Gypsies

In last Sunday's El País a Gypsy was featured on both the front page of the newspaper and the cover of the Sunday magazine, in two unrelated stories of people who had become accidental spokespersons, one in Spain and the other in Italy. One was Juan José Cortés (in center of photo at left, with his father and one of his brothers), a clothing merchant and Pentecostal minister in Huelva, Spain, who has become a prominent critic of the Spanish justice system, since his little daughter Mari Luz was murdered by a pervert who should have been in prison (but the judge, overworked or just distracted, had neglected to effect the sentence).

The other was 12-year old Rebecca Covaciu, originally from Rumania, who with her family had been chased from one end of Italy to the other, from Milan to Naples and finally to a secluded and secret rural area near Naples, provided by an anonymous Italian family who had read or seen on TV the family's tribulations.

The very articulate and determined Cortés was profiled and interviewed in the Sunday magazine, refused to make an issue of his ethnicity. He had never felt discriminated as a Gypsy, he said, though he thought that perhaps the Gypsies had "marginalized" themselves (by not participating fully in Spanish civil society). He himself has joined the Partido Socialista (an unusual step for a Gypsy), though he has no intention of running for office.

Rebecca's story is much sadder. She and her little brother were beaten by thugs simply for being foreign Gypsies, and when her father went to denounce the beating, he was beaten by the police -- who, it turned out, were the very same men who, in civilian clothes, had beaten the children.

Gypsies in Spain don't suffer anything like the official discrimination encouraged by the Berlusconi government in Italy, which wants to fingerprint them all and herd them into ghettos. But Gypsies, here known as gitanos, are viewed with a mix of suspicion and admiration. The common view is that they are mostly petty thieves, unreliable and disinclined to steady work -- although every Spanish payo (the Gypsy word for non-Gypsies) I know recognizes that there are exceptions.

The negative stereotype is no doubt exaggerated, but there are real problems. In Andalucía, where more than half of Spanish Gypsies live, seven out of ten children drop out before completing primary school, which makes it harder when they reach adulthood to find steady work. Almost half of those who do work (48%) are self-employed, far fewer than Spanish payos. (Actualidad Étnica) Why do the kids drop out? My guess is that in many cases they feel unwelcome in school, and have few role models in their community to encourage them to continue. And similar factors -- negative attitudes of employers, inadequate preparation and low expectations of job-seekers -- certainly account for the poor employment levels. But if anyone doubts gitano capacities to acquire the needed skills and make good, check out the impressive video of Acceder, an "affirmative action program" that has had great success in preparing gitanos in interview as well as work skills and getting tens of thousands placed in good, skilled jobs throughout Spain.

The admiration is for their lively, rebellious spirit, whose greatest expression is in their music, especially flamenco dance, guitar and percussion of palmas or cajón.

I've been puzzled by this strong Spanish ambivalence toward people that I have a hard time distinguishing from everybody else. Payos insist that they can recognize a gitano when they see one. I don't know. Most of them look like other Spaniards to me (check out the BBC's photos of European Gypsies in Testimonios : Los gitanos "europeos", to see if you can identify them). They are believed to have originated in Northwest India, and yes, there are some Spanish Gypsies who look to me more like Pakistanis or Indians. The flamenco singer Diego "El Cigala", for example. But in the many generations since they first appeared in Spain in the early 15th century, they have mixed their genes with the local population so that in most cases (at least for me) its hard to tell, and except when performing, they dress like everybody else. Foreign Gypsies, mostly from Rumania or ex-Yugoslavia, are more identifiable -- they often don't speak good Spanish, travel in bunches and dress very colorfully. These foreigners, especially the conspicuous beggars, can be an embarrassment to the more assimilated Spanish Gypsies.

Anyway, the question comes up because there are several gitano families here in Carboneras, whom I'm learning to identify as I get to know them. They are clustered in particular sections of town, and those I recognize are either manual laborers or unemployed -- I suppose there must be some with white-collar and even executive positions, but then they cease to be visible as Gypsies. And the other reason for my interest is the stirring flamenco music --where many (though by no means all) of the outstanding performers are, or pretend to be, Gypsies. And I'm one of a little group of guys who get together to try to perform it and improve our playing, every Saturday at midday. Some of the guys I practice with may really be Gypsies. The others, like Federico García Lorca in his Romancero gitano, are admirers or wannabes.

Catching up on continuing issues

I'm in Madrid this week, again using the connection available to anyone at the Casa Encendida, where things have been -- well, if not exactly "encendidas" (burning), at least hopping, literally. A rock-rap group was performing, and the main hall was filled with people about a third my age, jumping up and down along with the band. It was fun to see such enthusiasm.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to give some thought to two persistent issues in Spain: violence against women, and the peculiarities of the housing crisis, or more accurately, crises (plural), because several different things are at work here.

