CHAPTER 4

Cultures of Nature in 

Mid-Twentieth-Century Galicia

Daniel Ares-López

This chapter has two aims. The first is to provide a definition of the
concept of “cultures of nature” as a theoretical lens through which to
explore the material and semiotic entanglements among historical pro-
cesses so far mostly studied as either “cultural” or “environmental.”
As we will see, the concept of cultures of nature prompts us to look at
human societies and the nonhuman world in a relational, performative,
and material-semiotic way that overcomes stifling oppositions between
realist and constructivist approaches to nonhuman life, the environment,
or the landscape.1 The second goal is to point out how the concept of
cultures of nature can contribute to a better understanding of the cul-
tural, social, and environmental histories of twentieth-century Galicia. In
order to do so, I briefly explore some socio-environmental processes and

Many thanks to Belén Hernando-Lloréns, Dr. Katarzyna Beilin, Dr. José María
Tubío-Sánchez and to the editors of this volume, Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and
José A. Losada Montero, for their comments on previous drafts of this article.

D. Ares-López (*) 
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, San Diego
State University, San Diego, CA, USA

© The Author(s) 2017 57

B. Sampedro Vizcaya and J.A. Losada Montero (eds.),
Rerouting Galician Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65729-5_4
58  D. Ares-López

cultural practices in rural Galicia and propose a reinterpretation of them

through this theoretical lens.

What Are Cultures of Nature?

The concept of cultures of nature has been inspired by the intellectual tradi-
tions of science and technology studies and actor-network theory (ANT). It
is based, in particular, in Bruno Latour’s and Donna Haraway’s relational,
performative, and material-semiotic understanding of the ways humans and
nonhumans (e.g., animals, plants, microorganisms, nonliving matter, tech-
nologies, or techniques) continuously act, interact, are enacted, and become
new things through their assemblages, entanglements, and interactions.2
Both Latour and Haraway have used the neologism “naturecultures” to dis-
mantle the ideological divide between nature and society in Western moder-
nity and to point out the historical entanglements and assemblages among
people, technologies, discourses, nonhuman lifeforms, and nonliving mat-
ter.3 The use of this neologism in Latour’s and Haraway’s work has been
revealing for me. However, because of the paradigm-changing tropes in
which the notion of “natureculture” is grounded (such as “entanglement”,
“hybrid”, “network”, and “assemblage”), I found it would require semantic
and theoretical clarification to make it accessible and useful across different
disciplines and, particularly, to cultural studies. I discovered such clarity in
Alexander Wilson’s study of North American postwar “culture of nature”4
and in Tim Ingold’s anthropological theory.5 Other influences have included
the emerging paradigms in cultural geography, which—inspired by the
actor-network theory tradition—have developed “topological” approaches
to study the interactions of humans and other lifeforms through networks
that cannot be traced in conventional topographic representations.6
I define cultures of nature as historically and geographically situated
clusters of material-semiotic practices that involve conscious encounters or
attentive interactions between people and nonhuman living organisms or
inanimate matter. These encounters and interactions may take place in envi-
ronments experienced as inhabited, or along routes of travel, in spatial prox-
imity or through long distances mediated by documents or technologies.
Yet the diverse socio-environmental practices of a culture of nature weave
together common ways to conceive, split up conceptually, perceive sensually,
and respond affectively to nonhuman life and matter. It is important to note
that in cultures of nature, the terms “nature” and “culture” do not refer to
differentiated entities. The heterogeneous constituents of cultures of nature
 4  CULTURES OF NATURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY GALICIA  59

