The fiesta, an instrument of participation
Participating, feeling part of the community, can be complex in an urban society. The fiesta is a good instrument for voluntary identification, freely feeling part of the community. Rituals express sentiments that are invisible in everyday life as a result of the behaviour imposed by social norms. Phrases like this are often used to express some of the added values that we feel in the fiesta, though many researchers have pointed this out before us. Edmund Leach considered that rituals could be understood as the representation of the dramas of a society, expressing its conflicts at the same time as covering them up. Claude Lévi-Strauss and especially Victor Turner were fascinated by the individual emotions that surface in ritual celebrations, clearly showing the communitas, the utopian idea of paradise, of a ideal threshold situation showing the creative force of the ritual process and in which there is a idealised social relationship that is apparently based on equality and solidarit...