Why the Maltese festa survived the seventies

Dutch anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain, renowned for his landmark work on Malta, humbly – and thoroughly – admitted that his prediction about Maltese festi disappearing from the scene altogether was wrong. 

In his latest collection of essays, ‘Factions, Friends and Feasts: Anthropological Perspectives on the Mediterranean’, Boissevain adapts a conference paper first presented in Edinburgh in 1990, in which he publically acknowledges that his 1965 prediction about Maltese festi was wrong-headed.

But the paper, entitled ‘On Predicting the Future: Second Thoughts on Feasts and Patrons’, also sets about suggesting socio-political factors that may in fact have contributed to the enduring nature of local religious feasts, despite Boissevain’s otherwise logical prediction of the opposite. 

More than anything, the paper sounds a cautionary note to Boissevain’s fellow anthropologists. ‘Beware predictions,’ he seems to say, ‘especially when they appear to align in a perfectly logical rhythm’. 

To this end, Boissevain outlines his original argument about the decline of feasts – first articulated in ‘Saints and Fireworks’ (1965) – and it’s hard to fault his line of reasoning without the benefit of hindsight. 

Writing in the mid-sixties, Boissevain observed how substantial migration from Malta in the 1950s drained a lot of the manpower necessary for the organisation of feasts, while an improved transport system enabled people to socialise outside their immediate village core – which would instantly drain some of the appeal of the local festa. Moreover, Boissevain maintained, the increasing popularity of football was drawing young people away from the band club as a social contact point, while public attention was increasingly being diverted away from entrenched religious traditions, and instead to the machinations of local politicians. 

‘By the 1970s, however, I became aware that my prophecy had failed,’ Boissevain writes. ‘Village festi were noisier, more crowded and contested with greater vigour than I had ever seen … What had happened?’ 

In part, Boissevain writes, the very same factors that would appear to have worked against the festi in the first place – such as migration and increased social mobility – in fact only ended up reinforcing the importance of religious pageantry among village communities. Improved public transport and a spike in car ownership may have encouraged people to pursue their social and professional lives away from their birthplace, and gentrification of places like Naxxar may have dispersed the traditionally tight-knit village core. But instead of eradicating the need for feasts altogether, these factors only served to foment a kind of communal nostalgia, Boissevain claims. 

To bolster this claim, Boissevain invokes the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, specifically his notion of ‘communitas’: ‘the direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities which tends to make those experiencing it think of mankind as a homogeneous, unstructured and free community’.

‘During these community celebrations kin meet up, but so do neighbours, ex-villagers who have moved to other parishes, and more distant acquaintances… Community celebrations act to structure and to protect group identity in this small, densely populated and intensely competitive island,’ Boissevain writes, adding that this activity in turn spurs other villages on to mark out and celebrate their own territory in the same way – ensuring that a competitive edge is added to the equation. 

The subsequent sudden increase in tourism is another factor that Boissevain failed to take into account during the mid-sixties – and as it happens, it was also a major contributing factor to sustaining the growth of village feasts. ‘Because many tourists began to watch these colourful events, government (and the anglicanised elite, who had once looked down upon such folk occasions) began to view parish religious pageants as an important cultural resource,’ Boissevain writes, commenting on how ‘rising prosperity’ in the country also put a stop to the heavy migration of the 1960s – once again furnishing villages with able hands to help with festa logistics. 

There was a political dimension to the 1970s dynamic between Church and State that Boissevain failed to predict, too, and which had a direct impact on feasts. While the Church would previously find it relatively easy to curtail the excesses of the feasts – since they ‘diverted attention from the liturgical content of the rituals’ – with Labour in power, things were different. Furthermore, Nationalist voters who were irked by Labour’s reduction of calendar feasts – and who would usually avoid festi, began to celebrate them as a form of protest. 

Boissevain adds that the Labour government in the 70s also ‘democratised culture’. 

‘The government promoted popular culture via contests, festivals, brochures and especially, by broadcasting and televising Good Friday processions and festa celebrations. This attention helped to promote them and to make them more acceptable to a wider public and so encouraged the organisers.’ 

Speculating as to why his predictions proved to be incorrect, Boissevain suggests two main reasons. Apart from the ‘rate and complexity of the changes that were to sweep over Malta’ – as outlined above – Boissevain also admits that he ‘underestimated the cultural momentum of the Maltese attachment to religious pageantry’. 

‘More historically oriented research has subsequently shown me that the expansion of festa and Good Friday celebrations was of long standing and, especially since the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been growing rapidly. The developments since 1970 merely continued this pattern. Seen in historical perspective, the decline I observed and extrapolated was a momentary hiccup in a long-term trend,’ Boissevain writes. 

Boissevain confesses that part of his misguided attempts at predicting the future socio-political scenario of Malta were down to an infatuation with developments in the present, without taking a fuller historical context into account, citing it as a characteristic of his ‘generation of anthropologists – especially of those trained in Great Britain’. 

‘In part, neglect of the past also reflects the arrogance of field researchers who believe that the events that occur during the short time that they are there to observe them are of major significance’.