Abstract: Eyewitness accounts and ethnographic interviews with elderly inhabitants of rural southwestern Spain reveal that at the time of Franco’s dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s, destitution was rampant among the landless population. While some of the rural poor did not succeed in finding employment at all, others were exploited on the farms of large landholders. In both cases, hunger and deprivation led people to seek alternative means to ensure the survival of their families. This talk analyzes the theft of acorns from private farm grounds in terms of its threefold meaning as bare survival, as a claim to rights of use, and as a form of protest. The social roles and moral valuation of acorn theft by various actors—such as farm workers, foremen, landowners, members of the acorn watch, and the Guardia Civil—are examined for their impacts on the moral-economic fabric of the rural landscape. Social inequality, customary rights and practices, and an enduring “refusal to let the individual starve” (K. Polanyi) are central components of the longue durée of the moral economy that has materialized over centuries in one of Spain’s most emblematic landscapes, the dehesa.

 

Discussant: Susanne Fehlings (Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt)

 

Pondělí / Monday 2.12.2024, 14:00 CET

Velká zasedací místnost Ústavu analytické chemie / Meeting room of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry of the CAS
Veveří 97, 602 00 Brno, 5. patro / 5th floor

 

 

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