Traditional festivities, political domination and social reproduction: Case analysis of Valencia’s Fallas Open Access

Festive culture has attracted growing scholarly interest since the 1980s, showing that sociability and its ritual basis are not an element of the past but, as suggested by Collins, make up the basis of social stratification (Collins, 2005). Previous works on festivities and traditions have certainly stated the possibility of a combination of modernity and tradition, of communal forms of sociability and the structure of society. In general, this point of view highlights the potential of festive sociability for generating and articulating a collective identity and, at the same time, permitting the development of an individual identity that is not annulled but strengthened through ritual interactions (Costa, 2002).

Furthermore, traditions and rituals have been interpreted as a way of fostering consensus, breaking down social conflicts or generating what has, in a somewhat confused manner, been classified as civil religion (Bellah, 1967). This perspective observes the rituals of contemporary societies as exercises of national communion (Shils & Young, 1953) and interprets it as a mechanism for creating shared, sacred memory, and thus a foundation for social cohesion and political order (Bellah, 1967). However, from other perspectives, festive rituals can also become a social space for symbolic investments of power, especially carnival festivities (Bakhtin, 1968; Gilmore, 1995). Moreover, some traditional cultural celebrations (such as carnivals) include rites that challenge authority or turn the ‘normal order’ upside down (Antebi & Pujol, 2008; Cohen, 1982). Therefore, established authority is altered in these spaces, with rites that can be described as ‘realms of pure possibility’ in which alternative models of society operate (Turner, 1988). Moreover, in festive contexts people may radically change their appearance, risk harm by over-drinking, handling fireworks, or running with bulls, thus turning their bodies into ‘recreational battlefields’ that link pre-modern tradition with post-modern consumerism (Langman, 2003). These exhibitions have been interpreted as rituals in which social identities could be redefined by those lower down the social ladder (Lewis, 1996; Spooner, 1996). Moreover, those interactions in challenging contexts (such as riding bulls or handling fireworks) put the group at risk and therefore foster group solidarity and boundaries, giving them emotional energy (EE) pay-offs and moral awareness (Summers-Effler, 2007; Walby & Spencer, 2018). Nonetheless, domination processes embedded on festive ritual is underestimated in these studies given that these customs obey rules that are laid down by tradition and habit, including patriarchal domination and the setting of gender roles such as those applied in carnivals or Mardi Gras (Gilmore, 1998a; Kates, 2003; Ravenscroft & Matteucci, 2003).

Therefore, it is worth considering the possibility of developing the social and political struggle within the framework of festive culture and the possibility of redefining social roles and collective identities (Gisbert Gracia, 2011; Guss, 2001). The festive ritual can thus take place as a form of uprising, not just of symbolic investment but of a struggle to control public space and local power (Delgado, 2003; Rivière, 1984). According to Durkheim, we can conceptualise religion as a form of rationale for society, and ritual as the instrument that generates a representation of collective identity, producing ideas charged with social significance (Durkheim, 2007; Shils & Young, 1953). Yet based on this conceptualisation, we believe one needs to complement it with Collins’ idea that these representations and rituals simultaneously define political rules and social structuring, and are therefore vehicles of domination and stratification. On the one hand, the literature on traditional culture tends to focus only on reproduction aspects of social roles. On the other hand, academic approaches to local governance generally leave out the cultural dimension of instruments for building political consensus and the social domain. By contrast, we see Collins (2005) perspective on Interaction Ritual Chains (IRC) as a way of forging an analytical link between the two phenomena. This approach helps explain both the survival of the festivity and the logic of reproducing a social order that some sectors legitimise as ‘natural’ through their monopoly of the ritual.

From this point of view, rituals set out the identities of the different status groups, establish the centrality of one group over another through their position and command of the ritual, and emotionally charge and mobilise some groups to dominate others (Collins, 2005). As these rituals create collective representations charged with emotional force, they are a powerful instrument for catalysing the moral force that defines dominant collective representations (Dingley, 2008; Fournier, 2010). Then, there are the strong feelings stemming from the ritual and from the communal ‘shared intent’ accompanying it (Tomasello, 2010). These features come to the fore in hard, risky feats undertaken in a ritualised way (Walby & Spencer, 2018).

