Monthly Archives: June 2024

Northern Valleys

Reading an old ethnography of a Northern Spanish Valley, Person and God in a Spanish Valley. It was written by Californian-trained anthropologist, William Christian, after his stay in the Nansa Valley in the 1960s.
Reading old ethnographies is a necessary activity because I think we should value past works and nuance our allure with the very latest. It helps to reinforce the understanding of scientific knowledge as dialogue and to counter-balance the usual narrative of individual-led changes.
It is also interesting to act as the researched group, looking at what things encountered by  in the 1960s, applied also to my childhood in a nearby valley some thirty years later.
To add further, Arnau Ruiz De Villa did a wonderful photographic project in the Nansa Valley, along with men still harvesting hay to feed cattle in the winter.