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The matador flourishes his cape, the bull charges, the crowd cheers: this is the image of Spain best known to the world. But while the bull has long been a symbol of Spanish culture, it carries more meaning than has previously been recognized. In this book, anthropologist Carrie B. Douglass views bulls and bullfighting as a means of discussing fundamental oppositions in Spanish society and explains the political significance of those issues for one of Europe's most regionalized countries.

In talking about bulls and bullfighting, observes Douglass, one ends up talking not only about differences in region, class, and politics in Spain but also about that country's ongoing struggle between modernity and tradition. She relates how Spaniards and outsiders see bullfighting as representative of a traditional, irrational Spain contrasted with a more civilized Europe, and she shows how Spaniards' ambivalence about bullfighting is actually a way of expressing ambivalence about the loss of traditional culture in a modern world. To fully explore the symbolism of bulls and bullfighting, Douglass offers an overview of Spain's fiesta cycle, in which the bull is central. She broadly and meticulously details three different fiestas through ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a number of years, delineating the differences in festivals held in different regions.

She also shows how a cycle of these fiestas may hold the key to resolving some of Spain's fundamental political contradictions by uniting the different regions of Spain and reconciling opposing political camps--the right, which holds that there is one Spain, and the left, which contends that there are many. Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities is an intriguing study of symbolism used to examine the broader anthropological issues of identity and nationhood. Through its focus on the political discourse of bulls and bullfighting, it makes an original contribution to understanding not only Spanish politics but also Spain's place in the modern world.

Creating Spaniards is a cultural and intellectual history that explains the intersection of politics and culture, and the formation of a national identity, during Spain’s Second Republic and Civil War. It counters recent scholarship claiming that leaders of the Second Republic had no programs for "inventing traditions" to encourage a Spanish national identity.
    Focusing on the Second Republic, 1931–1936, Sandie Holguín illustrates how various intellectuals and politicians of the Republican–Socialist coalition used theater, literature, and film to aid the construction of a unified Spanish culture and history. She uses memoirs, journals, newspapers, parliamentary debates, and archival sources in her examination of the impact that cultural reforms had on the transformation of one of Europe’s oldest states.

What is Spanish identity? The stereotype conjures up images of 'temperament', 'passion' and 'difference' from the rest of Europe. But, within Spain, is there a single image all Spaniards identify with?


The two case studies included in this book (dealing with the Football World Cups of 1994 and 2002, and the general elections of 1996 and 2000) examine competing discourses of Spain, Catalonia and their national identities, as constructed in the Spanish press. The conservative discourse offers traditional and unified images of Spain close to the stereotype, whereas more liberal visions of the country regard 'Europeanism' and 'reason' (not 'passive') as the values Spain should aspire to. From a peripheral perspective, Catalan self-definition is of a people that is hardworking, thoughtful, truly European, and different from the rest of the Spaniards.


However, these differences between the discourses are not always so clear-cut. Central to Negotiating Spain and Catalonia is the idea of the constant renegotiation of Spanish and Catalan identities in order to adapt them to the political circumstance: both case studies show how radically different narratives of Spanishness and Catalanicity offered in the turbulent political past tend to merge into the more tranquil present.