Ethnography of Spain
The ethnography of Spain or anthropology of Spain is the study of the ethnographic or anthropological components of the Spanish population. Its cultural components are the subject of cultural anthropology, and the physical ones of physical anthropology.
The physical anthropology of Spain (both traditional anthropology and more recent genetic anthropology) is in charge of the study of biological traits that can identify similarities or physical variations (sometimes improperly called races) between the population of Spain and that of other parts of Europe, the Mediterranean basin or the world; or different populations within Spain. Although statistical prevalences of different anthropological models defined both genotypically and phenotypically can be established (the most obvious, the prevalence of white skin color -traditionally interpreted as Caucasian race- and of brown hair color and dark eyes -traditionally interpreted as Mediterranean phenotype-) are necessarily as arbitrary as the criteria that ethnically classify Hispanics as a separate category in the United States Census. -European state can be defined thus). The impossible definition of the non-existent Spanish race has not prevented the attempt to do so on occasions, although it is true that there are some similarities among the Spanish people.
The unit members who dream of the imposed unity of force speak of the Spanish race. It is not to know what is said, so many are the races that have sought the heat of the sun of Spain.Miguel de Unamuno
The cultural anthropology of Spain studies culture, customs, folklore (literary or musical, such as popular tales, dances, etc.), rural sports (some very localized, such as Basques, Montañeses, Canarias, Leoneses, Galicians, Valencians; some very widespread, such as ball or bowling), popular festivals (with many modalities, from Holy Week processions to traditional running of the bulls and bullfights, evolved with centuries in what since the 19th century was institutionalized in the so-called national festival or bullfighting), gastronomy and the production of cheeses and wines, material culture (clothing, crafts, etc.), ideological expressions (myths, totems, taboos, manifestations of popular religiosity, legacies of paganism or contacts with Islam and Judaism that sometimes the dominant Christianity assumed as its own rites -Christianization through syncretism-, sometimes tolerated as simple e superstition and sometimes prosecuted as witchcraft or heresy) and social organization (institutions of socialization, form and structure of the family, marriage, inheritance, property, social functions of the sexes and of the different ages, etc..).
Series of 19th century engravings on Spanish regional costumes. Aragon, León, Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria.
Castilla
Catalonia and Valencia
Andalusia
The method of cultural anthropology is usually applied to a specific object of study: primitive societies, which in the case of Spain ceased to exist centuries ago: first, already in the Ancient Age with Romanization, and later, in the Middle Ages with the different cultural contributions of successive migratory waves and invasions (Germanization -scarce-, Arabization -much deeper-) and the formation of the medieval kingdoms of the Reconquest whose merger constituted the Hispanic Monarchy of the Modern Age, although languages and dialectal varieties survived (languages of Spain, in some cases, also very peculiar forms of communication, such as the Gomeran whistle), institutions and particular rights (foral civil law), and highly marked cultural personalities in their different regions, and within each one of them, with an extraordinary variety and richness of manifestations in each of its regions and towns, and even within these. alleged identification of the Basques as the only one of the pre-Roman peoples that was perpetuated in a Basque national identity of thousands of years of existence (embodied in the Basque race, in Basque traditions and in the Basque language), is a pseudoscientific topic that is sometimes intended to be presented as a controversial ethnographic issue, although it can only be understood as the result of a nationalist-ethnicist interpretation, which has sometimes been claimed to be supported by different types of material evidence, such as anthropometric measurements and genetics and archaeological remains of very doubtful validity. The continuity of other peoples with little Romanization (Cantabria and Asturias) with the Kingdom of Asturias, which led the western Christian nuclei of the Reconquest, has also been the subject of intellectual controversy.
