Anthropology research seminar: People of the Sierra revisited. Presented by Peter I. Crawford (UiT/ISV)

Based on his fieldwork in Sierra de Grazalema in Andalusia, Spain, in the early 1950s, the Oxford

anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers published his seminal monograph, The People of the

Sierra, in 1954. Through his friendship with Julio Caro Baroja and his long stay in and

connection to the country, Pitt-Rivers may be considered one of the founding fathers of

modern Spanish anthropology. His monograph was a careful description and analysis of

life in what then remained a very isolated place in the mountains, still struggling to

overcome the scars of the civil war, in a country heavily controlled by Franco’s

dictatorship. This presentation concerns a fieldwork-based research project, started in

2022, almost literally following in the footsteps of Pitt-Rivers. What have the main social

and cultural changes been seventy years on, in an area no longer considered as that

remote, with the two landmark historical events being the death of Franco in the 1970s

and Spain joining the EU in the 1980s?