Paper short abstract:

The objective is to discuss the production of social categories to identify the population in a context of growing heterogeneity in a Pyrenean valley. It also explores the relations between locality and community, and the impact of a symmetric separation within the main population of the valley.

Paper long abstract:

The main aim of this paper is to discuss, in the context of an ethnography of Pirinean valley, the limitations and unsuitable character of administrative categories such as "fixed" and "temporary" populations, of popular categories such as "locals" and "foreigners", with the sub-categories of "hippy" and "newcomer", and the category "neorural" of the social scientists and it's ability to represent, in a precise way, the social and cultural heterogeneity of a population that in the last two decades has stopped a deep decline. This is all due to the arrival of many waves of inmigrants with different resources and symbolic capitals, trajectories, projects, values and identities. This inmigration is related with consecutives crisis and changes that in the past 50 years have the economy and the local social estructure experiencied due to the growing impact of globall factors, going from a subsistence production system to a market oriented to milk production and tourism. The term "hippy", still in use, can not represent the inmigrants evolution from an initial search of an ideal of self-sufficiency in an rather depopulated countryside, according to foreigns guides, in a wage-earning world, based on an economy of tourism and services; the term "newcomer" unifies different processes of insertion of foreigners workers, both comunitary or outside the European Community, and nationals, and also conceals the genders differences. The term "neorural" doesn´t stress the important differences of planification and transition in the diverses inmigrants insertion processes, differences that made less clear the separation between fix and temporary population.

This paper also wants to explore the relationship between locality and community, examining the impact of a simetric separation within the main population of the valley, and its projection over the rest, over the inmigrants insertion process as long as this gap doesn't leave available social spaces except the marginal ones. It also studies this relationship through etnographical documentation about the structures of values and feelings corresponding to the diferents categories of inhabitants of the valley.

Dr. Juan Frigolé

Camila del Mármol

Universidad de Barcelona