The Religious Affairs Office

He goes on to explore this question in greater depth, stressing the importance of approaching heritage and tradition as living things, things that are at the same time sustained and constantly mutating, within a religiously and culturally plural world.

• How did you get into the world of popular culture, and how do you work with it?

I got into it as a teenager. In the 70s and 80s, the Guinardó neighbourhood was buzzing, and people were getting organised, with the aim of making it a better neighbourhood. One of the initiatives was led by the Grup Torxa, a group of families from the Virgen de Montserrat parish, who founded what would today be called an athenaeum, albeit a really tiny one. That’s where I started to experience first-hand what popular culture is, with a degree of freedom that was hard to find anywhere else at that time. There was also a library which specialised in three subjects: the Republic, hiking, and popular culture. At the same time, in this state of simmering excitement I founded a “colla de diables” [a group of ‘devils’] with some other young people when I was about 14 or 15, and we joined the giant-carriers in Sant Joan. All of this was a springboard for me.

At the same time, when I was young, I began to develop a particular kind of social sensitivity, due to my militancy and my involvement in the local youth club and other centres. This is the source of my professional vocation – people – and I’ve been working with adults with intellectual disabilities for 34 years now.

In the end, these two realities came together when I discovered all the possibilities for working with people opened up by the festive calendar, especially in terms of therapeutic and outreach work. It’s a matter of experimenting with tradition, engaging in the activities that are typical of different festivals: The Dancing Egg for Corpus Christi, a Chinese shadow theatre show for Sant Jordi, or a living nativity scene at Christmas, which this year has attracted around 1,600 visitors. Always in ways that involve the people, that look to a display of some kind, with the idea of invading public space, exercising our right to be visible.

• And when did Amadeu the folklorist arrive on the scene?

I went from practice to theory. I gradually began to move beyond the festival event itself, studying it, becoming an observer. I ended up publishing books, giving lectures, taking part in research, exhibitions, etc. And this was based on observation, because we folklorists aren’t anthropologists, sociologists or historians, basically we’re just inquisitive eavesdroppers.

And since then, the theoretical side has steadily grown. I’ve become involved in the world of public sector cultural management, and have been a member of the Council of Popular and Traditional Culture and Cultural Associations at the Generalitat de Catalunya (now the Directorate General of Popular Culture and Cultural Associations), and today am also a member of the Council of Culture of Barcelona. It’s like a huge universe, it makes your head spin at times.

• Based on all these overlapping perspectives, what do you consider a popular festival to be? Why is this important?

If it’s a grassroots festival, it builds bonds between people who live in the same community. It’s a tool that fosters cohesion and coexistence, and also a period of truce – a respite from bad feeling, from routine, from the frenetic rhythm of life. Apart from this, theory has produced some definitive definitions of what a popular festival is, and I don’t really feel comfortable with these. For example, the ‘fiesta mayor’ – a big annual festival attached to a particular town or city – has been defined as “the ultimate expression of a community of people”. This definition made sense 40 years ago, when communities were homogeneous, and the festival was a space where everyone had their own place. But this is no longer the case. Our country has changed, and continues to change, demographically.

And this is true even in smaller, local communities, which is where I think the focus should be. That community of equals, in the sense of shared beliefs and common denominators, has been shot to pieces. But the festive events we have fail to reflect this reality, they only welcome, or make sense to, a very specific part of the community.

• How would you define this heterogeneity from the perspective of a common but diverse popular culture?

The word “integration” needs to be removed from the equation. I’m very wary of using this word, because I don’t want to be integrated into a place, I want to belong to it. Integration would mean renouncing my cultural background, my language, my oral tradition, my traditional and mythical universe.

In a heterogeneous society such as our own, everyone needs to bring their own cultural baggage, and that’s something that can only be done in a natural way, no grand plans from any kind of administrative body are required. It’s always best for things to happen in a natural way in each neighbourhood. The duty of organised civil society is to go out and meet newcomers, and make it easy for them to settle in. The rest will come later.

Everyone arrives with a pack on their back, and these packs are cultural heritage. This is what true intangible heritage is; it’s not something unique and homogeneous, it’s a cultural jigsaw, a patchwork of the many diverse cultures that make up the country. And I believe that public administrations are guilty of poor practice – the mania for making grand plans, when the solution lies simply in making this jigsaw puzzle visible.

• In terms of celebrations, an important part of this baggage is religion. How do we balance a society labelled as “secular” with the cultural and religious fragility it’s made up of, and how do we do so through popular festive events?

To say that society in the 21st century is secular is an argument that reveals profound intellectual indigence. Societies are not secular, because they are made up of individuals who may or may not hold beliefs. Public administrations should indeed take a secular stance, not in the sense of ignoring religion, but rather by taking all religions fully into account.

