Person and God in a Spanish Valley

Revised Edition

William A. Christian, William A. Christian Jr., William A. Christian, Jr.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691028453
  9780691094441
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691214757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A classic twentieth-century work in the anthropology of Catholicism

Person and God in a Spanish Valley is a moving portrait of how individuals and communities in a remote, mountainous valley of northern Spain relate to the divine. In the late 1960s, anthropologist and historian William A. Christian, Jr., conducted groundbreaking fieldwork in the Nansa Valley, one of the most devout regions of Spain. With sensitivity and uncommon insight, Christian describes the complex system of shrines, devotions, and pilgrimages that existed in the region for centuries, and recounts the disruption of the valley's traditional way of life as young priests from urban centers arrived carrying a more modern, Vatican II version of Catholicism. Person and God in a Spanish Valley places Catholic faith and practice within a broader history of agrarian politics and reform in northern Spain, and stands as a landmark work of modern anthropology.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PEOPLE: ACTIVITY AND IDENTITY

Adiós Reinado de España

Adiós Valle de Rionansa

Provincia de Santander

Nobleza de la Montaña.

Adiós Pueblo Rozadío

Donde yo pasé mi infancia

Adiós mi padre y mi madre

a mi cuñado y mis hermaños.

Goodbye Kingdom of Spain

Goodbye Vale of Rionansa

Province of Santander

Nobility of the Montaña.

Goodbye village of Rozadío

where I spent my childhood

Goodbye father and mother

brother-in-law, and brothers.

from the epic trova of

Manuel Agüera Bedoya, 1926

I. Introduction: The Annual Cycle

Entre estas cosas fue creciendo mi ánimo. Los hitos del tiempo eran los motivos trascendentales de la Naturaleza en lo anodino del pueblo. Épocas de nieve, de cosecha, de trajín en las tierras, de ocio en los portales y en las cocinas . . . . No se decía la primavera, el verano, el otoño, el invierno. Se decía la época de los vendavales, de la caída de la hoja, de las golondrinas, de las cerezas, de la siega, de las panojas, de las nueces, de las magostas, del ábrego. Todo el tiempo sin los hitos numéricos del calendario. Cronología marcada por los aperos, por la nieve, por el viento, por las romerías, por las novenas, por las costumbres, por los pájaros trashumantes.

Among these things my spirit was growing. In the dullness of village life the milestones in time were the momentous changes in Nature. The epochs of snow, of harvest, of work in the fields, of idleness in the doorways, and in the kitchens . . . . They did not speak of spring, summer, autumn, winter. They would speak of the time of the gales, of the falling of leaves, of the swallows, of the cherries, of the haying, of the maize, of the walnuts, of the chestnut roasts, of the south wind. All the time without the numerical markers of the calendar. Time marked by the tools, by the snow, by the wind, by the pilgrimages, by the novenas, by the customs, by the migratory birds.

from La Braña, by Manuel
Llano, (1934)²

The Cantabrian mountains stop the rain before it reaches most of Spain, leaving most of the country arid and brown, but the narrow 50-mile strip of countryside between the mountaintops and the Atlantic is lush and green. Stretching from the Basque country in the East through Santander and Asturias to open out into Galicia in the northwest corner, this strip is part of a zone of high rainfall that goes up the European coast through Norway and includes much of Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. It is known to cultural ecologists as The Atlantic Fringe. The weather limits the agriculture fairly strictly to the raising of livestock, for cereals are impractical with so much rain.³

This relatively homogeneous horizontal strip along the Bay of Biscay is divided vertically into a number of grooves formed by rivers draining the rainfall into the sea. There are about thirty such valley systems from the Basque country through Asturias. Since roads normally go up the valleys and towns are located on the sides or floors of valleys (depending on whether their chief activity is herding or trading, respectively), most valleys are distinct political and cultural units. At various points the valleys narrow and these points serve to mark off the valleys into townships or vales. (See Fig. 1.)

The Nansa is one of three rivers (the others being the Saja and the Deva) that run to the Bay of Biscay in the western portion of Santander. I became most acquainted with the way of life of the three upper vales of the Nansa: Polaciones, Tudanca, and Rionansa. These three vales had nine, four, and six villages, respectively. With minor variations due to differences in rainfall, soil quality, and slope, the way of life of these villages applies to most of the upper portions of the provinces of Santander and Asturias.

