Proverbs and Cabañuelas. International Projection of a Sabbatical Year

Research in Humanities made at UNAM has great prestige and dissemination in the American continent in Spanish. For natural reasons, the dissemination of our work is done especially in the Latin American region. In a culturally diverse but linguistically uniform scope, our knowledge dissemination is directed to Spain, Iberian America, and the southern states of the American Union. The humanistic work carried out at UNAM is not recognised as much in Europe (except from Spain) due to the secondary role assumed by Cervantes’s language among the European Union.

In the following pages I will summarise part of the experience of a sabbatical period I enjoyed in 2022 as a researcher. Due to this invaluable benefit offered by UNAM to its researchers, I was able to expand my academic ties with institutions dedicated to humanistic and social studies in two European countries (Spain and France) and two South American countries (Argentina and Brazil).

It has been an enriching experience professionally and had a huge impact personally. The dramatic pandemic period generated different affectations in most of us. Along with the pain of disease or of losing loved ones, many of the certainties and routines that used to accompany our daily lives suffered abrupt alterations. As humanistic researchers we are quite aware of our intimate fusion with the society we live in. This time, the face of adversity grew to a global community scale.

“The pandemic changed my life”, we say, and this is not an obvious truth. I believe that this phrase, reproduced millions of times in almost all languages, could even be included in the objects of study of linguistic anthropology. In a similar way, phraseology includes the object that inspired my research during the sabbatical year: the language of proverbs. I should figuratively add that this research became possible “at the moment when the polluting ashes of the pandemic began to cool off”.

Proverbs are condensed forms of peoples’ traditional knowledge. They are phrases or chains of phrases that we all know and can interpret; the native speaker of a language speaks in formulas, using phrasemes. The phraseme, a traditional conventional phrase, helps us understand, in a synthetic way, using a single verbal gesture, a specific situation or a stable configuration of relations and acting roles that are brought by it into play.

In the political life of very different societies, since ancient times, some kind of debate or duel using ancestral proverbs was practised to tip the balance of the public in favour of one of the contenders. In those societies this was way to make decisions about fundamental matters of power or of the state.

During the period we call prehistory, long before the invention of writing, oral communication was the main genre. Knowledge, feelings. and normative models of our illiterate ancestors were generated, expressed, and memorised orally. In each cosmovision and identity—popular, local, national, civilizational, or ethnic—speech has been the medium and the message. In the present, the promise of a utopian global civilization should not make us forget the local knowledge of orality, amassed with the agglutinating substance of situated, lived experience, which is the timeless seat of our ways to understand the world and act in it.

In 2022 the world had been just transformed by the pandemic. During that year I discovered that my schedule had been calculated on financial, health, and institutional assumptions that became obsolete as soon as the global pandemic emergency was declared. Travelling to Europe and South America, I found myself faced with new realities and limitations in various aspects: migratory and sanitary restrictions, health problems, changes in the procedures and academic calendars in the universities that hosted my project, among others. The increases in the costs of my trip left me stunned and financially weakened.

Nonetheless, I tried to follow the program I had set for myself consistently. I stuck to the research plan proposed in January 2022. At the end of the sabbatical period, I was able to confirm, by comparison, that the anthropology we practise at UNAM is of high quality and specialisation. I will describe in the next lines a part of the activities I carried out, specifically in Spain.

LOCAL WORLD AND GLOBAL WORLD
In February 2022 I travelled to Spain and settled in a town of the Seville province. I immediately contacted colleagues at the University of Granada’s departments of Linguistics and Social Anthropology.

My initial interest were the traditional proverbs used in El Arahal, a town of thirty thousand inhabitants located southeast of Seville, whose main economic activity is the production of olives. Some very friendly neighbours in the oldest street of this town agreed to be interviewed. After a well-attended meeting with the women of the extended family, I thought that if I wanted to focus on the proverbs of the region I had to use some ethnographic collecting technique, since the of information was of a very specific nature. It was impossible for me, an anthropologist just arrived from Mexico, to obtain an intelligible sound sample from the complicated polyphony reigning in the meetings I was invited to. The scenes of Andalusian speech are, if the comparison is allowed, resplendent and sparkling. The conversation around plates of chacinas, accompanied by good bread and seasonal beverages, lights a primordial bonfire, the same one that, since time immemorial, creates the nocturnal context of narration and other oral genres.

I made several visits like that to my neighbours. I was introduced to a hospitable and benevolent matriarch of a family, and immediately I met the male members. I listened to the testimony of the father, a retired baker from a family dedicated for generations to this noble occupation, about the serious economic situation that traditional trades and small-scale production face. Through these interviews I knew a firsthand vision of the history of a village in Andalusia in the 20th century: the creation of the town, now a city, with its mud streets; its stone and lime houses; the disproportionate social distance prevailing between landowners and common people; the tragic poverty; the lack of health services, inaccessible to the poor; the saga of some local characters known for their enormous meanness, bad habits and manias; the late arrival of the telephone and tap water. They also gave me their views on the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, their painful memories, the extremist, vengeful attitude of victors and vanquished, the desecrations that some Republicans did to sacred symbols, and the relentless harshness and corruption of the Francoist dictatorship. We also talked about the COVID-19 pandemic and the war unleashed in Ukraine. Another topic that interested particularly

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