Bullfighting is practiced primarily in Spain and to a lesser extent in Mexico, Central America, South America, southern France, and Portugal. Its existence depends on

(1) a large and constant supply of “noble” or “brave”bulls (i.e., bulls specially bred to charge aggressively in a straight line);

(2) a large and constant supply of young poor men;

(3) large numbers of hero-worshipping people addicted to thrilling displays of raw physical courage;

(4) a smaller number of aficionados obsessed with technical and historical details; and

(5) generations of taurine writers and intellectuals who consider bullfighting a fine art rather than a sport. In any given year, approximately 10,000 bullfights are held worldwide, usually in the context of a local religious fiesta that may also include running bulls or brave cows through the town streets, as in the famous festival of Pamplona.

Although bullfighting possesses many ritualistic aspects, it is misleading to call it a ritual. In a true ritual, such as the Catholic Mass, the officiate and communicants are engaged in deliberately symbolic activity; their every word and action has an agreed-on spiritual referent; everything is rigidly predetermined, nothing is left to chance.None of these qualities can be found in a bullfight. There is no deliberately symbolic activity, only simple signals such as handkerchief waving and clarion calls. The bullfighter’s actions do not “stand for” anything beyond themselves, and the spectators are always entitled to disagree about them. A great deal is left to chance as it is impossible to predict the behavior of bulls, crowds, or matadors beforehand. There is always a fair chance that the performance will turn sour and anticlimactic, or tragic and ugly. The rules of a typical bullfight call for a four- or fiveyear-old bull to be “picced” in his withers with a long lance, further weakened by banderillas and risky or flashy cape passes, then killed with a sword thrust by a man wearing decorative rather than protective clothing. Since picadors’ (mounted riders who pierce the bull with lances during the first stage of the fight) horses now wear thick padding, the element of cruelty to animals is incidental rather than central to the actual mechanics of the bullfight, more apparent than real. Bullfighting has been a de facto ecological preserve for the Iberian toro bravo, a species as rare and unique as the American buffalo, cherished and pampered by ranchers. For another, the archaic concept of manhood that animates the spectacle requires a worthy opponent at all times (women toreros exist but they are still regarded as anomalies, as are midget and comic bullfighters). That is why Hispanic publics always shout out their disapproval if they perceive that a bull is being mishandled and mistreated. Nevertheless, the psychology of both bullfight performers and spectators is thoroughly sadomasochistic, as could hardly be otherwise in a show that features public killing and needless risk of human life. For the thoughtful student of world sports, bullfighting raises questions of a moral or ethical nature much more serious than the ones raised by overwrought animal-rights activists.

History

A predatory species of mammal known as Homo sapiens and a herbivorous mammal species known as bos taurus had gone forth and multiplied with particular success in the Iberian peninsula. Mythology tells us that when Hercules had to steal bulls,he went to what is now the province of Cádiz in southern Spain. Apart from being used as food, the bull was in all likelihood a totemic figure and/or sacrificial victim for the races that populated Iberia during the Bronze Age. Local cults were later blended with beliefs and practices common to the entire Mediterranean area—chief among them the cult of Tauromorphic Bacchus, or Dionysus, firmly entrenched in the Hispania of Roman days. But the Visigoths who occupied Hispania when Rome fell had no interest in animal-baiting, and the grand amphitheaters were abandoned and never used again. In the hinterlands, however, the bull continued to play the role of magical agent of sexual fertility, especially in wedding customs that called for the bride and groom to stick darts into a bull tied to a rope. The object was not to fight the beast—certainly not to kill him—but to evoke his fecundating power by “arousing” him, then ritually staining their garments with his blood. This nuptial custom evolved into the rural capea, or bull-baiting fiesta, which in turn led to grandiose urban spectacles organized to celebrate military victories or royal weddings. The common people were permitted to crowd into gaily decorated plazas (one in Madrid had room for 60,000 spectators) and watch their lords,mounted on gallant steeds, lancing bulls. Until the 18^th century, vast herds of aggressive Iberian bulls roamed freely and bred themselves with no interference from the human species. When knightly bullfighting was in flower, the elite sent their peons into the wilds to round up as many bulls as they could. But not every wild bull had the right amount of bravura (focused aggressiveness) to make the aristocrat look good with his lance; thus, large numbers of bulls were supplied in the hope that enough of them would act out their roles convincingly.

