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.
Re-inventing Europe: the case of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela as European heritage and the political and economic discourses of cultural unity.
This paper argues that the enthusiasm for heritage tourism that has developed in Europe in the past three decades is inextricably tied to the political project of the European Union and its drive to create cultural coherence in a multinational, multicultural continent. I explore the ways in which the 'heritage-scape' of Europe, in particular its pilgrimage routes, are portrayed as emblems of European values and culture. I claim that these values are built on selective readings of history and a romantic re-imagining of the past that serve present political and economic ends. Through peripheral pilgrimage sites and routes, messages about cultural unity are disseminated, and the reproduction of an ideal of 'unity in diversity' is brought to centre stage in the politics of the Union. I exemplify this process with a description of the pan-European network of pilgrim routes that now forms the largely re-invented Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.
Gender Politics and Research: Male and Female Violence in Intimate Relationships
This article reviews a wide range of research reports on male and female violence in intimate relationships and highlights the political nature of domestic violence research. The authors review incidence and prevalence-based research that uses quantitative surveys and illustrate how quantitative, family-focussed researchers tend to ignore the political and social context of domestic violence and the complex issues of gender and power. The authors argue that understanding the complexities of domestic violence requires clear definitions of what constitutes domestic violence and multi-method approaches to research, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.