Alternative countrysides Blank page Alternative countrysides Anthropological approaches to rural Western Europe today Edited by Jeremy MaCClancy Manchester University Press Copyright © Manchester University Press 2015 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY- NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched, which permits non- commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 9684 6 hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Out of House Publishing Contents List of figures vi List of contributors vii 1 Alternative countrysides: anthropology and rural West Europe today 1 Jeremy MacClancy 2 A ‘private place’? Changing meanings of the countryside in northern Italy 29 Jaro Stacul 3 Environmental attitudes, community development, and local politics in Ireland 46 Paul Collinson 4 Ethnic identity, power, compromise, and territory: ‘locals’ and ‘Moroccans’ in the Sainte-Foy-Bordeaux vineyards 61 Chantal Crenn 5 The new rural residents: emerging sociabilities in Alava, Basque Country 82 Josetxu Martínez Montoya 6 Farms, flats, and villas: senses of country living in a Basque-speaking village 95 Kepa Fernández de Larrinoa 7 The recuperation of Galician pottery: craft professions, cultural policies, and identity 119 Elena Freire Paz 8 Fear and loving in the west of Ireland: the blows of County Clare 143 Jeremy MacClancy Index 169 Figures 1.1 Fairy-tale turreted house, for a blow-in cheesemaker, County Clare, west Ireland (Jeremy MacClancy). 11 1.2 Locals thought this blow-in carpenter ‘mad’ to construct a wooden house in such a gale-swept area as County Clare, west Ireland. More than a decade later, the house still stood, in good shape (Jeremy MacClancy). 11 2.1 The ‘cultural landscape’ of the village of Caoria and its surroundings in the 1930s (Foto Fontana. Historical Archive Ente Parco Naturale Paneveggio – Pale di San Martino). 36 2.2 Caoria in 1992: the forest is encroaching on the village (Jaro Stacul). 36 2.3 The material and symbolic cultivation of landscape: haymaking in Caoria in 1992 (Jaro Stacul). 38 6.1 The village of Alkiza, 1945 (Oilategitik: Alkizako Herri Aldizkaria). 109 6.2 Alkiza, 2006 (Oilategitik: Alkizako Herri Aldizkaria). 110 6.3 The festivity of San Juan, Alkiza, 2006 (Oilategitik: Alkizako Herri Aldizkaria). 113 7.1 Pieces made before 1960, and a modern reproduction of an original shape (the breastmilk pump piece) (Vicente Blanco). 123 7.2 Pieces of traditional pottery made in the twenty-first century in Galicia (Vicente Blanco). 125 7.3 Diachronic evolution of a breastmilk pump piece (pezoeira) (Vicente Blanco). 135 7.4 Souvenirs sold as traditional pottery (Vicente Blanco). 135 8.1 The Burren: karst limestone (Jeremy MacClancy). 152 8.2 This blow-in’s house has been built around the original caravan (just visible through the leftmost window) (Jeremy MacClancy). 160 List of contributors Paul Collinson is an honorary research associate and former lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University. His research interests are in the anthropologies of development, conflict and food, focused largely on the Republic of Ireland. His latest publications include Food in Zones of Conflict (Berghahn 2014), co-edited with Helen Macbeth. He is currently the UK Chair of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. Chantal Crenn Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Bordeaux mountain, researcher at CNRS research laboratory UMI ESS 3189 Dakar and LAM / IEP UMR 5115 Bordeaux, specialises in international migration, eth- nic relations, and practices and representations related to food. She conducts her fieldwork in France, Senegal and Madagascar. Recent publications include Mobility and Migration: contemporary figures and challenges (L’Harmattan, Coll Presses Universitaires de Sceaux, 2014), co-edited with Gérard Azoulay, Véronique Ancey, Daniel Dormoy, André and André Mangu Thomashausen, and ‘Migration and rural Worlds’, Hommes et migrations, Working Paper No. 1301, January/February/March 2013, co-edited with Simona Tersigni. She is a mem- ber of the editorial board of Anthropology of food (aof.revues.org). Kepa Fernández de Larrinoa (PhD, London School of Economics; MA, University of Western Ontario) is a Basque anthropologist dedicated to