The Methodology of Studying the Festive Culture in the Paper “The Carnival” by Caro Baroja

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2021-53-1/325-335

Abstract

The paper studies the methodology of the famous Spanish anthropologist, historian, linguist and folklorist Caro Baroja (1914-1995) applied to his analysis of the festive culture of Spain. The study traces the evolution of the scientific views of Caro Baroja. At the beginning of his career before the Civil war in Spain and during the first decade after it the main method he applied was cultural diffusionism, which was formed mainly under the influence of Jose Miguel Barandian, the patriarch of the Bask ethnography. Afterwards his interest shifted to the functional method under the influence of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowsky. However, later Caro Baroja was disappointed with the functionalism, and that led him to search his new method of scientific analysis. Caro Baroja calls it “historic structuralism”. Though often the historic component in his studies predominates, and the researcher criticizes structuralism for its antihistorism. The advantages of this method as compared with other methods applied in socio-cultural anthropology are shown. For his analysis Caro Baroja chooses a series of festive and masquerade processions mainly of the winter cycle and analyses them from the point of view of an anthropologist, describing some rituals, interpreting them in terms of historic and anthropological perspectives, comparing them with similar African and European festivals.

For Citation: Pavlova, A.N. 2021. The Methodology of Studying the Festive Culture in the Paper “The Carnival” by Caro Baroja. Herald of Anthropology  (Vestnik Antropologii) 1 (53): 325–335.

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