{"id":70,"date":"2009-04-11T14:32:37","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T14:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/?p=70"},"modified":"2009-04-11T14:32:37","modified_gmt":"2009-04-11T14:32:37","slug":"the-basque-country-a-cultural-history-by-paddy-woodworth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/2009\/04\/11\/the-basque-country-a-cultural-history-by-paddy-woodworth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Basque Country: A Cultural History by Paddy Woodworth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Few and far between are the “popular” books on the Basque Country that give an overview of the people, the land, and the culture of Euskal Herria.\u00a0 The Basque Histroy of the World<\/em>, by Mark Kurlansky, is probably the most well-known.\u00a0 Now, Paddy Woodworth, author of Dirty Wars, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL, and Spanish Democracy <\/em>(an excellent book, by the way, that I highly recommend), enters into this area with his The Basque Country: A Cultural History<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We read The Basque Country <\/em>as part of the book club my wife, Lisa, has organized for our Basque club, the New Mexico Euskal Etxea.\u00a0 It has been a long time since I read Kurlansky’s book, so I may misremember some of the details.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I really enjoyed The Basque Country.\u00a0 I think Woodworth took a fairly balanced view of the Basque Country, looking past the “glossy” surface of things and examining the “nitty-gritty” if you will, the politics that infuse everything that is Basque.\u00a0 At times, I think he went a bit too far.\u00a0 Especially in the first half of the book, it felt like he couldn’t say anything positive about the Basques without a corresponding negative spin.\u00a0 FOr me, this was epitomized by his comments on the company AZTI, which is trying to respond to, for example, declines in fish populations due to overfishing and finding alternatives for the future.\u00a0 They have developed an unmanned drone to scour the seas and find schools of fish.\u00a0 Woodworth couldn’t leave it at that, and essentially chastises the company for developing what could become a tool of war.\u00a0 This seemed too much to me, especially after all the negative spin he had done before.<\/p>\n

Woodworth is definitely not a friend of the nationalists.\u00a0 His most negative comments are often reserved for them and their policies.\u00a0 He criticizes them for using the traditional symbols of the Basque people — the basseri, the dancing, the music — for political purposes, for not letting the country evolve past those symbols, for keeping the country stuck in the past in some sense.\u00a0 This is an interesting dichotomy in the Basque Country.\u00a0 The image of the country is strongly tied to these traditional images, but the Basque Country is nothing if not dynamic, always pushing their resources to be at the leading edge of industry and technology.\u00a0 In the past, this was exemplified by their mining and steel production, which lead to some of the modern conflict between traditional Basque culture and a more modern, urban populace, as many of the people who worked in the mining industry were immigrants from other parts of Spain.\u00a0 Today, the Basques are at the forefront of several more modern technologies in the information technology areas.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see how these efforts further modify the Basque cultural landscape.<\/p>\n

Even if Woodworth was negative towards nationalist policies, I still felt he was more balanced than Kurlansky’s effort.\u00a0 Reality may lie somehwere between the two, and a more balanced perspective might be found by reading both books and “averaging” what the two authors say.\u00a0 Kurlansky definitely glorifies Basque traditions much more than Woodworth, though Woodworth finds his most exhuberant descriptions of the Basques when he is in the small villages experiencing traditional festivals.<\/p>\n

And, Woodworth is not immune to the mystique of the traditional Basque life.\u00a0 Much of his book is spent wandering the villages of Nafarroa and Iparralde, describing their history and their ancient traditions.\u00a0 While this gives a nice introduction of some lesser seen parts of Euskal Herria, at the same time I felt that what I might call the “modern” Basque Country, the intersection between the urban and rural, the modern and traditional, was neglected as a result.\u00a0 The traditional values and practices are certainly an important part of the Basque Country and its identity.\u00a0 However, in my mind, it will be how those traditions are incorporated into a modern and vibrant country that will determine the future of the country.\u00a0 If the Basque Country is to become a modern nation where Euskara can thrive in a modern setting, the language and traditions can’t be relegated to the rural, traditional villages.\u00a0 It has to become part of the urban setting, has to be a language in which science, politics, and technology can be discussed.\u00a0 In that sense, I would have preferred to see more of that intersection between modern and traditional.\u00a0 That is, in my opinion, where the real struggle for the future of the language and the cultural will occur.<\/p>\n

I am definitely interested in what you thought about the book.\u00a0 Did you feel differently?\u00a0 Did you love or hate the book?\u00a0 Please share your thoughts with the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few and far between are the “popular” books on the Basque Country that give an overview of the people, the land, and the culture of Euskal Herria.\u00a0 The Basque Histroy of the World, by Mark Kurlansky, is probably the most well-known.\u00a0 Now, Paddy Woodworth, author of Dirty Wars, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL, and Spanish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-euskadi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2sYNu-18","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}