(people, nonhuman lifeforms, inanimate matter, technologies, techniques,

texts, images, and ideas) move across urban and rural spaces and are con-
tinuously transformed through their dynamic interrelations within a monist
world defined by the continuity of matter.7 Practices in contemporary cul-
tures of nature include both leisure and professional activities as well as pro-
ductive and consuming ones. Some examples of these practices are hiking,
sightseeing, landscaping, hunting, fishing, wildlife management, pet-keep-
ing, zoo-going, bird-watching, wildlife filmmaking, gardening, the con-
sumption (or non-consumption) of particular foodstuffs, biological research,
urban and rural planning, and extractive and agricultural work.
In the rest of this chapter, I will show how the concept of cultures of
nature can be productively engaged to illuminate some important aspects
of the troubled relations among the forestry engineers and economic
planners of the Francoist state, Galicianist intellectuals, subsistence farm-
ers, and the local environment in twentieth-century Galicia. I will tell the
story of the tense and contradictory relationships among three cultures
of nature—state-orchestrated extractivism–productivism; peasants’ mul-
tifunctional engagements with nonhuman life and matter in inhabited
environments; and elite excursionism-landscaping—and will clarify the
meaning of each along the way.

Maps, Montes, Shoes, and Wildfires

The term “state-orchestrated extractivism-productivism” points to the
surveying, mapping, legal-framing, and bureaucratic management of
a territory by a modern state with the exclusive aim of maximizing the
production or extraction of raw materials, energy, fossil fuels, and food-
stuffs destined to satisfy the ever-growing material, labor, energy, or
capital requirements of centralized states immersed in modernizing pro-
cesses of (agro)industrialization. Alberto Costa defines extractivism as
“those activities which remove large quantities of natural resources that
are not processed [or only partially processed], especially for export”;
this “is not limited to minerals or oil, [but it] is also present in farm-
ing, forestry and even fishing,” and it is connected to the develop-
ment and global expansion of colonialism and capitalism.8 Others have
defined productivism as “a commitment to an intensive, industrially
driven and expansionist agriculture with state support based primarily
on output, [the use of biochemical inputs,] and increased productivity.”9
The concept of extractivism–productivism points to the fact that many
60  D. Ares-López

“productive” agro-industrial endeavors generate socio-environmental

costs (such as soil depletion, dependency on fossil fuels, chemical pollu-
tion, biodiversity loss, and sometimes the coerced displacement of disen-
franchised communities) on a scale that makes them undistinguishable
from “extractive” ones.10 As James C. Scott has shown with different
case studies, modern states direct very selective attention to the environ-
ment and conceive an enormous diversity of life processes, living bod-
ies and biotic communities as a single set of national natural resources.
These, he observes, may be found within long-established state borders,
in relatively remote lands within these borders, or in more distant lands
managed as colonial territories. In this way, the modern state (and the
web of business partners and clients directly plugged into it) constantly
looks for new ways to make “legible” and to control life processes and
biotic communities—often including human bodies and populations as
well—so that they optimally contribute to the quantifiable goals that a
particular modern state aims to reach: economic growth, capital accumu-
lation, industrialization, national economic independence, the expansion
of internal markets, etc.11
After the Civil War, the Spanish state and its Cuerpos de Ingenieros del
Estado [State Corps of Engineers] adopted a radical extractivist–produc-
tivist assessment and management of the rivers, forests, mountains, sub-
soils, and cultivable lands of the state territory with the aim of achieving
a nationalist, fascist-inspired, and utopian economic goal.12 This goal was
to reach “autarchy” or national economic independence from the states
that had emerged victorious from the Second World War, and that for
a time barred “fascist” Spain from international organizations.13 When
the Cold War transformed Francoist Spain into a “respectable” interna-
tional economic player, a fast-growing industrial economy, and a useful
ally in the fight against communism, the radical extractivist–productivist
approach to the management of the state territory intensified.14 In this
way, the Francoist state promoted, sponsored, and enforced the expan-
sion of agroindustries and extractive industries without considering the
historical land-use rights of subsistence farmers and the demands for
land redistribution of impoverished landless agricultural workers. This
aggravated social inequality and provoked a massive rural exodus unprec-
edented in Spain’s contemporary history.15 This amounted to a brutal
top-down imposition of a modernist vision of the roles that nonhuman
lifeforms and matter perform in human life and, crucially, of the national
territorial scale on which these roles are performed.
 4  CULTURES OF NATURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY GALICIA  61

