Why You Transform at Local Festivals

Every August, thousands of towns and cities across Spain pause for a few days to celebrate what their neighbors have been celebrating for generations. And every single time, without fail, something changes in how those neighbors think and act.

You don’t need a massive festival to notice it.

The square of a two-hundred-person village during its August verbena is enough.

People who’ve known each other their whole lives behave, during those days, in a way that isn’t quite their usual one.

And this isn’t a vague impression. It’s one of the best-documented phenomena in modern sociology and anthropology.

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 verbenas, processions, and bull-running events that fills the August calendar from north to south.

• In Buñol (Valencia), the last Wednesday of August brings La Tomatina: a full-blown tomato fight born in 1945 from a spontaneous incident during the giants-and-big-heads parade of the San Luis Bertrán festival, repeated year after year until it became a ritual officially recognized as a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest in 2002.
• In Bilbao, mid-August brings Aste Nagusia (Great Week), founded in 1978 through an idea contest among neighborhood associations to give the city a major festival week it didn’t previously have as such.
• That 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 speeches, 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: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) to a very specific phenomenon: what happens to a person the exact moment they stop being alone and become part of a crowd.

• According to Le Bon, a crowd forms a kind of transitory collective mind, distinct from the sum of the individual minds that make it up.
• That collective mind has, in his description, three drivers: anonymity (nobody feels identifiable, and therefore individually responsible), contagion (a feeling or a gesture spreads from one person to another almost without rational mediation), and suggestibility (the person ends up, in his own words, “in a state resembling the fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer”).
• His most quoted conclusion: “an individual immersed for some time in an acting crowd” can end up losing the will and judgment they’d have alone.

This doesn’t turn anyone into someone else. It changes, for a while, the frame in which that person acts.

The effervescence only the 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 is capable of creating that no isolated individual could produce alone.

Durkheim studied this through the nighttime ceremonies of the Warramunga people of central Australia: chants, fires, dances intensifying for hours toward a point 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 from 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 during the rite, something we’ll return to with Mary Douglas.

Durkheim’s underlying reading 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 of time, not of a person

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

Less well known is that he applied that exact same scheme to seasonal festivals: solstices, new-year changes, the shift from winter to summer.

• A patron saint festival has, in that scheme, its own rite of separation: the opening speech, the starting rocket, the shot marking that the town has officially entered festival time.
• It has its transition: the days of the festival itself, a suspended time with its own rules, distinct from the rest of the calendar.
• And it has its incorporation: the return to normal life, often marked by its own closing rite, like the burning of a figure or the symbolic “burial” of the festival.

Van Gennep observed that this seasonal scheme has its own logic: farming and herding communities needed to mark, collectively, when one economic cycle ended and another began. The festival doesn’t just mark one person’s passage through life. It marks an entire 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, ordered and “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.” Order and disorder are, for Douglas, two sides of the same classifying activity.

A popular festival can be read, under this light, as disorder with permission:

1. Throwing food, as in La Tomatina, is exactly the kind of “out of place” act that would be frowned upon the rest of the year.
2. Staying up all night with no schedule, 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 the normal begins and ends.

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

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

Hobsbawm defines the “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 own Aste Nagusia is almost a textbook example:

• It was created in 1978, not in some distant past, but through an idea contest among neighborhood associations.
• Its most recognizable symbol, Marijaia (the thirteen-foot doll who opens and closes the festival, burned at the end as a farewell), was commissioned from artist Mari Puri Herrero barely a week before the first edition.
• Today, fewer than fifty years later, Marijaia works exactly like any thousand-year-old ritual effigy: she marks the start and end of festival time, and her burning symbolically closes the incorporation phase Van Gennep described.

The same thing happens, on a smaller scale, with La Tomatina: an improvised incident in 1945 that, repeated year after year, took on the symbolic weight of a centuries-old tradition in little more than a generation.

For Hobsbawm, this doesn’t diminish the festival’s value. On the contrary: it shows that a community can manufacture continuity with the past almost from nothing, as long as the practice serves a real symbolic function for those living it. If this mechanism interests you in more detail, with cases like the Scottish kilt or the nineteenth-century Welsh druids, you can read more in The Englishman who invented the Scottish kilt (and the Welshman who invented his own druids).

Five pieces, one mechanism

None of the above needs superstition to work.

• The group dissolves, for a while, each individual’s conscious personality (Le Bon).
• That dissolution releases an emotional energy only the group, gathered together, is capable of generating (Durkheim).
• That energy organizes itself 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 gets dressed up with the feeling of being “age-old,” even though 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 most modest village verbena anywhere in Spain this August, and for any popular festival anywhere in the world, in any century. The costume changes. The mechanism doesn’t.

If you’re interested in how these same group bonds work outside a festive context, you might also like the article on why connecting isn’t the same as relating.

Sources

• Le Bon, G. (1895). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
• 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., & 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.