Myth of Matriarchy

The Myth of Matriarchy: Symbols of Womanhood in Galician Regional IdentityAuthor(s): Heidi KelleySource: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2, Symbols of Contention: Part 1 (Apr., 1994),pp. 71-80Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317362 .Accessed: 06/10/2011 05:01

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THE MYTH OF MATRIARCHY: SYMBOLS OF WOMANHOOD IN GALICIAN REGIONAL IDENTITY

HEIDI KELLEY University of North Carolina at Asheville

Galicia, the northwesternmost region of Spain, is often popularly characterized within that nation as matriarchal. This concept of female power has also been elaborated and drawn

upon by Galician regionalists in their construction of a distinctive regional identity. This article examines the ways in which a myth of matriarchy and symbols of womanhood have been used in Galician ethnogenesis. It explores both the aptness of feminine symbols for expressing the paradoxical nature of the relationship of region to nation and the ironies evoked by the use of the hegemonically devalued symbol of woman to stand for the region. [regional identity, gender, Spain, Galicia, symbols]

Since the death of Franco in 1975 and the ensuing political changes in Spain that have culminated in the creation of the seventeen comunidades autbnomas (autonomous communities), questions of regional identity have been emphasized in the nation's political culture. Greenwood (1989) describes Spain's current federalist constitution, written in 1978, as "ethnogenetic" and points to the study of "ethnogenesis," the process in which ethnic identities are developed "out of particular insti- tutional and historical conditions" (1989: 6), as a key area for anthropological attention in Spain today.1 In this article I explore the ways in which a myth of matriarchy and symbols of womanhood have been used by regionalists in this process of ethnogenesis in the northwesternmost Spanish region of Galicia.

Since the mid-nineteenth century Rexurdi- mento, a romantic renaissance of Galician history, arts, customs, and language, the struggle to define and preserve a Galician identity has been in the forefront of regional political and intellectual life. At times this struggle has been more highly politicized than others, for instance during the Sec- ond Spanish Republic (1931-1939), when a statute of Galician autonomy was proposed, and today, as the scope and orientation of the current regional government is debated.

Key to the process of Galician ethnogenesis is the creation of a distinctive regional identity in opposition to a Spanish national identity that is pic- tured as homogenizing, absorbing, and dominat- ing.2 Gender symbolism may be a particularly productive vehicle for symbolizing the relationship of dominated to dominator. This relationship is not a simple one and thus a symbolic vehicle that in- cludes ambiguity and paradox is necessary to en-

compass its complexities. The oppressed region is to be portrayed as weakened by its oppressor at the same time that its inherent independent strength is celebrated. In this article I argue that feminine symbols drawn upon by regionalists from the mid- nineteenth century to the present may be particularly expressive of the paradoxical relationship of region to nation, of periphery to center. Ironically, however, while feminine symbols capture well the ambiguous nature of regional identity, they may also be used by the center to disparage the periphery (hence also capturing the ambiguous nature of the relationship of nation to region, of center to periphery).

During the course of my research in Galicia (I have lived both in the capital city of Santiago and the coastal village of Ezaro),3 for instance, I have often been struck by the reaction of non-Galician Spaniards when I describe to them my research on Galician women. Non-Galicians often exclaim about the matriarchal nature of Galician society and marvel at my ability to interview such independent-minded women. Within Galicia I have heard similar comments from urban Galicians with refer- ence to rural Galician women. A female shop- keeper whom I befriended in a market town near the village where I lived often quizzed me with concern about my ability to interact with village women who she portrayed as tough and garrulous. The tone of these comments about Galician matriarchy usually reflected curiosity about these novel women but also often was tinged with a conde- scending amusement over the very idea of powerful women. In this discourse the popular stereotype of Galicia as "matriarchal" within Spain, and the image of rural Galicia held by urban Galicians, may be related to the marginal position that the region

71

72 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

is seen as occupying by other Spaniards and the marginal status accorded to rural areas by many urban Galicians. From the hegemonic perspective of the center, a cultural tradition in which male authority is sanctified, it makes sense that the "marginal" Galicians would also be the ones seen as dominated by their women.'

This concept of female power, nonetheless, is one that has also been elaborated and drawn upon by Galicians themselves in their construction of a regional identity. While from the perspective of the center (the national and/or urban perspective), notions of female power may be used alternatively to exoticize or to deride Galicians, at the regional level similar notions have been employed positively to assert a distinctive Galician identity. This ironic contrast between the connotations of "matriarchal" from the vantage of the center as opposed to that of the periphery is mirrored in the paradoxical ways in which symbols of womanhood have been elaborated by regionalists themselves to stand for Galician identity.