I start from two assumptions, one modern and the other very ancient. The modern one, still resisted by theocrats and other believers in magic, is that "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." (Which I got from biologist D'Arcy Thompson via Daniel Dennett.) Like Charles Darwin and every other serious scientist since him, I am firmly convinced of this.

The older assumption is that everything is connected to everything else. The connections may be distractingly trivial (the butterfly's wing in one place and a traffic accident somewhere else, for example), but for large-scale social phenomena, probably useful.

Saying that women in Spain get beat up or killed by their partners because Spanish men are especially "machista" (an argument you sometimes hear) doesn't explain anything. Even if it were true, that is, if Spanish men were especially prone to such violence (which they aren't: check out the UN International Violence Against Women Survey), we'd have to ask, What made them that way? And in fact, about half the men involved aren't even Spanish but immigrants from as far away as Russia, or Bolivia, or Morocco, or the Ukraine. So how did THEY get that way?

Part of the answer is no doubt the stress on traditional family structures and expectations that occur in immigration. Great article on this: "No reconocí a mis hijos, ni ellos a mí" by J. J. Áznarez.

Casa Encendida is about to close down my computer (time's up), so I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks. More on this later. Hasta luego. I still owe you a comment on the housing problems, too.

Historical v. sociological imaginations

I've been reading Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (London: Phoenix, 2006), and just got through the intro and Part I, “Old Spain and the Second Republic”. It's a marvelously clear, though overly concise, account of some of the key events and for this reason will be an excellent starting point for anyone new to the subject and a good refresher for those who already know some of it. There is much to praise here -- but still, it left me unsatisfied. It doesn't really explain why things happened they way they did. And I think this has to do with the hidden, unasked questions that a more sociologically-minded author would make explicit.

The first question is, what are the criteria for selecting certain events and ignoring others? This is a big book (479 pages plus intro, notes, maps, index, etc.), but it can't tell us everything and if it did it would be no more useful than the mapamundi that Borges imagined, of exactly the same dimensions as the territory it mapped. For example, why tell us about the anarchist rising and subsequent massacre at Casas Viejas, in Cádiz (1933)? And not about, for example, the traveling puppet theater and variety performances organized by Federico García Lorca and his associates as part of the cultural awakening of the same stratum of angry, ignorant peasants who were massacred at Casas Viejas? The first mention of García Lorca in this book is his murder (1936), but great upheavals are made up of more than violence and political maneuverings. The cultural changes during the first, left-liberal government of the Republic (1931-34), especially the increasing political and civil consciousness of many women, had a lot to do with the repression during the second, right-wing government of the Republic (1934-36) and the intensity of political conflict in the months between the election of a new, further left government (January 1936) and the rising of Franco and other generals (July 1936).

The second question is really another way of putting the first one: How do we think certain kinds of events affect others? What sorts of cultural phenomena could explain, for example, the extremely inflammatory rhetoric of Calvo Sotelo (on the right) or Largo Caballero on the left? For example, what were the imagined audiences for each one? History? A close circle of sycophants?

I don't really fault Beevor for not posing these questions. He has done what he saw as his job, of telling the overtly political events as clearly as possible. This gives us a good basis for working out the next part of the job, forming and testing hypotheses that may better explain the events and so help us understand other phenomena that may or may not be comparable (factional conflict in Iraq today, for example).

The rose and the cross

To understand the rage of the Catholic bishops against the "radical laicism"of the Socialist government of Spain, you have to look at their precipitous fall from the power they exercised only 40 years ago. To understand the pusillanimity of the Socialist response, you have to look at the continuing erosion of what used to be the Party's base.

Spanish habits, desires and world-views, like those everywhere else in the world today, are changing too rapidly for the old institutions -- churches, parties, trade unions, etc. -- to contain them. The new organizational forms are multiplying as suddenly as the windmills of La Mancha in the 17th century, and the priests and politicos of today, like Don Quijote then, see them as monsters.

In the Spain governed by Francisco Franco, when there was only one Church and the schools taught that patriotism, religion and obedience to the caudillo were all the same thing, something like 98% of the people declared themselves to be Catholics. It was almost impossible to get married outside of the church -- to do so, a couple would have to demonstrate that they were not Catholics, or if they had been baptised, make a formal declaration of apostasy, and you can imagine how that would be seen. There was no divorce, of course. And no right to abortion, or even contraception, or even sex instruction.

As recently as 1998, 83.5% of Spaniards still said they considered themselves Catholic -- a huge drop from just 10 years before. By 2007, the figure had fallen to 77%. And vocations are way down. A cheery Catholic statistician pointed out that the news wasn't all bad, that there are still 10 million who go to mass at least once in a while. "In Spain there's no other social phenomenon as big as this, not even football!" he declared. (I'm not making this up. See Crisis de vocaciones en España.) Maybe. But fans of fútbol are a lot more enthusiastic. More than half (56.2%) of those self-declared Spanish Catholics tell researchers they never go to mass, and only 17% say they go only occasionally. So I don't know where they get that 10 million figure.

