In the last two centuries the concept of “culture” has been given importance. When industrialization, capitalism and Eurocentric imperialism were destroying hundreds of popular cultures, curiosity was awakened by cultures that were on the way to being lost in many places.

If a person passes his life in a single language and culture, he will not have a special attachment to his culture. He knows no more and places what is done around him within “normality”. It will accept some trends in its culture, others will not love them, but it will not have the means to make a comparative exercise.

For centuries, many people lived like this. Although all cultures are always dynamic and there was a constant relationship in many parts of the world, every human being tends to be in a limited period, in a limited scope, in a limited and understandable context. This environment is often self-formed, using tools in the same way that we are building our autobiography. But without those limits, it overcomes the complexity of reality.

Thus, in times when world change is accelerating, human beings need supports: religion, nation, ideology, family, love, work, metaverse... The changes multiplied in the nineteenth century, so that is when the adhesion to popular cultures is situated.

In our country we had a similar process, since some of the characteristics of Euskal Herria from previous centuries were melting, so they had to find some brackets to be able to continue as Basques in the new world. As was done in most places, a great simplification was made, which could be simplification, mytification... Therefore, like the sponsors of other European cultures, Basque culture was related to habits, clothing, behavior, concrete and stereotyped attitudes. Most of them are historically quite close and too often intermingled with folklore and culture.

Let us simply look at what a culture is. Let's take a deeper look. The human being without language and culture is impossible. Language and culture have made us human. They have changed us, both biologically and psychologically, until we create our peculiar species. We have created culture, but it has also changed us. Culture is, above all, a set of resources that provide us with tools to cope with life, at the individual and collective level, since the linguistic and cultural transformation it entailed is the intergenerational transmission capacity. As a cognitive revolution.

Every global culture provides practical and symbolic resources to place the individual in the world. Practices for the effective management of limited resources of the environment, symbolic, that allow the healthy management of psychological, social and affective needs. If a culture has the ability to do all of this, it will last a long time; if a culture breaks those balances, if it generates ingestionable and chronic environmental, neighborhood or internal conflicts, it will collapse.

I have no doubt that at some point sufficient characteristics were accumulated to qualify as “Basque culture”. This people was able to structure a coherent whole over long historical periods, in a complex and dynamic situation. Maybe it was later than we thought. Making constant changes and adaptations with all certainty, often with almost radical transformations, but in this long period it seems legitimate to me to use the name “Basque”.

I at least received it this way, I felt it and developed it as a Basque born XX.mendean. By then we have gathered, created and modeled tools to reinvent the Basque world so far away from our grandfather people. It gave us resources to settle in the world, gave me some guidelines to be as happy as possible. That is, we maintained the essence of a culture.

Now, you cannot deny, the world has changed radically. We are definitely immersed in the Planetary Age. Changes occur at high speed, it seems that the strongest supports are softening. The culture of children raised many times in the same house is not the same. The effects from all over the world reach all the holes in the houses. We live in extreme cultural diffusionism. The most naive song by a millionaire singer comes everywhere for 24 hours. New powers emerge that are capable of conditioning our customs, our thought, our lives, our purchases, our survival.

As I said, culture unable to manage conflicts is going to collapse. The main model that has led us to the Planetary Age leads us to collapse. Therefore, being an active member of a town and a culture with deep roots can provide personal and community tools. XXI.mendeko The effort to relocate as Basque is a creative, pleasant, constructive effort. In the same way that we take and model the witness of the previous ones, the new generations will adapt, paint, adapt. We are at the moment of recreating the Basque anthropopolitical subject.

Patxi Azparren

Bachelor of Social and Cultural Anthropology