Each village is in a cup of hills. The valleys are steep and green; one day out of four brings rain, and often shafts of sunlight come down through broken clouds and illuminate a field, then move across the valley and over the mountain. Rainbows are common, and the many colors of green in the valley are met by many different colors in the sky. The rain gives life to everything. The hillsides begin the spring brown, then green, then brighten with the yellow of the gorse; all is green all summer. In the fall the ferns turn first russet, then golden, then golden on white as the first snows come.

As if to parallel the changes in the scenery by the seasons, there are several fairly consistent moods to be found among the people at different epochs in different settings. That of the upper pastures in spring and fall, free from the village, is airy, open, and honest. Among the herdsmen there is an easy freemasonry that betokens an escape from the village. Food is shared and eaten from common bowls; tools and stable paraphernalia are freely borrowed. Some of the men sing as they work, breaking off into long cadenzas as they drive their cows before them or climb up the mountain into a cloud.

Fig. 1. Map of the upper Nansa valley.

The opposite of this is the mood of the village center in the fall, winter, and spring, when the teenagers are away on their seasonal jobs. For life is more difficult at close quarters. There are people with whom, for one reason or another, one does not speak. There is an undertone of competition. Conversations are likely to be about other people. The social circle is more restricted in space, to the hearth or the cafe. The village at times acts in the same way as it is arranged, a lot of people facing away from each other, huddles of houses back to back.

In the summer when the teenagers return from their jobs in the lowlands to work the hay, there is a bustle that partakes both of the freedom of the fields and the tension of the village. The houses awaken; families eat picnic lunches in the pastures; teenagers visit from family to family; and people call greetings and sallies to each other as they pass. The work partially diverts people’s attention from each other.

Finally, there is the fiesta. For the village holiday, lasting two or three days every year, there is a respite from work and a truce from disputes. Relatives return, people visit from other villages, and for a time the village opens up. The fiesta is run by the teenagers, who are removed from the problems of their parents; problems stemming from disputed inheritances and boundaries, politics, and broken engagements. Most of the youth are away for half the year, free to work elsewhere, to meet new people. Their parents must stay in the village, must work out ways to coexist with their neighbors in a small, concentrated community .

Each vale is a township, and the townships are divided into concejos, or councils, which are the governing bodies of the individual villages. In the Nansa valley every village’s land is used in four ways: the cornfields, gardens, meadows (prados), and wilderness (monte). On the valley bottom and sheltered flat places, maize is grown. These lands, usually close to the villages, themselves in sheltered positions, are known as the mies. They provide food for the villagers and some of their animals. The maize is ground into corn meal from which flat corn cakes (tortas) are made. Before maize was brought in from America (it was cultivated in the valley at least as early as 1626) rye may have been grown. Until the mid-1950’s homemade torta was the staple food. Now corncakes are made only by herdsmen tending cattle in the mountains, for virtually all the familes can afford to buy bread. The maize kernels are fed to the fowl that each family keeps, and the stalks are fed green to the cattle in the fall. Because maize is coming to have less utility, many families in the valley villages are leaving their mies fields fallow and cutting them two or three times a year for hay, or cultivating artificial pasturage like alfalfa. Other vegetables–generally potatoes and occasionally beans—are grown in the mies, but not extensively. Families also grow limited amounts of fruit and vegetables which require closer attention in gardens close to their houses. These gardens are often walled to keep out animals and children.

Uphill from the mies are private meadows that produce hay for the winter. The hay for the meadows close to the village is kept in lofts in the village, and hay from the meadows farther than a five-minute walk from the village is stored in winter barns called invernales. The fields are often divided among many owners with stones marking off the different strips. The long stone barns also may belong to as many as four or five owners, each with a section of loft and stable.

Finally, around the hay fields is the land unfit for cultivation referred to as monte. Some of it, gorse- and fern-covered mountainside, is fit for sheep and goats, and communal or private flocks graze it. The more remote corners of the village territory may still be forested, owned collectively by the village and occasionally auctioned off for logging when the commune is in financial need. The forest, seemingly unproductive, is an essential part of the countryside. The woods provide firewood for the houses, and timber for hay sleds and wooden implements. Previously they also supplied lumber for the frames of the stone houses, although now much ready-cut lumber is brought in from outside the villages.

The highest land, along the ridges and on the mountains, is excellent pasture land. Here the cows and horses are sent during the summer while the meadows are being harvested.

