Saints, fireworks and a dodgy baseline

When Dutch anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain published Saints and Fireworks in 1969, his mission was "to make clear for the urban middle-class, upper-class in Malta, what was going on in villages".

"They had no clue of that, the people in town. But I wanted to explain what was happening there, to make it logical why people shoot off fireworks and make a lot of noise," Boissevain said of his work on festa-partiti.

As the country comes to terms with the fatal consequences of fireworks production, and the patronage it enjoys from MPs and local councillors, in certain aspects Malta is still the same island it was in 1969. The village festa, as this video shows, proves its staying power on new generations of partitarji.

Boissevain later said band club activity in Malta had become more pronounced today than in the 1960s and 1970s, with competition becoming even more intense. "I think it was related to the fact that the Labour government in the mid-1970s, decontrolled the external feast and refused to accept the parish priest's wishes to limit the festa, so it became an unlimited festa. Plus the fact that Malta is more affluent: you can spend more on decorations and fireworks. I think that's basically the reason it increased."

It was in fact one of Boissevain’s predictions that had gone slightly awry: the same festa which originally put him on the world anthropological map. Back in the 1960s there were many reasons to think the tradition would slowly peter out and vanish.

“The social changes taking place in village cores, with outsiders moving in and locals moving out, meant that fewer and fewer people would identify themselves as ‘from the village’,” he had said. “The villages themselves were growing and changing. There was also mass emigration at the time… at every point, all these changes seemed to translate into a situation whereby boys were being taken away from the village, and from organisation of the festa, never to be replaced...”

From this vantage point, a gradual extinction seemed more or less inevitable. But despite this mass exodus of young male volunteers, Maltese festi have not only stubbornly refused to keel over and die, but they have simply carried on growing and growing, until even Jeremy Boissevain himself is disconcerted by their garish enormity.

“Today, the village feasts lasts for a whole week, instead of the traditional three days. The fireworks are noisier, the band club rivalries are more intense…”

Extracts of this article appear in a 2007 interview with Jeremy Boissevain.