Paper short abstract:

J.R. Llobera was an outstanding Catalan anthropologist specialized in nationalism. His non-politically positioned perspective let him criticize the romantic construction of Catalan Volkgeist of 19th Century folklorists and also argue on the historical foundations of Catalan national identity.

Paper long abstract:

This communication aims to present the work of J.R. Llobera on Catalan nationalism. The Catalan case is widely known for its long history, which began in the mid-19th century with the romantic vindication of the Catalan language and its cultural nation. It became a political movement in the early 20th century and has survived to the present day, with the rise of independence demands from Spain. However, in Catalan anthropology, there are not figures that have stood out by their explicit action for or against Catalan nationalism. There was only the work of 19th-century Folklorists in the construction of Catalan Volkgeist, but his essentialist approaches were later widely criticized by Catalan anthropologists in the 1980s.

One of the prominent authors in the critique of the romantical gaze of the first Catalan nationalism was Josep Ramón Llobera, a Catalan anthropologist who developed his academic career in London, from where he contributed prominently in the development of Spanish anthropology in the late '70s and the 80s when political debates about how to resolve the different national identities inside Spain were intensive. Possibly because of his Catalan origin and his biography, Llobera stood out in a strictly academical study of nationalism as a phenomenon, but his analysis (which always had the Catalan case as a background), were never explicitly built-in defense or criticism of Catalan nationalism; although in his last works he argued in defense of a legitim Catalan identity as a result of historical processes of Longue durée.