Portal de Turismo de Castilla y León

Dates

1 December 2024 to 10 January 2025

When?

Currently

Link

To know more

From December 1, 2024 to January 10, 2025, the courtyard of the Provincial Historical Archive of Segovia will host the exhibition " La JOTA: a BIC heritage of all and reinterpreted folklore ", within the activities to promote the jota as a representative manifestation of intangible cultural heritage.

The jota is a tradition shared by many Spanish regions and has great social significance in the collective memory and imagination. As a traditional musical genre, it has come to be considered a Representative Manifestation of Intangible Cultural Heritage, as indicated by national and international regulatory frameworks. For this reason, on March 22, the Ministry of Culture and Sports initiated its declaration file.

In this statement, reading between the lines, we can see the need to highlight one of the traditions spread throughout, and we say, throughout the Spanish territory with a style that varies depending on the area. There are jotas from Aragon, Castile, La Mancha, Leon, Valencia, Mallorca, Navarre, Rioja, Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia, Extremadura, Andalusia, Murcia, Basque, Catalan or Canary Islands.

However, despite this generality, the history of this folklore, like any other of its manifestations, is conditioned by nationalist fervour and directed by political propaganda. On the one hand, promoting folklore has the purpose of preserving the picturesque within an established political system, but also, it gives arguments to the national identity in formation. A contradiction that is only apparent.

In the first case, it cancels out diversification within a unitary state that does not allow local cultural manifestations. The local becomes a folklore and a refuge for tourist entertainment, exaggerating the typicalities in favor of a homogenization of culture that claims to be universal and at the service of the Nation-State. In the second case, recovering cultural traits of rural communities and strengthening their identity is the nationalist strategy, indicating, in that village culture, the national and racial essence.

This is when folklore becomes folklorism. The ritual dance performed in an environment in which everyone feels involved becomes folkloristic theatre, something different from what it really is.