As bullfighting on foot became more popular in the 1700s, the demand for bulls increased accordingly, specifically for bulls that could be counted on to charge,not flee. So the landed blue bloods did the same thing with the bulls that they had done with themselves in earlier epochs: They developed techniques for testing bravura, then perpetuated the blood of the bravest through consanguineous mating. Whether or not we think that aristocrats were a superior species, it is unquestionable that the animals they bred were and are amazingly consistent in their power, size, and aggressiveness. Hundreds of brave cattle ranches are now in existence to supply the roughly 25,000 bulls killed every year by Spanish matadors. The many brands of brave bulls that constitute the indispensable raw material for today’s corridas (program of bullfights for one day, usually six) descend from only five different castas or bloodlines, all developed in the 18^th century. The prestige of a particular brand of bulls was traditionally based on the number of horses, toreros,or innocent bystanders they had killed or maimed. On several occasions, bulls being shipped to a bullfight by train escaped from their railroad crates to wreak havoc. Cossío’s taurine encyclopedia lists hundreds of notorious bulls.

Rules and Play

In a rural fiesta, no one is in a hurry to see the bull dead; when the time comes to kill him,any method will do, from a shotgun to a mass assault with knives. In the urban corrida, however, it is crucial to show efficiency and know-how; the bull is to be dispatched cleanly (at least in theory) and in three timed suertes, or acts—picador, banderillas, and matador. Daily experience in the slaughterhouse gave certain ambitious plebeians the necessary knowledge and skill, and the boldest discovered they could earn more money by doing their jobs in public in the manner of a duel: man against monster. The guild system then dominant in the workaday world served as the model for turning bullfighting into a true profession with rules, regulations, hierarchism, apprenticeship, and seniority. The first professional bullfighters were men completely immersed in the ethos of the 18^th-century urban slum. They detested the effeminate aristocratic fashions imported from France and proudly affirmed “pure” native concepts of male honor, along with bold and insolent styles of dressing, walking, talking, and killing.Among the rank and file of the down and outs, the readiness to kill or die with a maximum of nonchalance was the only route to prestige. Bullfighting on foot appealed chiefly to violent men who had nothing to lose and something to prove. Ironically, the sport has always enjoyed enthusiastic support among the same poor masses who would never have chosen bullfighting as a way to escape poverty; masses who, in other words,were either resigned to their lowly fate or hopeful that through hard work and daily sacrifice they could somehow find a better life, but who were willing, all the same, to deify those few who were neither resigned nor inclined to hard work. Bullfighters were rebels in a rigidly stratified society,violators of the general law of submission to circumstances. But the violation of one value system implies adherence to another. The code matadors lived by was called vergüenza torera or pundonor. Both terms possess a certain connotation of “touchiness” that descends quite directly from the oldest, most benighted tradition of Spanish honor obsessions. Simply put, vergüenza torera is a bullfighter’s willingness to place his reputation ahead of his own life. This is not a mythical or romantic notion but a genuine code of conduct. Flashy flirtation with death has both financial and psychological rewards:

By all accounts, the heady delusion of omnipotence and heroism that matadors experience is quite addictive. A retired bullfighter is like a reformed alcoholic, always on the verge of a relapse into his favorite vice. Sometimes death is the only sure cure.Those bullfighters who best embody the imprudent honor code receive positive reinforcement from the crowds—rewarded, as it were, for their appetite for punishment. Toreros who stray from the code are negatively reinforced in the form of jeers, taunts, thrown objects, and malicious reviews. Readers of Death in the Afternoon may recall Ernest Hemingway’s witty, catty, and often vicious disparagement of the bullfighters of his day. Throughout the 19^th century, the popular concept of bullfighting was that of a martial art.Matadors were considered to be warriors; their “suits of light” were a kind of super-uniform,and their performances were so many episodes of a grandiose national saga. Unlike other European nations during this period, Spain saw its colonial possessions shrinking instead of expanding. For many Spaniards, the corrida may have been a gratifying fantasy of national potency to make up for the less-than-glorious reality.

