From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village. JANE FISHBURNE COLLIER. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997; 264 pp. Jane Fishburne Collier is to be commended for having confronted a number of difficult theoretical and methodological issues in this impressive ethnography about the making of subjectivity in the Andalusian village pseudonymously called Olivos. An unusual feature of this ethnography is the extent to which Collier had access to, and makes wonderful use of, the fieldnotes and personal memories of not only herself and George Collier but also of other foreign anthropologists who worked in Los Olivos during the 1960s. These anthropologists include the late Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Sally Simmons, Sally Price, and Richard Price. Although she has returned to Los Olivos frequently for visits of varying durations over the last several decades, in this book Collier mainly contrasts her own and others' data from the early to mid-1960s with the material that she collected during fieldwork stays in 1980, 1983, and 1984. It is Collier's interest in mapping what some from Los Olivos characterize as a radical shift in the mentality of Andalusians over the latter half of the twentieth century that makes the existence of various sets of fieldnotes from the 1960s especially important. From duty to desire is organized to address the assertion of one of Collier's Andalusian interlocutors. In 1983 she was told that the generation of young people born in Los Olivos after 1945 tended to think for themselves rather than acting mainly in accordance with social conventions, as was common among of earlier generations (p. 4). Collier begins each chapter with a quotation from the 1876 novel Dona Perfecta by Benito Perez Galdos, in which a similar dichotomy is consistently drawn. This juxtaposition of correspondent emphases on a shift to modern persons in the latter decades of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is an effective reminder of the importance of exploring the historical emergence of discourses of Methodologically, Collier tackles the tough terrain of how anthropologists can contribute to analyses of how talk about the connections between personal motivations and behaviour. Theoretically she carefully dissects her own and others' uses of terminology such as tradition and modernity, pointing out that the very contrast traditional/modern is in itself a product of post-Enlightenment European constructions of history and self-making. For example, following the work of Michel Foucault and others, Collier explains that she disagrees with the assertions of some Andalusians about the personal freedom to act that they have gained with modernity. Moreover, she embeds her examination of the emergence of subjectivity within the context of the changing bases for social inequality in this part of Europe, as she demonstrates the explanatory consequence of practice theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Sherry Ortner. After carefully setting out the parameters of her study, Collier chooses to focus on the practices of social intimacy associated with family life and thus examines ethnographic data on changes in courtship practices, marriage, child rearing, and mourning customs. In a final chapter she examines the celebration of Andalusian cultural practices such as the dancing of sevillanas in the context of the politics of nonCastilian national traditions in post-Franco Spain. …
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Jan 1, 2007
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