In Galicia, state-orchestrated extractivism–productivism materialized in

the damming of rivers to produce hydroelectricity (which, in many cases,
involved the flooding of villages and agricultural lands) and in the mas-
sive appropriation of peasants’ common lands (montes comunales) in order
to plant fast-growing trees destined to produce cellulose-based products
elsewhere (repoblación forestal).16 These events triggered collective actions
of peasant resistance through the unreliable legal channels of the regime
and through illegal actions like intentional wildfires and acts of sabotage.17
In the case of the state appropriation of the montes comunales, this conflict
has been viewed as an “intermodal conflict” between different “modes of
use of resources”,18 as an example of Galician popular resistance against
the dictatorship,19 and, finally, as a conflict between a backward subsist-
ence agriculture and a process of modernization in the management of
forests promoted by the Patrimonio Forestal del Estado (PFE).20
My argument is that this conflict was a manifestation of a deeper his-
torical tension between two different cultures of nature. The first is the
state-orchestrated extractivism–productivism that assigned a key role to
the Spanish state’s forestry engineers and to the extraction-production of
wood to supply the national paper- and-pulp industry. The second culture
of nature is the one constituted by the practical engagements of mid-twen-
tieth-century Galician subsistence farmers with nonhuman life and matter
in rural environments that are perceived and understood as “inhabited.”
The term “inhabited”, here, must be understood in the phenomenologi-
cal sense that the anthropologist Tim Ingold (drawing from Heidegger
and Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotics, among others) gave to the term
“dwelling” and, later, “inhabitation.” For Ingold, “meaning does not
cover the world but it is immanent in the contexts of people’s pragmatic
engagements with its constituents” because of that, Ingold understands
social practices and cultural meanings through a “dwelling perspective […]
according to which the forms people build, whether in the imagination or
on the ground, only arise within the current of their life activities.”21 More
recently, Ingold has argued that this current of life activities do not come
about in a “place”, as the Heideggerian term “to dwell” implies, but in
“paths” along which “lives are lived, skills developed, observations made
and understandings grown.” In his view, “the path, and not the place, is
the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming [and] wayfaring is
the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth.” Hence,
while recognizing his debt to Heidegger, he prefers to use the term
“inhabitation” instead of “dwelling.”22
62  D. Ares-López

Adapting this practice-based perspective to the relational ontology of

the actor-network theory tradition, we can say that inhabited environ-
ments arise from the movements, interactions, and assemblages among
historically situated human actors and nonhuman actants or media-
tors: among particular people, cattle, soils, plants, and everyday objects
and technologies. Moreover, inhabited environments are experienced
through various forms of affect and through embodied practical skills.
Examples of affect are not only the sentiments of belonging based on
a cultural memory attached to plants, soils, or objects (which were ele-
vated to an almost mythical status by the Galicianist intellectuals of the
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries),23 but also the physical pain
and stress endured by rural children subjected to abusive working condi-
tions.24 Examples of embodied practical skills are cattle herding, sowing,
clog-making, and oral storytelling.
In very broad terms, mid-twentieth-century subsistence farmers in
Galicia performed these skills in order to make a living, to reproduce
life, and to cultivate communal relations (complex and often conflictive,
as the classic anthropological study of Lisón Tolosana has shown)25 in
places where the main attachments to national markets and capitalist net-
works were outward fluxes of “labor power,” inward fluxes of migrant’s
remittances, and the extraction of natural resources.26 This story is, in
fact, as old as capitalism and as new as today’s news. From the perspec-
tive that arises from inhabiting a place, however, particular natural things
and beings (forests, shrubs, animals, soils, plants, and inanimate organic
matter) blossom with multiple and evolving material-semiotic attach-
ments to human lives that are totally out of the scope of a extractivist–
productivist culture of nature.
In Galicia, the word monte is used to name an uncultivated land
covered by trees, shrubs or other vegetation. Until the 1950s (and, to
a lesser degree, from the 1970s), Galician peasants used most of the
montes as villages’ common lands with boundaries largely determined
by custom.27 For Galician peasant communities, montes comunales were
not landscapes in the aesthetic sense or territories in the topographical
one, but inhabited places lived and conceived through multiple eve-
ryday practical engagements with lifeforms and matter. Montes were
places for the planting and harvesting of cereals; for making controlled
burnings; for the herding of cattle; for collecting shrubs, organic ferti-
lizers, wood, firewood, wild fruits, and stone; for hunting and fishing;
and for socializing and celebrating.28 The actions I have mentioned
 4  CULTURES OF NATURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY GALICIA  63

