8 - Bridging Rural Culture and Expert Culture: The Agrarian Press in Galicia, c.1900–c.1950

Summary

The agrarian press is frequently used in historical research as a primary source for studying modern European rural society. Ernst Langthaler, for instance, used a number of periodicals to analyse the Nazi period in rural Austria, Johan Eellend to follow the development of the cooperative movement in Estonia, and Christine César and Nicolas Woss to reconstruct the genealogy of organic agriculture in France. Although the agrarian press obviously reflected and stimulated processes of change, it has received surprisingly little attention from historians as an object of study in its own right. This chapter aims at describing the nature, function and position of the agrarian press in the tangle of knowledge, know-how and communication that surrounded farming in Galicia during the first half of the twentieth century.

Galicia is situated in the north-west of the Iberian peninsula and is divided into four provinces (A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense and Pontevedra). It contained a little over 10 per cent of the total Spanish population in 1900. Its many peculiarities, including its language (kindred to Portuguese), was never acknowledged by the Spanish government or its legislation. Alienation from the Spanish state formed the basis for a political movement that sought autonomy (rather than separation) from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. It failed to attract much popular support until the 1930s.

The period under consideration – broadly the first half of the twentieth century – is important in many respects. It is marked by an explosion of local and, more specifically, agrarian periodicals in the context of a series of social transformations. In the first place, the rapidly declining illiteracy rates made the public receptive to published material: in 1887, barely 29 per cent of the Galician population knew how to read and write, compared to 35 per cent per cent in 1900, 43 per cent in 1910, 53 per cent in 1920 and 67 per cent in 1930. This improvement came about as a result of efforts by the state and civil society, in particular remittances from emigrants living in the United States to help build schools and raise the educational level.