Moreover, the social interaction at festivals creates a ‘cultural capital’ that consists of symbolic membership and ‘investment’ in social networks, and that may be used to dominate and exclude others or to punish those transgressing the symbols consecrated by the ritual (Jörg & Collins, 2001, p. 514) In order to analyse the dynamics of domination at the Fallas festivity, we firstly take Collins’s concepts regarding interaction rituals (2009), to analyse the festive ritual not as a way of consensus-building – as proposed by sociologists inspired by Durkheim or by functionalism (Bellah, 1967; Shils & Young, 1953) – but as a mechanism for social domination. This theoretical perspective allows us to come up with a new perspective on the mechanisms of domination in the status group organised around a ritual such as the Fallas. Ethnographic observation and discussion groups were used to focus on mechanisms for the emotional creation of shared experiences, sacred symbols, and the delimitation of social group boundaries. We establish how the ritual is used to delimit the differentiated status group, set the festive calendar, and define identity and politics. Lastly, we highlight the importance of this perspective in understanding stratification and political domination in societies such as Valencian Country, where advanced modernity coexists alongside an ethnocentric definition and reproduction of the social and political elite through a local ritual and the emotional energy it generates. Likewise, this analysis lets us delve deeper into the instrumental use of festive culture in contemporary society by intermediate status groups, and thus to further refine the generic interrelationship between ritual and status suggested by Collins (2009). Thus, we analyseboth the bi-directional relationship between the group dominating the ritual and political power, and the creation of emotionally loaded symbols, not just as a product of the interaction ritual defining the group – as stated by Collins (2009) – but also as a symbolic tool underpinning a social order in the context of a territorial and political dispute (such as that in Valencia).

The paper is based on the results of research on the Fallas of Valencia, co-ordinated by (author name citation anonymised). Six researchers from University of València participated in the study from February to November 2018 at the request of the Department of Gender Equality (part of the University of Valencia’s Advisory Council). The local government, as Fallas organiser and financial contributor, requested an analysis of the city's festivities from a gender perspective, with the aim of identifying factors fostering sexism. This study was the basis for a more general sociological study on the creation of identities and social reproduction through the rituals of interaction covered in this paper.

The field work comprised various stages. The preparatory stage involved an exhaustive bibliographic review of previous research on the Fallas and was accompanied by analysis of festival management structures. The second covered fieldwork using diverse research methodologies. These fell under two broad heads: (a) a systematic, quantitative and descriptive analysis of the Fallas creations from a photographic dossier of each one and a codification of the figures. This information was gathered during the holding of the 2018 Fallas, with the collaboration of a fourteen-man team that let us cover the whole city and analyse 207 Fallas (giant papier mâché creations), representative of the total of 380; (b) twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with Fallas representatives and six discussion groups were held between May and October 2018. The groups sought to bring out diverse discourses bearing on our research aims. Therefore, the first step was to identify those groups that might have different views on the Fallas given their position in the social and discursive structure. Groups were set up by sex and type of relationship with the festival Table 1.

The discourses and debates documented in the discussion groups proved to be excellent tools for the qualitative analysis of ritual chains of interaction (Brown, 2011). The processes and the participants included (and excluded) shed light on the creation of symbols and emotional energy in the Fallas festival through the mechanisms identified by Collins (2009) and by Summers-Effler (2007). The sense of moral outrage against those transgressing the festival’s symbols was also analysed. So too were the mechanisms for constructing images and discourses on the legitimacy of the conservative vision of group and territorial identity, and articulating condemnation of those the group considers to be transgressors and who betray the symbols the group holds dear (mechanisms identified by Collins, 2009). Said analysis shows how these symbols act as mechanisms for social domination and identity reproduction. Finally, photographic and ethnographic material was encoded and examined through content analysis, and the discussion groups were transcribed and codified with Atlas/ti.

One of Émile Durkheim’s most influential and durable contributions is his analysis of the ritual as a form of establishing society, not just on a symbolic level, but also as the basis for economic exchange and political structure (Collins, 1992; Durkheim, 2007). This allows us to understand that society is not based on a conscious, rational foundation as affirmed by rationalist and utilitarian theses (Collins, 1992). Likewise, ritual is a mechanism that forms the basis of the shared categories of organisation in the natural and social world and allows for the creation of representations of the collective identity charged with emotional force (Collins, 2005).