The military origins of bullfight music have been firmly established by scholars. Every change of suerte, or scene, in a bullfight was, and is, signaled by a bugle call; the melodies are much the same as those used in infantry and cavalry barracks. The pasodoble, the stirring music played even today by bullring bands, descends directly from the military march. Over 500 of them were composed, and the band was always on hand to set the right tone of militancy. Following the loss of Spain’s colonies to the United States in 1898, numerous bullfights were organized in which people wore the national colors and bullfighters made inflammatory speeches. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), both sides sponsored corridas; bullfighters would parade with clenched fists or fascist salutes, whichever was appropriate. And in the darkest days of their country’s isolation under Franco, Spaniards flocked to bullrings to reaffirm their identity with something they knew was their own and which they took to represent their finest qualities. However barbarous its origins, however sordid some of its practices, the fiesta de toros had truly become Spain’s Fiesta Nacional.

For every successful matador paraded around the bullring on the shoulders of ecstatic fans, there is an invisible army of forgotten young men who tried and failed. Like certain marine species that give birth to thousands of young in the hopes that a few will reach maturity, the overwhelming majority of would-be matadors have been eliminated by environmental factors, each harsher than the last.The bull’s horns are the most basic, physical agent of this process of natural selection. For many Spanish youth, the beginning was the end. From 1747 to 1995, at least 170 young aspirants were killed by goring, along with 142 banderilleros, 70 picadors, 59 full matadors, and 4 comic bullfighters. These statistics do not include toreros killed during ranch tests or private parties, nor do they include capeas (amateur bullfights), which have arguably been festal Spain’s major device for maiming young bodies and crushing hopes. Doctors specializing in taurotraumatología, or horn-wound surgery, are accustomed to working on the pierced thighs, ruptured rectums, and eviscerated scrota of bullfighters.When an apprentice torero recovers from his first goring and reappears in the ring, his manager anxiously watches for any sign that his valor or his determination have been compromised. The all-powerful element of luck will still preside over his career. To be successful, a man must meet a noble and cooperative bull at the right moment; he must also have padrinos, or godfathers, a good manager, opportunities, a crowd-pleasing personality, grace, flair, and a whole series of other qualities that are difficult to isolate but nevertheless mean the difference between glory and mediocrity.

In view of this brutal selection process, it might well be asked why any young man in his right mind would want to be a bullfighter. Poverty is the answer most often given to this question.Many portions of the Spanish populace have been condemned to misery, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity.Harsh as they have been, however, these social conditions are not sufficient in themselves to explain matador motivation. They obviously do not tell us why bullfighters who were already immensely wealthy—such as Espartero or Belmonte or Paquirri—remained in the plazas,or why so many men who had actually found good jobs wanted only to fight bulls. Additional motivational factors include self-destructive tendencies and unusually powerful oedipal conflicts.With an activity that has been one of the only means of advancement in a rigidly stratified society, whose wellspring is passion and whose lifeblood is the ritual combat between two animal species, where a lucky and skillful few succeed where so many hundreds fail, where so many frustrated men hound their sons into bullrings to avenge their own defeats,where critics dip their pens in poison and crowds go from adulation to mockery in a second, we cannot help but find sadomasochistic behavior patterns. In general,matadors are men obsessed with insurmountable violent masculine role models and rivals; their ambition is directly correlated with the obstacles placed in their path. Violence becomes identified with fullness of being; winning or losing, brutalizing or arranging to be brutalized, the bullfighter keeps his buried fantasies of omnipotence alive. Hemingway idolized masochistic matadors with adolescent enthusiasm, but in many ways they are like compulsive gamblers who throw caution to the winds and unconsciously play to lose all. Unlike gamblers, bullfighters go for broke in front of huge crowds of people egging them on; so in the last analysis, the taurine honor code is a matter of mass cultural psychology. Countless bullfighters have confessed to fearing the crowd’s reactions more than the bulls themselves.Mass desire is as potentially sadomasochistic as individual desire: It will polarize around any expert manipulator of violence, seemingly autosufficient and untouchable in his charisma.The dramatic death of a matador in the line of duty (caused most often by his socially sanctioned suicidal honor), and his subsequent deification in popular lore, simply carry the whole idolatrous process to its logical conclusion.