Despite the limitations of their field of study, ethnologists and cultural anthropologists also extended the application of their methodology to the survival of the most archaic features typical of pre-industrial society (as Spain was until the first half of the 19th century). XX), especially in the cases of more or less isolated rural communities, especially in mountain environments (such as, was the case of Patones despite its proximity to the city of Madrid, the Sierra de los Ancares in Leon or the Extremaduran region of Las Hurdes; emblematic cases that were once the subject of studies, and that are currently not studied. They are distinguished by their particular social conditions from other remote but evolved rural nuclei, all different from each other and with more or less marked local characteristics, such as the Baztán valley in Navarra, the Andalusian Alpujarras or the region of Matarraña in Teruel). Some communities with a nomadic past continue to be markedly differentiated and with problematic integration (especially the gypsies, present since the XV< century; but also some others like the merccheros).
For an industrial and urban society, such as Spain's since the second half of the XX century, these studies are more properly the subject of sociology and another division in the anthropological disciplines called urban anthropology. Already in the XXI century, when speaking of a new post-industrial society, typical of globalization, the strong impact of tourism and of immigration, the connection of Spain with its European neighbors and its global projection, make the detection of traditional persistences and differentiated ethnographic features even more difficult.
History of the population of Spain
Prehistory
Paleolithic
The Iberian Peninsula presented exceptional paleo-bio-geographical conditions for the development of the hominization process in its extension phases after the successive African origins. Evident proofs are (apart from findings of more problematic interpretation, such as the so-called Orce Man), the most important site of the European Lower Paleolithic: Atapuerca, and the numerous records (from the classic findings of Gibraltar and from Banyoles to Lagar Velho) that it was in their territory where the greatest persistence of Homo neanderthalensis occurred and therefore the greatest opportunities for its coexistence with the first populations of Homo sapiens.
The traditional paleoanthropological interpretation saw the Iberian population of the Upper Paleolithic as integrated by chromañoid elements (obsolete name, which is only used as a descriptive element by current anthropology, without claiming to identify it with any current racial type) associated with the Magdalenian culture (Term applied to an evolutionary phase of material culture with more established features).
Neolithic
The diffusionist or endogenous interpretations of the origin of agriculture, domestication of animals, ceramics, settlements, etc., constitute the main controversial points for the period. In any case, the dates are later on the Neolithic centers of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean, from where the most important cultural, and where appropriate, population contacts would have taken place. Other contact routes also worked more or less smoothly: the Pyrenean isthmus and the primitive coastal-Atlantic navigation (difficult to verify, but detected by obvious relationships, especially in the age of metals), in addition to the one that crossed the Strait of Gibraltar.
The problematic definition of the Iberian and the Celtic
The traditional interpretation of the History of Spain (today not shared by the most modern historiography) posited that the population of Spain in historical times was made up of an Iberian base, identifying this difficult-to-define term with a racial substratum, although in Reality is a concept that can only have a cultural and geographical value, defining the pre-Roman peoples of the Mediterranean fringe, the Ebro valley and the Guadalquivir who had maintained more contact with the Phoenician and Greek colonizing peoples; The presence of those Phoenicians, later Carthaginians, in turn provided an excuse to maintain a series of historiographical polemics with the diffuse identification of the Punic and the Semitic.
According to that same traditionalist interpretation, Celtic elements would have been added to that base (a concept that presents the same impossibility of identifying it with a race, but rather with the cultures of central and western Europe). The name of Celtiberians that the Romans gave to a town in the center of the peninsula was identified with a sort of racial and cultural synthesis that was far from being produced. The peoples of the Cantabrian coast, Cantabrians, Asturians and Galicians, would be found in the Celtic cultural environment, with the exception of the Basques, whose identification with the rest of the pre-Roman peoples and their continuity with the Basques of today is clearer, but also subject to manipulation and debate.
This whole complex issue is complicated by the addition of the also confusing concept of the Indo-European, cultural linguistic world (whose extension to the ethnic is more debatable) that can be associated with the Celtic or the Latin, but not with the Iberian or the the Basques, who are usually included as a pre-Indo-European substratum, a concept whose descriptive value is limited, beyond pointing out a diffuse ethnographic proximity of the different populations of the Mediterranean world.