Collins considers there to be two legacies of Durkheimian theory (Collins, 1996). The first stresses the macro sociological level such as the division of labour and collective consciousness. The second, – which is of a more anthropological nature and has been applied at the micro-level by sociologists such as Erving Goffman, 1970 and Basil Bernstein (1989), – provides a micro basis for the analysis of interaction rituals and class cultures. Likewise, for Collins (1996) the Durkheimian tradition may also help link the macro questions of stratification at the micro-level. Thus, Interaction Ritual (IR) perspective explains a link between the micro-level of festive interaction rituals with the macro-level of social conflicts and structures. In Collins’ view (1996, 2009), following Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in his work Ancient City (Fustel de Colanges, 2009), there is no contradiction between IR theory and Conflict theory because they are complementary (Collins, 1996).¹ Thus, rituals are not a way to generate consensus and social harmony – as suggested by functionalism and its descendants (Birnbaum, 1955) – but instead constitute a framework for social conflicts (Fustel de Coulanges, 1984).

Furthermore, rituals can foster a notion of belonging to a local group, including those considered citizens in the ritual and excluding non-citizens from them because they are considered inferior or foreign (Fustel de Coulanges, 1984). Thus interaction rituals in a festive setting define an ‘us’ based on representation of the community’s origins (Picard, 2016) and link individual identity to in-group socialisation (Costa, 2001). On the one hand, within the status group people not considered worthy for social reasons may be excluded, or women may be confined to a secondary role, thus helping to reproduce patriarchal structures (Gisbert Gracia, 2011; Ravenscroft & Matteucci, 2003). In addition, the festive culture may reinforce the definition of the boundaries of the ethnic or social group through rituals that reproduce a conflict and the representation of the other (González Hernández, 1996; Santamarina, 2008).² In this process, there is a creation of an ‘us’ and boundaries for accessing social citizenship, while a social hierarchy is established in terms of prominence within the ritual. There is simultaneously a legitimation of the definition of own culture in contrast to the culture of others, even though others often share very similar festive rituals (Ariño Villarroya, 1992a).³ However, in contemporary and pluri-cultural societies, festive identities and collective symbols are not always consensual and unanimous.

Additionally, festive rituals constitute a chance to exhibit economic power in the form of conspicuous consumption, as analysed by Veblen (1899). This materialises in the offering of donations, sacrifices or the provision of food and drink for all or some of the population that enable the satisfaction of desires and collective exaltation (Picard, 2016). Likewise, they also exercise wealth destruction, which may in some cases also serve as rituals for purification or punishment of those considered to be at fault, such as the burning of effigies (ninots) in the case of the Fallas, or floats and costumes at carnivals. This is a transgressive ritual if the party represented is a powerful one, but one which may also serve to reinforce the established order if the parties represented and maligned are the marginalised or the excluded (Gilmore, 1998b; Mintz, 1997).

Stratification is also based on rituals of power that involve a continuum where some classes give the orders, others form part of chains and institutions that implement those orders, and others simply comply and obey. Domination and conflict in modern societies take place within complex organisations with internal structures of power and prestige (Dahrendorf, 1962), which could also be applied to the festive environment, where a few are in control and occupy high-profile, ‘centre-stage’ positions that the ritual organisation affords them, where they are aligned in relation to ideals (Goffman, 1970).⁴ Bearing all of this in mind, these rituals are not neutral in relation to inequality but, on the contrary, are weapons for reproducing or changing social structures (Collins, 2005). These social strata engaged in festivities, which may identify with the status groups defined by Max Weber (1944), establishing their identity through what Collins conceptualises as Interaction Ritual Chains (IRC) (2005). On the one hand, rituals take on the appearance of focusing on the community itself and representing it as a unit. However, the focus is on religious and historic symbols, thus paying tribute to one part of the community – and its social and symbolic descendants – which is normally in power.

Thus, individuals who take part in successful interaction rituals on a regular basis, such as festive culture, are charged with emotional energy and confidence, key to social and political domination. As Summers-Effer notes (2007), apparently festive rituals may well involve the kind of IRC formal rituals identified by Collins. However, she observes that group risk may enhance group pay-offs (2007). It is precisely this kind of risky group behaviour that characterises key rituals in Southern European festive culture. Prime examples are the Sanfermines (bull-running in Pamplona) and the Fallas (handling fireworks, with all the dangers entailed). Exposing the group as a whole to physical harm is used as a way of fostering a common mood and group solidarity (Ravenscroft & Matteucci, 2003; Roviras & Castellet, 2017).

