A Nation of Monasteries: The Legacy of Víctor Balaguer in the Spanish Conception of National Monuments
Medieval Spanish monasteries were turned into monuments through a series of political struggles that claimed them for competing ideas of the nation from federalist, Catholic, regional, and fascist conceptions of Spain. Víctor Balaguer was a key figure in establishing the centrality of monasteries in the Spanish national imaginary. Monasteries, seen as nodes in a network that structured the Iberian territory since medieval times, were central to his political conception of the relation between Catalan and Spanish nationalism. Significantly, monasteries have remained central to debates about Spanish nationalism from 1835 to the World Heritage designations of the twentieth century. Seen in this light, monasteries appear more as instruments of political and cultural processes than as static objects. They are monuments in constant evolution, the changing and dynamic outcome of an intricate and complex process of confrontation and negotiation between social agents who struggle to define their value and meaning to the nation.
Guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas: The building of Montserrat through modern mass media
This article demonstrates how guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas have mediated spiritual, cultural, and nationalistic narratives of Montserrat, a mountain and monastery-shrine near Barcelona, Spain. Montserrat—as a place and as an idea—was shaped as a national symbol in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a struggle among shifting religious, cultural, and political forces. These struggles have influenced individual and collective memories while they have informed the architectural grammar used in the reconstruction of the modern monastery-shrine, influencing the work of the Catalan architects Antoni Gaudí and Josep Puig i Cadafalch and informing the alterations of the sites that these mass media represent and idealize.
The Value Base of Social Work
Abstract Values may be conceived along three basic dimensions which would account for the major value orientations shared by social workers and related to all aspects of their professional practice. These are: preferred conceptions of people, preferred outcomes for people, and preferred instrumentalities for dealing with people. Distinguished from “knowledge,” and adequately refined, these categories of values might constitute a guide for planning and action in social work practice and education. The predictability of professional behavior which might then result would also define the expectations of clients and society with respect to what the social work profession stands for and what it does.