The Festival as Carnivalesque : Social Governance and Control at Pamplona’s San Fermin Fiestas

Using empirical data from a questionnaire survey of residents and visitors attending the 1998 San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona, Spain, the paper offers a critique of the contemporary construction of festivals as interpretive devices. Informed by the work of Bakhtin (1984), the paper makes the case that festivals should be understood as carnivalesque inversions of the everyday, deployed to maintain and reinforce social order and, thus, the discipline of bodies. This is achieved, the paper argues, by creating ‘liminal zones’ in which people can engage in ‘deviant’ practices, safe in the knowledge that they are not transgressing the wider social structure they encounter in everyday life. The paper suggests that the attraction of visitors is crucial, in providing a ‘cover’ for this activity, as well as conduit for the gradual legitimation of new and revised social values. The paper concludes by arguing that this need for tourists (local and outsiders) is both recognised and embraced by residents and visitors alike, with neither fraction naive enough to believe that authenticity resides in representation, or even cultural (re)production.