Last Friday the University awarded well-merited honoris causa doctorates to William Bannister and Jeremy Boissevain. I’m told by my colleagues at medicine that Bannister’s work in physiology was top-notch and a real contribution to their understanding of conditions like Down’s syndrome, among other things.

I’m better-placed to talk about Boissevain. Hugely respected among anthropologists worldwide, Boissevain is best known in Malta for his work on feasts. It goes back to a rude awakening in the village of Kirkop sometime in the late 1950s. On their first morning there, the Boissevains were rocked out of their bed by a blast that shook the house. The neighbours were unimpressed. It was just a murtal (petard), all in a day’s work down at the village.

True to anthropological form, Boissevain did not write in to Times of Malta to complain about the damage to his ear drums. Instead he decided there was enough colour, certainly enough noise, in Kirkop for him to settle and do research there. It didn’t take him too long to trot along to the source of that first vast explosion. One of his field photographs shows him cradling a 20kg petard, apparently the pièce de résistance of that year’s feast.

The rest is well known. If not quite a household, Boissevain is something of a band club name in Malta. That’s because he saw feasts not as some sort of anachronistic example of Mediterranean tomfoolery, but rather as an object that deserved the full attention of the international scholarship. Where Rudyard Kipling would have raised his eyebrows and said that natives love a bit of bunting, Boissevain suggested we hear them out.

I would like to think of this part of his work as a kind of rehabilitation. The first editions of both Ħal Farrug and Saints and Fireworks were published by two of the biggest names in the business. Here were festa, każini (band clubs), and murtali in all their village-like glory, being discussed by some seriously-bearded men and women in oak-panelled Oxbridge seminar rooms.

That’s the nice bit. Boissevain is also known in local circles as the prophet who got the future wrong. It’s all down to a prediction he once made that feasts, and the importance of demigods of the secular type for that matter, would decline. The saints, he argued pace the old American gospel song, were about to go marching out.

Only they did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, feasts have grown enormously in recent years. There are now more saints, more band clubs, more graven images, more fireworks, generally more bunting than there were 30 or so years ago. Thus the resurrection.

I suppose the reason why the failed prediction has so struck a chord is that it seems to be a kind of vindication, a testimony to the resilience of the Maltese spirit and a slap in the face of all foreigners who dare question it. It also makes a good cautionary tale, an antidote to a godly army of meddlesome reformers and restorers. For his part, Boissevain typically and productively saw the scholarly side of having got it wrong. If the natives saw fit to usher in the modern world with yet more bunting, surely that made them even more fascinating.

His renewed passion went quite unnoticed by the reformers. In October 2009, the Church unleashed a policy document called ‘Restoring Feasts Together’ (Nirrestawraw il-Festi Flimkien). Apparently based on a rather odd notion that there was nothing spiritual about theatre and performance, it promised an assault on the ‘non-spiritual’ stuff of feasts.

The list was long, and included, rather too predictably, things like too many drinks, dress that didn’t leave too much to the imagination, band marches that took too long and travelled too far, bells that were rung too enthusiastically, and so on.

It even frowned on the famous sorpriżi (surprises), a kind of Kinder-egg-meets-baroque-theatre innovation that keeps revellers guessing until the very last minute.

It turned out the natives had some slight problems with two of the document title’s three words. First, they saw nothing re­motely restorative about the proposed changes. On the contrary they saw them as a blood-letting job that would make a Grant Wood out of a Rubens. Second, they weren’t taken in by the togetherness bait. This was an attempt by the Church upper-crust to tighten its grip, and that was that.

Feasts are there for people to enjoy, not as a device for the advancement of nationalism

The restoration document was a complete flop. It was a big 20kg murtal which promised much but turned out to have not much lead in its pencil. The Church quietly shelved it after a brief burst of media fireworks. I’ve even a hunch the whole matter played no small part in Archbishop Cremona’s eventual downfall.

A few days ago, the government said that it wants feasts to be recognised by Unesco as intangible cultural heritage. A committee has been appointed and its job is to prepare and present a report by June 2015.

Now I have nothing in principle against the idea. I’m also happy to see that Godfrey Farrugia will be chairing the committee. Farrugia is one of our more solid MPs, and he also happens to be passionate about feasts in his own right. I think he even has a licence to manufacture fireworks, a skill he shares with his partner and fellow MP Marlene Farrugia.

Only I trust the committee won’t try to do by science what the restoration experts failed to do by religion. Just like religion, heritage management has its own creeds, dogmas, and rent-seeking specialists. Two things in particular concern me.

First, that the committee report should avoid the dirty language of identity, tradition, and authenticity. I dread to think what the committee will make of the kebab and Bavarian sausage stalls that have become a fixture of feasts. To put it differently, I hope the committee will report that there is nothing Maltese about Maltese feasts, or about anything else really, and that that’s just fine.

Feasts are there for people to enjoy, not as a device for the advancement of nationalism.

Second, that their recognition as intangible cultural heritage will not end up trying to fix, so to say, feasts.

That’s because, as Godfrey Farrugia will know better than I do, it is precisely the twin prospects of innovation and change that make feast dilettanti tick. Kill those and you end up with yet another fossil to wheel out at a Jien, Int, Aħna Maltin parade.

Now in his late 80s, Boissevain has consistently refused to become a dealer of fossils, let alone a fossil himself. That much was evident in his candid, informal and tongue-in-cheek acceptance speech on Friday. Perhaps the prophet did get it right after all.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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