• Dr. Maximiliano Salinas, researcher at the Department of History, was invited to Universidad de Concepción’s Summer School, where he talked about the meaning of festivities as part of the historical process of a country. “During festivities, people reencounter the essence of their human, spiritual and collective experience,” he stressed.

“Celebration: Dionysus’ times come back to us” was the name of the presentation given by Dr. Maximiliano Salinas, professor at the Department of History of Universidad de Santiago, to the Universidad de Concepción’s community in the inauguration of this university’s 2014 Summer School.

On this occasion, the activity that has been carried out uninterruptedly for more than a decade, has the topic “Festivities: the art of celebrating” as its central subject, a subject to which our University’s researcher can considerably contribute, as he is an expert in popular culture history.

Regarding the role that celebrations play in local identity, the academic says that in all cultures and civilizations, festivities are an integral dimension of people’s lives, because during celebrations people reencounter the essence of their human, spiritual and collective experience.

“In the case of Chilean history, festivities, like all life dimensions, are crossed by contradictions stemming from the colonial times. Indigenous peoples were prodigiously inclined to celebrating. The colonial times order, the European enlightened absolutism, tried to control and restrain that spirit,” Dr. Salinas explained.

However, according to Dr. Salinas, that was not possible, “because the celebration legacy was passed to mestizo peoples and it got mixed with the festive influences from Spain and Africa that left us the cueca, the dance of the Chilean celebrations. Although colonial aspirations- coercive and repressive ones- are replicated until today, festivities will always represent the extension of our humanity and our spirit. The student protests nowadays have undeniably included a festive component that is part of our more permanent culture.”

When asked how the military dictatorship affected this characteristic feature of Chilean culture, Dr. Salinas said that this process can be understood as a systematic effort to extinguish the spirit of popular celebrations, indigenous or mestizo festivities in the country. “Their ambition to impose manu militari, the neoliberal discipline was, basically, an aggressive aspiration to finish with community life and the merry communal living among Chilean people. The idea was to subdue us and turn us into consumerist, scared and indebted individuals,” he said.

According to the expert, a cultural reflection about our identity as a nation is a challenge today, especially in a context in which some sectors of our society express the need of having a new Constitution. “In this sense, it is essential to have a reflection and a discussion about celebrations, as they are part of our original biological and spiritual make-up as a country. This is much more deciding, lively and deep than legal texts or the discussion among constitutional ‘experts’,” he said.

Finally, Dr. Salinas thinks that we should recover the original religious spirit of celebrations, that is to say, the spirit reflected by Dionysus, the god of cosmic harmony, of beautiful lush vegetation; the god of the joy of a nude and equal community without disguises and without ambitious aspirations. “We have to recover the spirit that indigenous peoples had and cultivated for thousand of years and that mestizo peoples legitimately inherited. In that spirit, we should find the delighting value given by the historical vindications of our societies during the 19th and 20th centuries. This was especially expressed during the Government of the Popular Unity, in a much more decisive way than in any other particular political circumstance. There it lies the deepest mysticism of festivities,” he said.

Translated by Marcela Contreras