While the use of engendered symbols to stand for regional or national identity is not unique to Galicia," the elaboration of the metaphor of matriarchy in Galicia to represent the distinctiveness of the region (and, I would speculate, in other regions with similar myths such as the Basque region and Brittany),' may serve to highlight the polysemous and multivocal nature of feminine symbols as they have been drawn upon in the construction of such identities. As anthropological attention has increasingly been drawn to the ways in which national and regional identities are "imagined" (Anderson 1983), "invented" (for example, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, Hobsbawm 1990, Linnekin 1983), "authenticated" (for example, Handler 1988, Han- dler and Saxton 1988), and generally "contested," so too has interest in the metaphorical and negotia- ble nature of such identities peaked. At the same time, anthropological studies of gender have been moving away from using oppositional logic to explain gender categories (Sanday 1990) towards understanding gender categories themselves as fundamentally malleable and contestable (for example, Dubisch 1986b, Herzfeld 1986, Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991).

In this article I bring these two perspectives together to show how symbols of womanhood have become symbols of contention in Galician ethnogenesis. This occurs on at least three levels. First, the popular understandings of womanhood

that are drawn upon by regionalists are themselves ambiguously construed. I argue that feminine symbols may be particularly effective expressions of regional identity precisely because of their ambiguity. Second, power struggles concerning the value of regional identity occur both at the national level (national vs. regional identity) and internally (urban vs. rural identity). Regionalists have constructed Galician identity in opposition to a hegemonic national identity but ironically at the same time postulate a hegemonically devalued identity, that of rural, peasant women, as emblematic.7 Third, symbols of womanhood are also contended as they are refracted back onto the lives of the rural women from whom they were drawn in the first place.

In exploring the uses of symbols of womanhood by Galician regionalists, it is important to emphasize that these individuals by no means con- stitute a homogeneous group (they represent a spectrum of political positions) nor have they uni- formly appropriated notions of femininity. A case in point is that of many contemporary Galician feminists who emphasize the oppression of rural women in contrast to what they view as the "myth- icizing" of an "idyllic rural world" (Queizan 1977: 49). I describe below what I see as some central themes in the ways in which feminine symbols have been used in the construction of Galician regional identity.

In the pages that follow I first lay out the ways in which regionalists have characterized Gali- cia as matriarchal, showing how inchoate regionalist sentiments have been given body in the myth of matriarchy. Then I consider the labile and polysemous nature of symbols of womanhood in general, drawing parallels between the use of feminine symbols by Galician villagers and regionalists. Next I examine the ways in which one Galician regionalist has drawn upon representations of womanhood in his metaphoric portrayal of the region. Finally I turn to the ways in which these variant representations of Galician womanhood are interpreted by rural Galician women themselves. I con- clude with a brief consideration of academic myth- making.

The Embodiment of Myth

Empirically, anthropological evidence does not sup- port the existence of a Galician matriarchy, in the sense of female domination over men, either in the

THE MYTH OF MATRIARCHY 73

past or the present.8 Rural Galician women, both in the past and the present, have however com- manded a significant amount of power and these attributes of female strength have been drawn upon in the process of Galician ethnogenesis. In the coastal Galician community of Ezaro, for instance, women are responsible for agricultural decision- making and for planning and carrying out agricultural tasks. They carry considerable weight in con- vincing other family members (particularly husbands and daughters) to help with agricultural tasks even when they are not especially inclined to do so. In addition, not only do women inherit land but they maintain independent control over their inherited property, even to the point of being able to select their own principal heirs independent of their husbands' choices. Women may be said to have a certain measure of reproductive freedom in that while an illegitimate pregnancy is considered initially shameful, the unwed mother is accepted in the community and may eventually achieve an hon- orable reputation based on her hard work and initi- ative (Kelley 1991).

