Jone Miren Hernández García is a professor of Social Anthropology at the UPV/EHU. In the spring of 2014, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, she offered a talk with the School for Equality and Empowerment of Women: From the past to the future, a reflection from the gender perspective. The full talk video can be found in the multimedia section of ARGIA.

In the following lines we collect a fragment of an hour and a half of talk. During the talk, Hernández has reviewed his academic trajectory and has reported the scarce efforts made from the gender perspective around the language, from the book Basque Woman to the concept of mother tongue. In these lines we gather the initial general reflections and a concrete fragment of female and male storytellers.

Jone Miren Hernández: “Since I started doing the academic journey, I have always had two themes on the table, feminism or gender and language. On that tour there have been streaks, sometimes I have put feminism in the middle and other times I have walked more around the tongue, always without losing the gender glasses. Sometimes bridges have been built.

The first approach between both lines occurred around the thesis. I started the thesis in 1997. In Txepetxe [José María Sánchez Carrión] I got the 1981 text. In the ethnographic study, he took an area of Navarra and analyzed the situation of the Basque country. The gender issue was in a way in the middle. Until then, as far as the Basque country is concerned, I had not seen it. She analyzed the delay of the Basque country and clearly indicated that the “guilt” of this loss was the attitude of women towards the Basque country, at least a powerful reason. It was an impact for me. In his view, this was the main reason for understanding the loss. I mixed psychology and language, I think the reasons I gave were pretty psychological, but it was amazing.

But it was very difficult to find other references from this text, where the role of women in the development of the Basque country was analyzed, as did Sánchez Carrión. I tried to see what other cases were in the world. There wasn't much at that time. I studied some cases, but I wasn't able to come to a conclusion. There was no consensus about the role of women.

Hardly segregated data

It is clear that in recent decades there has been an increase in social, political, academic concern about the Basque country, for example, projects and studies, quite a lot of data have been collected about knowledge, use, motivation… But the truth is that we have rarely had segregated data and this has not helped women and men to position themselves on the Basque country. In recent years, there has been a greater tendency to show segregated data, and that has helped me.

However, if we take the production of the last decades, the gender variable and the feminist perspective have scarcely existed. There have been very few studies and data, and also the work done has been quite dispersed over time. Most of them have not been profound reflections.

It is surprising, if we address social movements, feminism has a long way to go, and I would say that it also has a majo path social movements around the Basque country, but rarely have they been found, rarely have they joined together to share it. I say very rarely, and it's amazing, because they have so many things in common. I remember when I was an equality technician at the City Council of Tolosa, I had the highest relationship with the Basque Service. We were sharing our sorrows, and I always told them, ‘You don’t worry about us, we will always be worse than you.’

But it is true that when we talk about feminism, when we are in the realm of Euskera, we talk about exclusion and discrimination, also about value. Many parallels can be made between these two worlds. It is a pity that these two paths have not been united, neither movements nor administrations. In Udaltop, Mari Luz Esteban was invited to reflect on the links between these two worlds. He made that effort and it became clear that there is something to share.

Responsibility for transmission yes, prestige no

I wanted to talk especially about transmission, since when women have been named as transmitters in relation to the Basque country. I see an interesting contradiction here. On the one hand, the importance of transmission from the point of view of language is stressed, and this responsibility is left or left to women. On the other hand, women have not played a leading role in the act. The role of transmitter has been recognized, this role has been given importance, but from the point of view of the Basque Country this importance has not been manifested, it does not have a clear reflection in prestige, creativity, power.

Women low acceptance rapporteurs

In the book Basque Woman [Work of the research team led by Teresa del Valle 1985], a chapter analyzes the role of female and male storytellers in Basque culture. Today, that's over, but there are some interesting things to think about. Female and male storytellers have different characteristics. The narrators are located at home and in the surroundings of the house, closely linked to the transmission of stories and phrases. They usually do not receive recognition or reward for their work, they are considered to have a natural capacity, so they do it without further ado. In most cases, it is dedicated to leisure and family members gather. They're anonymous storytellers.

However, male storytellers usually work in the public sector, in the street or in the plaza, although sometimes they work in private spaces, in bars or in bars. They're known and accepted as storytellers, and they're recognized for what they do. It's considered a gift, and in particular it recognizes its ability to entertain people. In most cases, the audience of these men is usually other kind of men.

In both worlds, the protagonists have a different recognition. In the domestic sphere, acceptance will be the closest and in the rest, acceptance is much wider, more public. In one place and another, the word will not have the same prestige or value. When I say this, the words spoken by Maialen Lujanbio in Horacio come to mind. This television programme revolved around women and Bertsolaris. Lujanbio said that, when he started, the hardest thing was to believe that he had something interesting to say. Who will be interested in what I have to say?’ And he clearly related it to the issue of gender, to the fact that I am a woman. He said that the word of the woman is worthless. I think for a bertsolari that's a drama. It is true that in Basque culture the word male has been recognized and exalted, and on many occasions also says the anthropologist Joseba Zulaika, man and the word have been considered synonyms”.