Pot-banging has been a common feature of protest in Spain over the last decade. In this paper I will discuss how we can historicise the emergence of political pot-banging through a focus on episodes of carnivalesque noise-making since the 1970s. I argue that while ‘traditional’ charivari disappeared, pot-banging was appropriated from Latin America in the 1980s. I will also discuss how pot-banging can be inserted into a wider history of collective action and the politics of noise-making, with implications for how we think about the evolution of protest, ‘transitions’ in modern Spain, and the nature of the carnivalesque.