point to material-symbolic entanglements, and corporeal and affective

interconnections among women, men, children, technologies, animals,
plants, and inanimate matter that configure particular nature-cultural or
socio-natural worlds: Worlds (or natures) that can only be apprehended
through specific embodied skills of perception and action.29 These
embodied skills may involve rational decisions about how to cultivate a
small plot most profitably, but also the embodied skills for taking care
of animals and working with them, and the ability to see many kinds of
useful things in the monte comunal.30 Needless to say, twentieth-century
Galician peasants’ world-making activity did not always result in good
lives for the rural poor, especially in the postwar years when food short-
ages and material scarcity peaked in the Spanish state. Ethnographic
accounts such as that of Buechler and Buechler show how the posses-
sion, or non-possession, of decent footwear entirely transforms one’s
lived experience of the environment.31 Both the dwelt perspective on
nonhuman life and matter and the role of footwear in rural Galicia are
beautifully highlighted in the first page of Xosé Neira Vilas’ classic novel
Memorias dun neno labrego [Memoirs of a peasant boy] (1961). In this
fragment, the peasant child who narrates his memoirs describes his every-
day life: “In summer, I go barefoot. The hot dust in the paths makes me
stride. The grains of sand hurt me and there are always spikes sticking in
my feet. I get up when night is still dark […] to take the cattle to graze,
to till, or to tie sheaves. By dawn, my back and my legs already ache.
However, the day’s work is still to be done. Thirst, heat, horseflies.”32
In the collective petitions that Galician subsistence farmers addressed to
Francoist authorities to halt the state project of reforestation of the com-
mons, we can also observe how they understand soils and plants in terms
of inhabitation, belonging, livelihood and reproduction of life. In his excel-
lent study of the divided responses of Galician farmers to Francoist refor-
estation projects, Rainer Lutz Bauer reproduces a 1953 petition directed by
the representatives of Meiraos (a village community in the western part of
the region of O Courel) at the head of the Patrimonio Forestal del Estado
(PFE). These representatives declared that “there remains no other remedy
for us than to sadly abandon our community, since [reforestation] makes it
impossible for us to live, given that this is a very rough terrain, little usable,
and these are the sole montes that help us, working a lot, to live.” For the
peasants, the reforestation of “these primordial montes, [which] have been
the property of [their] ancestors since time immemorial, [would] deprive
[them] of [their] bread and that of [their] children.”33
64  D. Ares-López

The PFE’s extractivist–productivist understanding and management

of the four provinces of the Galician (non-)region—it did not have offi-
cial administrative status—came about also through very specific profes-
sional practices and skills of perception and action. These practices were
the meticulous surveying, measuring, mapping, and planning of the ter-
ritory performed by the PFE that culminated with the completion of the
Mapa Forestal de España after one century of work (1868–1966).34 The
Francoist period also introduced changes in the PFE’s vision of the roles
that national forests should play in national economy. If before the Civil
War the main role of forests had been to protect soils against erosion,
now a radical productivist approach dominated, focused on the produc-
tion of wood.35 From their self-confident perspective over the territory,
PFE’s forestry engineers saw peasants’ management of the monte comu-
nal as something irrational and destructive, and as a product of their
backwardness.36 A perspective of inhabitation of the territory chartered
in their topographical maps was beyond their scope.

