live it.

If this mechanism interests you in more detail, with cases like the Scottish kilt or the nineteenth-century Welsh druids, you can read on in the Englishman who invented the Scottish kilt (and the Welshman who invented his druids).

Five pieces, one mechanism

None of the above needs superstition to work.

• The group changes, for a while, the frame from which each individual acts (Le Bon, with Reicher’s correction).
• That shift releases an emotional energy that the group, and only the group, is able to generate (Durkheim).
• That energy is organized into a structure of time, with its entry, its transition and its exit (Van Gennep).
• Within that transition, everyday order is suspended with permission, not by accident (Douglas).
• And the whole thing is dressed in the feeling of being “age-old,” even when in many cases it’s younger than the person living it (Hobsbawm).

This holds for Bilbao’s Aste Nagusia, for Buñol’s La Tomatina, for the humblest village dance anywhere in Spain this August, and for any popular festival in the world, in any century. The costume changes. The mechanism doesn’t.

If you’re curious about how these same group bonds work outside a festive setting, you may also like the article on why connecting isn’t the same as relating, or, if what draws you is how a collective event can alter the perception of an entire group, the one on what happens to the human mind during an eclipse.

Sources

• Le Bon, G. (1895). Psychologie des foules. Félix Alcan (English translation The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind).
• Reicher, S. D. (1984). The St. Pauls’ riot: An explanation of the limits of crowd action in terms of a social identity model. European Journal of Social Psychology, 14(1), 1-21. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420140102
• Durkheim, É. (1912). Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (English translation The Elementary Forms of Religious Life).
• Van Gennep, A. (1909). Les rites de passage (English translation The Rites of Passage).
• Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge.
• Hobsbawm, E., and Ranger, T. (eds.) (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press.
• History of La Tomatina de Buñol.
• The history of Aste Nagusia: the birth of a festival.
• elDiario.es: Bilbao buys the rights to Marijaia, icon of Aste Nagusia, from artist Mari Puri Herrero.