«The people makes the feast»: social change and cultural change

Abstract

This text belongs to a longer work in which one tries to analyse the social structures and processi in one region of the Portuguese northwest, in special concerning the parish of Fonte Arcada, in the municipality of Penafiel. It is a region in the province of Minho, having a dense and scattered population, with high rates of fertility and strong percentages of young people and women, where a
peasant economy with a high range of renting has survived up to now. But the apparent stability of social structures at Fonte Arcada, as well as its demographic regimes, its agrarian landscape, its productive forms, must not forget the significant aspects of change in progress in that parish. And, if the transformations in the social groups tend to associate themselves to change in collective practice and in symbolic and cultural references, the analysis of the feast will aid to make such change clear. On describing some festive displays at Fonte Arcada, the author makes this analysis of the feast, in this article, taking as a starting-point that the changes occurred in the traditional usages and feasts, whenever the former and the latter are still kept, are an important discloser of the global dynamics in the local social processi.