Memoria Tramontana: Changes in rural Europe as seen by its inhabitants
Edited by Gianfranco Spitilli, Giovanni Agresti and Luís Costa
160 pages, published in June 2019
ISBN: 978-989-99856-4-3
This volume is a quintessential account of just a few of the great many meetings that have characterized the six years of the Tramontana Network Project, implemented as part of the Creative Europe Program. This project is dedicated to the documentation, study, conservation, and creative diffusion of the life of those populations living in European rural and mountain areas. It is supported by eight associations committed day after day to fieldwork conducted in as close proximity as possible to the subjects, speakers who are as indispensable and as numerous as the dialogue is endless and rich. The research has resulted in a corpus containing several thousand interviews and archives which are unique in nature, specialised in audio-visual, sound, and photographic documents. The documents presented in this book have been pulled from these specific archives.
The eight testimonies assembled here are organised by a common underlying narrative, and illustrate the changes in social, cultural, economic, and political life of the mountain areas traversed by this project’s researchers over time. We find examples of these changes, such as the transformation of the pastoral tradition of Podhale, or in the Polish Carpathians, or even in the southern part of Navarre, in the Spanish Basque country; more still are found in the evolution of land ownership and rural life in the region of Lafões in central northern Portugal, as well as the gradual obliteration of social relationships and lifestyles connected with livestock and farming in the Pyrenean region of French Ariège; there are those environmental, technological and urban changes brought about by earthquakes, landslides, hundreds of years of innovation in artisanal craftsmanship in the Central Abruzzi of Italy, or even the decline and eventual attempts to preserve the language and its accompanying way of life in the French department of Pyrenees-Atlantiques, in the Western Pyrenees. We will also assess how these changes have affected social and family life in the neighbouring area of the Hautes Pyrenees over the course of the twentieth century, due to wars (including colonial), the turmoil of the Second World War, and the desertion of rural life in a hilly territory of the Abruzzi following the departure of so many men to the front lines.
Eight testimonies represent eight points of inquiry, all situated within European peripheral and mountain areas, sometimes thousands of kilometres away from each other; yet all are intricately connected by ways of life and of thinking, or by having shared similar, often radical, changes. And while each country’s particular history has been affected in undeniably different ways, these changes impacted nearly all regions of the continent during the twentieth century. The interviews gathered here were conducted in Zakopane, Sartaguda, Aldeia, Montgauch, Salle, Montaner, Clarac, Penna Sant’Andrea, between autumn 2012 and spring 2018, thanks to the participation of subjects born after 1922.
Akademia Profil, Audiolab, Bambun, Binaural/Nodar, Eth Ostau Comengés, LEM-Italia, Nosauts de Bigòrra et Numériculture Gascogne are the eight associative entities committed to documentation, led by ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, sound artists, sociolinguists Maciej Kierzkowski & Magdalena Masewicz-Kierzkowska ; Xabier Erkizia & Luca Rullo ; Gianfranco Spitilli, Luís Gomes da Costa, Mathieu Fauré, Giovanni Agresti, Fabrice Bernissan, all falling within, in various capacities, the associative, academic, educational, and creative worlds.