From a historical point of view, bullfighting has been nothing less than a microcosm of Spain, a nation built not on individuals but on quasi-familial factions, where a “strong man” ultimately derived his strength from the debility of his supporters and the weak got nowhere without patriarchs, caudillos, godfathers, political bosses, and other men who bestowed rewards and punishments in accordance with their mood swings. Until recently, the Spanish political system served to keep most Spaniards out of politics altogether, instilling in them a fatalistic attitude vis-à-vis the whims of authority. The office of presidente of a bullfight still represents this legacy of arbitrary despotism. Fraud and influence peddling were once endemic on the “planet of the bulls.”Horns were shaved,half-ton sandbags were dropped on bulls’ shoulders, critics were bribed. (One of the cruel ironies of bullfighting is that the most honest and reputable critics are also the ones most determined to preserve the authentic risk of human life upon which the whole enterprise is founded.)

Beyond tricks and venality, we can see that bullfighting’s personalistic patronage system mirrors that of the larger society. The provincial fiesta de toros was a cautionary tale about what could happen to people without connections or friends; small-town mayors anxious to please their supporters had no qualms about acquiring the largest,most fearsome bulls for penniless apprentice toreros to struggle with and occasionally succumb to. Sooner or later a would-be bullfighter must find protectors/exploiters, the more the better, or he will get nowhere. El Cordobés wandered for years without such connections, and when he finally found them they were desperate gambling types much like himself who were willing to take a chance on a brash newcomer. The other side of this coin of unfair exclusion is unfair inclusion, young men from the right families, prodigies favored from the beginning by cattle breeders, impresarios, and critics. Traditionally, the whole point of a matador’s career was to go from being a dependent, a client, a receiver of favors in a more or less corrupt system of personalistic patronage, to being a dispenser of favors and patronage—the boss of his cuadrilla, or team, a landowner, a big man in his community, a pillar of the status quo, idolized by impoverished and oppressed people.

A whole web of complicities make bullfighting possible—including local religious belief systems. The fiesta de toros is always held in honor of a patron saint, a kind of supernatural protector in touch with an arbitrary central authority that can be cajoled into doing favors for his “clients.” Like old-fashioned Spanish political oratory, bullfighting can be seen as a series of dramatic public gestures. Every bullfighter is a potential demagogue, a man who stirs up the emotions of a crowd to become a leader and to achieve his own ends.A bullfighter gains power and wealth only when he learns how to sway the masses, to mesmerize them, to harness their passion for his private profit. The matador rides to the top of society on the backs of mass enthusiasm. But no bullfighter could sway the masses if they were not disposed to be swayed. As soon as we become spectators of the spectators,we find their mobile and emotional disposition to be intimately related to popular concepts of power, authority, justice,and masculinity.Without heed to experts or critics, bullfight spectators evaluate artistic merit or bravery on their own and express their views instantly and unselfconsciously. The downside of this refreshing spontaneity, however, is that popular value judgments tend to be arbitrary,impulsive, and irreflexive. The impulsive evaluations of bullfight crowds rattle and unnerve bullfighters, sometimes leading them to commit acts that result in serious injury or death.At the Almería Fair in 1981, for example, the normally cautious Curro Romero was gored in an attempt to appease a hastily judgmental crowd. Afterwards the public was very sorry, of course, as sorry as it had been in 1920 after hounding Joselito into fatal temerity at Talavera and in 1947 when it drove Manolete to impale himself on the horns of Islero. Blood and Sand, the famous bullfighting novel by Blasco Ibáñez, ends with this description of the public: “The beast roared: the real one, the only one.”

