FROM DESIRE TO ENDURANCE: Hanging on in a Spanish Village

Abstract

Comparing a Spanish village in the 1960s and 1980s, Jane Collier analyzed how the different ways of making a living in those decades generated distinct dispositions: from abiding by duty to pursuing desire. I revisited this village to explore the ideological contours of finance-led capitalism and the livelihoods it enables in rural Andalusia. I found that villagers’ struggles to hang on, arrested in a present in which property carries over insufficient value from the past, and work offers no path to progress in the future, are redeemed by a discourse of endurance. I trace its material underpinnings to constraints imposed on work and property and demonstrate how it renders villagers’ struggles as an accomplishment rather than an affliction. I also use this ethnography to make a case for studying contemporary attitudes as reflections of ideology, rather than as expressions of political agency.