Senses of spring: Local enactments of the Valborg bonfire festival in Sweden.

摘要

Valborgsmassoafton (St. Valborg's Mass Eve), or Valborg, is a nationally observed calendar custom in Sweden which marks the beginning of spring with communal gatherings, bonfires, speeches, songs, special dress, and fireworks. It is simultaneously local and national, since its enactments take place in local neighborhoods and town gatherings all over Sweden virtually at once. But it is "national" only as a sum total of prevalent local enactments. Field data from tape-recorded interviews with ritual participants and the author's participant-observation show heterogeneity and multiplicity of meaning, whereas the calendar custom heretofore has been studied mainly in an idealized or typified way. The field site is a cluster of neighborhoods in Umea, a northern town distant from national cultural and political centers in central and southern Sweden. Though ritually prescribed in structure and influenced by national models, the ways in which Swedes in Umea celebrate Valborg are emergent and contingent on issues of gender, age, and class consciousness. They are also characterized by participants' views of nature and the localized symbolic environment around the bonfire. The human senses bring out the intensified experiential aspects central to the festival's performance and key to its ideational process. Large human themes regarding the influence of history on the present, views of the future, change, social relationships, the links between local and national identities, and environmentalism are ritually encoded and thereby given order in the localized festive gathering.