However, recent scientific research in population genetics is eventually interpreted as confirming traditional ethnographic theories, or national identifications, abuses that geneticists themselves often warn against:
There are no races. From the point of view of genetics, we only see geographical gradients.
Romanization
Romanization, which more than a demographic contribution was a process of acculturation, undoubtedly had demographic consequences in terms of the arrival of population contingents (most notably settlement of veteran soldiers).
Other contributions. Arabization. Middle Ages
The various contributions from other peoples not mentioned above would include Ligurians; Germans, who in their first waves were the Suevi (with a continuous presence in the northwest), and two peoples with an ephemeral presence: Vandals and Alans (the latter not German but Iranian); and notably the Visigoths, whose presence as a ruling minority presented a stronger implantation in the center of the peninsula, with its capital in Toledo); a contingent of Jews (who would later be known as Sephardim or Judeo-Spanish), and an even greater contribution during Arabization: mainly Berbers, and a smaller number of Arabs and from other places in the Near East, without forgetting the importation of African slaves and Europeans, among whom the Slavs would stand out (saquliba or saqäliba). Logically, the term Arabization should not be understood in a racial or biological sense, but cultural and linguistic, as well as parallel to religious Islamization. Additionally, the arrival of Viking expeditions can be noted, which did not fully settle in the territory.
In the Canary Islands the population of the Guanches developed, related to the ancient Berbers (proto-Berber population) and with an apparently Capsian culture of filiation. The current inhabitants of the Canary Islands have a gene pool that some studies have identified as coming from both the Iberian Peninsula (majority contribution) and the Guanche population (minority contribution). Guanche genetic markers have also been found at low frequencies in mainland Spain, probably as a result of slavery or later immigration from the Canary Islands.
During the Middle Ages and through the Camino de Santiago and the Pyrenean passes, cities and regions were repopulated (during the so-called Reconquest) with settlers from central and western Europe: French ("Franks") from Brittany and Gascony, Germans, Flemish... Between the 15th and 16th centuries, the gypsies also arrived, who still today constitute the most differentiated ethnic minority in Spain.
During the Middle Ages several unique groups were formed, such as the agotes, vaqueiros, pasiegos and maragatos.
Since the establishment of trade routes in the late Middle Ages, colonies of merchants from different Italian cities (especially the Genoese) were established, which lasted through the Modern Age.
Modern Age
The Modern Age began in Spain with a social and political desire for ethnic-religious simplification -classified as maximum religious politics- that identified the dominant Spanish population with the concept of Old Christian, as opposed to to the concept of the new Christian that encompassed a Jewish-convert minority whose social and legal discrimination and inquisitorial persecution gradually faded or reactivated, even before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492, with uncertain figures, between 50,000 and 200,000 people, of a population of about 5 million inhabitants) throughout the Old Regime (the last auto-da-fe against Judaizers date from the beginning of the century XVIII). The Moorish minority did not assimilate despite the policies of forced baptism and dispersion, and they opted for expulsion in 1609 (approximately 325,000 people, out of a total of 8.5 million inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula -in 1580 there had been the incorporation of Portugal into the Hispanic Monarchy-, with a very different presence depending on the area -practically nil in the north and west and maximum in the kingdom of Valencia, 33%-). Beyond the customs, the language and other characteristics of cultural anthropology, the physical anthropological identity between the Moors and the rest of the peninsular population was practically total, or at least indistinguishable (as evidence collected even in Don Quixote, work contemporary to the facts); This is evident, given that the Andalusian population was mainly Hispano-Roman-Visigothic (Muladí) in origin, and its eight centuries of presence in the Iberian Peninsula had been characterized by the abundance of demographic contacts.
At the same time, the opening of the overseas empire meant the beginning of a secular emigration trend from Spain to America, which can be considered a long-lasting phenomenon, a continuation of the repopulation process from north to south of the Iberian Peninsula during the Reconquest.
However, the arrival of European emigration contingents continued, in some cases in an organized way (repopulation of Sierra Morena by German settlers in the reign of Carlos III, when La Carolina and other towns were founded under the direction of Pablo de Olavide).