the study of cultural models in specific ecological systems undergoing processes of social change. As an ethnographer, he is largely engaged in arts-informed lines of inquiry, such as rural theatre and performance, folk literary genres, and indigenous new media, especially radio stations and video production. He conducts fieldwork among European agropastoralists in the Pyrenees Mountains, and hunter-gatherer peo- ples in the Amazonian rainforest of Ecuador. Elena Freire Paz Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, University of Santiago de Compostela, specialises in heritage processes (crafts and food). Her most recent publications include ‘Modelando la tradición. El papel de las mujeres en la artesanía del barro’ in Interculturalidad, género y derechos humanos: dilemas sobre viii List of contributors la cultura subsahariana, (Editorial AXAC, 2014), edited by Xaquín Rodríguez Campos; and, with Ana Cabana Iglesia, ‘Vendedoras de barro. Mujeres rurales y los límites de “lo doméstico” a mediados del siglo XX’ Teresa Mª Ortega López (ed.), Sociedad Española de Hª Agraria-Monografías de Historia Rural. Jeremy MacClancy Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Anthropological Centre for Conservation, the Environment and Development, Oxford Brookes University, specialises in the anthropologies of Europe, art, sport, food, and nationalism, as well as writing on research methods and the history of anthropol- ogy, both academic and popular. His latest books are Anthropology in the public arena. Historical and contemporary contexts (Wiley, 2013), and Ethics in the field: Contemporary Challenges (Berghahn, 2013), co-edited with Agustín Fuentes. Josetxu Martínez Montoya was Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Deusto, Bilbao, in the Basque Country, from 1995 to 2011. Now retired from academia, he continues his research in the following fields: European identity, and Basque culture, especially cultural changes in rural areas produced by the globalising process. His main publications include Pueblos, ritos y montañas, Practicas vecinales y religiosas en el espacio y en el tiempo de la comunidad rural (Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), and La identidad reconstruida. Espacios y sociabilidad emergente en la ruralidad alavesa (Vitoria-Gasteiz: Gobierno Vasco, 2002). Jaro Stacul (PhD, Cambridge) is a research associate at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He has held full-time positions in various academic institutions in Britain, Bulgaria, and Canada. He conducted research on local identity in the Italian Alps of Trentino in several spells between the mid 1990s and 2007, and analysed the ways in which ideas about private property and the natural environment form the background against which the ‘ideologies’ of regionalist political forces are debated and understood at the local level. His publications include The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley (Berghahn, 2003). Since 2008 he has been working on a research project on the redevelopment of post-industrial spaces in Poland, which involves fieldwork in the city of Gdańsk. 1 Alternative countrysides: anthropology and rural West Europe today Jeremy MacClancy I remember the moment well. I was doing fieldwork in Navarre, northern Spain, in the mid-1980s. Taking a weekend break, I was due to visit a commune in a hilly valley at the foot of the Pyrenees. Local friends had established it in a deserted vil- lage two years earlier. Before making the trek to their homes, my companion, who was from the area, wanted to show me Lakabe, the long-established, very successful commune on the other side of the narrow valley. As we walked down the valley’s sole road, we met a group of some twenty youths, all carrying shovels, picks and hoes. ‘They’re a work party from the drug rehabilitation centre in the next village,’ she said. ‘And in the village after that, Buddhists from Bilbao are renovating the houses for a meditation centre.’ Her words made me realise, with a sudden flash, that almost the entire valley was being repopulated by a variety of alternatives: organic communards, Indophilic mys- tics, and addicts digging their way out of their habit. The indigenes had fled the area two decades before, for the