Studying Flamenco in Sevilla, Spain


Jumping back to my Cotlow which, as I detailed above, couldn’t in reality be about conservation and primates: I went online and found an abstract of my project that I wrote on GW’s Anthropology website. Here goes:

Flamenco has emerged as a product of the dialectic confrontation between Gypsy and non-Gypsy societies in Andalusia. This project addresses how flamenco works to undergird Spanish and Gypsy identity; how flamenco performers consciously/unconsciously conceptualize it/its origins; how Spanish society comes to terms with a performance culture that intensely appropriates and may even co-opt the cultural traditions of its much-maligned "other." It investigates whether there is a distinction — from emic (the performers) and etic (the tourists) perspectives — between flamenco puro and that which is performed in the commercialized venues.

Reading over that abstract again after five years, it sounds so gosh-darn dry?

The flamenco idea came about after Dr. Miller said, “Meg, these primate projects are great but not feasible.” Next, she asked, “Where have you been before where you speak the language where you could study something that interests you?”

Good question, right? Hm, where have I been before where I could study something that interests me, where I can speak the language so I can hit the ground running, so to speak?

Spain. Spain. Spain.

As an anthropologist I tend to be more interested in topics than regions. I'm not sure if this is normally the case. I know a lot of anthropologists who study Andean folklore or who only really care about female infanticide in India, not elsewhere. Or who only concern themselves with HIV/AIDS risk in Central America and not in Africa or the former Soviet Union. Many would rightly counter, “well, Meg, these are parallel problems the world over & to counter them properly and with any hope of success, we need to do so locally.” Micro, not macro. Yea, I get it and I agree but for some reason, my interests have trended more the broadly topical and not the strictly regional.

I like to examine how, let’s say for example, racial difference and inequality plays out in the Brazilian shanty towns studied by former Peace Corps volunteer and medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes as much as I do down the block from me at Safeway. Maybe I have ADHD or am impatient and can’t concentrate. Perhaps I drink too much caffeine (or red wine at night). Who knows, but I feel that while being micro is important, we as social scientists also need to look up, lift our eyes from the local and see the trends and parallels binding us as humans throughout the world, in our struggles and our triumphs. That’s how we can better understand our human family and work to help those who need help to help themselves.

The flamenco study fit this rubric in that it as an art form and southern Spain as a locale were places in which difference and discrimination are at play. What I mean is that flamenco is often claimed by the “mainstream” Spanish as an “authentic” “Spanish” art form. Is it?

Where did it come from? While doing research for my grant proposal, I read that flamenco is a complex interplay of Spanish, Jewish, Roma (Gypsy), and Moorish (Muslim) dance and musical traditions. Think American Jazz and you get a partial picture.

Flamenco, particularly dance which is what I focused on, is a hodge podge of styles and influences. It’s a relatively young art form and, as it’s more and more packaged and polished to be sold, it’s more and more codified.

If you talk to people in southern Spain, however, sevillanas, not flamenco is the “true” dance of the region. Flamenco is the tourists’ dance. Not that tourists usually or actually perform it, but it’s a dance form done for them. Marketed for them. Presented to and for them.

My study was to see flamenco in southern Spain, specifically Sevilla, and investigate how it was packaged and sold. How is the flamenco performed in a free venue different from a theater where tickets costs 40 euro a pop?

Who’s performing flamenco? Roma? Spanish women and men? How do the tourists consume it? What do they think about it? What prior knowledge do they bring to it?

And, when talking to the performers and to “regular” Spanish people on the streets, how do they understand its origin as an art form? If the books and scholars are right and flamenco indeed has rich and diverse roots, mixing the Jewish with the Roma and the Muslim with the Christian and nationalistic Spanish, do Spanish people acknowledge this complex intermingling? Do they admit that the origins of one of their most famous art forms and markers of Spanish identity (second to only bullfighting, perhaps) comes from the people they expelled five centuries ago (the Jews and the Muslims) and those they denigrate and marginalize currently (the Roma)?

The study was not so much about the content as it was about the context of flamenco dance performance. I did, however, take some flamenco lessons and this was not to become anything close to a performer of it myself but to see who took these lessons (mostly foreigners, primarily from Taiwan and Hong Kong, amazingly enough) and who taught them (typically older dancers, from southern Spain) and what their interactions were (usually limited due to lack of a common language; I was often a translator) as well as to get to know some flamenco performers personally.

The Guadalquivir River cuts through Sevilla. On one side, there’s the old town, el Barrio Santa Cruz [neighborhood of the Holy Cross], the Jewish Quarter, and the hulking cathedral that used to be a mosque when the town was under Moorish rule for close to 700 years. There’s a gorgeous Moorish palace, El Alcazár, flush with orange blossoms, bubbling fountains, and striking Mudejár architecture and adornment.

On the other side of the Guadalquivir, there are the more working-class, often less touristed neighborhoods of Los Remedios, where my ex lived in a students’ dormitory after being kicked out of his host family’s digs, and Triana, the traditional birthplace of flamenco and home, supposedly, to several well-known flamenco dynasties, mostly of Gypsy origin. Calle Betis [Betis Street] transverses both Los Remedios and Triana; many upscale shops dot the street, solidifying the transformation of this side of the river from rough and tumble to well to do.

Although Triana has gone through a gentrification of sorts, it is still known for its flamenco and its schools. Before deciding which school I would attend, I visited my host mother, Ana, on Avión Cuatro Vientos [Street of the Four Winds].


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