El Castillo: The Politics of Tradition in an Andalusian Town.

El Castillo is a cultural history of power relationships from the Old Regime to the present in a Spanish hill town in the southern region of Andalusia, a geneological study that "maps major lines of descent, patterns of affinity and points of generation of future cultural forms." More specifically, it is about how the cultural idiom of "tradition" has been used to reproduce and maintain forms of domination even through periods of dramatic sociopolitical change. Fro this perspective, Maddox explores the intricate process of constructing a hegemonial system that binds as much through consent as force. His goal is to chart, not only the evolution of power structures within a single town, but, as he puts it, "how the grand strategies associated with the development of capitalism, the state and civil society are linked to local conflicts, specific practices and transitory events."

Maddox opens the book with the image of "El Castillo," site of the parish churc and the ruins of the medieval fortress as well as the town's central visual reference point. But "El Castillo's" physical reality is less important than it role as a signifier that reminds people of "tradition." Thus, it functions as a cultural space that evokes an entire way of life summed up as "traditional." While the specific notions of what constitutes tradition have been reinvented over time, the recourse to tradition as a cultural strategy has remained constant. Moreover, it has been a remarkably successful strategy in the hams of both local elites and the central government. One of Maddox's central questions is to ask why it was so effective.

To answer this question, Maddox considers the available alternatives, especiall those articulated by various opposition movements that challenged the elites' hegemony. He emphasizes a contested theory of power relationships that played itself out in the cultural realm as well. As he says, culture is a language of argument, not a chorus of harmony. Thus, as socialists and anarchists attacked sociopolitical hierarchies they also launched a frontal assault on the cultural master narrative when they torched the churches and destroyed religious icons a the outbreak of the Civil War.

And yet, despite the existence of oppositional arguments, the master narrative, what Maddox calls the "pastoral epic," is able to remake itself time and again in a way that effectively vanquishes all opponents. Crucial to this victory is the fact that no group is able to articulate an equally captivating narrative that would unify the "modernizing" forces in the town. I would argue that this was a crucial problem that continued to plague the various incarnations of the Spanish "left" from the 19th century through the Civil War. In other words, there was no image as powerful as "El Castillo" that the progressive forces could rally around, and this cultural vacuum seriously weakened their cause, particularly during the Republic and the Civil War.

To explore the evolution of this cultural discourse, Maddox has organized the book into three chronological sections: the Old Regime (17th-18th centuries), the liberal revolution (1830s through the Civil War), and the period from the Franco dictatorship to the present. In his introduction, Maddox explains that h originally intended to do a study of religion and politics during and after the Civil War, but became convinced that it would be like jumping into a story afte all of the characters and plot lines had been established. As a result, he decided to go back to the Old Regime when, he argues, the pastoral epic was originally composed. With Part I as a baseline, each of the three sections explores the relationship between cultural discourse and socioeconomic power relations as it evolved in response to the major transitions in modern Spanish history.

Part I lays out the original version of the pastoral epic, a narrative of hierarchy and social harmony, encased in the rigid institutional structure of the old regime. Aracena was an agrarian hill town with a classic Andalusian landowning structure: a few large property owners and a majority of landless laborers, with a sprinkling of intermediate groups that serviced the town's rol as a regional market center. The major landowning families also controlled the "self-perpetuating civil-religious oligarchy" that governed the town. The cultural idiom that justified this hierarchical society was based on three central values: patronage, orthodox religion and honor. To flesh out the articulation of this idiom, Maddox looks at an array of practices, from ritual processions to kinship patterns, using information culled from a variety of sources, most notably a biography about a 17th century beata, or holy woman.

In Part II, Maddox examines the transformation of the idiom of patronage, religion and honor under the pressure of the legal and social changes of the liberal revolution. With the end of aristocratic privilege and the establishmen of liberal economic relationships, the cultural idiom was redeployed as a set o moral ideologies adapted to fit a new set of class relationships. The new patro was the cacique, the local political boss capable of procuring favors from the centralized state. As the idiom of tradition was redeployed to legitimate the authority of the local gentry, however, it was also inverted by radical opposition movements. In the same language of moral authority, they accused the rich of moral failure in fulfilling their obligations to the poor. The Civil Wa was in part the culmination of this argument over honor and obligation.

Part III looks at the formation of the existing social order in Aracena, as it emerged out of the "economic miracle" and the democratic transition of the 1970s. Despite the dramatic changes and the decline of overt class tensions, Maddox sees the survival of a revised version of the pastoral epic that functions to accommodate local residents to their marginal position in the modern bureaucratic state, as well as to domesticate the tensions arising from the more subtle class hierarchies that remain. In the revised version, "El Castillo" has come to represent a more egalitarian community, one whose citizen are struggling valiantly together to survive the homogenization and brutality o a mass bureaucratic society.

Such an abbreviated description cannot do justice to the richness of Maddox's study, which weaves together an impressive combination of rigorous theory, compelling personal stories, archival research and the insights of a self-conscious ethnographer. In addition to all of the virtues that make El Castillo an admirable monograph, the book also offers social historians of Spai a valuable anthropological map for venturing into the almost uncharted territor of the "new cultural history." For this reason, it should be required reading for historians as well as anthropologists of Modern Spain.

Pamela Radcliff University of California, San Diego