The Tradition Industry

There was this flyer in the letter-box. “Traditional Mallorcan cuisine.” The words were in Spanish. You might think that advertising traditional Mallorcan cuisine should demand that the blurb is in Catalan and not in Spanish, but maybe the restaurant is owned by a staunch supporter of the Partido Popular. Anyway, let’s not go there again.

The flyer was less a promotion for the restaurant and more one for a take-away service. “We will cook for you and bring our specialities to your home.” Which is sort of what you expect with a take-away service, but perhaps these things have to be spelt out, as traditional Mallorcan cuisine being ferried around in cardboard containers covered with aluminium on the back of a scooter (or however it is transported) doesn’t sound all that traditional. Contemporary meets the traditional, and it comes on a Honda 125.

Take-away is really pizzas, beef chow mein and tikka masala. Pork wrapped in cabbage? It doesn’t quite have the take-away ring about it. Traditional cuisine demands traditional modes of eating, as in sitting down in a restaurant. But there again, what is traditional?

This is a question I have been grappling with. Traditional – Mallorcan traditional – is referred to that often that is hard to know what is a tradition and what isn’t. The word is interchangeable with “typical”. Restaurants do typical/traditional cuisine, troupes perform typical/traditional dance and music, fiestas are typical/traditional. In the case of La Beata in Santa Margalida, this is the most typical of the lot – or so they always say. Girly saint rebuffs the attentions and temptations of the devil, good conquers evil and a whole tradition spawns demons with fire crackers, beasty masks and virgins of the parish parading in white.

The irony of tradition in a Mallorcan style is that it has created something that is distinctly of today – the tradition industry. There is marketing gold to be alchemised from a dry-stone wall, silver to be sold from the singing of a Sibil·la, bronze from coins clattering in the tills of the most ancient of the island’s traditions, the Talayotic.

The blurring of the lines between modernity and antiquity invites a question as to the degree to which tradition is forced and with the express purpose of creating a marketing benefit from the historical. The very promotion of tradition, with its narrative captured in the word itself and in the words typical or authentic, is sloganising. The words themselves are marketing tools, directed at both the native and the visiting markets.

The constant reinforcement of tradition for domestic consumption reflects a society still uneasy with modernity. Traditional Mallorcan society, by which one means that before the tourism industrial revolution of the sixties and one that was far more wedded to the land than it is now, still resides in the collective memory. This is unlike Britain, for example, where there is a general lack of tradition and an accommodation with its absence that doesn’t require an industry with its marketing plans to force it onto the populace or the tourist.

Of course, there are organisations such as English Heritage which maintain a connection with the past, but the promotion of English and British tradition and culture doesn’t have a sense of desperation; that of demanding that the past is held onto.

A key difference, though, between what occurs in long-industrialised countries and an island such as Mallorca where traditional society can be actively remembered lies in the capacity for a tradition industry to flourish. It could never have happened in Britain, for instance, because the wherewithal for such an industry simply didn’t exist. And by the time the wherewithal was discovered, it was far too late. Contemporary Mallorca, on the other hand, has that wherewithal, because the invention and development of marketing, and hence the tradition industry, pretty much coincided with the island’s industrial revolution.

Mallorca’s traditions aren’t invented, thanks to the temporal proximity to when traditional society started its decline, but they are an invention of the marketer who flogs them to a tourist market which has forgotten its own traditions.

Tradition is good. That’s the message, even if what is described as traditional isn’t necessarily exceptional. So it is with much traditional Mallorcan cuisine. Yea, it’s ok, but then so are fish and chips. They’re traditional, but they don’t come with a label attached that demands that they are considered thus. And the constant labelling is the constant reinforcement of a marketing message.

The flyer in the letter-box was selling. But it was also selling, in its curiously contemporary take-away way, that is on behalf of one of Mallorca’s strongest industries, its tradition industry.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Year Of Living Corruptly

This has been the year of the corrupt. Topped and tailed by cases that at the start of the year ensnared prominent members of one political party (the Unió Mallorquina) and at its end with the “Caso Puertos”, 2010 has been one long and sorry tale of the enduring rotten state of Mallorcan public life.

