The Christmas Sociology of Ambivalence, Identity, and Transgression in the Gastein Valley. ‘Krampuses are very very very wild. And Krampuses are very beautiful’, an eight-year-old pupil from Dorfgastein in Austria wrote in her school essay on Saint Nicholas’s Day in 2011. She is not alone in her ambivalence regarding its attractiveness for her. Confronted with the Krampus, hardly anyone re-mains indifferent. Tourists produce their cameras, children roam the streets to tease them or hide in the attic gripped by panic. At the bar of a pub in Dorf-gastein, elderly locals shake their heads out of concern and complain about The decline of the ‘true Krampus tradition’ when asked about changing cus-toms, especially when they talk about the ‘excesses’ they encounter when they travel beyond the valley. To them, a Krampus is a young local man dressed in a wooden mask with at least three pairs of goat- and ram-horns, a long fur coat, a belt from which three to four large, loud bells hang and a switch in his hands. In groups of four to eight, they accompany Saint Nicholas and walk from house to house in early December. But take a thirty-minute drive to a similar pub in a similar small town, and people’s imagination of the ‘true’ Krampus might be very different.
Austria has seen a tremendous increase in Krampus events since the turn of the millennium. Today there are hundreds of them every autumn all over the country. Many active Krampuses insist that ‘their’ custom is hundreds or even thousands of years old, and they often use such words as ‘pagan’, ‘pre-Christian’, ‘Celtic’ or ‘Ger-manic’. However, there is no written evidence for the practice before 1582. In the mid-nineteenth century we know of only a few villages scattered across the Austrian and Bavarian Alps where groups of young, unmarried men dressed up in horned wooden masks, fur suits and cow bells in an attempt to impersonate the devil. The majority of these towns are on the fringes of the former Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg. A first wave of expansion and consolidation of the custom occurred in the four decades before the outbreak of the First World War, an era that Eric Hobsbawm has aptly described as one of ‘mass-producing traditions’. This expansion links the Krampus to many other ‘invented traditions’ all over Europe, such as the pageantry of the British royal family or the introduction of personifications of nations like ‘Germania’.In 2014 in the Gastein valley alone, there were 97 ‘Passen’ (Krampus groups). The valley is about an hour’s drive south of Salzburg and has a population of 13,000 inhabitants divided into the three municipalities of Bad Gastein, Bad Hofgastein and Dorfgastein. Each ‘Pass’comprises of Saint Nicholas; the ‘basket carrier’, whose large basket is filled with small bags of sweets to be left in people’s homes; sometimes one or two (female) angels; and four to eight Krampuses. On 5th and 6th December only the Krampus groups walk from house to house to reward good children and punish naughty ones. In most other regions, the Krampus season stretches from early November until Christmas. Many of these troupes do not include a Saint Nicholas and only visit houses by prior arrangement, with most people encountering them exclusively during a specially organized event most com-monly referred to as Krampuslauf, that is, a Krampus run.
In the old town of Salzburg, these events are the highlights of Christ-mas tourism. There, the groups are hand-picked ‘according to custom’. They provide spectacular performances in compliance with all safety regulations, yet are always ready for a selfie with the excited crowd of tourists. In stark contrast to these tame tourist performances are the Krampus events in the suburbs and rural towns. Also, they have various security arrangements. Sometimes, Krampuses and onlookers are separated by barriers and a large contingent of security personnel. At other times, only loose ropes separate onlookers from the performers or there are no boundaries at all. In the an-nual parade in Sankt Johann im Pongau, halfway between Salzburg and Gastein, a thousand Krampuses divided into eighty troupes move along a designated, marked route. Thousands of spectators fight for spots in the first row to witness the morbid vitality. Here, the troupes look much more diverse than at the tourist events. While some follow the ‘traditional’ aesthetics, oth-ers display so-called ‘future’ masks that are inspired by contemporary splat-ter and fantasy movies. In addition, the ambiance is more direct, aggressive and emotional at these events, which are intended for a ‘local’ audience with fewer cameras, more action and increased adrenaline.
When we look at the literature, however, the substantial increase in Kram-pus events and the diversification of aesthetics and performative possibili-ties have hardly been taken into account. Instead, Krampus is described as a custom with ‘pagan roots’, originally confined to remote mountain valleys, whose aim was to cast out winter and its evil spirits. Johannes Ebner rightly observes that this ‘mythological interpretation’ remains the hegemonic origin story of the Krampus, despite the clear lack of supporting evidence. Under the influence of tourism, so this traditionalist line of argumentation continues, the ‘original custom’ has been ‘sanitized’ and become meaningless public entertainment. We believe that this explanation hides more than it reveals. In the Austrian media, on the other hand, the Krampus is often connected to sexualized violence, alcohol-ism, atavism, rural backwardness, low levels of education and right-wing na-tionalism. However, just looking at the scale and di-versity of the Krampus shows that both the ‘mythological’ and the ‘atavistic’ explanations fall short of explaining the phenomenon.
Let us stress right at the outset that contemporary Krampus practice in Austria is violent on many levels. Through the aesthetics of his mask, his switch, his way of performing and his actual practice of attacking people, he represents and exerts both physical and symbolic violence in the public sphere. Beginning in the 1970s, physical violence or the threat of it against women and children has become increasingly unacceptable and subject to legal sanctions in Austria. However, no matter how ‘friendly’ an individual Krampus might behave, his presence is always considered to carry a threat of violence that constitutes a transgression of common sense and decency. We will argue that this is one of the main reasons for his recent rise to global popularity.