But recently there’s been a tendency to strip festivals of all religious content. In Barcelona, for example, we have the Corpus Christi festival, which is a heritage festival of national interest which has involved the organisation of processions since 1320. And now they’ve appropriated it and are calling it “la festa de L’ou com balla” [The Dancing Egg Festival]. And then there’s also “The Winter Solstice Festival”. You, as an individual, can say that you celebrate the solstice, but collectively, what we celebrate is Christmas.

And this is something that needs to be strongly underlined, because if not, in the end we’ll have festivals that are empty of real content, festivals that no longer have any meaning. I see it as being rather like a cake that’s made up of many different coloured layers. Cut into slices, each coloured layer is a generation. It’s said that Christianity uprooted all things Roman, but in reality, it built on Roman foundations. And the same is true for the popular festivals of today. The ‘festa major’ is supposedly a secular municipal event, but that’s only been the case for a very short time. Some celebrate 170 years of history, but that’s because they’re rooted in patron saint festivals. In Barcelona we have the Mare de Déu de la Mercè, Santa Eulàlia – and that’s it.

• How can this contribute to the recognition of Catalan cultural diversity?

Removing this sort of content is a mistake, first of all because it’s a form of content that defines identities. But what’s more, guaranteeing coexistence in diversity and building a form of identity within which everyone feels comfortable must necessarily begin with a recognition of where things come from, and for what they are. Everything, every celebration.

This is the beauty of culture, and of festivals, which are a multi-layered communal construction that’s in a constant state of evolution. I can have my own festival, and at the same time be comfortable in yours, and vice versa – but this is only possible if both have content that we can explain to each other. It’s not at all clear to me that in order to have a broad community celebration we need to champion a kind of false snobbery, eliminating all that has that has been handed down to us from the past. Unless we come to the conclusion that a festival or custom no longer makes sense to us, as has happened in the case of certain processions in Barcelona, for example. These things are part of a living festive culture.

• If there is a change, it should be an organic one.

Of course it should. Have we really considered what it means to renounce the roots that tie us to the past? What guarantees do we have that starting to celebrate things like the winter festival will lead to a fairer and more participatory society, one in which everyone will have a place?

For example, ‘decolonialism’ is very much in vogue at the moment. In museums, for instance. But our society is rooted in colonialism. What we must do is accept this part of our past, interpreting it, but never renouncing it, because renunciation is cowardly. We need to take on board what we are, and add to it.

It’s clear that the current festive calendar isn’t a good fit with our reality. But give it up? I don’t believe we need to give anything up, I think we should find strategies that make it possible for us to join forces.

• But how can this agenda be driven forward by the public administration?

Politics needs to be courageous, and to make each and every religion, faith, culture and language that exist side by side visible. Because I have no problem at all with the Baha’is, Romanian Orthodox, Sunnis, Shiites, or Jews. The problem is that they’re my neighbours and I don’t know them.

It’s a question of a firm policy, with strategies to make these realities visible. Because if we know each other, we’ll respect each other.

• However, you also said that it wouldn’t be possible to achieve this by devising grand public policy plans.

I think that strategies should be based on much simpler things, at street level, meeting each other face to face and exchanging experiences. The problems arise when we start getting to know each other based on clichés. What does it matter to you if someone eats sausages or not? It’s a question of getting to know about customs first hand, the cultural roots we need to understand and to take part in.

For me, an ideal first step would be to make an inventory of all the popular culture in the city. Let the neighbourhood experts comb every corner of the city and record all the expressions of grassroots culture: a group of Moroccans who tell stories in line with their oral tradition in C/ Indústria, people from India who sing and dance in Passeig Maragall, to give just a couple of examples. If we combine all these things, we’ll have a very accurate picture of what’s happening in the city.

We need to arm ourselves with courage, and take a long, cross-cutting look at things. For example, someone from the Office of Religious Affairs (OAR) and a member of the Heritage Department should have a role on the municipal technical team in charge of planning a festival, providing content and perspective.

• And what about the experiences of drawing up an intercultural calendar?

What’s needed is a calendar based on information, not just on events. We need a realistic picture, one that captures everything. Everything except national days. Because those are not typical public holidays on the yearly calendar. But yes, all the others.

The religious legacy is also highly significant on this calendar, even though today there seems to be a tendency to get rid of such things. Because in reality, all festivals have their roots in one religion or another. Religion joins people into communities, and this common denominator translates into so many things, including ways of celebrating and festive calendars.

• We’re back to the idea of visibility, getting to know each other, even of giving public space.

The calendar could even help us to realise that our view of everything, including ourselves, is partial and biased. Some people tell me that nobody goes to the processions in Barcelona. I ask them: “Have you ever been?”. Because at the Pla de la Catalana 3,000 people come together for Holy Communion. And in the towns of Mataró and Hospitalet, Holy Week is huge.

And the same goes for all the other cultures that make up our fragile mosaic. In Barcelona, seven percent of the population is Muslim. And one or two percent are Bahá’ís. Substantial numbers of people. But we don’t know anything about this faith.