January 27, 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS IN NAVARRA

The survey ethnographic as tool for its study.

Mrs. Mª Amor Beguiristáin Gúrpide
University of Navarra

To approach the knowledge of the uses and customs of any human group there are several sources of information. The written documentation, both public and private, civil or ecclesiastical, and the visual images that save for the report social practices and fashions in the dress of different strata, including those collected in engravings, photographs and film documentaries. 

However, the tool by antonomasia to access the culture of living societies and their background, is the ethnographic survey , a tool that will report the data enough to elaborate monographs on human groups. The ethnographer, in his field work , should integrate the three levels of the social reality to be studied, the morphological, the functional and the symbolic. Only in this way will the result be satisfactory, it will be possible to know the answers that the group analyzed has given to the needs that have arisen in a specific space and time.

The ethnographer should not prejudge whether what he or she observes or is told is good or bad, should not discard the data that makes him or her uncomfortable, but should order coherently and present what he or she sees and what he or she is told with the pertinent explanations or clarifications. Therefore, the information is obtained by the researcher with his observation of the facts and with the questionnaires addressed to the individuals immersed in the analyzed culture, a way of rescuing information mostly unwritten that is part of the popular heritage, difficult to access for the historian who only relies on the study of written documents. In this way, the historian becomes a notary of the culture under study. 

An ethnographic survey is not a sociological or historical survey , neither random samples nor statistical results are sought. It should be addressed to significant informants because of their sensitivity, their experience and the knowledge experience of the topic investigated.

Basically there are two types of survey: the elementary elementaryThe elementary one, which analyzes only one cultural aspect (for example, aspects of rural architecture, the bonfires of San Juan, refrigerators...), and the systematic one, which analyzes only one cultural aspect. survey systematicThe systematic approach, which studies the system of norms, Structures and functions that characterize the way of life of a people in its temporal evolution. The result of both will be reflected in the corresponding publications that, far from the traditional folklorism that focused on static, fossilized ways of being, of human behavior, will try to reflect the life of the communities in all its amplitude, with the conscience of being in front of living societies, therefore changing.

Boy in his grandmother's Christian costume
 

A very interesting case of survey, both for the topics addressed and for the time at which it was carried out, which was also applied in Navarra, is the one promoted between 1901 and 1902 by the Section of Moral and Political Sciences of the Ateneo of Madrid, related to the Vital Cycle in Spain, which included questions related to birth, marriage and death. It was a model of survey "indirect", at a distance, to which we have access through the critical edition of A. Limón Delgado and Eulalia Castellote Herrero, which focused on aspects related to conception, gestation, childbirth, baptism and illegitimate filiation in Sumbilla, Pamplona, Estella, Valle de la Burunda, Tafalla, Falces, Caparroso, Cascante, Olazagutía, Valtierra, Aoiz, and Monteagudo. 

However, the systematic and direct fieldwork work was initiated by José Miguel de Barandiarán, first sporadically in Ochagavía (1923), Ciga (1923), Espinal (1926), and Gorriti (1926), and then systematically from the creation of the Chair of language and Basque Culture at the University of Navarre on November 16, 1963, in response to the application sent by the Provincial Council of Navarre, in October of the same year, committing itself to its sponsorship. The then Dean of the School of Philosophy and Letters, Mr. Antonio Fontán, was involved in its genesis and endowment of academic staff . As a complement to the teaching of Basque Culture, Barandiarán founded a group of research called Etniker, and endowed it with a homogeneous instrument of work: the guide for an ethnographic survey , with which its members have been working on the systematic collection of data of popular culture for more than four decades. In the journal Cuadernos de Etnología y Etnografía de Navarra, of the Institución Príncipe de Viana, we can read the results of these systematic surveys.

Folk architecture: Aria's granary (Salazar)