Likewise, participation in the ritual shapes the identity of small groups and networks such as social movements or organising committees for festive events (Summers-Effler, 2007). By contrast, those who are not accepted into the ritual become demoralised and are more likely to consent to that domination or, under certain circumstances, oppose the ritual (Boyns & Luery, 2015). Being the centre of the ritual affords political benefits in terms of political status, which is greater the more followers are gathered. Therefore, the ritual is a central element of social stratification. Likewise, we might also consider that a status group greatly mobilised by the festive ritual, such as the groups promoting the rituals (such as the casals fallers: the social clubs that organise the Fallas), manages to gain social and political capital, thus exercising a position of power and a privileged position in terms of status in the local context (Collins, 2009; Rivière, 1984). This occurs even though their cultural form does not belong to an elite class with abstract, individualised thought but rather draws on symbolic forms of a given dimension based upon tradition and community. However, social capital emerging from rituals may be used to develop clientelist networks. This is especially so if this is the purpose of the party funding and centralising the organisation of the ritual. In such case, a neo-patrimonial kind of political structure arises (Resico, 2015), in which status groups and political institutions join hands within the ritual and keep others out. This puts festivity organisers in a socially privileged position – which we suggest has been Valencia’s case ever since the mid-Twentieth century.

The Fallas constitute a traditional festivity of huge dimensions because of its audience appeal and, in particular, because it constitutes a network numbering over 100,000 people in Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, with some 790,000 inhabitants in 2017 (Oficina Estadística. Ajuntament de València, 2018). The roots of the Fallas festival go back to the popular satirical catafalques built in the squares and streets of the city’s historic quarters in the mid-Eighteenth century (Ariño Villarroya, 1992a). That early forerunner of today’s Fallas was initially banned by the bourgeois authorities until they discovered that they could instrumentalise it in their favour. In the process, the Fallas became Valencia’s ultimate expression of sentiment, like a new, local religion (Ariño Villarroya, 1992a) forging a local identity, and an ‘us’ and ‘them’ through the ritual. This explains why after Franco won the Spanish Civil War, the new Fascist regime proceeded to intensify control over the Fallas festivity with a host of special arrangements, regulations and institutions. These arrangements did away with the earlier political and ideological pluralism of the festivity and quickly turned it into a propaganda vehicle serving the dictatorship’s ends (Hernàndez i Martí, 1996). This marked the beginning of a long period during which the festivity became a tool of hegemony in the city’s political and social life. The homage paid to the dictator by the Junta Central Fallera (Fallas Central Board, JCF) and the tradition of making offerings to the Verge dels Desamparats (Our Lady of the Forsaken) were part and parcel of the ‘National Catholicism’ of the time that gave the dictatorship God’s seal of approval. This led to the establishment of the JCF who governed the festivities. This body was controlled directly by the local government and used the distribution of funding and prizes to control the Fallas committees (Hernàndez i Martí, 1998). Likewise, the casals – closely controlled local ‘community centres’–were allowed to monopolise the organisation of the festivities within their respective districts, with a veto over the creation of new casals, thus controlling who could join the ritual. Moreover, this conservative hegemony in the new democratic period closed the door on making the world of the Fallas more democratic and open in favour of a communitarian, traditional approach to the festivities. The city’s left-wing circles were perplexed by these developments but did nothing (Borja, 2018; Cucó i Giner, 2018). Meanwhile, the local post-Franco right wing, reconstituted into a conservative, anti-Catalanist, unionist movement called Blaverism seized its chance (Flor, 2011). Its anti-progressive messages were transmitted through the Fallas universe, receiving extensive popular support under the new constitutional democracy (Ariño Villarroya, 1992a; Peris, 2014).

Over the past thirty years, the Fallas have continued to spread throughout the city of Valencia, with some 340 committees setting up a Falla in the street every year, with the associated private marquee for festivities and catering, occupying public space for a week. Furthermore, the festivities receive lots of public money every year, which came to no less than €4.7 million in 2016 (Ajuntament de València, 2016). In spite of this, the process of international acknowledgement and significant public support has not been accompanied by a process for democratising the festivity and participation in it. This failure has split Valencian society into a highly-organised Fallas sector with central political and social prominence, and an anti-Fallas sector (or one that is absent from the festivity) which is usually ignored. So, the Fallas ritual congregates a significant part but still a minority of the city: around 100,000 people were counted on the records of Fallas committees, barely fifteen per cent of the total population of 749,000 Valencians.

