Interior and Internal Spain: Visions of the Primitive at the Cultural Interface

Abstract

This essay sets out to examine the underlying agendas between different but related visions of the rural in Spain in the 1930s, and to consider dynamics of conservation and disruption that characterize the reception and promotion of these visions. It argues that there are two predominant tropes of rural Spain in the early twentieth century: 'internal' or 'inner' Spain, a concept of national character and tradition, and 'interior Spain', a reality, the geographical interior that could be visited and known in material and scientific terms. The complexities involved in discerning these distinctions surface in two contrasting depictions of rural Spain in the 1930s: Buñuel's film, Tierra sin pan (1933), and the reporting of the Misiones Pedagógicas in the early 1930s. Contemporaneous in both the travelling and the reporting, they can be read as cultural endeavours linked to cultural imaginaries, or resistance against such imaginaries.Using Bourdieu's idea of the habitus, and of the formation of groups in contra-position to one another, this paper explores how these journeys of cultural mission viewed those visited as exotic and unfortunate foreigners, and yet simultaneously as the traditional repository of a lost history. While on the surface the depiction of rural Spain in the examples taken is clearly distinct, an unexplored commonality is also present, indicative of the complexity of cultural attitudes in 1930s Spain.