A Contemporary Archaeology of Cultural Change in Rural North-Western Spain: From Traditional Domesticity to Postmodern I
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A Contemporary Archaeology of Cultural Change in Rural North-Western Spain: From Traditional Domesticity to Postmodern Individualisation Pablo Alonso González 1,2 & David González Álvarez 3
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract This paper explores the built environment in two rural areas of Northwest Spain that were historically inhabited by two of the so-called “cursed peoples.” Combining contemporary archaeology and material culture studies, we analyze the role played by the house in processes of socio-economic and cultural change, and in the reproduction of internal hegemony within villages. To do so, we study the tensions and connections existing between the transformations undergone by the built environment during the last century and different socio-economic processes, including the depopulation of the rural areas, their conversion into tourist attractions, and the current process of individualisation of subjectivity in line with the transformations taking place in the postmodern era. Keywords Domesticity . Cultural change . Rural Spain . Built environment
Introduction The modernisation of the state and the inception of enlightened culture in Spain since the eighteenth century highlighted the need to build a homogeneous nation with a common identity (Álvarez Junco 2001, p. 334). As with any other process of modern nation building, this process required the construction of “others,” both foreign and internal. Accordingly, a series of social groups started to be perceived and constructed as internal others, now referred to as the “cursed peoples” of Spain (Miner Otamendi * Pablo Alonso González [email protected] David González Álvarez [email protected] 1
Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2
Incipit-CSIC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
3
Department of Prehistory, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Int J Histor Archaeol
and Martínez 1978). This paper analyses the contemporary processes of cultural change through an exploration of the material culture and built environment of two of these groups, the maragatos and the vaqueiros d’alzada. The study is bounded to two rural areas of northwest Spain, where we study three villages in the municipality of Val de San Lorenzo (León) and three in Somiedu (Asturias) (Fig. 1). Both groups underwent a characteristic modern process of knowledge/power dichotomisation. First, this process involved the generation of epistemological and discursive cultural representations of their minority identity and “otherness,” understood here as the quality of being perceived as distinct or different from the majority. Secondly, modernisation and the spatialisation of the State gradually undermined their ontological alterity (Kapferer 2007) in terms of ways of life and culture, ultimately leading to the disappearance of their differential traits and the depopulation of their territories. However, the last decades of postmodernity or supermodernity (Augé 2008) and the post-industrial transition in Spain have witnessed a return
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