UC Berkeley

The maintenance of minoritized expressions has long preoccupied scholars. In the Basque Country, a stateless nation with a small population and geographical territory, Basque language, music, and dance are alive and thriving among micro-communities of practitioners. This study seeks to understand how this happens through the creation of “breathing spaces,” arnasgune in Basque (Zalbide 2019), places in which Basque cultural expressions are the predominant means of socializing. The idea of breathing spaces was originally developed by Joshua Fishman (1991) to consider how minoritized languages survive and thrive. I expand upon this notion to ask how music and dance, in small-scale interactive settings, help minoritized peoples maintain their cultures as living breathing ways of life.In an ethnography informed by history, I consider the current (2020s) situation in Donostia-San Sebastián in the southern Basque Country (within Spain). I draw upon twenty months of ethnographic research conducting formal interviews and taking part in informal conversations; being a student in Basque language, music, and dance classes; participating in informal musicking; and attending formal concerts and events.Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter which provides background information about the Basque Country, my involvement in Basque communities, and this research. I explore the concept of breathing spaces or arnasgune in depth and detail the ways in which my expanded framing of the concept allows for music and dance along with language to be considered as integral parts of these Basque breathing spaces. In Chapter 2, I consider how official language, music, and dance classes transmit “living culture” (in which cultural expressions are dynamic practices integrated into people’s social lives) by both facilitating the development of skills and knowledge that allow students to participate in breathing spaces outside of class, and by becoming breathing spaces themselves. I contend that these classes not only provide people with practical skills and knowledge to be able to speak Basque, play Basque music, and dance Basque dances, but are also means by which students cultivate Basque sensibilities—ways of being in Basque-speaking spaces. Chapter 3 focuses on highly structured kinds of participatory singing and dancing events (kantujirak and plaza dances), to investigate tensions between discipline and breath and between older and younger generations of Basque musicians and dancers. Although discipline and breath might at first glance appear to be at odds, I argue that twentieth century history caused traumas within Basque-speaking communities that have made the relationship between disciplining and breathing to be far more complicated for the mostly older participants of these events. Chapter 4 takes shape around three ethnographic vignettes to explore how different kinds of intimacies arise through informal musicking in the Basque Country. I show how expressions and experiences of intimacies depend on the conditions of possibility of each setting. Throughout this chapter, I examine what is understood as a “good environment,” or giro ona in Basque, how and why such an environment arises and is maintained, and what kinds of intimacies it can facilitate. In Chapter 5, I examine erromeriak (open-air dance events in the mountains), and their relationship to place, authenticity, and politics. The Basque mountains are deeply meaningful for Basques and affect the experience of these events in material and symbolic ways. Conceptions of authenticity in erromeriak troubles simplistic understandings of it as something connected to the past, the community’s origins, or “natural.” These events’ relationships to place and authenticity elucidate the fundamental issue of why to be Basque is always inherently political.Throughout this study, I move away from a focus on identity as fixed and static to a more expansive focus on processes of identification considering different temporal, political, geographic, and social exigencies. I insist that music and dance not only do important affective and aesthetic work, but also nurture civic values and personal, social, and political worldviews.