So what’s new, you might ask. The new year same as the old year. In her Christmas message in 2009, the president of the Council of Mallorca, Francina Armengol, had called for commitment to “ethical civic behaviour”, referring to the “repeated occurrence of corruption”. In this year’s message, while praising the efforts of those pursuing the corrupt, she said that there needed to be a change of direction in politics to one of transparency that is far removed from corruption.

If Sra. Armengol is still in office this time next year, she will probably be revisiting her theme. If not her, then her successor. Despite the diligent probes by prosecutors, judges and police, the cases of corruption and allegations of corruption keep coming to the surface with the regularity with which malodour filters out of a sewer cover.

Even where public figures are beyond reproach, so prevalent, so almost institutionalised has corruption been that you cannot be certain as to what you’re seeing. Mallorcan politics is like the doping cheats in athletics or cycling or Pakistani bowlers deliberately overstepping the crease. You just can’t be sure.

The level of corruption in Mallorca is, in one respect, surprising. The degree of decentralisation in local government conforms with the principle of subsidiarity whereby organisation is passed down to ever smaller authorities. In theory, subsidiarity should be an obstacle to corruption because its manifestation is easier to detect rather than in monolithic centralised organisations. Perhaps this subsidarity could now be said to be working in that more and more cases are coming to light. But it doesn’t stop it happening in the first place.

Less surprising as a cause of corruption is the sheer size of the local public sector and the plethora of authorities which are both directly governmental (town halls, Council of Mallorca, regional government) and quasi-governmental, such as the ports authority, the subject of the “Caso Puertos”. The larger the public sector, the more fertile the terrain in which corruption can take root.

Yet this doesn’t always follow. Scandinavian countries, for example, have large public sectors but a virtual absence of corruption. Mallorca’s corruption stems in part from its system of government but more importantly from a societal ethic that transmits itself into government – it is one of tribalism and nepotism.

The newspaper “El Mundo” recently carried an article in which it quoted the views of Juan Luis Calbarro, the spokesperson in the Balearics for the Unión Progreso y Democracia, a national party that was formed three years ago. What he has to say makes for difficult but not revelatory reading. “The Balearics have the highest number of people who are corrupt or allegedly corrupt per square metre in Spain.” He then reeled off a list of cases, all of them ongoing, and concluded by saying that all the main executive and legislative bodies in the islands are implicated along with various individuals – “businesspeople who are friends of certain politicians, businesspeople who assemble companies in order to receive adjudications decided by their political friends, as well as the wives, husbands, cousins and nephews of politicians”.

His is a damning indictment of the nepotism and cronyism that are the root cause of Mallorca’s corruption, and it is one that may well afflict even those who enter politics with honourable intentions. To what extent does a societal ethic of granting favours act as a form of pressure on politicians to engage in dishonourable practices? As Gabriel Garcías, a professor of law at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, has said: “so long as there is no ethical or moral transformation in society, the law will solve nothing.” Which is a depressing view of how, despite the huge publicity given to cases, legal measures may not eradicate corruption. The line from Monty Python’s “Church Police” sketch isn’t far from the truth: “it’s a fair cop, but society is to blame”.

And so you wonder if, at the end of 2011, we will be saying much the same thing as we are now and whether the president of the Council of Mallorca, whoever it might be, will be relaying the same message. You wouldn’t bet against it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Do Me A Favour: Spas, corruption and society

One of the features of quality and service improvements to Mallorca’s hotels has been the introduction of spas – beauty salons, jacuzzis, wellness sessions, all that sort of carry-on. Demand for spas has come from tour operators who see them as important in upgrading the standard of hotels. Provision for their additional creation was covered by the virtually zero-rate interest finance offered by the regional government as a way of assisting hotel upgrades during the crisis and by the so-called “decreto Nadal” which cut out some bureaucratic procedures in order to facilitate renovation and development work at hotels. The reclassification of hotels that is to take place within the next few years will take account of spas.

