Catalonia's Human Towers: Castells, Cultural Politics, and the Struggle toward the Heights

by Mariann Vaczi

Overview

The building of human towers (castells) is a centuries-old traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of effort and overcoming, tension and release.

Catalonia's Human Towers is an ethnographic look at the thriving castells practice—a symbol of Catalan cultural heritage and identity amid debates around national autonomy and secession from Spain. While the main function of building castells is to grow community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive leisure activity, Mariann Vaczi reveals how this unique sport also provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the independence movement.

Highlighting the intersection of folklore, performance, and sport, Catalonia's Human Towers captures the subtle processes by which the body becomes politicized and ideology becomes embodied, with all the desires, risks and precarities of collective constructions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253067166
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mariann Vaczi is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is author of Soccer, Culture and Society in Spain: An Ethnography of Basque Fandom and editor (with Alan Bairner) of Sport and Secessionism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Sisyphean Ascent
Visual Glossary
1. From "People of Farts and Burps" to Crowning the Olympic Games
2. The Politics, Erotics, and Social Class of Touch and the Body
3. Risking the Fall in Political Rallies
4. Rivalry, Antagonism, and Identity Among the Xiquets de Valls
5. Bones Have No Gender
6. The Grace in Every Child
7. At the Height of Death
Epilogue: Rebuilding Towers in Messianic Times and the Global Pandemic
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Jeremy MacClancy

On the whole, Catalonia's Human Towers is a marvelous ethnography, reliant on fine-grained insights gained from thorough fieldwork. Her prose is highly accessible, and her text is alive to contemporary concerns within anthropology, performance studies, nationalist studies, and allied disciplines.

Dorothy Noyes

Mariann Vaczi takes us inside the complex embodied collaboration that generates Catalonia's human towers. Celebrated as allegories of national striving, raised literally to new heights by the incorporation of women and girls, transitioning from festival into sport, these ephemeral constructions also anchor support networks and mediate social inclusion. Tracing the practice through the European economic crisis, the Catalan independence referendum, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Vaczi elegantly captures the force of endlessly renewed collective effort against the eternal threat of collapse.

Editorial Reviews

"On the whole, Catalonia's Human Towers is a marvelous ethnography, reliant on fine-grained insights gained from thorough fieldwork. Her prose is highly accessible, and her text is alive to contemporary concerns within anthropology, performance studies, nationalist studies, and allied disciplines."—Jeremy MacClancy, author of Anthropology in the Public Arena: Historical and Contemporary Contexts

"Mariann Vaczi takes us inside the complex embodied collaboration that generates Catalonia's human towers. Celebrated as allegories of national striving, raised literally to new heights by the incorporation of women and girls, transitioning from festival into sport, these ephemeral constructions also anchor support networks and mediate social inclusion. Tracing the practice through the European economic crisis, the Catalan independence referendum, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Vaczi elegantly captures the force of endlessly renewed collective effort against the eternal threat of collapse."—Dorothy Noyes, author of Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco, and Humble Theory: Folklore's Grasp on Social Life.

"At the intersection of effervescent regional separatism, cultural habits of competition and death-defying risk, multiple activisms, gender tensions, and intergenerational solidarity lies an unusual form of bodily confluence: the Catalan human tower. Mariann Vaczi weaves her vivid ethnographic account, as structured and as intricate as the towers of living bodies she describes, to show us how social actors physically debate the dilemmas of identity in daring, defiant, and demonstrative displays. Through her intensely observed account of the enduring tug-of-war between the sensual and the sensible, Vaczi brings immersive fieldwork and political history into a lively and engaging synergy."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

"This lovely book is as intriguing and illuminating as the incredible ten story human towers it describes. Vaczi takes us on a journey into the world of the castells and their Catalan makers in a brilliant exploration of solidarity and complexity at possibility's tottering edge."—Orin Starn, author of The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal.

"Catalonia's Human Towers demonstrates how close attention to a visually spectacular sporting event can enhance our understanding of local politics, ethnic relations, and social organization and identity. Mariann Vaczi has produced a magnificent, beautifully written and illustrated contribution to the ethnography of contemporary Iberia and the Mediterranean world. It is a literary and social scientific treasure"—Stanley Brandes, University of California, Berkeley.

From the Publisher