Dr John Corbin
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John Corbin attended school in Cuba, Columbia, Brazil and the United States, took his BA at the University of Chicago, was a graduate student at the London School of Economics and the University of Kent at Canterbury, from which he received his PhD in 1975. Now a Senior Lecturer at Kent, he has also taught at the Universities of East Anglia in England, Cornell and Columbia in the United States, Tasmania in Australia, Complutense de Madrid in Spain. His main interests are in the anthropology of conflict, violence and revolution and the contribution of anthropology to an understanding of history. He has conducted field work in Spain over a period of almost thirty years, working in the small Andalusian city of Ronda, focusing on cultures of equality and inequality, the inter-relations of class and gender. Drawing on the understanding of Andalusian culture derived from this field work, he has produced commentaries on anarchism in Andalusia over the last century and the atrocities of the Spanish Civil war of 1936-39. He is more generally concerned with the relationship between cultural continuity and political instability and with colonial transformations of European culture. All these interests come together in his current work which aims to produce an anthropological study of the revolution of 1959 in the country of his birth, Cuba.
Other interests include applying the perspectives of social and cultural anthropology to visual/performance arts and to human evolution and biology. The first is reflected in, for example, his film for the BBC/Open University on the interpretation of Picassos painting Guernica; the second in his convenorship of the new Part I course on The Foundations of Human Culture.
Recent Publications
1995, Truth and Myth in History: an example from the Spanish Civil War, Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
xxv:4, 609-625.
1994, El Anarquismo Andaluz en Perspectiva Antropoló gica, Revistas de Antropologí a Social,
Editorial Complutense, Madrid.
1993, The Anarchist Passion: Class Conflict in Southern Spain, 1810-1965,
Avebury, Aldershot.
1989, The Myth of Primitive Spain, Anthropology Today,
5, 4.
1988, Insurrecciones en Espana: Casas Viejas 1933 y Madrid 1981 in D. Riches (ed.), El Fenó meno de la Violencia,
Ediciones Piramide, Madrid.
Ronda - Map Coordinates
Longitude 5° W, Latitude 37N
Photographs
Party politics can also take form in street events. After Francos death May Day was declared a national holiday. In 1979 the Communist Party organised a demonstration against unemployment and some 250 men, women and children marched under the banners of the groups they represented. In contrast to most public holidays the streets were empty except for the marchers. Some slight scuffling arose when speakers were denied access to the city hall and the balcony of the mayors office. The authorities seemed intent on avoiding trouble and no police were visible. After several short speeches and chants attacking the mayor and the Socialist Party for not participating, the crowd dispersed.
The Corpus Christa procession in June differs from others in that the Host, the Living God is carried through streets naturalised with greenery and traditionally only men participate.
In most religious processions human images of Christ and/or the Virgin Mary are paraded through the streets. Those of Holy Week enact parts of the Christ myth. People who do not participate as officials, carriers or penitents line the streets, often regardless of the weather.
Ronda is a small city (pop. 30,000) in the mountains of Southern Spain. The urban centre is compact, surrounded by farms owned and worked by city residents. The streets are the focus of public life, the high points of which are the religious or secular festivals that make up the annual cycle of street events.
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