Books, Bodies, and Landscapes

The term “excursionism-landscaping” points to a set of interrelated
material-semiotic practices through which particular expanses of soils,
minerals, waters, and the atmosphere—including the nonhuman life-
forms, human bodies, buildings, and artefacts that can be perceived by
humans when they encounter these expanses of matter—become land-
scapes. These material-semiotic practices include walking, observing,
sightseeing, listening, collecting natural objects, taking notes and keep-
ing travel journals, sharing personal feelings and reflections about the
landscape (either publicly, by means of lectures or writing, or in pri-
vate conversations), and actively interpreting the meanings of land-
scapes by following elite intellectual traditions of “landscape theory.”37
Landscapes, in this sense, are not just observable natural objects in the
realist sense, individual lived experiences, or the symbolic constructions
of a particular culture. They are the performative and relational effect of
the activity of very heterogeneous entities (people, books, visual tech-
nologies, scientific or artistic techniques, social discourse, plants, ani-
mals, soils, minerals, atmospheric processes, etc.), which often circulate
and move around widely, and which are temporarily assembled into an
integrated whole.
 4  CULTURES OF NATURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY GALICIA  65

Even though the practice of landscaping has been traced back to

ancient China and the European Renaissance,38 in an Iberian con-
text the particular culture of nature of excursionism-landscaping has its
roots in recreational and intellectual practices developed and promoted
by late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists, writers, visual
artists, and education reformers.39 The best known of these were asso-
ciated either to the intellectual circles of the Madrid-based Institución
Libre de Enseñanza or to Barcelona-based Catalanist excursionist asso-
ciations.40 In Galicia, there was an autochthonous version of excursion-
ism-landscaping that developed in Galicianist circles before the Civil
War and that remained very influential with the gradual reemergence of
Galicianist cultural and intellectual activity after the war. The key figure
in the Galicianist excursionist-landscaping tradition was the prestigious
geographer and writer Ramón Otero Pedrayo.41
Otero’s writing on landscape has been successfully analyzed as a dis-
cursive construction, whose main building materials can be traced back
to nineteenth-century Galicianism and to Europe’s cultural history,
especially to the rich turn-of-the-twentieth-century European elite intel-
lectual milieu that the erudite Otero knew so well.42 Though fruitful
in relation to the study of Galician cultural history, from the naturecul-
tural and socio-environmental perspective I propose here constructivist
and discursive approaches to the study of landscaping present serious
limitations. They represent historically situated environmental processes
and lifeforms as a lifeless backdrop to which symbolic meanings and dis-
courses are adhered.43 They also dematerialize the production of things
(such as books and pictures representing landscapes) which, in fact, are
the product of elite “mobility practices” (strolls, excursions, hikes, trav-
els, and so on),44 elite embodied skills of perception and action (ways
of observing, listening and knowing lifeforms and matter that has been
mediated by previous readings), and material-semiotic processes (such
as writing about what you have seen by following particular observa-
tion techniques). These social practices are perceptible everywhere in
Otero’s writing.45 His Guía de Galicia, for example, published in 1926,
but republished several times before the Transition, tells the reader
line by line and step by step where to walk, what to see, and how to
interpret and feel the Galician landscape in organicist, historicist, and
nationalist terms.46 Otero’s post-war writing on the Galician landscape
became intellectually challenging and nuanced. Influenced by Bergson,
Otero proposed an interesting method for the understanding of the
66  D. Ares-López