All good stuff, but as usual there is a rather different story to be told. Note that “decreto”. Who was the Nadal in question? Miguel. The former tourism minister and the “chosen one” by his predecessor as leader of the Unió Mallorquina, the matriarchal Mother Maria, Munar of that ilk. Nadal and Mother have since fallen out, their lovey-dovey photos regularly reproduced in order to stress the irony of the breakdown in their relationship, Nadal trying for all he’s worth to avoid taking the rap for corruption allegations that have come his and Mother’s way.

Building spas was fair enough, but who do you think was instrumental in a process for the spas – the number of which could be expected to increase – to be accredited and given quality ratings?

Maria Antònia Munar, never a hair out of place, always looking a million dollars, but don’t let’s ask where the dollars might have come from. As befits a one-time president of the Council of Mallorca and speaker of the regional parliament, she did of course need to look a million dollars.

Mother Munar had a personal beautician, and it was thanks to Munar that the beautician, Marisol Carrasco, along with two partners, managed to secure the contract, worth around a hundred thousand euros, to audit and certify hotel spas. The process of awarding the contract was rigged. There were three companies invited to tender for the award of the contract from the Inestur agency within the tourism ministry. However, all three belonged to the same group of people – those who won the contract.

Two former tourism ministers and key men in the UM, Francesc Buils and his successor, the aforementioned Nadal, were also keys to the process as it unravelled. Buils, himself implicated in scandal, had to have his arm twisted in order to set the process in motion. By whom? Yep, Mother. Nadal was the one who signed off on the invoices to Carrasco’s company once the auditing work had commenced last year. A fourth UM politician, Antoni Oliver, is also tied up in this deal. Oliver is the former director of Inestur and was a mate of one of Carrasco’s partners, one Josep Lluís Capllonch who owns a cosmetics firm in Pollensa. The role of Oliver in Pollensa’s own politics has been subject to questions raised by opposition groups in the town.

The story of the spas – and all this information is, by the way, in the public domain – tells you much about how the “system” works in Mallorca. Personal favours allied to political ones. All that seems to be missing in this instance is familial nepotism. It is a system that stinks in such a rotten way that not even the aromas from a spa could get rid of the stench. And in Mother you have, or had, someone who treated her party as her own personal fiefdom, with the wretched Buils, Nadal and others her subservient Mark Antonys.

Nothing in the UM appeared to happen without Mother’s bidding or approval. The election of her successor, Nadal, was a case in point. She let the chosen one have his scrapes with his rivals, Ferrer and Grimalt, let him throw his toys out of the pram and then stepped in to give them a telling-off and to approve him as leader, an outcome that had never been in question. The UM, in particular the party’s mechanism in Palma, was as close as you could get to familial nepotism without there actually being blood ties. But it was a metaphor for a society in which deference – matriarchal or patriarchal – persists, and which goes a long way in explaining the “system”.

Back in March, I wrote about the emergence of all the scandal that had engulfed Munar and the UM. Then I said that rather than there being concerns as to an electoral system that facilitates coalition (wrongly being singled out as a breeding ground for corruption), the “corruption scandals should be informing a debate as to what brings them about”; that it is society (Mallorcan) that “begets the politics of the island, not the other way round”. In other words, it is societal collusion or at least societal mores and the way in which society operates which breed political corruption.

The other day there was a debate, one that featured leading figures from the university. A professor of law said that “so long as there is no ethical or moral transformation in society, the law will solve nothing”. I suppose I feel vindicated in what I had said in March.

The spa story is a relatively minor matter when compared to some of the other charges that have been emerging, but is significant in that it highlights what many suspect, which is that little or nothing happens – be it spas or whatever – without someone benefiting in a way that they shouldn’t. The spas should be places of health, but even they have been tainted by disease.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.