Vicente Risco. Etnografía y literatura en la configuración nacional de la identidad gallega

Abstract

The great figure of Vicente Risco ought to be revised in the process of assessing his extensive ethnographic work, done under the shelter of the incipient Galician nationalism of the early 20th century. Risco's intellectual prominence before the years of the Second Republic enabled him to defend, from traditionalist and culturalist positions, a nationalism founded upon the notion that culture is a distinctive fact. He was joined in this endeavor by other members of his generation. The author, who finds fault with the received interpretation of Risco as a "political man" and of his work as something unrelated to his life, attempts to recuperate this provincial as well as cosmopolitan scholar by showing the coherence that his complex personality, life and work reveal. The author's aim is to find for Risco the place in the history of anthropology that he deserves, beyond any ideological branding.