Women's Work in Rural Andalusia

Anthropologists, like those who contributed to The Social Anthropology of Work (Wallman 1979), are just beginning to analyze work as a culturally variable concept that describes more than a system of production. Rather than looking at work as an economic attitude, process, or product, it is possible to conceptualize it as a social category fundamental to a capitalist society. To Spaniards, work maintains life rather than give meaning to it, and whenever possible they devote time and energy to leisure, not work. Classification of any given task as work, rather than as leisure or obligation, is arbitrary and tied to a particular culture's basic values, division of labor, and sources of identity. How work is defined and evaluated is directly related to whom is expected to perform it and under what circumstances it is performed. Work is never viewed neutrally but is seen as joyous, degrading, boring, or meritorious, depending on the culture's ideology of work. Indeed, it is impossible to define an analytical notion of work as paid labor, subsistence activity or production without reference to cultural notions. Cultural notions make weight lifting a sport as opposed to the work of a stevedore, or separate the obligation performed when a wife makes a bed from the wage labor performed when a hotel chambermaid does it. Spain has undergone an extremely rapid economic transformation in the period between 1960 and 1980. A part of that transformation has been the industrializa? tion of a predominately agrarian economy and the labor migration of agricultural? ists to secondary and tertiary economic sectors in Spanish cities and in the laborhungry economies of Western Europe. In order to understand the cultural process underlying this transformation, I conducted field work in a rural Andalusian community given the pseudonym, Las Cuevas de San Juan. I interviewed over 100 families with members of both sexes who have migrated outside Spain (out of a crude estimate of 1,000 migrants) and conducted participant observation with informants of both sexes drawn mostly from the barrio where I lived. At the time of my research,1 the town officially had 7,586 inhabitants, but the community includes hundreds of guestworkers in France, Switzerland, and Germany, and urban migrants in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid, who return frequently to visit friends and family in Las Cuevas. Las Cuevas is characterized by such massive migration because of its location in the mountains of an olive-producing province, Jaen, and because of the predom? inance of minifundios. Olive production accounts for over 80 per cent of the cultivated land and 84 per cent of the landowners possess under five hectares (1972 agricultural census). Olive production only provides seasonal employment, so Cuevefios were ready to migrate abroad or to Spanish cities in search of supplemental income, steady work, or increased opportunity when the possibilities were presented after 1959.