Playing bear: The issues and limits of mimesis

In France s Eastern Pyrenees, three villages celebrate, the festival of the bear at the end of each winter. In a tradition that involves the whole community, young men in bear costumes, surrounded by hunters, roam the streets in pursuit of girls they pretend to abduct. The festival of Prats-de-Mollo, analyzed here, presents a series of confrontations that emerge from this “playful pretense”, and that entail all the paradoxes of mimesis.