The research for this thesis has been confined in space and time in order to facilitate an investigation of the Church at several levels: the study is as concerned with the faith and the faithful as with the official presence of the hierarchy. It examines questions of religious identity in an area of high Catholic practice, conservative politics and, eventually, genuine popular support for the Nationalist rising. The province of Salamanca, in the north west of Spain, is a particularly appropriate focus for such a study. Part of the Castilian heartland of traditional Spain, it was the home province of Jose Maria Gil Robles and a major area of strength for the parliamentary Catholic right, which mobilised here before anywhere else in Spain. This has led to Salamanca receiving some attention from historians. Scholars such as Paul Preston and Juan Jose Castillo use it to provide examples of the Catholic right's techniques and rhetoric, arguing that the innate conservatism of the Castilian smallholders was manipulated by the great landlords. However, perhaps the most interesting feature of the history of the province in the 1930s is how its story differed from that laid out in Madrid. The historiography of the Second Republic has concentrated - perhaps inevitably - on political and parliamentary struggles. While issues such as disestablishment and the fate of the religious orders were of crucial importance at institutional and governmental level, the impact they had outside the professional circles of church and state is far less certain. This study has moved outside the administrative world of the capital to investigate the impact of the Republic on ordinary Catholic citizens. The minutiae of church/ state relations and the undoubted injustice of the treatment of the religious orders may have outraged the Catholic deputies representing Salamanca in the Cortes, but their Catholic constituents had different concerns. By examining these concerns, this thesis throws new light on the process of breakdown of the Second Republic.

/pdf/catholicism-in-the-second-spanish-republic-religion-and-3pl92srntp.pdf

Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic : religion and politics in Salamanca, 1930-1936

In 1886 Emile Zola published La Terre (The Earth), a novel about peasant life in nineteenth-century France. In that novel, the peasant-proprietor Fduan, aware that he has reached an age at which he can no longer farm his own property, decides to divide it among his three children. Monsieur Baillehache, the notary before whom they all appear to legalize the transaction, feels that it is his duty to “make the usual comments.”

Kinship and Contract: Property Transmission and Family Relations in Northwestern Portugal

Similar forms of subsistence and social organization have emerged in different parts of the world in response to similar ecological, technological, and demographic factors. For example, moldboard plow agriculture evolved in many places as the result of high population density, availability of large domesticable animals, presence of wet and heavy soils, and such staples as wheat, barley, rye, and buckwheat, which required extensive land preparation and “considerable surface area to produce the food calories necessary to feed a family” (Pryor 1985:732). Wolf long ago (1957) noted that the colonial experience had helped to promote the development of closed, corporate communities in rural societies of Mesoamerica and Indonesia.

The Evolution of Common-Field Agriculture in the Andes: A Hypothesis

Venerated throughout Latin America, the saints of the Roman Catholic Church are important folk symbols. In one Panamanian village the system of saints preserves fundamental understandings about the world, the social order, and the person. During the various feast days, which involve the people in different but patterned experiences, these meanings are revealed to and revivified within the individual. The details of this system are particular to one area, but the basic patterning involving people, saints, and ceremonies is widespread.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ae.1976.3.4.02a00090

saints, symbols, and ceremonies

Foster's analysis of the image oflim ited good (which also seeks to subsume the concept of amoral familism) is still frequently referred to in studies of the European peasantry, although it has also been criticised in various ways as a predictive model of behaviour. Without entering the issue of prediction, the present study considers whether the image of limited good does in fact accurately reflect the thinking of a "classic" peasant village in Greece. It emerges that limited goods, which are necessarily viewed as commodities, are not easily discriminated in village thinking from other kinds ofgoods, which are not so viewed, and whether in regard to land, the family, hospitality or economic improvement, the meaning of village behaviour depends less on images of limited good than on images of other goods which accord with, oppose, or complement them. While Foster's analysis has contributed interesting insights on the way values can be defined as co nmodities, it is better to view European peasant societies within a more comprehensive framework which is sensitive to the other ways in which peasant values can be defined. [amoralfamilism, entrepreneurs, Greece, limited good, peasants]

Amoral Familism and the Image of Limited Good: A Critique from a European Perspective

The functional context of local religious practices within the structure of formal Catholicism in Spain has received little attention. Close examination of the ceremonial life of a Castilian village, and of the attitudes accompanying ceremonial and nonceremonial events, points to the existence of a complex of political and economic activities that are the chief objects of ritual sanctification and the arena in which religious sanctions function to maintain social control in the community. A survey of the ethnographic literature indicates that religious ceremonial may function in similar contexts in extended areas of the Iberian peninsula. The Castilian case and the available comparative data point to the crucial role of local religious traditions in strengthening territorial ties and in helping to define and integrate some of the fundamental units of the social structure.

Religious Aspects of the Social Organization of a Castilian Village

Corporately organized, egalitarian systems of turn-taking and cost-sharing in local economic, administrative, and ceremonial life are found in Iberian communities of different sizes. Here their occurrence in the countryside is reviewed and analyzed together with new material, historical and modern, on the Spanish city of Soria, which gives perspective on the integration of egalitarian structures into the hierarchical wider society. Ideological aspects of the turn-taking systems are explored and the position of the “rotative community” vis-a-vis the wider social system, with their contrasting styles of interpersonal relations, is assessed, [social organization, economic institutions, ritual organization, urban social structure, urban history, Spain, Iberia]

egalitarian structures in Iberian social systems: the contexts of turn‐taking in town and country

THE PAPERS in this group do not treat a common theme but, rather, represent some of the variety of concerns which characterizes European studies today. While the papers speak for themselves, I should like to say a few words about the research in Europe specifically of social anthropologists trained in the Anglo-American anthropological tradition. Prior to 1950, the only published European community studies based on fieldwork and growing out of this tradition were those of Arensberg and Kimball, unless we include Homans’ archival tour de force on thirteenth century England. The 1950s saw the first publications of the work of social anthropologists in Belgium, Spain, Norway (and generally among the Lapps), The Netherlands, Wales, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece.’ But the field, even as narrowly as I have defined it, really burgeoned in the 1960s, when the number of social anthropological publications on Europe doubled. The early 1970s have already produced an increase nearly equal to that of the entire previous decade. Publication, of course, lags considerably behind actual research: unpublished dissertations and works in progress contribute to make the body of anthropological literature on Europe large indeed. The literature to date indicates certain general trends in social anthropological studies in Europe. First, there is a notable tendency to employ the single nation as the ethnological frame of reference; this is related both to the amount and the complex nature of relevant source materials and to the linguistic difficulty of working across (and often even within) national boundaries. Second, within nations, most field studies have focused on exceedingly small geographic entities, and few ethnological approaches have been made to the study of larger regions or of nations themselves. A review of some specific concerns which inform European research indicates the major areas of our contribution as well as some respects in which Europe’s potential interest has yet to be dealt with by social anthropologists.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1973.75.3.02a00070

Studies in rural european social organization

Julian A. Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001)

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ae.1982.9.3.02a00220

Susan Tax Freeman

Papers

Religious Aspects of the Social Organization of a Castilian Village

egalitarian structures in Iberian social systems: the contexts of turn‐taking in town and country

Studies in rural european social organization

Julian A. Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001)

The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community. SANDRA OTT