Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
open access
Throughout the last 50 years the Spanish countryside has emptied due to the rural migration from villages to main industrial cities such as Madrid, Bilbao or Barcelona. Now, after decades of...Show moreThroughout the last 50 years the Spanish countryside has emptied due to the rural migration from villages to main industrial cities such as Madrid, Bilbao or Barcelona. Now, after decades of demographic decline, depopulation has become central in public and academic debate about rural development. This growing concern of emptying villages has raised questions about the precarious life and the sense of threat to people who live in these spaces and who are exposed to a loss of services and stable livelihood. This research is an ethnographic analysis of locals’ perspective living in the depopulated village of Yanguas, in Tierras Altas in the province of Soria, the most depopulated area in Spain. Departing from the concept of precarity within global capitalism I will focus on how people of Yanguas sustain a livelihood and how they perceive the village’s livability, while addressing the future perspective of development based on infrastructure creation. The findings in this research suggest that the struggles some people experienced while living in a depopulated village were not derived strictly from the fact that they live in a small community. On the contrary, the experience of depopulation, rather than being the source of precarity, was very often a symptom of other large-scale issues and social changes such as industrialization, delocalization, and patterns of social mobility and migration. This thesis combines audiovisual and text, and the outcome is this article and a film.Show less
Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
open access
With increasingly pressing and widespread ecological, social and personal crises, the forward march of progress has come to a dead end, and this time is ripe for sensing precarity, as Tsing (2015)...Show moreWith increasingly pressing and widespread ecological, social and personal crises, the forward march of progress has come to a dead end, and this time is ripe for sensing precarity, as Tsing (2015) announces. A sense of precarity is prevalent among practitioners in the Plum Village meditation center. In a case study, I join practitioners to encounter opportunities for engaging with the challenges of precarity and new possibilities for progress. With these experiences I point out the relevance of the Plum Village tradition in our earthwide precarious predicament. My aim in this thesis is to speak to the possibility of changing with mindfulness practice the dualist worldview that is at the root of widespread unsustainable progress practices. The devastating consequences of the forward march toward limitless growth demand a change of direction. My commitment to sustainable, inclusive living leads me to assess to what extent wholesome directions emerge for people and our planet in the other-than-modern views and practices that are taught in the Plum Village tradition.Show less
