Ursum facere or re-constructed meaning : Endurance, resilience and transformations of the Bear festivals in Haut-Vallespir

Résumé 0

Each winter, in a valley in the Eastern Pyrenees, young men dressed as “bears,” pursued by “hunters,” roam the streets of the villages to capture young girls. In spite of their antiquity, or better, because of it, the Bear festivals are indeed a reenactment: not that of a past staged in its materiality, but that of meaning, perpetually reconstructed as time and social transformations erode it. The customs and the expression, “to make the Bear”, ursum facere, show unique endurance. This is because, as far back as our documentation goes (since the mid-nineteenth century at least), the reasons for keeping the tradition alive have been continually re-elaborated. The coherence that gives it meaning is being permanently restored, facilitating its renewal, and its repetition gives it ritual value. Reuse, borrowings and transfers are at work, using the successive recoveries of indigenous discourses, on religion first, local erudition second, and, last but not least, the human sciences. These recoveries, one could say this recent indigenization, by a community that is anxious to enunciate and value its own culture, does not confine the re-enactments to fidelity to one original, unique truth. To reconstitute coherence is above all to orchestrate a polyphony. In this article, we try to isolate some of these voices.