The Purity Panic: Notes from the Museum of Imaginary Nations

🎃 Trick, treat… and tradition with a twist 🎃

What if your Halloween bucket of candy held more than sweets—what if it carried a message about identity, culture, and the absurdity of purity? In my latest column for SUR in English (“The Purity Panic: Notes from the Museum of Imaginary Nations”), I peer into the masked world of tradition and show how our spookiest of nights reveals something rather ironic about nationalism — that the fear of change often hides the very thing we claim to protect.

Here’s the kicker: Halloween is a delicious mash-up. Celtic roots, Catholic overlays, American marketing, kids in skeleton costumes, Dutch candy in Chinese‐made pumpkin buckets… it’s living proof that culture is less like a sealed museum and more like a bustling kitchen.

In the Spanish version of the piece (my bi-weekly “Camino a Ítaca” in HOY) I take the same theme and ask: Why do we cling to “tradition” as though it’s untouched by time, when the most vibrant traditions are the ones that adapt and borrow? (Spoiler: the extremists threaten what they truly fear – the messy, joyous mingling that makes culture.)

👉 Curious yet? Head over to the English version here and the Spanish version here.

Let’s embrace the costumes, the borrowed stories and the pumpkins with a wink — because when culture evolves, it doesn’t just survive, it thrives.

See you on the other side of the door-knock. 🚪🍬

(en castellano aqui https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oIAiIBW567U-J4Hz27msodRYgLAaUAJ8/view?usp=sharing)