The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa Maria Del Monte

Alive with the voices of both historical and contemporary villagers, this study of a northern Spanish community shows how the residents of Santa Maria del Monte have acted together at critical times to ensure the survival of their traditional forms of social organization. The survival of these forms has allowed the villagers, in turn, to weather demographic, political, and economic crises over the centuries. Through case studies gathered in the course of fieldwork and textual analysis of local family and council documents, Ruth Behar brings a new level of historicity to ethnography.