VICENTE BLANCO, JAVIER DÁMASO, PEDRO TOMÉ MARTÍN, IGNACIO FERNÁNDEZ MATA AND SUSANA ASENSIO LLAMAS (COORD.), “Salvajes” de Acá y de Allá: Memoria y Relato de Nos-otros. Liber amicorum Luis Díaz Viana, Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid, 2022
It would be naïve to think that ethnography and writing are merely the continuation of a lineage of country people, big and small landowners, and bourgeois and aristocrat people. This book, a tribute to Luis Díaz Viana, shows that, despite the attempts to forget decades of culture, in the end the characters and the common and subjective place full of hope that encourages individuals and usually helps compensate failures and successes emerge. This anthology of stories is also a clarifying and simple ethnographic contribution by all those involved, because the current and global world, exhausted by accurate or inaccurate information and the dazzling substitution of images, leads to a certain degree of indifference. The temptation is everywhere or, as Díaz Viana puts it, “acá y allá” (here and there), to focus on our own art and on the art of our people, because the value of human beings is the same “here and there”, yesterday, today and always, just like their identity.
With tenderness and realism, “Salvajes” de Acá y de Allá has taken on the duty of watching over the life of our futures. Everyone’s. Moreover, as an anthropologist, I admit that the act of transmitting is a virtue characteristic of the people of any researched land, free of thought, as if it were an individual victory, although, to some extent, it is a collective one. I share the pride with which the freedom and dignity of human beings, regardless of origin or culture, has been portrayed in this book, in one way or another. Future generations should safeguard the culture and traditions of a land so that it is habitable, a land where our ancestors left their voice; the voice that accompanies this book, with its multiple voices and authors that enable us to reach the past, the here and the now.
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