The myth of matriarchy thus may be understood as a symbolic elaboration of selected cultural characteristics to stand for regional identity. Re- gionalist discourse about Galician womanhood is not limited however to the symbol of matriarchy. Matriarchy rather may be understood as a focal point in this discourse. Key to the forging of a Ga- lician regional identity has been the reappropriation of what are seen as "traditional" roles for rural women and the use of these roles to stand for certain qualities that regional activists wish to por- tray as intrinsically Galician.9

This reappropriation of tradition by regionalists has two facets. In the first, tradition is viewed as history. Activists look back into the past in order to define Galicia as a distinctive region. In this vein, some regionalists have pointed to a primordial Celtic identity for Galicia. "Celtic" is popularly used as an umbrella term to refer to the pre-Ro- man inhabitants of Galicia. The Celtic identity has also been characterized as autochthonous (Gran Enciclopedia Gallega 1974). The Roman occupa- tion is seen as having little affected this original Celtic culture; hence the unique identity of the region is understood as having been preserved intact for centuries. One element of this identity is a pre- sumptive Celtic matriarchy. This concept of primordial female power is popularly invoked as evidence for both the uniqueness of Galicia's past and

the unusual power of female roles in rural Galicia today.

A Celtic identity has been emphasized by Ga- lician regionalists not only to distinguish their history from the history of the rest of Spain, but also to identify themselves with what they see as the other Celtic regions of Europe, for example, Ire- land, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany, in opposition to the other regions of Spain. Thus Galicia is defined as separate and primordially independent not only from the centralizing politics of Castile, but also from all of the rest of Spain. There is interest in Galicia today in the pan-Celtic identity being developed in the Celtic language regions of Eu- rope.10 A matriarchal orientation is one of the common characteristics that Galicians see themselves as sharing with the other Celtic nations.

In the second facet of the reappropriation of tradition, tradition is understood as a way of life exemplified in peasant culture which is viewed as representing a "pure" version of Galician-ness, minimally corrupted by urban and Spanish (or Castilian) influences.1 The customs of the peas- antry-among which the strong roles played by women in the household are emphasized-play a key role in the construal of a distinctive Galician identity.

The centrality of the idea of a unique rural culture to Galician ethnogenesis has been under- lined in the attempts to create a regional law code based on Galician consuetudinary law. Documents were prepared in 1880, 1899, and 1915 (see, for instance, P6rez Porto 1915) outlining what were seen as the distinctive bases of Galician law, but it was not until 1963 that the Compilaci6n del Der- echo Civil Especial de Galicia was actually passed into law (Boletin Oficial del Estado 1963, Castan Tobehas 1964). Regional jurists have viewed the family-agrarian sphere as the source of the distinctive Galician law code and have claimed the com- pania familiar (the family company) as "the key- stone that conserves the purest essence of Galician civil law" (Gran Enciclopedia Gallega 1974). The compafiia familiar is a family unit in which all re- sources are pooled, in which the family essentially acts as a single economic and legal entity. Scholars debate the degree to which the concept of the compaifia familiar elaborated in the 1963 law code in fact accords with the reality of rural family organi- zation, but reality aside, the concept of the compa- flia familiar has figured strongly in the construction of a Galician identity. One of the main distinctive


features of the compaifia familiar pointed to by regionalist jurists is the fact that a woman is viewed as a participant with equal rights to a man, and the married woman has her own legal personality.

The above examples are indicative of the ways in which a myth of matriarchy has been used to stand for the region of Galicia. In each case female strength (whether to dominate men in the distant past or to achieve an egalitarian marital relationship in contemporary rural communities) is singled out as distinctive to and representative of the region (in contrast to what is perceived as the dominant Spanish culture). A regional tradition of female power is thus created to contrast with a national and hegemonic tradition of male authority. Representations of female power may be particularly effective in Galician ethnogenesis because not only do they highlight distinctiveness but, as I explain below, they also capture the paradoxical nature of the relationship between regional and national identity (a paradox I have already hinted at in the ironic multivocality of the ambiguous connotations given the term matriarchy both inside and outside Galicia).

Myth as Symbol

The contradictory nature of the relationship between region and nation that I have explained in the introduction is reflected in the paradoxical way in which the concept of woman is used symbolically by Galician regionalists. Woman is celebrated as matriarch at the same time that femininity is used as a symbol to stand for the oppressed character of the Galician nation. Woman is an effective symbol precisely because women are seen as at once powerful and powerless. The contradictions implicit to Galician conceptions of womanhood are particularly apt for symbolizing the ambiguous nature of the relationship of oppressed to oppressor.

