El teatre, la festa, el mite, el ritual quotidià

Abstract

The important work developed by Xavier Fabregas as a theatre critic and historian has actually darkened another aspect of his work as investigator: his work as revealer and studious of paratheatrical celebrations, myths and rites of the cultural tradition of Catalunya. There exists a work about cultural anthropology accomplished by Xavier Fàbregas starting at the mid seventies. This less recognized contribution should not be forgotten, as, only because of the number of publications, it is as vast as all his other dramatic and theatrical contributions.

Regarding the cultural anthropology and trying to resume we could say that Xavier Fàbregas transmits and projects in his speech the criterion of permanency of tradition in the time, but not from a static point of view but an evolutive one that means loss, change, transformation and incorporation of new elements of cultural definition. Popular action exercises an active intervention even without being conscious of it. Referring to religiosity, the sacred and profane aspects, that is, the battle between cosmogonic and metaphysical ideas, the defining concept is «superposition». We refer to the superposition upon the pre-roman pagan cults of christian cults and to the forming of a new stratum which today defines and explains the mythic-religious frame of all Catalans or of all those within the western area of the Mediterranean.

The categories of permanence, mutation and superposition define the theoretic interpreting keys of the studies undertaken by Xavier Fàbregas. A thought that in the anthropologic field would fluctuate between the euhemerist historicism which defines the theory of survival and the positions of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, with his theory of the archetype, and the collective unconsciousness. As it is reminded by Julio Giqueaux, this collective unconsciousness contains the «ancestral images» which, being present in all individuals, are transmitted from generation to generation.