The Ritual Mode of Identification, or What events to observe, how?

The rituals investigated may vary enormously in scope, from the intensely local to the national. They may range from a small, communal meal eaten collectively by all the members of a hamlet during its annual fiesta to a particular day in the calendar associated regionally or nationally with certain foods, e.g. the inclusion of elvers (now a very expensive dish) in Christmas Eve dinner, the main Yuletide feast in the Basqueland. I remember attending the annual fiesta of a small village in the Central Zone of the autonomous province of Navarre, northern Spain, where the dia del pueblo (‘day of the village’) was not only celebrated by a collective meal but by the cooking, in the central square, of the main course in an extraordinarily large flat cooking dish. As some locals told me with pride, it had belonged to the refectory of a former seminary within the village. They were not just concelebrating community by eating together but having the communal meal cooked on an instrumental product of their common history.

Also, events here may be defined in terms of occupation or leisure-group (e.g. the gastronomic societies of the Basque area), or the stages within the annual agricultural cycle (e.g., in the Basqueland, the ritual opening of the first cider barrel or the first bottles of txakoli [a local, somewhat acidic white wine] of the new harvest).

The Historiographic Mode of Identification, or Whose past to study?

This mode is particularly pockmarked by difficulties. Thanks to the work of academics such as Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Boissevain (1992), it is now extremely well-established that many so-called traditions are in fact relatively modern inventions or recent revitalizations of almost moribund customs. And that the reasons why people today maintain particular traditions, cloaking them in the trappings of the past, may be very different from why they or their predecessors maintained them in previous decades.

This is especially so when we come to questions of identity, for it appears that the upholders or promoters of an identity often feel it necessary to supply that identity with a past, even if much of that past was specially created for the purpose. This is very much a question of the production of particular pasts for the present. Nostalgia can here play an eminently practical role, as the praise of a particular view of the past while keeping one eye on a particular, wished-for view of the future.

For instance, in my own research on the creation and evolution of gastronomic societies in the Basque area, I was very conscious throughout that I had to constantly sift the seemingly historical material which so many local eulogisers used when speaking about this regionally distinctive institution. A particular image of these societies, it appeared, was so useful to particular sectors within Basque nationalism that most of the popular conceptions about the societies are best regarded as more mythical than factual. Many nationalist writers, it appeared, wanted it believed that the societies were the traditional homes of a democratic egalitarianism where, in a playful inversion of the normal order, men acted as the chefs. I found that much of that statement can be radically questioned.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 945