research ethnographic: Etniker-Navarra

meeting of Etniker Euskalerria in front of the cave of Isturitz at leave Navarre

Etniker means, in the words of its founder, José Miguel de Barandiaran, "to investigate ethnicity" and it emerged as a complement to the teaching at the Chair of language and Basque Culture at the University of Navarra. Its goal is to obtain data with a view to drawing up a cultural atlas of the Basque people.

There is no exact date of creation of the group since Etniker is the reformulation of a project whose roots go back to 1920, during the teaching of Barandiaran in the seminar Conciliar of Vitoria but, the infancy of the group as such takes place between 1964 and 1969 under the protection of the new Chair. Barandiaran, aware of the cultural change brought about by industrialization, managed throughout his life to involve those who approached him in the systematic recording of the facts that make up the traditional life of the localities of the Basque area. In any case, he always tried to provide his collaborators with three basic elements: training by means of classes or seminars, a methodological instrument formulated as survey and a space where to publish the result of the research.

In the case of Etniker de Navarra [PDF], the support of the teaching was the Chair of language and Basque Culture of the University where he taught the a course focusing on a single topic of Basque Ethnology between 1964 and 1979; the methodological instrument was the guide for an ethnographic survey [PDF]; and the space in which to make known the result of the research of field was the magazine Notebooks of Ethnology and Ethnography of Navarre created in 1969 by the Diputación Foral, whose direction was entrusted to the anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja.

Once the model Etniker was exported to Alava, Biscay, Guipuzcoa and the northern Basque Country, the different Etniker groups worked to contribute materials for the elaboration of the Ethnographic Atlas. In order to give more impulse to the project of the atlas, in 1987 they constitute a society legally registered as Etniker Euskalerria [PDF], with an interregional committee , in order to promote the publication, not only of local monographs but especially of the Ethnographic Atlas of Vasconia, project undertaken by José Miguel de Barandiaran and whose first Issue, dedicated to the food, could see a reality in 1990.