In the coastal Galician community of Ezaro villagers draw upon a number of contradictory conceptualizations of womanhood (Kelley 1988). Much feminine symbolism may be understood to refer not merely to the characteristics of individual women, but perhaps more fundamentally to the nature of the household, the basic unit of identity and prestige in the community. As Dubisch (1986b) and Herzfeld (1986) have shown in their work in Greece, the gender symbolism used by villagers is highly malleable. Womanhood is associated positively with the values of hard work, motherhood,

and purity. All of these values are related to the integrity of the household. The hard-working woman is symbolically seen as making the reputation of the household. The mother is the figure portrayed at the center of the ideally harmonious family, an ideal rarely perfected in reality. Female purity is held up for emulation as well; but here purity refers principally to the foods produced by and consumed in the household, rather than the sexual purity of more concern in southern Spain.12 Woman's role as agricultural worker thus comes to stand for the reputation of the household, measured in its ability to work all of its fields (to keep them "clean") and to be as nearly self-sufficient as possi- ble with regard to food. The purity and integrity of the household are thus measured in terms of its productivity and the notion of "woman as powerful" comes to stand for the integrity of the household.

Regionalists have used the symbol of woman as powerful in parallel ways to stand for the integrity of the region as I will elaborate below. One way in which this notion is expressed is in the focus on simple, peasant foods such as caldo (a soup made with salted pork, potatoes, and greens), em- panada (a fish or meat pie), chourizos, and torti- Ilas made with homegrown eggs and potatoes as epitomizing Galician identity. These

foods, are re-

ferred to as caseira.13 Literally this term means homemade but in fact the term evokes broader associations with the idea of the casa, the home, and all that the casa, and particularly the rural home, symbolizes about purity and integrity, the very characteristics that are emphasized in discussions of foods that are caseira." Negative conceptualizations of female power nonetheless also abound in the village. Just as a woman can stand for the unity and productivity of the successful household, so can she stand for the destructive tendencies inherent to the household. Women are associated with conflict, envy, and witchcraft. These destructive potentials of womanhood per se have not been drawn upon by regionalists. The idea of Galicia as "a terra das bruxas" (the land of witches), however, has been popularly elaborated; this fascination with witchcraft may be understood, at least in part, as a celebration of the idea of female power which is conceptualized as intrinsically Galician. Bruxas sell well to tourists-as evidenced by the number of trinkets in Galician souvenir shops bearing the terra das bruxas slogan-but in Ezaro the fascination with witchcraft has also been reincorporated


into the village celebration of San Xoan (St. John's Eve) where incantations against witches are recited over a steaming pot of queimada (a heady brew of unmatured brandy [aguardiente] flavored with cof- fee beans and lemon). In contrast to everyday be- liefs in witchcraft this ceremony self-consciously draws on an idea of belief in witchcraft as being quintessentially Galician.

The ironic multivocality of the myth of matri-

archy is echoed in local reactions to the characteri- zation of Galicia as a terra das bruxas. While witchcraft is highlighted in the community celebration of San Xoan, most village women, keenly aware of urban characterizations of witchcraft as ignorant superstition, were reluctant to divulge to me (at least initially) any personal knowledge of bruxeria, the term used locally to refer to a wide

range of practices that invoke the supernatural, from healing involving herbs and prayers to malefi- cent charms. The ambiguity here pivots on whether bruxeria is to be esteemed as distinctively Galician or ridiculed as "rural" and "backwards." Further

irony is added to representations of witchcraft as distinctively Galician by the ambiguity between viewing female power as noteworthy or amusing. When, for instance, a Galician folklorist gave a public lecture titled "Brujeria con accento gallego" (Witchcraft with a Galician accent) in Santiago, he was asked by a member of the audience if he himself had ever been embruxado (bewitched)."1 His response-"Yes, the day I fell in love with my wife"-drew sustained laughter from the crowd.

While notions of female power, both positive and negative, are thus well elaborated in Ezaro (al- beit often ambiguously), there also exists in the village a perception of women as being at the mercy of masculine whim, as the hapless victims of male machismo. I observed this notion of woman as vic- tim applied often to explain the high numbers of unwed mothers in the village. From this perspective the integrity of a woman, and her household, are seen as vulnerable to penetration by outside disrup- tive forces. As I will explain below, this same char- acterization of woman as powerless has been used by Galician regionalists to refer to the vulnerability of the region to outside control, as its being at the mercy of the whim of central authority.