landscape as a “primary experience of time” that implies a “mental effort

and work” for the person who wants to landscape in Otero’s way. Yet,
Otero argues, “this does not diminish the value of landscape as repose.”47
Needless to say, most of the working people who actually inhabited those
landscapes (and that Otero describes as ritual and intuitive landscape
makers in communion with nature)48 were too busy in their taskscapes
and lifescapes to be aware of this.
As Patterson suggested, Otero reluctantly adapted some of his ideas
about the landscape to accommodate it to the socio-environmental
changes that were going on in twentieth-century Galicia.49 In other
words, its original material-semiotic framing was being increasingly over-
flowed by the ways the Galician territory, and its trees, soils, animals, and
people were being partially inserted into twentieth-century modernist
capitalism. As we have seen, the regime’s engineers and economic plan-
ners and their extractivist–productivist culture of nature were key actors
in this process. In any case, Otero continued to promote among his elite
readers and audiences a perception and assessment of nonhuman life-
forms, nonliving matter, and Galician people’s work and artifacts as a
landscape. That is, a moral, political, scientific, and aesthetic object (these
dimensions were not separated in Otero’s work) contemplated through
a traditionalist and nationalist frame. Landscape, in this sense, is a doing
of things, a cluster of indoor and outdoor practices from which emanates
particular perceptions, feelings, and understandings of what the world is.
As Otero rightly suggests, this way of doing, feeling, and understand-
ing might be intellectually challenging and psychologically gratifying.
In Otero’s case, excursionism-landscaping also had the virtue of keep-
ing Galicianism alive, at least within its elite cultural milieu, when mani-
festations of sub-state nationalism were being repressed by the Spanish
state. However, the socio-environmental troubles generated by extractiv-
ism–productivism in Galicia could not be effectively addressed through
the promotion and extension of excursionism-landscaping as a culture of
nature. As Agustin Berque has suggested, modern landscaping’s attach-
ment to elite leisure practices and to an individualist perception of the
world makes it incapable of comprehending the world-making com-
plexity of communal perspectives of inhabitation (what he calls “life
milieu”).50 This also made landscaping easy to package as a commod-
ity.51 Moreover, excursionism-landscaping had problems in engaging
with socio-environmental processes generated by extractivism–productiv-
ism that are difficult to perceive sensorially and to interpret aesthetically.
 4  CULTURES OF NATURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY GALICIA  67

These processes (such as the flows of energy, materials, and bodies

between the rural and the urban) connect distant places and things: for-
ests and factories, fields and laboratories.

Cultures of Nature and Galician Cultural Studies

From the nineteenth century, Galician peasants’ world-making and
nature-making activity gradually evolved, as many scholars have pointed
out, through the incorporation of new techniques, technologies, and
sources of capital (such as immigrants’ remittances). During the late
twentieth century, when Galician peasant families and communities
found alternative or additional ways to make a living, wages, retirement
pensions, and emigrants’ remittances were often complemented with
the cultivation of potatoes and vegetables, with the picking of chestnuts,
with beekeeping, or with the raising of a few farm animals. These activi-
ties continue to take place not only in the countryside, but also in hybrid
rural-urban working-class neighborhoods like A Ponte, the neighbor-
hood where I grew up in the city of Lugo. This rarely produces pictur-
esque agrosilvopastoral landscapes. Industrial materials and artifacts are
everywhere and very often they are reused creatively for purposes other
than those the designer and manufacturer had intended. Matter may
have many lives if we give it a chance. Peppers grow in plastic bottles,
discarded CDs become effective scarecrows, and spaghetti leftovers feed
dogs and pigs. In the pages of one of the leading Galician newspapers,
this multifunctional use of stuff has been ridiculed as the “ugly” product
of Galician rural backwardness.52 Yet material objects now have longer
lives, and living beings are not regarded as raw materials or piles of genes
for the food industry. The times have also changed in other aspects.
Controlled fire or fires caused by arson now easily become devastat-
ing wildfires, principally because many modern forests were created and
managed in Galicia’s depopulated rural interior in ways that make them
extremely vulnerable to wildfires.53
These contemporary socio-environmental processes show how cul-
tures of nature in twentieth-century Galicia have persisted under evolv-
ing material-semiotic configurations and networks. Understanding these
changing configurations, and the historical tensions among different
cultures of nature, requires an interdisciplinary work with an unapolo-
getically critical edge for which the interdisciplinary field of Galician
cultural studies is superbly positioned. This work has not much to do
68  D. Ares-López

with aesthetic celebrations of nature, fascination with wildlife, or nostal-

gia for a vanishing rural world. Its aim is to contribute, no matter how
modestly, to the most urgent political task in the current age of the
Anthropocene. That is, to figure out ways for a communal inhabitation
of this planet which, while being materially and emotionally satisfying,
do not put in risk the future reproduction of human and nonhuman life.
Galician cultural studies could help in this task by providing critical anal-
yses and historiographical accounts of historical processes and practices—
at once material and discursive, social and environmental—that help to
understand the failures and successes in developing conditions for the
sustenance, sustainability, and flourishing of human and nonhuman life
in Galicia during the last century.