Related to the African slave trade to America, there was some presence of the black population in Spain, which in at least one case had a significant local concentration: in the middle of the century XX the presence of descendants of slaves was still detected in Huelva, in towns such as Gibraleón, Niebla, Palos de la Frontera or Moguer. Only in Gibraleón their number was counted at two hundred, with some cases of miscegenation.
Contemporary Age
In the last decades of the XX century and the beginning of the XXI century, Spain has become a country that receives immigrants, first of European tourists, mainly German and British pensioners, staying in residential developments on the Mediterranean coast and the Canary Islands; later, with the development following the entry into the European Union (1986), it began to receive a migratory flow that slowed down in times of crisis (1993) and was reactivated in times of economic expansion. The intensification of migratory movements has caused the Spanish population to become even more ethnographically diverse than it already was throughout its millenary history. Spain has been among the countries with the highest immigration in the world, reaching second place in absolute immigration figures after the United States for several years. Since the year 2000, Spain has absorbed more than three million immigrants, who are part of a growing group that in 2008 has come to represent more than 10% of the population (4.5 million out of a total of 44 million), coming from all the continents: in the first place from Latin America (Ecuadorians, Colombians, Argentines, Bolivians, Peruvians, Brazilians, etc., in total more than 36%), Europe (from Western Europe - British, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Dutch -, a total of 21%, mostly tourists who extend their stay until they become stable residents, many of them after their retirement, executives or highly qualified professional workers; such as from Eastern Europe -Romanians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, etc.-, a total of 18%, who usually occupy lower-skilled positions), North Africa (Moroccans, Algerians, etc., a total of 15%), Sub-Saharan Africa (Senegalese, Nigerians, Gambians, etc., totaling 4%) and Asia (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, etc., totaling 3%).
Traditional classification: the "Mediterranean race"
The traditional classification of human races, which was based on anthropometric measurements and interpretative models from the XIX century, now outdated (Blumenbach, Madison Grant -see Nordicism-), attributed to the Spanish population physical anthropological characteristics typical of what was defined as the Mediterranean race, one of the variants of the Caucasoid (white) race, which was located in a very broad way (Italy, Spain, Portugal, southern France, parts of Greece and the Mediterranean islands), as well as parts of the British Isles, particularly Wales, Cornwall and parts of Ireland and the west of Scotland - and that in turn Once it was divided into two subraces or variants: the Ibero-Insular and the Atlantic-Mediterranean. The Mediterranean race would also extend to limited areas of North Africa and would be precisely the result of a racial mixture of European and African populations, which for the antr opologues of this era would have produced the defining features of this race: dark hair color and white-brown skin color. Subsequently, the pigmentation of hair, eyes and skin of different population groups and cultures has received different types of interpretations by physical and cultural anthropology, in relation to food taboos and livestock (given the relationship between dairy food, the different degrees of sun exposure depending on latitude and time of year, the synthesis of vitamin D and the calcium absorption and lactose tolerance or intolerance).
Genetic studies
Current anthropology applies different methodologies and paradigms to ancient anthropology, among which the inclusion of data from linguistics and population genetics stands out. With the precautions that the geneticists themselves observe for the application of the data obtained in their studies in interpreting the provenance of current or past populations, there are numerous studies, including two recent genetic maps, and the one that up to now (2010) is the largest molecular study of populations, on three hundred thousand SNP markers (snips), and which finds no distinctions between the genetic markers of inhabitants of 10 regions (Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias, Catalonia, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, the Valencian Community, eastern Andalusia and Murcia, western Andalusia, Extremadura and the Basque Country - the latter case is usually considered the most significant, and in which this study has not found any special difference-).
Prehistoric genetic footprints
A large European study from 2007 included population samples from the Basque Country and the Valencian Community, proposing that the population of the Iberian Peninsula clustered further away from the other continental groups, which would imply that it holds older European ancestry. In this study, the most prominent genetic stratification in Europe was located between the north and the southeast, while another important axis of differentiation ran from east to west across the continent. He also argues that, despite differences, all Europeans are related.
