Modernity and rural changes in northern Portugal: Land, house, women, and food

Abstract

At different times and for different reasons, peasant societies have occupied an important place in anthropological analysis. At the dawn of the discipline, their analytical value came above all from an idea of permanence, seeing them as a window into the past. Far from being outside history, these societies have been transformed, both by internal dynamics and by impulses from outside. Fieldwork carried out by anthropologists and sociologists in the north of Portugal in the 1980s shows these processes of change. Transformations can be observed in the relationship with land and labour, with consumption habits, with the deconstruction of hierarchies, including gender relations. In this article, we revisit these studies to systematise the traces of these changes, especially regarding the role of women. Starting with a particular monograph (Wall, 1998), we will extend this retrospective look, drawing on other works that will help us to understand women’s assumption of responsibility for the management of propriety in a context of strong migration, as well as the consequences of the increasing monetisation of these rural communities on consumption patterns. What we're talking about here, then, is bringing together some of the fundamental vectors of what we call modernity in order to understand how they reached the rural societies of northern Portugal, and how they were shown and described in monographs that have become referential in the Portuguese social sciences.