Fire in the Placa Catalan Festival Politics After Franco Dorothy Noyes Winner of the 2005 Fellows of the American Folklore Society Book Prize "An excellent model of how to approach the analysis of principal communities, in Europe and elsewhere, that are struggling to overcome internal conflicts and contradictions and find acceptable ways of participating in a wider, increasingly globalized world."--"South European Society and Politics" "This impressive contribution to the anthropology of Europe is the first full-length study in English of the Patum, a Corpus Christi fire festival unique to the town of Berga, in the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain). It also marks the emergence of an important scholar. Noyes combines that rarity--well-crafted and accessible prose--with a theoretical architecture that borrows from hermeneutics and the anthropology of power. . . . Highly recommended."--"Choice" "This book stands above other festival studies in its ability not only to convey information but also, of equal importance, to recreate the emotional texture of events for performers and audience alike. . . . This book is a must."--"Journal of American Folklore" Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Fire in the Placa" is the first full-length study in English of the Patum, a Corpus Christi fire festival unique to Berga, Catalonia, Spain, celebrated annually since the seventeenth century. Participants in the festival are transformed through drink, sleep deprivation, crowding, constant motion, and the smoke and sparks of close-range firecrackers into passionate members of a precarious body politic. Combining richly layered symbolism with intense bodily expression, the Patum has long served as a grassroots equivalent of grand social theory; it moves from a representation of social divisions to a forcible communion among them. Dorothy Noyes is Associate Professor of Folklore and English at The Ohio State University and author of "Uses of Tradition: Arts of Italian Americans in Philadelphia." 2003 336 pages 6 x 9 14 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3729-0 Cloth $69.95s 45.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-1849-7 Paper $28.95s 19.00 World Rights Anthropology Short copy: "This impressive contribution to the anthropology of Europe is the first full-length study in English of the Patum, a Corpus Christi fire festival unique to the town of Berga, in the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain). It also marks the emergence of an important scholar. . . . Highly recommended."--"Choice"

Celebrated folklorist, Dorothy Noyes, offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Folklore is the dirty linen of modernity, carrying the traces of working bodies and the worlds they live in. It is necessary but embarrassing, not easily blanched and made respectable for public view, although sometimes this display is deemed useful. The place of folklore studies among modern academic disciplines has accordingly been marginal and precarious, yet folklore studies are foundational and persistent. Long engaged with all that escapes the gaze of grand theory and grand narratives, folklorists have followed the lead of the people whose practices they study. They attend to local economies of meaning; they examine the challenge of making room for maneuver within circumstances one does not control. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the "humble theory" of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world.

Celebrated folklorist, Dorothy Noyes, offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Folklore is the dirty linen of modernity, carrying the traces of working bodies and the worlds they live in. It is necessary but embarrassing, not easily blanched and made respectable for public view, although sometimes this display is deemed useful. The place of folklore studies among modern academic disciplines has accordingly been marginal and precarious, yet folklore studies are foundational and persistent. Long engaged with all that escapes the gaze of grand theory and grand narratives, folklorists have followed the lead of the people whose practices they study. They attend to local economies of meaning; they examine the challenge of making room for maneuver within circumstances one does not control. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the "humble theory" of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world.