Previous Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analyzes still pointed to Paleolithic ancestry among the population of the Iberian Peninsula. Although this methodology does not provide strong insights into the genetic structure of the population, it is useful in searching for parts of the migration routes of the European population. Both the Y chromosome haplogroup R1b and the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup H reach frequencies of 60% in most of the Iberian Peninsula, with R1b reaching up to 90% in the Basque Country. This shows an ancestral link between the peninsula Iberia and the rest of Western Europe, and particularly with Atlantic Europe, with which it shares high frequencies of these haplogroups. Analysis of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are interpreted by some studies in a sense that would support the theory that the original populations of the north of the Iberian Peninsula colonized the rest of Western Europe at the end of the last ice ages.
In fact, according to one article, the main components of European genomes seem to derive from ancestors whose characteristics are similar to those of modern Basques or those from the Near East, with values greater than 35% for both parental populations, without the molecular information being taken into account. The lowest degree of this genetic component is found in Finland, while the highest values are found in Spain (70%) and in the Balkans (more than 60%).
Autosome studies, using a small number of classical genetic markers, supported by more recent analyzes of microsatellite data, have supported the existence of a large element interpreted as neolithic in the European genome, and a pattern of its diffusion from the ancient Near East. This element, interpreted as neolithic, has been detected at substantial levels in Spain, but at very low levels in other north-eastern European countries.
Medieval genetic traces
There are several studies that focus on the genetic impact of the eight centuries of al-Andalus on the genetics of the current population. Some recent studies propose that there is a genetic relationship between the Iberian Peninsula (particularly the south) and North Africa as a result of this historical period. The Iberian Peninsula is the only European region with the presence, albeit very scarce, of the Y-chromosome E-M81 Y Va haplotypes (interpreted as typically North African). An analysis revealed that the E-M81 haplotype reaches frequencies of up to 10% in some areas of the south of the Iberian Peninsula, although several experts consider that this contribution in real terms is almost non-existent. For mitochondrial DNA analyses, the Iberian Peninsula has much higher frequencies of haplogroup U6 (interpreted as typically North African) than other European areas. The North African ancestry in Iberia (the Algarve and Alentejo, Portugal) is mostly on the maternal side where the Northwest African mitochondrial DNA contribution to the Iberian peninsula (taking into account that the mean frequency of U6 is 10 % in northwest Africa compared to 1.8% in the Iberian Peninsula) can be estimated at 8%.
This European region (especially in southern Portugal and to a lesser extent in Andalusia) also has the highest frequency of haplogroup L interpreted as being of sub-Saharan origin, a fact that these studies attribute to the result of Berber emigration and arrival of African slaves brought to the Iberian Peninsula during Muslim rule. In any case, in the samples analyzed the genetic element interpreted as African is much lower than that interpreted as pre-Islamic.
A large study published in 2007 that used 6,501 samples of Y chromosomes from 81 populations proposed that what it interpreted as the North African contribution to the male gene pool in Spain reached 5.65%. Other studies consider that it does not exceed 3.6%.
A 2008 study on the Y chromosome of 1,140 individuals from the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands concluded that 10% coincided with the population from North Africa and 20% from the eastern Mediterranean, a trait that can be attributed to the latter. a large group of populations, from Sephardic Jews to those that Andalusian medieval sources called Syrians or even older population movements, such as those led by the Phoenicians. In this study carried out by the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona and the University of Leicester (United Kingdom), it is concluded that at the national level, Castilla-La Mancha is the autonomous community with the fewest genetic characteristics typical of the North African population, while Galicia and the Balearic Islands lead this particular classification. Genetic markers make it possible to locate from the VIII century the inclusion of certain North African lineages, and detect a greater presence of them in the western half of the peninsula (León, Salamanca or Zamora) than in the eastern half (Granada), which can be interpreted as a consequence of the dispersion of the Moors after the Alpujarras revolt of 1568.
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