Ruin, dirt and rubble: nature and cultural models in rural Catalonia

During the last half century, the Catalan rural world has been transformed by a series of processes – industrialization, urbanization, consolidation of an economy linked to leisure, rural exodus, crisis of family agriculture – that have left a deep footprint both in its territory and in the consciousness of its inhabitants. Inspired by the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Gastón Gordillo on ruination and ruins, and based on several recent ethnographic works, this article looks for the traces of dislocation that these economic transformations have left in the landscape of the High Pyrenees and Terra Alta. The purpose of this exercise is twofold. On the one hand, to question the triumphant temporality embodied in the narratives of modernization and economic growth. On the other hand, to investigate how these traces speak of the survival of ways of life and ways of conceiving nature and territory – what I call “cultural models” – linked to a peasant-based agricultural economy.