Catalonia's Human Towers

"On the whole, Catalonia's Human Towers is a marvelous ethnography, reliant on fine-grained insights gained from thorough fieldwork. Her prose is highly accessible, and her text is alive to contemporary concerns within anthropology, performance studies, nationalist studies, and allied disciplines."—Jeremy MacClancy, author of Anthropology in the Public Arena: Historical and Contemporary Contexts

"Mariann Vaczi takes us inside the complex embodied collaboration that generates Catalonia's human towers. Celebrated as allegories of national striving, raised literally to new heights by the incorporation of women and girls, transitioning from festival into sport, these ephemeral constructions also anchor support networks and mediate social inclusion. Tracing the practice through the European economic crisis, the Catalan independence referendum, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Vaczi elegantly captures the force of endlessly renewed collective effort against the eternal threat of collapse."—Dorothy Noyes, author of Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco, and Humble Theory: Folklore's Grasp on Social Life.