Cultura y soledadSilencios, ausencias y memorias en el ocaso de la vida rural (Resumen)

Zusammenfassung

Loneliness has emerged as a problem in post-modern societies since the mid-20th century. As an object of study, it is constructed from the epistemological frameworks of psychology and biomedical sciences through the reductionism of standardised scales and universalist approaches. Attention is focused on its prevalence and solutions are proposed as if it were an «epidemic». This thesis aims to open this concept by exploring the field of its conceptualisation and phenomenology from the anthropological discipline. This ethnography is based on the empirical materials collected in a fieldwork carried out between 2019 and 2022 in different villages in a region of the Autonomus Community of Extremadura, in the west of Spain. This approach focuses on a group of elderly people living alone in rural areas with a significant degree od depopulation as a result of the different migratory waves that have shaken this territory since the sixties of the last century. This text adderesses lonelinees as a social and cultural construction, far removed from traditionally hegemonic conceptions. To this end, it looks at the importance of ageging and its implications in the reduction and deterioration of physical faculties and how this can lead to loneliness through the social constructions surrounding the bodies of these people. It also explores the intimate world of cultural meanings around loneliness constructed from the field of expectations and the different emotions it evokes, highlighting its relationship with nostalgia, melancholy, or sadness, but also boredom or fear. In the community relational scenario, we explore the possibility of understanding loneliness as an experience shared and the rest of the nearby community and reflected in transformations in the space of practices that announce the impossibility of social reproduction and, with it, the path towards the possible disappearance of these villages. Loneliness thus opens to the social and cultural world, taking it out of the restricted space of individuality.