2023-09-02 22:26:42
It is always impressive to think that a birth is the countdown to an end. 1901 was the first year of a century already dead. Until that January 1, there was not the same time for all of Spain. Rather, not for all, since the administration forgot about the Canary Islands. It was then that our country adopted the Greenwich meridian as a temporal reference. Before, it had been difficult to break with the fact that each city had an hour based on the height of the sun. Just to be clear when a train passed through your station was a nuisance, so the time was unified with that of Madrid until the aforementioned first year of the 20th century. The clocks were numbered up to 24 although, in a show of contention, the churches continued without striking more than twelve bells. It was surely one of the first times in which all Spaniards were, in addition to being born and dying, equal in something.
Sue Black, forensic anthropologist: “I want to be dissected and have my bones exposed in class”
Further
That year and the following, 1902, saw the last triumph of the liberal Sagasta and the last regency, that of María Cristina de Habsburgo, mother of Alfonso XIII. But the Ateneo de Madrid, which still did not admit women as members ―Emilia Pardo Bazán was the first, in 1905―, wanted to know in depth the true Spanish society between two centuries. For this purpose, she carried out an investigation that has been digitized a few months ago by the National Museum of Anthropology. To the Survey of the Ateneo: Spanish customs in 1901-1902 we could consider it as a kind of first sociological approach to the people of our country. The theme of the questions asked revolved around three fundamental issues, then and in a certain way now as well: birth, marriage and death. The information was collected by 198 men and two women, people mostly linked to letters or law, but also doctors, pharmacists, priests or parish priests. And the answers that we can read are organized in 17,000 tabs.
One of the most serious concerns of the time was having children. We have testimonies from a town in Orense where “to get pregnant, if under normal conditions they have not had children”, they have to offer an arm or a leg made of wax to an image of Christ. It is also claimed that faithful came barefoot from neighboring Portugal to make this offering. “Traveling a lot” or “bathing in the sea during a novena”, the nine-day period after the death of a loved one, helped, it seems, to stop being “infertile”. Some pregnant women were advised to avoid eating hare to prevent the child from sleeping with its eyes open at birth. It was also not good to go under a rope because the newborn could suffocate on the umbilical cord. The presence of “witches” or “sorceresses” is also documented, as well as that of the evil eye, which could be neutralized, as we read in the example of one of the cards, making the sign of the cross when moving the child. of clothes.
Mischief, that postgraduate course of those who do not have a godfather and that is attributed so much to the Spanish character in a somewhat essentialist way, is also seen by the study. Apparently, in the city of Huesca, we read in the Ateneo archive, there was a custom in baptisms. To the entourage of the baby and his family were added “a crowd of children from the lower class shouting incessantly ‘they poke, they shit, they will die, dirty godfather.’ Indeed, they craved “sweets or money”. This child tax had to be characterized by tenacity, because “if the accompaniment lavishes the candies or distributes any coins, the shouting subsides for a few moments, but it takes shape again when the little ones from Huesca have seized what was thrown at them”.
The class differences were extreme. Most of the time, despite the fiscal patrol mentioned above, the redistribution of assets -the attempt at agrarian reform would still have to wait some three decades- was carried out at the initiative of wealthy families through Christian charity. For example, in the invitation after a baptism or a wedding, “which consists -we read- in throwing abundant almonds, walnuts or abundant sweets and money on the street. If it is a baptism from a rich family, the women and children are joined by men to dispute the distribution. It is a luxury that short people greatly appreciate. As it is. There was still almost half a century to go before the post-Franco war bonus.
Love, of course, was central. Or perhaps rather looking for a partner to start a family, which we already know has sadly never coincided as it should. We read that at the time “the young men go out on the eve of the holidays and even these same days, in the rounds, without instruments, and they treat the girls with songs of a slow and monotonous rhythm, sleepy and heavy reproduction, almost all of them” impressing “. the mood of melancholic sadness”. Indeed, the informants of the Section of Moral and Political Sciences of the Athenaeum of those times did not spare even music criticism. They also looked closely at flirting among youth, a subject on which we can read that “a long period of acting like a bear precedes the declaration”, using an expression very of the time equivalent to a mixture of the later “pelar la pava” or “fool.” In Malaga’s Ronda, San Antonio must have been fried. According to the investigation, the idea that throwing chinas or chickpeas at a figure of the saint, and especially hitting his navel, was “safe to find a boyfriend” became popular among single women. The Time.news speaks of a San Antonio in a “truly lamentable” state.
The end of the vital path, death, has also changed in this almost century and a quarter that separates us from the times of the Ateneo study. Perhaps one of the most striking customs was the death knell that the church bells gave, slowly, while the person clung to life, something that we can see, for example, referenced centuries ago in the novel. the heretic by Miguel Delibes. Although the most common thing was to distribute bread and wine, the so-called “charity”, the wakes in which “food is prepared that looks more like a wedding rather than a burial”, as one of the informants of this field work writes. And he continues “all families have been protesting for a long time against such a custom that makes them do without their grief to take care of those who do not have it.” Some guests returned to their homes as if from a pilgrimage, describes another tab of this photograph that shows how rough the weather was but that had to be stretched as far as possible. How we were, deep down, ourselves before we were born.
#beginning #20th #century