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18th century, bare bottom, caganer, Catalonia, nativity, popular, Spain, the pooper, Toys
Caganer (Catalonia, Spain)
What kid doesn’t love a doll that poops? It might seem far-fetched, but the Catalonian people who live in northwest Spain have a tradition of placing caganer dolls in their Christmas nativity scenes. The caganer traditionally wears a white shirt and a Catalan-style hat. More importantly, he’s bare-bottomed, with his trousers around his ankles, as if he’s in the act of, well, going #2. There are competing theories about why this tradition came to be, but hit any Christmas market in the region and you can find both traditional and pop culture-themed caganers.
The name “El Caganer” literally means “the pooper.” The exact origin of the Caganer is unknown, but the tradition has existed since at least the 18th century. According to the society Amics del Caganer (Friends of the Caganer), it is believed to have entered the nativity scene by the late 17th or early 18th century, during the Baroque period. The caganer is a particular and highly popular feature of modern Catalan nativity scenes. Accompanying Mary, Joseph, Jesus, the shepherds and company, the caganer is often tucked away in a corner of the model, typically nowhere near the manger scene. A tradition in Catalonia is to have children find the hidden figure.
Possible reasons for placing a figure representing a person in the act of emptying his bowels in a scene which is widely considered holy include:
The Caganer, by creating feces, is fertilizing the Earth. According to the ethnographer Joan Amades, it was a "customary figure in nativity scenes [pessebres] in the 19th century, because people believed that this deposit [symbolically] fertilized the ground of the nativity scenes, which became fertile and ensured the nativity scene for the following year, and with it, the health of body and peace of mind required to make the nativity scene, with the joy and happiness brought by Christmas near the hearth. Placing this figurine in the nativity scene brought good luck and joy and not doing so brought adversity."
Many modern caganers represent celebrities and authority figures. By representing them with their pants down, the caganer serves as a leveling device to bring the mighty down.
As to the charge of blasphemy, as Catalan anthropologist Miguel Delgado has pointed out, the grotesque, rather than a negation of the divine may actually signify an intensification of the sacred, for what could be more grotesque than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a bloody public torture and execution as the defining moment in the story of Christianity.
In his essay Les virtuts cìviques del caganer ("The Civic Virtues of the Defecator"), American anthropologist Brad Erickson argues that Catalans use the caganer to process and respond to contemporary social issues such as immigration and the imposition of public civility regulations.
Further opinions:
"The caganer was the most mischievous and out-of-place character of the pessebre's [otherwise] idyllic landscape; he was the "Other." with everything that entails, and as the "Other," was accepted, in a liberal vein, as long as he did not aim to occupy the foreground. The caganer represented the spoilsport that we all have inside of us, and that's why it is not surprising that it was the most beloved figure among the children and, above all, the adolescents, who were already beginning to feel rather like outsiders at the family celebration." Agustí Pons
"The caganer is a hidden figure and yet is always sought out like the lost link between transcendence and contingency. Without the caganer, there would be no nativity scene but rather a liturgy, and there would be no real country but just the false landscape of a model." Joan Barril
"The caganer seems to provide a counterpoint to so much ornamental hullabaloo, so much emotive treacle, so much contrived beauty." Josep Murgades
"The caganer is, like so many other things that have undergone the filtering of a great many generations, a cult object; with the playful, aesthetic and superficial devotion that we feel towards all the silly things that fascinate us deep down." Jordi Soler