Myth as Text

To illustrate the ways in which symbols of womanhood have been used in the construction of Galician

regional identity I have chosen to analyze one text, written by a Galician nationalist who was both particularly eloquent and particularly influential. The author is Alfonso Castelao and the text is Sempre en Galiza (Always in Galicia), a series of essays which Castelao began in Spain in 1937 and com-

pleted in exile in Buenos Aires in 1943.16 Castelao is among the best-known of Galician

regionalists, matched in popularity perhaps only by Rosalia de Castro, a nineteenth-century poet and novelist. Villagers often spoke of Castelao in rever- ent terms; my first gift from a village friend was a book by Castelao. When I once asked a middle- aged woman from Ezaro whether she had studied gallego in school, her response was to exclaim no, that she had not even known who Castelao was until she learned of his death while she was living in Buenos Aires. Here "not knowing who Castelao was" becomes symbolic of the repression of Gali- cian identity that took place during the Franco dic- tatorship. Today, not only Castelao's work but the man himself have become beloved symbols of Gali- cian identity.

For Castelao, the authentic Galician personality is found in the rural sphere. He sees peasants and fishermen (1977: 39) as the authentic Galician workers and the language of the peasants and fishermen as the authentic Galician language (p. 46). He also emphasizes the affinity of Galicia with what are viewed as the other Celtic nations. Castil- ian politics, opines Castelao, severed an essentially primordial relationship that Galicians had main- tained with what he terms the other Atlantic communities (the other "Finisterres atlOnticos"), a relationship that he describes as underlaid by a "mysterious racial contract" (p. 37).

Feminine metaphors are used in three main ways in Castelao's text. Woman is conceptualized first as beautiful, gentle, and pure, second as strong, powerful, and maternal, and third as suffering and subjugated. All of these metaphors are used to describe a terra, the land, a polysemous concept which refers at once to the Galician landscape, the Galician people, and Galician tradition. Fundamentally, the land is the Galician identity.

First, Castelao uses feminine metaphors to describe the Galician landscape. "Los montes son redondos como pechos de mujer. . ." (The moun- tains are round like a woman's breasts) (p. 46). The landscape is described as soft and harmonious in contrast with the harsh, arid terrain of Castile. Feminine gentleness and beauty thus characterize


the land of Galicia. The land here is seen as a lover, alluring, and romantic. For Castelao, Gali- cian tradition is found in, among other things, the amorous identification of the Galicians with their land and their predisposition to poetry.

The land is also fertile and maternal. Castelao portrays the Galicians as children of Mother Earth. The creative powers of Mother Earth, writes Caste- lao, are what make the Galicians distinctive.

Para nosotros la patria no es esa idea abstracta que defienden los imperialistas. Para nosotros la patria es un sentimiento natural, inspirado en realidades sensibles a los cinco sentidos. La patria es la Tierra. La Tierra que nos dio el ser y que nos recogera en la muerte como simiente de nuevas criaturas. (For us the.native land is not that abstract idea defended by the imperialists. For us the native land is a natural sentiment, inspired by sensate realities. For us the native land is the Earth. The Earth that brought us into being and will gather us up in death as seed for new life) (p. 47).

Pero Galicia es la mas viva posibilidad de vida espahola. Galicia es un brote nuevo, que serb rama florecida en el viejo cepo de Espaha. (Galicia is the liveliest possibility for Spanish life. Galicia is a new shoot, that will be a flourishing branch of the old bough of Spain) (p. 35).

The goal of Galicians must be to reclaim this fertile land as their own. "Pedimos que nuestra Tierra sea nuestra. Porque somos hijos de ella" (We ask that our Land be ours. Because we are her children) (p. 36).

In elaborating his concept of the Galician character, Castelao focuses on the uniquely Gali- cian concept of "saudade." "Saudade," difficult to translate directly, refers to a complex emotional mixture of melancholy and nostalgia. It is most often used to refer to the sentiments of Galician emigrants separated from their native land. It evokes a sense of almost inevitable pain.

Castelao paints the Mother Land as suffering in this same sense. She is crying tears of pain and it is only her children who are capable of wiping those tears away. "Nuestra tierra es nuestra . Porque somos los inicos capaces de enjugar sus ltgrimas de dolor" (Our land is ours. . . . Be- cause we are the only ones capable of wiping away her tears of pain) (Castelao 1977: 36). The Mother Land is suffering because she is affronted, denied the right to speak and think, held in chains.

Nuestra tierra es nuestra. De quitn mhis podia ser? De los que la ultrajan? De los que le niegan el habla y el pensamiento? De los que la encadenan? De los que la

roban? De los que asesinan a sus hijos mas queridos? De los que la hundieron en la ignorancia? De los que la quieren vender como esclava? De los que le niegan el derecho a ser libre? (Our land is ours. Whose else could it be? Those that affront it? Those that deny it speech and thought? Those that shackle it? Those that rob it? Those that assassinate its most beloved children? Those that drown it in igno- rance? Those that want to sell it as a slave? Those that deny it the right to be free?) (pp. 36-37).

