La Villa de las Tres Cuturas: A Study of a New Tourist Festival in Frigiliana, al-Ándalus

This study focuses on a new tourist festival in the southern Andalusian village of Frigiliana. The festival began in 2006 and celebrates the village’s plural Jewish, Christian and Muslim past. The thesis argues that a recent tourist invention has moved beyond the confines of a four-day commercial event and into the everyday lives of the population. It argues that through the sustained management of culture, the organisers of the festival have consciously defined and configured an emergent local ethnicity. Festival Frigiliana 3 Culturas is a considered political move framed within national discourse relating to the recuperation of lost historical memories. The festival was created within this discursive field, but it is more than a symbolic gesture. It is a form of cultural activism that counters a dominant monocultural narrative in a somatic manner. Festival Frigiliana 3 Culturas playfully conjures up the past during a tourist event. Yet in doing so, it is playing with new myths and legends in the present. Within a festival atmosphere, locals claim ownership of their public space in order to express their myths and legends. The festival constructs a medieval sensorium through which the body encounters lost histories. Thus, the festival moves beyond symbolic constructions and creates a space where the internal organs of the body validate a recent notion of local identity, tradition and culture. The thesis argues that the internal organs of the body work in communion with reconfigured symbols. It argues that the inner body actively engages with the festival and attains the level of discourse required to transform “pure” blood into “plural” blood. It contends that the kitsch plastic realm of proletarian tourism realises the potential for social change. During this commercial process, Festival Frigiliana 3 Culturas creates a new ethnicity called al-Ándalus and it is the commercial component within the event that allows locals to claim ownership of their public space.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Power, Robert

• Spanish
• Anthropology

Language dc:language

en