Demonstrations and collective identity

Abstract

The transformation of a group of people into a recognizable social unity is a dynamic process that, in the case of social movements, is always necessarily linked to the celebration of regular ceremonies of protest. In this paper I pay attention to the contemporary Basque Country, according to all empirical evidence the country in the Western world in which protest as a political mean is more frequent and resorted to by different social actors. More in particular, I show the relevance that ritualized mass demonstrations (that is, demonstrations symbolically loaded and regularly scenified in the public sphere) acquire for the survival of a given collective actor, namely the so-called Basque Freedom National Movement. The emotions unleashed during the acts of protest contribute to shore up collective identity and solidarity of a social group that sees itself as threathened as far as its system boundaries are concerned. To the extent that mass acts also have the goal of uniting its participants, the present paper corrects instrumentalist approaches to collective action for which interaction between social movements, on the one hand, and authorities and public opinion, on the other hand, constitutes the main object of attention.