Krampus events can take very diverse forms and are embedded in a wide and complex discursive field. It is by no means a uniform ‘custom’, but a whole conglomerate of often conflicting performances that span a wide spectrum: for instance, while some are specifically intended to be consumed by a tourist audience, others are decidedly anti-tourist. During fieldwork we were strong-ly confronted with questions of identity, belonging and the politics emanat-ing from these topics. In an attempt to deal with these (at times) confusingly entangled threads, we here adopt a layered analysis as proposed by Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. In their work on property and care in complex contemporary state societies, they distinguish between different layers of social organization, ‘which allows the analysis of the interrelations between those layers’. As a methodological and heuristic tool, they suggest at least four separate layers: first, the cultural and religious ideals and ideological dimensions of a phenomenon expressed through norms and discursive formations; second, official legal and institutional regulations; third, the social relations in which practices are embedded; and fourth, the social practices themselves in which the effects of all the four layers meet.
In our case, the ideological layer is made up most importantly of argu-ments about the historical origins and the ‘true’ meaning of the Krampus phenomenon. Folklorists and representatives of organized folklore are heav-ily engaged in differentiating the allegedly ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ custom from perceived processes of commodification. Here the place and meaning of vio-lence constitute a heavily contested topic. Secondly, legal and institutional regulations affect Krampus performances and direct concrete practices in different ways. Among these we include the self-prescribed rules of active Krampuses, as well as regulations ‘from above’ made by state and other au-thorities.
We see the third layer in the social relations into which these social prac-tices are embedded. Identity and belonging are especially strongly mobilized here. In most cases, the members of a troupe are bound by ties of friendship, kinship and spatial proximity. There are whole groups of family members behind the scenes who support and steer the practice. The social composition and the power relations in these groups, each of which consists of between seven and a hundred individuals, are highly diverse and show different facets of identity politics. These three layers are internally structured by a mul-titude of processes that, taken together, affect the fourth layer, that of the practices of the actors. It is only in these practices that Krampus customs are reproduced and transformed.
Since the 1970s, identity and belonging have been important topics, and they have been diversely conceptualized and empirically investigated in socio-cultural anthropology. The term ‘identity’ originated in 1950s psychoanalytic theory, where it referred to something deeply rooted in the un-conscious of the individual ‘as a durable and persistent sense of sameness of the self’. In anthropology, personal identity was seen as having strong connections to social and cultural surroundings. The main disciplinary focus was on collective identities of various kinds of groups as a foundation of community building. The collective identity of ethnic belong-ing was an important point of departure. Initially, anthropologists tried to describe ethnic identity through the idea of a cultural ‘core’ unique to each ‘culture’. When a group of people believe they belong together, what is it that makes them the same? Through Fredrik Barth’s formative contribution to ‘ethnic groups and boundaries’, this perspective shifted fundamen-tally. In his understanding, ethnicity was not defined through essential in-terior sameness or a form of cultural inventory, but through differentiation from an exterior ‘other’. Also, the feminist debates on the category ‘woman’ in the early 1990s showed that ‘woman’ is not a uniform identity position but multiply intersects with class, race and religion.
How are identity and belonging expressed in accordance with the layers of analysis mentioned above? Starting with its cultural and ideological dimen-sions, one fundamental aspect of the Krampus identity is to anchor oneself to history. The mythological explanation imagines the origin of Krampus as an ancient pagan fertility rite that was performed to chase out the winter and revive the reproductive power of nature and humans. In many cases,the origins of Krampus were the first topic that came up after we introduced ourselves as anthropologists to Krampus performers. Often our interlocu-tors would assume that we were most interested in solving the mystery of the origins of this seemingly ancient tradition and accordingly they would explain its roots to us. These explanations, while in many ways contradictory, tended to agree that the origins of Krampus predate the advent of Christian-ity at around 700 CE. On other occasions, our informants assumed we were historians and would ask us questions such as, ‘Is Krampus a Germanic or a Celtic tradition? And how did Saint Nicholas get involved?’ It soon became clear that we would have to engage with the available historical scholarship on the topic in order to take part in these discussions.
By assessing the existing literature, we soon realized that the active Krampuses’ convictions about the pre-Christian roots of this custom result-ed not from locally passed down knowledge, but from an origin story deliber-ately disseminated by folklorists in the early twentieth century. According to recent scholarship, they were motivated by a clear political agenda. Inspired by the proto-fascist ideology of German nationalism, ethnologists such as Viktor von Geramb, Richard Wolfram and others were convinced that the masked rites were the remnant of a Germanic custom that had been ‘moulded’ (überformt) by Christianity. One of the main aims of National Socialist folk studies, then, was to remove this imagined Christian layer. The frequent attempts to ban the custom by the archbishops of Salzburg and other religious institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served as a convenient confirmation of this line of argument. In 1940, one of the largest weeklies in Nazi Germany published a photo essay of the Gastein ‘Perchtenumzug’ with a convoluted caption reading, ‘The ancient custom, frequently banned for its pagan roots, has kept as a precious inherit-ance its belief in the always recurring spring of peasant Volkskraft [people’s strength]’.
However, this is not to say that all three grammars impact on processes of identity formation in a symmetrical way. After hundreds of interviews, we are certain that the main allure in becoming Krampus for young white men in rural Austria today is indeed nostalgia for a form of unambiguous, confident, heteronormative masculinity in an ethnically homogenous society that is far from their everyday experience. The increasing emancipation of women, the increasing precarity of the labour market and the growing pres-ence and influence of immigrants are processes that attack classic male white identities all over the region. For many young men, becoming Krampus is a way to ‘stand their ground’ in these ongoing and emerging conflicts over re-source allocation. If we think about other recent examples from around the planet, we cannot help but observe a strong tendency among young men in times of uncertainty to resort to violence that warrants further ethnographic research. Given the widespread feeling of growing uncertainty in Austria, especially after the arrival of a substantial number of refugees over the past few years, we are sure that the Krampus boom has only just begun.
By: Prem Priyank
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