Furthermore, their characteristics are not as distinctive as the status group structure of the Fallas committees. These committees function as private clubs with a members’ area and members-only activities delimited by the ritual framing of the interactions of a closed, socially-delimited group:

Nonetheless, in spite of being a specific status group, this group is presented as the organiser of the festivity that globally defines the Valencian identity. In doing so, it claims the right (through the ritual) to define what it is to be a ‘Valencian’ (which largely mirrors the meaning given to ‘Valencianism’ by the Franco regime) (Hernàndez i Martí, 1996).⁵ At the same time, anyone who does not participate is excluded from this symbolic good generated through the ritual and ‘just ire against transgressors’ (Collins, 2009, [pp.]) is generated, in which those condemning the festivity are condemned as ‘foreigners’, ‘enemies’ or ‘traitors’ (Ariño, 1988). This delimited the group that could participate in the ritual (which is not a social elite but a middle class with a given ideological profile), excluding a large part of the Valencian population from the cultural capital generated in the ritual. Likewise, the fallero collective has an idea of monopolisation of the public space that is a metaphorical evidence of symbolic and political power:

Therefore, as Collins’ IRC theory (2005) states, the festivity permits the shared focus and co-presence with the aim of generating ‘emotional energy’ among falleros. Here, one should note Summers-Effler (2007) observation that traditional rituals resort to some symbolic, attention-grabbing act to unleash a flood of pent-up emotion. In the case of Pamplona’s Sanfermines festivity, a rocket (el chupinazo) is launched from the Town Hall balcony above the crowd-packed square below (Ravenscroft & Matteucci, 2003).

On the other hand, often from official discourses on Fallas are presented as a space of transgression and criticism, but the ‘criticism’ largely focuses on ‘ethnic enemies’ or political adversaries (usually identified as the pro-Catalan left). So, the supposedly ‘critical’ nature of Fallas is largely a veil for underpinning the status quo. It is true that in the run up to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Fallas was an expression of popular culture and was initially critical of power (Ariño Villarroya, 1992a). However, during the Franco dictatorship, the dominant classes and the regime realised that the Fallas was a vital instrument of control and for reproduction of the city’s social order – something that persists to this day. As a result, the Fallas has lost its popular, anti-hegemonic character (Hernàndez i Martí, 1996).⁶ Although there have been critical or alternative Fallas running counter to the officially-sanctioned ones since the 1980s (Hernàndez, 2011), they make up a small proportion of the total and have never managed to form part of the festivity’s governing bodies or change its rules.⁷ On the contrary, the Falla world is a heteronymous one with respect to the economic and political field, recognising the domination of the richest Valencian ruling families, through the prizes accorded to their Fallas commissions and the nomination of their daughters as queens of the festivity (Fallera Mayor and Corte de Honor).⁸

Moreover, the central, wealthier districts account for the most valued Fallas, the Special Section Fallas and the First category. Yet there are some notable exceptions to the rule, with top Fallas from more working-class areas such as Poblats Martíms, L’Olivereta or La Creu Coberta; in upper middle class neighbourhoods such as Antic Campanar and the area of Avenida Blasco Ibañez, and in formerly working-class areas that have become gentrified, such as Russafa (Torres & García, 2014). In addition, we find Fallas in the first categories in the new upper middle-class urban areas of Nou Campanar, and the City of Arts. There is thus a strong correlation between upper-class neighbourhoods and dominant Fallas, as demonstrated in Table 2.

Therefore, an interpretive key to the homology between social space and the Falla space shows a strong correlation between the level of gross average income and the presence of higher-category Fallas in which the ten districts with the highest income make up 72 per cent of the Special Section and the First Category Fallas. By contrast, the remaining 18 lower-income districts make up under a third of such Fallas. This break-down confirms that the structure of the Falla world follows a heteronymous logic that ties in with the social hierarchy, which helps to visualise and reinforce the symbolic order.

The local cults analysed by Fustel de Coulanges (1984) are the core on which belonging to the social space is based and inclusion in the ritual affords access to citizenship, from which other inhabitants or those considered foreigners are excluded. In this regard, in contemporary societies access to certain interaction rituals also plays an informal role in the consideration of belonging legitimately to a community and access to the status benefits that entails. However, access to the rituals and the emotional energy is not open to everyone but involves acceptance by a Fallas committee, which means there is a social filter and the payment of a monthly fee for each person in the member family (which may vary but could involve paying hundreds of Euros per month), which reinforces the obstacles to participation for part of the population, who are thus excluded from the ritual and endure the monopolisation of the urban space as spectators.