Notes
1. The difficulties of an intellectual dialogue between these theoretical
approaches in relation to the topic of the landscape can be observed in
Díaz-Fierros and López Silvestre, Olladas paisaxe.
2. Latour, Reassembling; Haraway, When Species Meet.
3. Latour, Never Been Modern; Haraway, When Species Meet.
4. Wilson, Culture of Nature.
5. Ingold, Perception of the Environment; Ingold, Being Alive.
6. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies; Hinchliffe, Geographies of Nature; Jones
and Cloke, Tree Cultures.
7. Hinchliffe, Geographies of Nature, 63.
8. Costa, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism,” 62.
9. Lowel et al., cited in Wilson, Multifunctional Agriculture, 80.
10. For a general study of some of these processes in Spain in the period
1955–2000, see Carpintero, Metabolismo, 267–313.
11. Scott, Seeing like a State.
12. Two excellent recent monographs have explored the key role of state
engineers and the mobilization of natural resources in the Francoist state:
Camprubí, Engineers; Swyngedouw, Liquid Power.
13. Tusell, Spain, 74–92.
14. Tusell, Spain, 247–52; Carpintero, Metabolismo, 197–253.
15.  Naredo and González de Molina Navarro, Evolución agricultura,
195–337.
16. Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, 99–163; Rico, Política forestal.
17. Cabana, “Minar la paz social”; Cabana, “Incendios monte comunal.”
18. Cabana, “Minar la paz social.”
19. Cabana, “Minar la paz social”; Rico, Política forestal.
20. Lage, “Monte, cambio social.”
 4  CULTURES OF NATURE IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY GALICIA  69

21. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 154.

22. Ingold, Being Alive, 12.
23. Domingues, “Paisaxe e identidade.”
24. Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 1.
25. Lisón, Antropología cultural.
26. Beiras, Atraso económico.
27. Balboa, Monte en Galicia.
28. Lage, “Monte, cambio social,” 109–11.
29. Enrique Couceiro (“Imaginarios”) has studied the communal practices in
the monte of a contemporary Galician community as an example of “a
lived system of representation.”
30. Buechler and Buechler (Carmen, 175) present an interesting testimony
of affective human–cow relations in rural Galicia, as well as the gender
dynamics involved in these relations.
31. Carmen, 1.
32. Neira Vilas, Memoirs.
33. Bauer, “Economic Differentiation,” 193.
34. Cañada and Pellejero, “Mapa Forestal.”
35. Rico, “Conflictividad social,” 119–20.
36. Rico, Política forestal, 14–15.
37.  The concept of landscape has been elaborated by Agustin Berque
(Thinking Through Landscape), who points to the idea that premodern
landscapes were created through the work and tacit knowledge of work-
ing people (“landscape thinking”) that he opposes to the explicit theo-
retical and aesthetic attitudes of nature-loving city dwellers in different
cultures since ancient times (“landscape theory”).
38. Berque, Thinking Through Landscape.
39. Otaola, Naturaleza patria, 95–161.
40. Otaola, Naturaleza patria, 135–61.
41. Patterson, Galician Cultural Identity, 43.
42. López Sández, Paisaxe e nación; Patterson, Galician Cultural Identity,
43–125.
43. Ingold, Perception Environment, 189.
44. Urry, Mobilities.
45. Otero Pedrayo, Pelerinaxes, 11.
46. Otero Pedrayo, Guía de Galicia.
47. Otero Pedrayo, Paisaxe e cultura, 14.
48. Otero Pedrayo, Paisaxe e cultura, 52.
49. Patterson, Galician Cultural Identity, 294–309.
50. Berque, Thinking Through Landscape, 43–53.
51. Berque, Thinking Through Landscape, 61.
52. “Chapuzas gallegas.”
53. Rey, “Incendios forestales,” 21–23.
70  D. Ares-López

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