The José Miguel de Barandiarán Foundation has published under degree scroll "a course focusing on a single topic de Etnología Vasca" the scripts of the classes that Professor Barandiarán taught at the University of Navarra for 14 years.

Mª Amor Beguiristain, deputy director of Diploma of programs of study Basques of this university, has directed the edition and written the prologue of this book, which aims to disseminate the content of these lessons of Basque ethnology. Professor Beguiristain pointed out that "this fulfills one of the objectives of the foundation, which aims to compile his work and, above all, to make known his unpublished texts".

According to the expert, director of the committee of Humanities of the University of Navarra and member of the scientific committee of the José Miguel de Barandiarán Foundation, the a course focusing on a single topic of Basque Ethnology was not an ordinary subject within the teaching of those years. "It did not appear in any Study program and students from any licentiate degree and even people from Pamplona interested in Basque culture could attend these classes".

In the initiative, the scripts of the 1973-74 academic year have been taken as reference letter and, as far as possible, drawings by Barandiarán himself have been used to illustrate the text. "We have scripts from different academic years, although incomplete, and recordings of classes from a couple of consecutive courses that I myself recorded," explains Professor Beguiristain.

He also notes that the first intention was to make all the material available, but he rejected the idea because "although the programs varied somewhat from one year to another in certain topics, the novelty lay, above all, in the diversity of the examples with which he illustrated them, and it gave the impression of finding a new subject each year. This explains why, year after year, there were regular students at subject. Finally, I decided to distribute the thirty scripts of the 1973-74 course, which was completed when Barandiarán was 84 years old and had already been a university professor for ten years".

 

Creation of the group Etniker de Navarra and the Cuadernos de Etnología y Etnografía.

The possibility of Barandiarán teaching a subject in the Chair of language and Basque Culture of the University of Navarra arose when, in 1964, the then Dean of the School of Philosophy and Letters, Antonio Fontán, and the Full Professor of Geography Manuel Ferrer went to visit him in Atáun (Guipúzcoa). "Don José Miguel, who was 74 years old, accepted the invitation and began the teaching on February 21 of that same year. And until 1978, he punctually attended his quotation on Thursdays and Fridays with the students. Only snowfalls or an untimely flu prevented him from going to classroom", recalls Mª Amor Beguiristain.

Faithful to Antonio Fontán's idea that the course should become "not only a tribune professor, but a nucleus of research", Barandiarán organized the group Etniker de Navarra which since then has been carrying out systematic ethnographic surveys whose results are still being published today, "with a view to elaborating the Ethnographic Atlas of Vasconia as planned by Barandiarán himself from the beginning of the research", says Professor Beguiristain.