Proof of this control of local power is The Fallas Proclamation signed by the Councillor for Festivities, which allows a large part of the city to be occupied for an entire week by the cadafalcs themselves and also by the marquees and stages that are set up by the casals fallers. The interruption to traffic during this time makes moving around the city difficult and is detrimental to economic and civic life, and this is experienced as appropriation (and therefore control) of the city:

However, critical debate has always been silenced by the authorities and the media, considering the slightest criticism or desire for reformation of the Fallas – which are consecrated by the ritual – as sacrilege to local identity (Ariño Villarroya, 1992b). Likewise, the Falla Board decides who can take part in the festivities and who cannot and therefore creates the frame to ritual interaction. It exercises the power of veto over the creation of Fallas committees, participation in the parades, and so on. This lets the Board (unlike in other popular festivals such as Carnival, where the population can participate in some parades freely) exclude a large part of the population.

Therefore, the division between Falla members and non-members, and the pre-eminence of the former, is explained in no small measure by the instrumentalising of the festivity by the traditionalist and conservative sectors, so-called ‘Blaverism’ (Peris, 2014). A political usage that was first put into practice by Franco’s regime and then channelled by the forces most reactive to democracy during the transition, especially by the anti-Catalanist movements, who thus established a link between the value that consecrates the Fallas – a state of being from Valencia, understood as a kind of regionalism – and, at the same time, a form of regionalism that demonstrates an otherness and opposition to Catalanism (Hernàndez i Martí, 1996). Anti-Catalanism is expressed by an angry reaction to real or imaginary transgressions by Catalans against the object of the ritual. This was the case of critical observations made by Joan Fuster in a book, leading diverse Fallas to call for his expulsion, and burning his effigy. A critical article by some Valencians in a Barcelona underground magazine, Ajoblanco, which was sued by the Fallas sector and was banned and fined by Franco’s legal system (Ariño Villarroya, 1992a). In spite of the fact that both cases featured Valencians, the Catalans were blamed for them to the point that the Junta Central Fallera attributed them to a conspiracy led by Catalonia and ‘to people at the service of petty interests opposed to truly Valencian interests’ (Las Provincias, 1976, quoted in Ariño 1992, [p.]), in opposition to which they organised collective protests. Lastly, at the Falla Members General Convention in 1980, they aligned themselves clearly with the thesis of anti-Catalanist and right-wing regionalism, constituting a conservative force against change during the democratic period (Flor, 2011).

Moreover, in these photos it is particularly worth noting one Falla where a parallel is established between the myth of Spanish nationalist historiography regarding El Cid as a military hero of the so-called Reconquest (in reality, the conquest and sacking of the territories of the Iberian Peninsula inhabited by Muslim people) with current times, thus using the myth and ritual to reclaim the preponderance of Falla members over the territory they establish as their own (Ríos Saloma, 2008). Without this intentional setting of the general tone of the Fallas, we can observe that the framework of the Fallas ritual allows messages that are very close to those put out by the Spanish far right, where the theme of ‘The Reconquest’ is defended as a form of supremacism and a way to legitimise the expulsion of migrants (García Sanjuán, 2018). Likewise, it is worth noting that neither the committees nor the Junta Central Fallera, which organises juries to score all the Fallas, have ever made any negative comment about this kind of cadafalc or ninot. Rather, they have continued to reward and subsidise them with public money.

The Fallas ritual has been revealed as a powerful instrument for reproducing political and social order, firstly by the dictatorship and then by the elite that inherited power during the democratic period, grouped into unionist, conservative regionalism (Peris, 2014). Likewise, the emotional energy generated during the ritual and its identification with the regional identity have allowed the unionist, conservative right wing to legitimate itself and become a sector that is ‘untouchable’ by other sectors of Valencian society:

Initiatives such as the Fallas Convention as an opportunity for reforming the ritual or running a sociological survey on the terms and conditions of the Fallas have repeatedly come up against resistance, if not open hostility, from conservative sectors (Garsan, 2017). These sectors, led by the Interagrupación de Fallas (an organisation created in 2010 under the mandate of Felix Crespo, Partido Popular Councillor for Popular Culture and Festivities) have become an exhausting factor for the local government, acting as extensions of the unionist right that conceives the Fallas sector as a mainstay of its social and political hegemony, with is threatened by a host corruption cases (Rius-Ulldemolins, Moreno, & Hernàndez i Mart, 2017). This sector represents the conflict as a war (see above photos) and uses the Fallas as a strategy for de-legitimising the government, using the ritual and emotional energy of festive culture to exclude them from the ritual and from power, discrediting them as traitors to the region and to the Fallas.