The Mother Land is thus seen as subjugated and her children claim that they have more rights to her than does her subjugator. An analogy may be seen here with Galician rural custom in which the link, both emotional and legal, between parent and child is seen as stronger than the link between hus- band and wife.

In summary, Castelao's text illustrates both the ambiguities inherent to the conceptualization of regional identity and the productivity of gender symbolism in expressing those ambiguities. It illustrates well the powerful flexibility of the symbol of "woman." In a similar fashion so does the work and person of poet and novelist Rosalia de Castro, a pioneer in the resurgence of a Galician literary tradition who used the Galician language as a vehicle to express themes of Galician life The very fact of her femininity makes her an apt metaphor for the gendered understanding of Galician regionalism I have presented above.17 Her bittersweet and often melancholic poems, drawn upon by regionalists of both her day and today to express Galician oppression, capture both the beauty and the suffering of the region. In her childhood as the illegitimate daughter of a priest and in her adulthood as the wife of an influential regionalist, Rosalia's very life evokes the aforementioned tension between feminine power and powerlessness.

Myth as Experience

In this article I have described how a tension between powerfulness and powerlessness in Galician understandings of womanhood evokes an essential ambiguity in regionalists' conceptualizations of the relationship of region to nation. I have also shown how while matriarchy is esteemed as emblematic of Galician distinctiveness by regionalists, it may be represented hegemonically as indicative of the region's subordination. How then is this myth of matriarchy interpreted by the rural Galician women in whose lives it is empirically grounded? How have regionalists' images of Galician womanhood


influenced the identity of rural women themselves?

Images of "traditional" Galician culture are today refracted back into the countryside via the media of television (in particular, the Galician language channel), the press, lectures, and perform- ances. In the early 1980s a Cultural Association was formed in Ezaro with the purpose of reviving traditional celebrations such as Carnaval and the San Xoan Day festivities described above. The villagers in the association have invited speakers, in- cluding Galician-born novelist Camilio Jose Cela (recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature), to educate them about their culture. I have also contributed to this process with a slide show on "Women's Roles in Coastal Galicia." Women I knew in Ezaro often proudly described to me certain of their characteristics as intrinsically Gali- cian. For instance, I was told that a Galician woman meeting a stranger on the street would boldly look him (or her) in the eye while a Castillian or Andalusian woman would demurely keep her eyes on the ground. Thus the fact of being Galician is a highly relevant part of a woman's identity and is used to stand for certain characteristics such as forthrightness, diligence, and productivity.

Issues of regional identity will continue to be highlighted in coming years, as Galicia struggles to define its role within both the Spanish state and the European community. In Ezaro I have observed an ongoing redefinition of women's roles as the orientation of the community's prestige structure shifts from the maintenance of family agricultural land to the acquisition of apartments and small busi- nesses. I have also observed many young women drawing upon galeguismo (contemporary Galician nationalism) to defend their agricultural roles to their husbands, many of whom have come to value cash more highly than land as a marker of success. Rural Galician women then may use galeguista ideals to resist their husbands' divergent definitions of household success. Here women use regionalist conceptions of womanhood to buttress their concep- tion of their roles as powerful and valuable.

Village women also draw on a strong sense of pride in their status as rural Galician women to resist urban hegemony more generally. As an out- sider, I was often lumped with the urban "other" against whom village women defined themselves. I was frequently criticized for being too delicate and too refined, for not knowing how to work, for being a spendthrift, in essence, for being the opposite of all that Ezaro women saw as noteworthy in them-

selves. Yet these same women often apologized to me for the condition of their houses, noting that if they were not so busy in their fields all day long, they would be able to keep their houses cleaner and better organized. The life of the urban woman, a life of immaculately clean houses, flawlessly dressed children, and afternoon strolls with friends, is at once rejected as immoral and extolled as a su- perior but virtually unattainable way of life by Ezaro women."' A tension between pride in their roles as strong-minded agriculturalists and shame at their failure to live up to urban standards under- lies Ezaro women's discourse about their own lives and echoes the ironic multivocality in the ways in which the myth of matriarchy is used to represent the region. As the economy and prestige structure of the community continue to change, this tension will be further exacerbated, particularly if regional identity continues to be a locus of resistance to what is perceived as nationally-imposed change. How contemporary Galician activists conceptualize the changing roles of rural women and how rural women use regionalists' definitions of Galician womanhood as they redefine their own roles in rapidly changing circumstances remain potent questions for the future.

