You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Galicia, the region in the northwest corner of Spain contiguous with Portugal, is officially known as the Autonomous Community of Galicia. It is recognized as one of the historical nationalities making up the Spanish state, as legitimized by the Spanish Constitution of 1978. Although Galicia and Portugal belong to different states, there are frequent allusions to their similarities. This study compares topographic and ethnographic descriptions of Galicia and Portugal from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand how the integration into different states and the existence of nationalist discourses resulted in marked differences in the historical representations of these two bordering regions of the Iberian Peninsula. The author explores the role of the imagination in creating a sense, over the last century and a half, of the national being and becoming of these two related peoples.
I. “In the birth of societies,” says Montesquieu, “it is the chiefs of the republics who form the institution, and in the sequel it is the institution which forms the chiefs of the republics.” And he adds, “One of the causes of the prosperity of Rome was the fact that its kings were all great men. We find nowhere else in history an uninterrupted series of such statesmen and such military commanders.” The story, more or less fabulous, of the foundation of Rome does not come within the limits of our design; and with no intention of clearing up whatever degree of fiction these earliest ages of history may contain, we purpose only to remind our readers that the kings laid the foundations of those institutions to which Rome owed her greatness, and so many extraordinary men who astonished the world by their virtues and exploits. The kingly power lasted a hundred and forty-four years, and at its fall Rome had become the most powerful state in Latium. The town was of vast extent, for, even at that epoch, the seven hills were nearly all inclosed within a wall protected internally and externally by a consecrated space called the Pomœrium....
This book is devoted to the inhabitants of the Spanish–Portuguese borderlands during the early modern period. It seeks to challenge a predominant historiography focused on the study of borderlands societies, relying exclusively on the antagonistic topics of subversion and the construction of boundaries. It states that by focusing just on one concept or another there is a restrictive understanding tending to condition the agency of local communities by external narratives. Thus, if traditionally border people were reduced by some scholars to actors of a struggle against a supposedly imposed border; in a more modern perspective, their behaviors have been also framed in bottom-up processes of...
Brettell's new book provides new insight into the processes of migration and transnationalism from an anthropological perspective. She analyzes macro and micro approaches to migration theory, utilizing her extensive fieldwork in Portugal and many other countries. Key issues she discusses include: immigrant incorporation vs. assimilation models; the impacts on individual, household and community as well as institutions and states; ethnic group composition; illegal immigration; city vs. suburban enclaves; ethnic entrepreneurship; the role of religion; men and women as migrants; and the use of oral histories in understanding immigration and the mediation of new social boundaries. This book will be indispensable to instructors and researchers in anthropology, race and ethnic studies, immigration studies, urban studies, sociology, and international relations. Visit our website for sample chapters!