Lastly, one part of the Fallas sector is playing an active role in recomposing the far right, taking ultra-unionist, anti-Catalanist and Blavera stances (Flor, 2011). It is significant that a well-known Fallas commentator was the organiser of the illegal far-right concentration against the Valencian nationalist, left-wing demonstration on the 9th October 2017. A concentration in which the President of Interagrupación de Fallas and violent far-right groups took part and at which diverse pro-Valencia, left-wing demonstrators were physically and verbally abused, along with journalists covering the event (El Diario, 2017). In addition, on the other hand, the Fallera Mayor of 2018 has been a candidate for the Valencian capital of the Spanish liberal nationalist party Ciudadanos, being elected member of local and provincial parliament (Alós, 2017). Thus the Fallas’ emotional energy and the media attention showered on the traditional festivity is intrumentalised in a political option characterised by hostility to minorities and aggressive assertion of Right-Wing Spanish nativism (Cantarero, 2018; El Diario, 2016).

The Fallas make up a macro event organised by committees where Fallas sociability takes place (Costa, 2002), a ritual that integrates some but excludes others, and standardises and unites certain sectors of the city through the ritual capital and emotional energy generated during the festive ritual (Collins, 2009). So, since the recovery of democracy up to modern times, the alliance between the status group organising the interaction ritual and the political and social elite through a symbolic and political exchange of legitimation and power has been rewarded with generous financing and scant control regarding its occupation of public space.

In this respect, we believe that those who point to the Fallas’ satirical nature greatly overstates their case. Here, such commentators succumb to a cultural populist perspective that idealises folk traditions – a tendency noted by Grignon and Passeron (1989). Such a view also greatly underestimates the festival’s reproduction of the social order. Likewise, the division between a top-down power culture and subversive bottom-up popular culture made from some populist perspectives seems far too simplistic as points Grignon and Passeron (1989). There may well be popular cultures of intermediate groups that may not be dominant in a purely political or economic sphere, yet which monopolise identity and the festive ritual and public space. As Collins (1996) notes, a neo-Durkheimian slant on micro-rituals and the neo-Weberian idea of the multi-dimensionality of conflict and domination make for an interesting combination. The dominant group in a festive ritual is not the same as in other social fields (artistic, economic and political elites). Nevertheless, the Fallas elite does forge alliances with other elites for mutual benefit by ‘legitimising’ a local identity underpinning the status quo.

Therefore, Collins’ theoretical scheme (1996, 2009) must be reconsidered in contemporary societies as multi-dimensional, because any modern society is split into relatively autonomous social fields (Bourdieu, 2001; Sapiro, 2013). Therefore, interaction rituals and their effect on social domination and stratification should be understood not as a bipolar divide (dominant versus dominated or upper-class versus lower-class) but as a way by which the festive ritual’s dominant elite generate social capital. Thus, a high-status group can use this ritual domain to define legitimate local identity, receive public largesse and dominate the public space vis-à-vis other groups, thanks to the support of political and economic elites. In return, certain elites win the loyalty of Falla groups, which function as a client network, thus generating an interested habitus (Auyero & Benzecry, 2017) through the festive ritual.

While the ritual is a way to dominate the definition of the community and assign limits to inclusion or exclusion based on participation or not in the ritual (Collins, 2009), it is also used to consecrate a legitimate definition of the local identity and thereby condition regional politics within the broader context of the State. In the case of the Fallas, ritual focuses on generating emotional attachment to Valencian regional identity. In this sense, rituals no longer forge a homogeneous community identity and loyalty to the city, as analysed by Fustel de Coulanges (1984) but rather symbolically express adhesion to the regional and nation state institutions through ritual localism. Here, the network created by the Fallas IR has proven useful in perpetuating the social order that is the legacy of the Franco dictatorship and its nationalist and Catholic ideology and an ultra-conservative vision of Valencian identity (Flor, 2015). To sum up, in the case of Valencia’s Fallas, the production field fosters a blinkered vision of national identity. Since the mid-twentieth Century, the emotional energy of the IR group has been shamelessly channelled to perpetuate a status quo whose roots lie in Franco’s dictatorship.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).