At the very least, the public judges the taurine performance in an arbitrary, capricious, and personalistic manner. Since the decisions of the bullring presidente form part of the entire affair, they too fall under the scrutiny—and often the vociferous condemnation—of the spectators. Like old Spain itself, the bullfight is a mise en scène of an authoritarian power in an uneasy relationship with a blasphemous and rebellious underclass. For many Spanish writers, the crowd’s impulsive style of reacting to duly constituted authority was the worst evil of bullfighting, one that reconfirmed Spaniards in their submission to the despotic whims of the powerful. As the very embodiment of arbitrary might, the presidente possesses total immunity and his decisions cannot be appealed. The public’s only recourse is to whistle, hoot, or insult. Thus, in much the same manner as the old African monarchies described by anthropologists, the corrida de toros permits a ritualistic contestation of power that is momentarily gratifying but essentially without consequence. In his own way, of course, the matador polarizes the crowd’s criteria of dominance and submission:Whatever power he has must be seen in terms of popular concepts of power (who deserves to have it and who doesn’t) worked out long ago during Spain’s traumatic history of civil conflicts.According to one Spanish sociologist, “The bullfight spectator believes in certain qualities inherent in a man that constitute manliness, and precisely because he believes in them he goes to see bullfights.” It would be correct to picture the bullfight as a dramatization of machismo, as long as we remember that machismo is primarily a psychological mechanism of compensation that provides a fantasy image of superiority in the absence of real sociopolitical power. Perhaps a bullfighter’s manly hyperbole serves to mediate between personal and national inferiority complexes. In any event, the evidence would seem to be on the side of those who argue that bullfighting is the legacy of obscurantism, that it is emblematic of the manipulability of the people, their gullibility, their irrational hero-worship, their civic immaturity. It would surely be an exaggeration to see bullfighting as the “cause” of Spain’s former political backwardness, but it was certainly no cure.

The bullfight is a spectacle of killing and gratuitous risk of life. It is extremely difficult for human beings to gaze upon such transgression without being aroused in some way.Even reactions of horror and nausea confirm that violent spectacle is inherently erotic. Properly defined, disgust is nothing but negative arousal, caused by the fear of degradation that accompanies the desire to give way to the instincts and violate all taboos. In reality, most people do not transgress one taboo after another and set off on the primrose path to ruin. Culture (whether in the form of Spanish bullfighting or American “slasher” movies) is there to provide official fantasy gratification as a safe substitute for the real thing. Order must be preserved even as desire requires some sort of release. The majority of Spaniards and many foreigners enjoy the titillating taurine spectacle without guilt or moral qualms of any kind. The group norms that hold sway at a bullfight enable each spectator to feel his or her physiological arousal as entirely appropriate. Intense stimulation actually increases commitment to the group’s rationalization of it. This is the sociopsychological mechanism that has permitted Spaniards to experience titillation at bullfights and associate it, at a conscious level, with patriotism, manly ideals, integrity, honor, art, and so on.What happens to this happy group consensus when a goring occurs and the transgressive nature of bullfighting is fully manifested? Community norms are already in place that will provide cognitions appropriate to the intense arousal spectators experience. These stand-by norms quickly forge a new group consensus whose conscious elements are pity, grief, forbearance, resignation, and ultimately, reaffirmation of all the heroic qualities that led the matador to risk his life in the first place. The normative emotionality that takes shape around the fallen bullfighter goes far beyond the bullring in its sociocul-tural implications and lasts for many years after the tragedy. There is still plenty of cultural debris left over from the emotional explosions that accompanied the deaths of star matadors.