Academic Myths

The symbolic potential of a myth of matriarchy for regional identity has been the focus of this article; in an analogous fashion we might ask how academ- ics have created their own regional myths.19 I was drawn to do fieldwork in Galicia because of what I had read of the distinctive position of women there."0 When I presented a paper at a national women's studies conference in Madrid, it drew considerable attention from Spanish feminist academ- ics who wanted to know if Galicia was really matriarchal. Just as activists may use myths to argue for the distinctive status of their regions, so may anthropologists use similar myths to defend the unique status of their field site in an academic arena of competitive exoticization. Doing so may lead us to use culture to divide the reality of human social experience into artificial chunks and consequently to both erase nuances within regional experience and underplay the common threads that may run across seemingly different types of human experience (Abu-Lughod 1991).

While the autonomy of movement and range of decision-making powers accorded rural Galician


women may set them apart from many other southern European women, women throughout the region wield significant power within the domestic sphere. Herzfeld (1986), for instance, demonstrates how in Greece women are associated with power in the domestic sphere and thus come to stand for both the comfortable familiarity of that sphere and the danger of revealing private inadequacies to the public eye. Herzfeld shows how analogous to concern at the local level with this tension between concealment (represented by the female) and dis- play (represented by the male) is the tension in Greek national identity between the inwardly-directed and familiar Romeic model and the out- wardly-directed and formal Hellenic model. The same ambivalence between the security of shared self-knowledge and the fear of disclosure that are characteristic of domestic identity as represented

by the feminine are manifested in the Romeic as- pect of Greek national identity. Here, the category of the feminine not only captures the paradoxical relationship between both household and community and that between subordinate and dominant versions of national identity but also reveals an un- derlying concern with concealment. Across regional boundaries the strong symbolic association drawn between woman and- the interiority of the household in rural Europe in combination with the construal of women as mediators of boundaries (Dubisch 1986a) and as representatives of both "inside" and "outside" (Dubisch 1993) makes woman-matriarch or not-a potentially powerful symbol to mediate the ambivalent relationship of regional, rural, and popular identities to national, urban, and formal identities.

NOTES Acknowledgments This article is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans in 1990. It is based on research conducted in Galicia between 1985 and 1987 that was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for An- thropological Research, a Fulbright-Hays/Spanish Government Grant, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sci- ence Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. I am grateful to all the individuals in Galicia who so graciously helped me with my research and to Kenneth Bet- salel, Diane Bennett, and two anonymous Anthropological Quarterly reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. I thank Stevan Harrell and Joan Connelly Ullman for encour- aging me to work in Galicia in the first place.

'Greenwood (1985: 205) notes that the contemporary Spanish federalized welfare state is "ideally suited to producing strong ethnic regionalist movements because phrasing regional claims in ethnic terms is perhaps the most successful political strategy in such a system." See Murphy (this issue) on the symbolic construction of regional identity in the southern Span- ish region of Andalusia.

2Galician (and other Spanish) regionalists often use Cas- tile, the seat of Spain's central government to stand for the centralizing character of the Spanish nation (Aceves 1983). Ironically, Castile today has itself been divided into three autonomous regions (Castile-Le6n, Castile-La Mancha, and Ma- drid) of which (at least) the first two are vigorously asserting their own ethnic identities. Douglass (1991, 1992) describes the ambivalence surrounding the cultural category of "Spain" in Spain and explains that this construct is still very much in the process of negotiation.

3Santiago, a city of some 60,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the autonomia of Galicia and the main site of the Galician university. Ezaro has a population of approximately 800. Dur- ing my original fieldwork period of 1985-1987 I lived in Santi- ago for six months and Ezaro for eighteen months. I returned to both sites for additional short periods of research in 1988 and 1990.

"See Freeman (1989) for a discussion of how the process of marginalization serves to define the center in Spain.

5See, for instance, Hubbs (1988) on the clash between feminine and masculine mythologies in the construction of Rus- sian national identity and Fernandez (1986) on the association drawn in Asturian folklore between women and the region (As- turias is also in northern Spain).

TFor a discussion of the Basque myth of matriarchy, see del Valle 1985. While not referring to a myth of matriarchy, McDonald (1987: 169) describes nineteenth-century Breton aristocrats as using feminine metaphors to represent Brittany and "using the symbolic associations of femininity and mascu- linity, and Celtic and Latin, to describe and define a Breton culture and Breton nation in moral and political opposition to the self-consciously rational and increasingly secular French world that threatened their own status and influence."

