Stanley H. Brandes

Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore

In the Andalusian communities throughout the olive-growing region of southeastern Spain men show themselves to be primarily concerned with two problems of identity: their place in the social hierarchy, and the maintenance of their masculinity in the context of their culture. In this study of projective behavior as found in the folklore of an Andalusian town, Stanley Brandes is careful to support psychological interpretations with ethnographic evidence. His emphasis on male folklore provides a timely complement to current research on women.

Towards a Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean [and Comments and Reply]

Daviss People of the Mediterranean provides a detailed survey of the writings of anthropologists who have worked in Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Its author focuses on economic organization, stratification, patronage, family and kinship, and the way anthropologists have dealt with history. He concludes that they have failed to compare, to work in cities, to relate part to whole, and to make use of history. These failures, he argues, maybe the consequences of a mass inferiority complex among Mediterraneanists. While partly admitted, these failures are inherent in the structural-functionalism that until recently dominated most anthropologists, not just Mediterraneanists. Daviss work, while provocative and informative, is limited by his own failure to provide a set of problems that could have placed his abundant data in a meaningful comparative framework. The consequences of variations in the regions geography and economy, dimensions Davis ignores when discussing Mediterranean unity, might well have provided such a framework; they furnish part of the answer to some of the similarities and differences he notes but does not explain.

The Sardana : Catalan Dance and Catalan National Identity

The sardana, a circle dance from northeast Spain, emerged in the mid-19th century as a key symbol of Catalonia. A prototypical invented tradition, the sardana represents qualities that Catalans hold dear, such as harmony, democracy, brotherhood, and national identity as an achieved rather than ascribed status. Threats against the sardana are perceived as threats against Catalonia. Hence, Catalan folklorists rewrite history in an attempt to defend the dances purity and persistence.

Iconography in Mexico's Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning

This article analyzes the origin and meaning of artistic representations of death-principally skulls and skeletons-in Mexicos Day of the Dead. It challenges stereotypes of the death-obsessed Mexican by tracing mortuary imagery in the Day of the Dead to Two separate artistic developments, the first deriving from religious and demographic imperatives of colonial times, the second from nineteenth-century politics and journalism. Now generally perceived as belonging to a single, undifferentiated iconographic tradition, cranial and skeletal images of death have become virtually synonymous with Mexico itself.

Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico's Day of the Dead

Mexicos most famous holiday is, without doubt, the Day of the Dead. At the end of October, large numbers of foreign visitors descend upon Mexico to witness colorful-some would say carnivalesque-ritual performances and artistic displays. Decorated breads, paper cutouts, and plastic toys, most of them humorously playing on the theme of death, are evident everywhere. Sculpted sugar candies in the form of skulls, skeletons, and caskets suggest an almost irreverent, macabre confrontation with mortality. During November 1 and November 2, Mexicans clean, decorate, and maintain vigil over the graves of relatives. Tombstones and burial sites are adorned with flowers, candles, and food, all aesthetically arranged in honor of the deceased. Some Mexicans claim that the souls of the departed watch over their living relatives during these few days. Negligent family members await punishment, whether on earth or in the afterlife. This belief is invoked throughout Mexico to explain the substantial time, money, and energy invested in the two-day ceremony. At the outset, it should be made clear that the Day of the Dead is, at least in the contemporary era, an essentially Mexican term referring to the Mexican version of a pan-Roman Catholic holiday. Strictly speaking, the Day of the

Sex Roles and Anthropological Research in Rural Andalusia

Does a fieldworker’s gender automatically confer advantages or limitations in data collection? Do women anthropologists have access to a wider range of information than men, or can men, normally endowed with greater power and prestige, expect to entertain the broader, more willing informant pool? In this chapter, I wish to explore these questions with specific reference to my own fieldwork in southern Spain. No single anthropologist’s experience can provide the definitive answers. Nonetheless, if we examine individual experiences in a systematic fashion, we can hope at the very least to prepare novice fieldworkers to anticipate certain triumphs or disappointments. We can teach students to recognise that there is a great deal to be learned even from unresponsive informants or from situations that are defined as off-limits simply by virtue of the researcher’s sexual identity.

Torophiles and Torophobes: The Politics of Bulls and Bullfights in Contemporary Spain

Although the bullfight as a public spectacle extends throughout southwestern Europe and much of Latin America, it attains greatest political, cultural, and symbolic salience in Spain. Yet within Spain today, the bullfight has come under serious attack, from at least three sources: (1) Catalan nationalists, (2) Spaniards who identify with the new Europe, and (3) increasingly vocal animal rights advocates. This article explores the current debate—cultural, political, and ethical—on bulls and bullfighting within the Spanish state, and explores the sources of recent controversy on this issue.

Animal metaphors and social control in Tzintzuntzan

Ever since Leach (1964) published his groundbreaking paper on animal categories and verbal abuse, scholars have demonstrated considerable interest in the subject of animal metaphors. Like Leachs study, most of this work (e.g., Basso 1976; Crocker 1977; Tambiah 1969) has grown out of the literature on binary oppositions, mediation, and anomalous categories; it has focused, in other words, on cognitive issues. Recently, the topic has been explored effectively with reference to the related subject of world view as well (Taggart 1982). In this paper, I analyze animal metaphors from a different perspective; i.e., the role they play in promoting social control. I intend to show that animal metaphors acquire this function in two ways: first, cognitively, by accentuating the differ? ences between human and bestial behavior and thereby encouraging people to conform to culturally approved codes; and second, socially, by providing people with highly charged terms that can be manipulated in daily speech to reduce or increase social distance. Animal metaphors constitute an important domain for talking about disapproved or undesirable attributes. Hence, when these meta? phors are invoked they implicitly remind people of human behavioral norms and physical ideals. They reinforce the social and moral order.

La Soltería, or Why People Remain Single in Rural Spain

This paper explores the reasons why a high proportion of Castilian men and women remain permanently unmarried. Previously advanced explanations for bachelorhood and spinsterhood in Spain and Europe generally are reviewed and shown to be inadequate. In their place, the author proposes a multicausal model based on an intimate examination of family and individual life histories in the small Castilian community of Becedas. The study illustrates how anthropologists, using traditional field techniques, can build upon and contribute to the work of demographers and other scholars who rely largely on aggregate statistics for their analyses.

The Cremated Catholic: The Ends of a Deceased Guatemalan

After a Guatemalan migrant worker living in northern California was killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing a highway one night, his family requested that his body be sent back to his native village in southwestern Guatemala to be mourned and buried according to traditional Catholic custom. But the County morgue confused this deceased individual with another Latino and cremated his body before it could be shipped. This article analyzes the cultural, psychological and economic ramifications of this accidental cremation. Although permissible within the Catholic Church, the cremation caused enormous suffering to the family of the deceased as well as to the dead mans soul. At the same time it generated potential financial windfall not only for his relatives, but for lawyers and the present author.