Throughout the alpine and lower mountain zones of western Europe there has been a slippage of meadows reverting to wilderness—prado to monte—in the last twenty-thirty years.⁴ This has occurred for two reasons: First of all, meadows left uncut for several years quickly revert to gorse and fern. As more families move out of the mountain villages there are not enough arms to cut the hay, and the least desirable fields lapse into the savage state. In the Nansa valley there are many such fields half-eaten by encroaching scrub. The second factor arises from absentee landowners: villagers who have moved to the city, the Ministry of Reforestation, or even occasionally nonherdsmen still living in the villages who plant tree seedlings on plots of field. The young forest quickly encroaches on the fields. The two cannot exist side by side because the roots from the trees spread under the grass and take up the moisture. Behind both these phenomena of reversion and reforestation lies the fact that cutting the hay by hand is uneconomic. For the effort involved the return is pitiful, and there are fewer and fewer men willing to spend time cutting marginal fields. I should say fewer and fewer sons. The fathers of local families are in the herding enterprise for the duration of their active lives, but fewer and fewer of their sons, once they pass a certain age, are willing to come back in the summer for the haying or to take over the fields and barns when their fathers retire.

In the Nansa valley there are three kinds of cows: the local Tudanca breed, a tough animal capable of climbing and surviving on the steep mountains, which is sold for meat; and two varieties of milk cow, Swiss and Holstein. A cabaña (the sum total of a herdsman’s animals) might include both milk and meat cattle, the proportions varying according to altitude in the valley. The higher villages, those of Polaciones, Tudanca, and Rionansa, have an overwhelming predominance of Tudanca cows, with occasional milk cows for family use. Until recently this was the pattern for virtually the entire province. The villages nearer the coast would pay to the higher villages pasture rights for upper mountain pasturage, while they harvested their own meadow hay. But with the advent of the train and the automobile and the growth of an urban market for milk since the Civil War, the lower villages have converted their herds almost exclusively to milk cows, and trucks come to pick up the milk every morning. As a result they have fewer cows, but the cows are worth more. With a reduced number of cattle and intensive cultivation of artificial pasture, they now can make do with the lands around the village, so few farmers from the lower Nansa valley have herds of cattle that they send up to the mountains for the summer. The changeover from beef cattle to milk cows has had a profound effect on these villages, accelerating the disintegration of the oldtime communal solidarity.

The upper villages cannot convert to milk cows for several reasons. One is that the villages are that much farther from the coastal cities, the markets for the milk. But more important, the meadows of these villages are too far from the road, and the paths from the meadows too precipitous and rough to permit the easy transportation of milk from the barns to the village or the daily driving of cows from the fields to the village for milking.

As in most herding cultures, the people of the upper Nansa valley have a certain amount of moving to do. Early in the spring, when there is enough grass on the mountainsides and it is warm enough to leave the cattle out all night, the cows are loosed on the common grazing ground of the mountains. Each herdsman has a sector where he puts the cows, so he will know the general vicinity when he goes to check on them. Checking on the cows throughout their stay in the mountains is necessary for two reasons: If a cow or calf falls from a cliff or breaks a leg in a hole and the herdsman discovers it in time, then the meat can be saved; secondly, the herdsman must keep his cattle from straying into the land of neighboring villages, where they can be captured and held for fines.

Cows that have borne calves, calves soon to be sold, and the milk cows are kept back in the winter barns where there is still hay. In these pleasant days of early spring the herdsmen arrive early in the morning from the village, turn the remaining cows out to pasture, push the manure out of the barn, and spend the day talking with each other, making wooden shoes or tools, and checking on the cows in the hills nearby. At dusk the herdsmen bring the remaining cows back into the barn, feed them, milk them, and go back to the village. These are the easy days.

In early May the schedule is reversed, since the man is needed to plough the mies. He may spend the night at the winter barn and the days in the village. At the same time other members of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the New Revised Edition
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter One: The People: Activity and Identity
• Chapter Two: The Saints: Shrines and Generalized Devotions
• Chapter Three: Person and God
• Epilogue: 1988
• Appendix I: Duties of the Various Stations
• Appendix II: Witchcraft and Occult Powers
• Appendix III: Reflections on This Book
• Appendix IV: A Long March and a Promise
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Supplementary Bibliography
• Subject Index