To say that feasts have grown and grown is probably a truism. Less obvious is a process which I shall call their ‘gentrification’. It seems to me that they’ve become more polished, professional, bourgeois even.

No longer entirely happy to carry statues around and empty beer bottles, festa people have taken to more genteel ways of expressing themselves. The list of signals in this direction is long.

Two weeks ago, for example, someone from the ‘street decorations committee’ wrote to invite me to a seminar on feasts as a ‘showcase of Maltese identity’. It was held at the Maritime Museum, apparently with the collaboration of Heritage Malta. A group from Mqabba is planning a similar do early next year, and I’m sure more will follow.

It has also become common practice for feasts to be advertised on road billboards, much like high-profile concerts or local council events. Fireworks dilettanti, maligned by many as some sort of primitive tribe, now have their own series – and an eminently watchable one NAR happens to be too – on peak time television. Add to that the large number of internet sites that bring dilettanti together to discuss and debate some or other aspect of their passion. Even the smallest festa sub-committee has aFacebook page these days.

In sum, it’s not just that dilettanti are more vociferous. It’s that they’re so in quite novel ways and in previously unexplored spaces, including some pretty privileged ones (Heritage Malta, for one, is no backstreet crew).

Access to these genteel spaces often requires a certain type of language, one that legitimates feasts with respect to something greater than themselves. It wouldn’t do simply to say that they’re a spot of good fun – their newly found status seems to call for a higherrationale.

Or two: identity and unity. Let’s start with the former. When the University Rector (as reported in The Times) called for the institution to “help develop Maltese identity” three weeks ago, he wasn’t being terribly original.

Dilettanti do it all the time. Their argument is that feasts are traditionally Maltese, and that anything that’s traditionally Maltese strengthens Maltese identity (never mind the mind-bending circularity).

A great position to be in, especially since there seems to be a popular feeling that ‘Maltese identity’, whatever that means, is a thing that’s worth developing for its own sake. Or rather for the sake of a ‘stronger nation’, because, as nationalists like to remind us, strong nations require solid and clear-cut national identities.

That’s why I’m saying that in donning the robes of ‘Maltese identity’, feasts are appealing to a higher power. It also happens to be an appeal that puts them in the same league as University, since that institution also apparently exists to serve the God of Identity. Saints are keeping rather genteel company these days.

With respect to unity, the argument here seems to be that people will proceed to kill and eat each other’s babies unless acted upon by some external font of goodness. Festa is one such source we’re told. It is only by virtue of celebrating a feast in common that the villagers of, say, Sannat, forget the great ethnic rifts that divide them and refrain from hurling the enemy off the cliffs.

Feasts are said to provide some of the cement necessary to keep Maltese society strong and united. In other words, another appeal by dilettanti to a higher logic, this time of a sociologistic kind.

The gentrification of feasts, their intentional embedding into a set of privileged matrices (such as those of national identity and social cohesion) will probably be very consequential indeed. We’ve already started seeing results.

For example, I doubt the local diocese – technically the real power behind feasts I suppose, since it has the right to call them off at will – expected the reaction its programme for reform got last year. Far from a bunch of villagers playing around with bunting and papier mâché, itwas received by groups of organised, articulate, and media-savvy dilettanti.

I rather pitied the hapless Mgr Anton Gouder, whose job it was to take them on in public. The general impression is that that particular battle was won by the dilettanti, and that most of the reforms will be ‘shelved’(read ‘forgotten’).

The corollary is that band clubs are set to become seats of power in their own right. They will probably also become increasingly corporate and professional in terms of image and practice.Almost like local brands, so to say, and managed and represented as such.

This would also mean aligning themselves with EU cultural policy (as in talk of ‘local communities’ and such) and tapping the rich stream of EU funds.

It’s easy to get carried away by notions of passionate Mediterranean islanders looking for ways to work off the summer heat. Rather, it’s a rather sophisticated crowd we’re dealing with. Anyone for a bet over the first salaried festa manager?

mafalzon@hotmail.com