Living between Countries, Living between Nature and Society: Anthropological Remarks on National and Cultural Identities

Humberto Martins

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Living between Countries, Living between Nature and Society: Anthropological Remarks on National and Cultural Identities

In: Boundaries: Dichotomies of Keeping in and Keeping Out

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Humberto Martins

Humberto Martins
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 69–81

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880214_007

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This chapter discusses the relations between nation-states by focusing on populations, and more particularly on individuals, who share memories and daily experiences whose main referential is a specific international borderland. The discussion reflects on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Portuguese-Galician border in which I pursued an anthropological study at the level of the individual. Memory and narration were crucial in my research. Several anthropologies have shown differences between lived and political borders; lived borders are negotiated as experienced varying-size areas by individuals all over time according to practical issues. I approached transnational and international daily experiences which are not new in time but refer to a long history of cross-border relations. National and cultural identities are theoretically discussed as being permanently negotiated, considering personal circumstances, concrete social trajectories and a new socioeconomic spectrum brought up by the recent political and economic histories of Portugal and Spain, and in particular the inclusion of these two countries in the EU in 1986. Despite the fact that physical borders have actually disappeared, new borders, now less territorial, less political, but perhaps paradoxically more identifiable, have been reinstalled between Portuguese and Galician men and women. In my argument I think it is crucial to look at human-nature relations, considering that the creation of a Tran Siberian Park (Xerés-Gerês) is a late acknowledgment of a long-term ecosystemic experience that has assimilated Galician and Portuguese peoples. They lived as peasants, exploiting natural resources, raising cattle, constructing walls between meadows that actually define the natural (social) landscape of the area. Today on the Galician side, family agriculture in which we acknowledge a specific eco-type has been abandoned. Portuguese men and women keep old forms of making agriculture. A peasant aesthetic that unified them in the past is not anymore shared and a new (but more perceived) border seems to have been installed.

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Boundaries: Dichotomies of Keeping in and Keeping Out

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880214

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 29 Apr 2010

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - General
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Living between Countries, Living between Nature and Society: Anthropological Remarks on National and Cultural Identities

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Boundaries: Dichotomies of Keeping in and Keeping Out

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