Most significant: 46% of Spaniards between 15 and 24 years old describe themselves as agnostics, atheists or indifferent to religion, only 10% say they are practicing Catholics and 39% nonpracticing Catholics.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Partido Socialista Obrero have nothing to do with this phenomenon, except that they are trying (weakly) to catch up with it. And as the Church decays, the PSOE has no attractive alternative. The old discipline of the socialist trade unions, fighting for workers' dignity, is barely a memory. It's globalization, stupid! It's the Internet and all the other communications with a wider world, the shifting (and in some areas disapppearing) job market, a turmoil where priests offer no certainties and your family, church and school connections offer you no job security. Those 15-24 year olds know that they're on their own.

The PSOE at least seems to be aware of the problem, and some of its people are trying to redefine their socialism as increasing opportunities for youth. But the government has made such drastic concessions to the vociferous church hierarchy -- continuing to finance religous education in public schools and even increasing the state contribution to financing the church itself, failing to follow through on defense of the right of abortion -- that it is having difficulty keeping any youth loyalty. The Cardinals, meanwhile, egged on by the German pope, are howling in the rhetoric of the by-gone fascist era, but nobody but the PSOE (in their own time warp) and a fraction of those ten million mass-attenders wants to pay them much attention.

España se seculariza, El País, 10 de enero de 2008
Parties & church in Spain

New slogan

You may have noticed the change at the top of this page. Up to now I had been using the most-quoted lines from William Carlos William's 1962 poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."

Sweet, but hardly startling. My new slogan is meant to suggest a less familiar line of thought. It is of course an inversion of Karl Marx' 11th "Thesis on Feuerbach": "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

In 1845 (Marx was only 27), when feudal structures of domination were still blocking the capitalist transformation of society, that thesis was forceful and persuasive. Today, with capitalism freed to do its worst, we know that it is only too easy for corporate executives, religious fanatics, and other revolutionaries under banners red or black to "change the world" uncomprehendingly, by (for examples) polluting our water, heating our globe, creating famine, blowing up marketplaces and even skyscrapers and so on -- whether in pursuit of profit, comfort, glory, spiritual salvation or power. Today, the most useful thing any of us can do is to try to understand these developments so as to predict consequences of alternative actions, so that we can steer our course. This has been the effort of sociologists such as Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, and Alvin Gouldner (to mention only those cited lately in this blog).

Anyway, it beats staring at a greeny flower.

Why Bourdieu?

Another book I picked up in Paris last month was by sociologist Nathalie Heinich, Pourquoi Bourdieu. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 188 p.) Among other things, the book has helped me understand better the anger of Alain Touraine, whom Heinich describes as a "collègue et ennemi" of Bourdieu, in the first half of his Penser autrement (discussed below, blog of 11-27), where he inveighs against a view of a society "without actors." It was the determinism of Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and others that Touraine continues to combat.

Heinich first encountered Pierre Bourdieu (1930-1992) when she arrived in Paris as a beginning graduate student in 1977, and fell under his spell. His style of "domination" was "charismatic," she argues, in the strict sense defined by Max Weber (1919): based on "personal, extraordinary grace" ("la grâce personnelle extra-quotidienne" in the French translation she's using). The book is mainly about why she and scores of other young students and even non-sociologists were so overwhelmed by him, and why it was important for her and probably all of us to break the enchantment. I don't have time this morning, and you probably don't have patience for an extensive summary. Briefly, she (and others) found him extraordinarily attractive even physically (in 1977, he was "un homme jeune, beau..., souriant," ... etc.), and a lecturer who seemed to trap new ideas on the fly and appreciate enormously the little suggestions that his students dared to offer, treating students (his clear inferiors) as equals and researchers in other fields as friends -- whereas other sociologists of his own generation he viewed as competitors and treated them scornfully. If you were to be his student-collaborator-colleague, you had to be with him all the way, with no tolerance for other approaches -- e.g., Alain Touraine or even more distant intellectuals such as Barthes or Bachelard.

But it wasn't just his personal magnetism that made him such a towering figure. He really had interesting ideas, a great number of them, and Heinich describes some of the main ones critically but sympathetically. For my purposes here, as I seek to comprehend developments in Spain, these seem powerful tools. Stratification and hierarchy (of all social relations), the importance of non-material resources ("cultural capital") motivations and motives ("distinction"), etc.; the power of "habitus" and the arena of competition or "champ", etc.

But my time on this borrowed computer is nearly up. These are just notes to help me and maybe intrigue you. If I get a chance, I'll be back tomorrow, to talk not about Bourdieu but about other phenomena where Bourdieu, Touraine, Alvin Gouldner and others may help us understand. Hasta mañana.