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The Culture of Radical Basque Nationalism

1988; Wiley; Volume: 4; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3032751

1467-8322

Jeremy MacClancy,

Basque language and culture studies

Jeremy MacClancy is at present an ESRC post-doctoral r esearch fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford. He has undertaken field research not only in Spain but in Melanesia and in a London auction house. Basque nationalism occupies space in British newspapers only when ETA gunmen claim fresh victims. On days otherwise devoid of news, the international pages carry 'action photos' of the latest violent clash between demonstrators and police. Occasional articles giving 'background' on this territorial conflict often merely perpetuate loaded stereotypes. To You, the Mail on Sunday colour supplement, the Basques are 'one of Europe's oldest, most mysterious and most turbulent peoples'. The Observer dubs them 'a myth-ridden people too superstitious to bring themselves to political cohesion'. Chatty pieces on drunk tourists running with even drunker locals against the bulls in the Pamplona fiesta of Sanfermines further skew British images of this region. In this ambience of uncoordinated reports and spasmodic misinformation, the politics of Basque nationalism remains difficult to understand and its cultural aspects almost wholly unknown. In my recent fieldwork I am attempting to elaborate an account of the confrontation between Basque nationalism and the regionalism of Navarre, a northern Spanish province. This ideological battle provides differing conceptions of prehistory, history, race, religion, territory, language and political destiny. Identity and ethnicity cannot here be taken for granted as Navarrans argue over who they are Basques, Spaniards, or both? In trying to chart the cultural consequences of this persistent debate over culture, I hope (most likely, naively) to help us situate our knowledge of the Basques in a more appropriate context. In Navarre, most Basque nationalism is revolutionary socialist. Basque patriots are abertzales, a status not defined by birth but by performance: an abertzale is one who actively participates in the political struggle for an independent Basque nation with its own distinctive culture. You are not born abertzale. You make yourself one. I have met people whose parents emigrated from southern Spain and who, though not born in Basqueland, identify with the Basque movement, learn Basque, and join demonstrations against the latest threat to the integrity of the Basque people. One told me, 'Not being born here doesn't matter. I feel Basque'. His gathered friends nodded agreement. To be abertzale is defined both prescriptively and proscriptively. Abertzales must totally shun chivatos 'informers, people thought to have any connection with the police'. My first month in Pamplona, friends of my Basque flatmate said I was a chivato because they had seen me chatting (innocently) to an armed policeman during a small riot. He corrected them, saying I was just an ignorant foreigner. Later, angrily, he put me right about local rules of life. People branded chivato can be so ostracized that the only community left in which they can find friends is the police. The chivato is pushed into becoming a real informer, sometimes with fatal consequences, for ETA'gunmen shoot informers dead. Radical ideologues speak of la gran familia abertzale, a social unit where political attitudes are often inherited and one broad enough to accommodate both militant nationalism and revolutionary socialism. Members of the radical coalition Herri Batasuna ('Popular Unity') have so successfully appropriated left-wing metaphors that in Basqueland it is now difficult to be left-wing but not abertzale. Almost all left-wing issues are discussed within a Basque frame. To abertzales, Basques are those who live and sell their labour in Basqueland. They are members of el Pueblo Trabajador Vasco ('the Basque Working People'), a raza ('race') or pueblo oppressed by the occupying forces of the Spanish state and exploited by centralist capitalists. Following their line of metaphors, the Basque people is already a 'nation' with its own 'popular army' (ETA) and whose gunmen are its 'best sons'. Basque politicians who do not advance the Basque cause are 'traitors', the attempt to build a nuclear power station on the Basque coast becomes 'genocide', and the entry of Spain into NATO is damned as subversion of Basque 'sovereignty'. This rhetoric can turn deadly, for when gunmen recently put two bullets through the head of an ex-leader who had renounced terrorism and returned to a quieter life, a Batasuna leader argued that 'an army cannot allow deviations, and even less so from one of its generals who appears strolling through territory occupied by the opposing army'. The quite literal appropriative power of radical nationalism was exhibited at the funeral last year of the first ever gunwoman to be shot in a police action. Though the funeral was the usual mass public event such occasions are, her father (a well-known nationalist moderate) removed the Basque flag draped over the coffin and tried to prevent Basque militants entering the graveyard, raising their fists over the descending casket and singing 'Eusko Gudari', the popular song to ETA gunpersons. He was strongly criticized in Egin, the Batasuna organ, which stated that the corpse belonged to the 'people' and not to its father, and that the 'people' could not be stopped claiming political kinship with their fallen sister. In dying for the cause, she had forfeited the rights of her family for those of la gran familia abertzale. Abertzales wish to increase the number of Basque speakers, to increase the sorts of occasions on which it is spoken and thus, if necessary, to create social events in which Basque is the language of communication. In an attempt to 'Basquize' Castilian abertzales impose Basque orthography on Spanish: tx is used in place of ch (e.g. txorizo, 'sausage, thief'), b instead of v (Nabarra). Where possible, Basque, rather than Castilian, terms are used (e.g. arrantzale, 'fisherman'; irrintzi, 'a cry, radio'), political slogans are preferably shouted in Basque, words for new Basque institutions come from the Basque, not the Castilian, lexicon (e.g. ikastola, a Basque school), and parents give their children Basque names a practice banned during Franquismo. In Basque-speaking areas place signs are often bilingual and