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What it Takes to Throw a Party: Community Frames of Meaning, Identity and Contestation in the Festival of San Fermín

Ordoitz Galilea
Department of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Wednesday, May 10, 2023
11:00am – 12:30pm EST
WebEx

Committee Members
Dr. Andrew Deener (Chair)
Dr. Manisha Desai
Dr. Elizabeth Holzer
Dr. Ruth Braunstein
Dr. Phoebe Godfrey

Abstract

Academics, organizers, participants, and the public have long debated the social role that festivals and celebrations play on the definition of local community identities. For many, festivals are uniform expressions of collective consciousness, while others see them as spaces of cultural contestation between different viewpoints and interests regarding the values, symbols, meanings and identities attached to the communities that host them. This dissertation engages with these debates by drawing on the concepts of “festive forms” (Guss 2000) and “community frameworks of meaning” (Douglass 1997) to examine the role of festivals in the public definition of community meanings and identity. I use archival research, ethnographic participation, and interviews based on seven iterations of the festival of San Fermín, held every July in the town of Pamplona, in Northern Spain. San Fermín, which started as a small, local, religious celebration of the patron saint of the region, has transformed, due to the fame of its “running of the bulls” event, into a global touristic experience.
In this dissertation, I trace the historical changes in the festival, and their connection to variations in the frameworks of meaning and community belonging. I find that there are several competing frameworks of meaning within the community, originating from different intra-communal actors, vying for legitimacy in the control of the public image of the community and festival. A framework based on the values of localism, tradition, and inequality, was central for most of the festival’s history. With the advent of the modern era and changes in the local and national economies, politics, and culture, this traditional framework was replaced by a transgressive framework of meaning that paints the festival as a space of individual freedom, acceptance, and equality. Individual responses to this framework affected the outcomes of organizations within the festival community, and also required individuals to find a resolution between distinct community meanings and practical needs.