7Similarly Gross and Murphy, in this issue, show how aspects of working-class culture have been generalized to stand for regional identity in Belgium and community identity in Andalusia.

'How to answer the question of the empirical existence of matriarchy in Galicia is clearly influenced by how one defines matriarchy. Sanday (1988) distinguishes two ways in which the term has been defined by feminist anthropologists. In what she terms the patriarchal model of gender relations the definition of matriarchy is limited to situations in which women have power over men. In the matrifocal model, matriarchy is used to define situations in which "women in their roles as mothers play a central role in social affairs" (p. 55), in which matricentered activities are more important than male activities. In terms of this second definition some aspects of rural coastal Galician social experience might be considered matriarchal, although in Galicia it is less in terms of their roles as mothers than their roles as workers that women gain centrality. It is, nevertheless, impossible to understand the emically defined woman-centered aspects of rural Galician life (for example, agriculture or the household) without placing them in the context of the man- centered aspects (for example, wage labor). As Sanday goes on to point out, both the patriarchal and matrifocal models of gender relations are underlaid by an obfuscating "tendency to op- pose the categories of male and female and examine relations between them in terms of a hierarchical ordering" (p. 55).


91I understand this tradition as "invented" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), that is, as symbolically constructed (Handler and Linnekin 1984; Linnekin 1992). I use the term "reappropriation" to emphasize the fact that regionalists draw from prior representations in constructing an understanding of Gali- cian "tradition." Rappaport (1990: 187) writes of a "reinvented" past (in the Galician case, we might also speak of a reinvented countryside), "the creation of a moral link to the past in order to defy the colonizing power" (in Galicia, the centralizing power of Castilian culture).

'0McDonald (1986, 1989) describes ongoing Celtic revival-. ist movements in Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.

"Here, it is typical for time and place to be conflated, for "peasant culture" to be characterized as timeless (in implicit opposition to a rapidly changing urban and Spanish world). See Bauer (1992) on a contrasting use of this conflation by villagers from the interior of Galicia whose aim is to separate themselves from local tradition in order to "resituate themselves in Span- ish society and come to grips with the changing integration of their distinctive local culture in an encompassing national culture" (p. 574). See also Rogers (1987) on the contradictory ways in which the concept of peasant is used to express ambivalence between centrality and diversity in French ideas about national identity.

"2Brettell (1986) and Cole (1991) note a similar de-em- phasis on sexuality as a determinant of female reputation in northern Portugal.

'3Foods such as tortillas and chorizos that are in fact prepared and eaten all through Spain are often nonetheless marked as characteristic of Galician cuisine. These are simple foods, and as such evoke the comfortable familiarity of home, a familiarity that regionalists also strive to evoke in their concep-

tualizations of the region. Furthermore, tortillas and chorizos, perhaps because of their ubiquity, are dishes for which considerable attention is paid to local variations in their preparation. These rather simple dishes then can be used to distinguish sev- eral levels of identity.

"In contrast, in the Basque Country regional cuisine has come to be associated with male gastronomic societies (del Valle 1989).

'"The speaker gave his lecture in Spanish but many of the audience's questions were posed in Galician.

'"Born in 1886 in the coastal Galician community of Ri- anxo, Castelao died in exile in Argentina in 1950. Trained as a physician, he found his true vocation in writing and drawing. His texts and caricatures inspired Galician regionalism during his lifetime and continue to do so today. He was also involved in Galician politics; a founding member of the Partido Gal- leguista (formed in 1931), he served as a minister to the Re- public in exile (Villares Paz 1980).

'7Contemporary Galician feminists have protested what they see as the stereotypical portrayals of "Rosalia" by many regionalists, for instance, in a special edition of the journal Festa da Palabra Silenciada (Queizdn 1985).

'8See Cole (1991) for a description of the ambivalence felt by northern Portuguese women between identifying themselves as fisherwomen or housewives.

'"See the collection on "Place and Voice in Anthropologi- cal Theory" edited by Appadurai (1988).

20In particular I was inspired by Lis6n Tolosana's ethnographic studies of Galicia (1979a, 1979b). I also was intrigued by Rosalia de Castro and the fact that two other well-known women of letters, the novelist Emilia de Pardo Bazin and the social critic Concepci6n Arenal, had emerged from nineteenth- century Galicia.

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