‘Old Europe’ on display

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is known and feared for his scorn. Underlings tremble. The press wilts. In our new Sound-Bite Millennium, nothing succeeds like mockery, and Rumsfeld has established himself as its most expert political practitioner. Recently and famously, he dismissed most of a continent as “Old Europe.”

By “old,” Rumsfeld means being stuck in the supposed rut of multilateralism, not going along when the United States goes it alone. Europeans have overwhelmingly opposed U.S. unilateralism in Iraq. Hence Rumsfeld’s deprecation: Old as in obsolete and irrelevant.

Last Friday – a.k.a. Good Friday – one corner of Old Europe was on vivid display. It showed me something: authentic community. And it got me thinking about the stark difference in attitudes – American and European – toward Gulf War Two. More than 70 percent of Americans support it; opposition here in Spain tops 90 percent.

How to explain this astounding gap? Is it due to recent, surface events? Or is some deeper cultural disparity at work?

Calanda is a foothills village in Aragon. Like many rural Spanish communities, it looks and feels prehistorically old. Stone buildings are bunched together. Streets, narrow and crooked, converge on the main square. Unlike the growing mall-orientation of many American settlements, Calanda has an actual physical center: a plaza complete with Catholic church, town hall, shops and bars. There’s no mistaking the center; you know when you’re there.

Humans have lived together on this spot for at least 3,000 years. Rock paintings in surrounding hills date back twice that long.

None of these details is unique to Calanda. For 51 weeks a year, it lives like nearby towns in quiet, undemonstrative obscurity. But during Holy Week – and especially for 26 hours beginning at noon on Good Friday – Calanda (population 900) becomes a place of enormous power: Upward of 1,500 drums, some as big as their drummers, are beaten without stop around the clock. This ritual is called Romper La Hora. The phrase means Breaking Time.

My friends and I arrived early … and should have come earlier still. By 10 a.m. Friday there was no place to park within a mile of town. We walked off the main road and became part of a crowd pouring downhill to the main plaza. It felt, when we got there, like a cauldron, and the crowd (myself included) seemed to me oddly liquid. I stood, as had been advised, with my back to a solid wall and watched people flowing back and forth across the square.

Hundreds of them wore long purple tunics and carried drums. These were the tamborileros who would, at least in theory, keep drumming for 26 hours. In mundane life they were farmers and hairdressers and mechanics and bank tellers. There were old folks and toddlers and – remarkably for erstwhile macho Spain – almost as many women as men. All, I was told, were from Calanda or nearby. Most still lived there; others came back every year for the ceremony.

The purple tunics bore insignia of different ritual cofradias, initially religious associations with resonant names like “The Entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem” and “The Slaves of the Virgin of Sorrows.” Such groups first arose four centuries ago in the Counter-Reformation assertion of Catholic power. Times have changed. Now Spanish attendance at Sunday Mass languishes at the same level as support for Operation Iraqi Freedom: statistically less than 10 percent. Even so, the cofradias have survived and reshaped themselves, like so much of Spain, from sacred to social and from all-male to gender-equal.

The drummers gathered in groups of 15 to 20: purple circles crowding the main square. Each group had both snare drums (tambores) and bass drums (bombos). Tellingly, almost every group was a mixture not only of men and women but also of cofradias. Several circles included baby carriages with infants in tiny tunics. Even teen-agers, those universal embodiments of sulky nonparticipation, held their drumsticks eagerly aloft at 11:59.

The clock struck 12 noon, and Calanda exploded. You felt as much as heard the enormous percussion: into your chest, up from the pavement, between your teeth, wave after wave off the wall behind your back. It was everywhere, and you were somewhere inside it. You were buffeted but there was no discomfort. How can something be so deafening and still feel good? You floated, particle-like, in a sea of sound.

It went on and on. Time – our most precious commodity and cruelest tyrant – was temporarily broken. You didn’t think about time. You didn’t think at all.

Only later, much later, did my anthropologist mind re-emerge. In the aftermath of all that sound, it was hard to make rational sense, to phrase any question. Finally I settled on this one: What, I asked myself, was getting drummed into whom?

“Into whom?” is the easy part. On Good Friday 2003 the people of Calanda were no longer drumming to God. Less still were they addressing outsiders like myself. Rather – at whatever level of self-consciousness – they were drumming some message into themselves, intensifying something already deeply engrained. That intensity was fierce. There were dark stains on many of the older bass drums. “These,” one man had told me before the world erupted at noon, “are blood from the hands of our fathers and their fathers. Every year we add our own.” Within an hour the heel of his drumstick hand was bleeding.

Those stains – blood upon generational blood – symbolized the message itself: deeply rooted common heritage. “We’re from this village,” the drums were saying. “We’ve been here forever. We share a common identity with our ancestors and each other.”

Hence the uniform purple tunics, the mixing of genders and generations and even cofradias. Hence also the special drumming classes for small children: five afternoons a week for six weeks in the village bull ring. Kids barely able to walk learn the basic drumbeats. Parents and grandparents watch. On Palm Sunday they make their rite of passage debut: miniature drummers in the ancient central square.

Later on Good Friday afternoon I was shown a painted rock face in the hills: two faint red human stick figures in what scholars call “Levantine” style. They’d been put there at least 6,000 years ago. Up the valley from Calanda the sound of drums kept coming. How many of the drummers, I wondered, were descended from the painters? The ochre of the paintings matched the dried blood on the drums.

My guide for the day was a psychology professor, now living in a big city but raised around Calanda. We talked about the emotional effect of drumming on the drummers. Her take was that it deepened an already profound sense of belonging, that the rumbling vibrations of Breaking Time reminded drummers of their relationship to place and to each other.

“Have you such celebrations in America?” she asked. I began mumbling about July 4, then about the Super Bowl. “How do they make you feel?” she wanted to know.

Good question. How do we feel watching fireworks from a distance on a comfortable mid-summer lawn? Or watching one team of professional strangers playing another on TV? What do we feel and how deeply do we feel it?

Compare Old Europe with Young America. European loyalties are primarily local. People seldom move. They belong, deeply, to their village or region or city barrio. Allegiance to the nation-state is serious but secondary. Few private Spanish citizens fly the Spanish flag.

America, in contrast, is more than ever a country of transient immigrants. Virtually all our ancestors came from somewhere else. On the average we change residence twice a decade. For many of us, deep local loyalties don’t exist. No amount of material opportunity can compensate for lack of belonging. So we turn to nation-state identity and fly ever-bigger American flags.

And what else? What activity, for Americans, matches the common emotional impact of Breaking Time in Calanda? What single nation-wide undertaking, filled with explosive noise and stained with blood, unifies us in a sense of shared belonging?

Europe has many problems. It trips over too many rules and regulations. It lacks our dynamism and sense of the possible. But, whatever Donald Rumsfeld says, Old Europe doesn’t need war to make it feel whole.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.