Premium
Death in the town square: body performance and community healing in a Catalan traditional sport
Author(s) -
Vaczi Mariann
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.13313
Subject(s) - performative utterance , grief , sociology , aesthetics , afterlife , psychology , gender studies , history , social psychology , literature , art , psychotherapist
Human tower building ( castells ) is a two‐hundred‐year‐old traditional sport in Catalonia (Spain), which has boomed since the democratic Transition (1975) as a national symbol and low‐cost intergenerational pastime activity. In 2006, however, a child performer died as a result of a collapse. Catalonia responded with profound grief, and the human tower community embarked on a process of ‘overcoming’ ( superació ), whose success was made contingent on the iconic outcome of towers ritually performed throughout a year and a half. Performers produced and deployed cultural meanings of verticality, and operationalized them for bereavement and meaning making. The case inserts the iconicity of body practice in anthropological debates about death in three ways. First, the verticality and body experience of tower building allowed the bereaved community to imagine life, death, transcendence, and ‘resurrection’, thus establishing continuing bonds and a social afterlife. Second, the structural completion of towers lent itself to stage‐ and task‐oriented interpretations of bereavement, whereby each tower level was a task the community had to execute to proceed to the next stage of bereavement. However, and third, mourning through sport performance also acknowledged the uncertainties of those cultural scripts of bereavement through the performative contingencies of the outcome of tower building.