➊ American Food Culture Observation Report

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Top 10 Traditional American Foods

The qualities of urban life are sought after; in addition, nonagrarian work, market opportunities, and numerous important services are heavily concentrated in cities. Dwelling types are varied, and what are sometimes called regional types are often in reality associated with local geographies or, within a single zone, with rustic versus more modern styles. Many parts of rural Spain display dwelling types that are rapidly becoming archaic and in which people and animals share space in ways that most Spaniards view with distaste.

Most houses that meet with wider approval relegate animals to well-insulated stables within the dwelling structures, but with separate entries. Increasingly, however, animals are stalled entirely in outbuildings, and motor transport and the mechanization of agriculture have, of course, caused a significant decrease in the number and kinds of animals kept by rural families. Houses themselves are usually sturdily built, often with meter-thick walls to insure stability, insulation, and privacy.

Preferred materials are stone and adobe brick fortified by heavy timbers. Privacy is crucial because dwellings are closely clustered and often abut, even if their walls are structurally separate. Southern Spain, in particular, is home to houses built around off-street patios that may show mostly windowless walls to the public street. Urban apartment buildings throughout Spain may use the patio principle to create inner, off-street spaces for such domestic uses as hanging laundry.

Building patios also constitute informal social space for exchange between neighbors. Outside of dwellings and within a population center, most spaces are very public, particularly those areas that are used for public events. Village, town, and city streets, plazas, and open spaces are common property and subject to regulation by civic authority. The very public nature of outdoor space heightens the concern with the separation of domestic from public space and the maintenance of domestic privacy. Yet family members who share dwelling space may enjoy less privacy from one another than their American counterparts: most urban families, in particular, live in fairly cramped spaces in which the sharing of bedrooms and the multifunctional uses of common rooms are frequent.

Beyond the homes of rural or middle-class urban Spaniards, there are palaces, mansions, and monuments of both civil and sacred architecture that display some distinctions but much similarity to comparable structures in other parts of Europe. These—along with prehistoric art and sites—are important in the array of emblems of local and regional identities. Food in Daily Life. The traditional Spanish diet is rooted in the products of an agrarian, pastoral, and horticultural society. Home production of honey is today mostly eclipsed by use of sugarcane and sugar-beet products, which have been commercialized in a few areas. Most important among the garden vegetables are potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, cabbages and chard, green peas, asparagus, artichokes and vegetable thistle cardo , zucchini squash, and eggplant.

Most of these are ubiquitous but some, like artichokes and asparagus, are also highly commercialized, especially in conserve. Important orchard fruits besides olives are oranges and lemons, quinces, figs, cherries, peaches, apricots, plums, pears, apples, almonds, and walnuts. Of these, oranges, almonds, and quinces, in particular, are commercialized, as are olives and their oil. The most important vine fruits are grapes and melons, and in some regions there is caper cultivation.

The heavily commercialized herbs are paprika and saffron, both of which are in heavy use in Spanish cookery. The Spanish midday stew, of which every region has at least one version, is a brothy dish of legumes with potatoes, condimented with cured pork products and fresh meat s in small quantity, and with greens in season at the side or in the stew. This is known as a cocido or olla or olla podrida and in some homes is eaten, in one or another version, every day. These rice dishes are eaten everywhere but in some areas are often reserved for Sundays. The midday meal comida around P. This follows a small breakfast desayuno of coffee or chocolate and bread or other dough products—purchased breakfast cakes, packaged cookies, or dough fritters churros.

Family members may breakfast at different times. A mid-morning A flamenco dancer in Madrid. This idiom of song, dance, and musical accompaniment is regarded as uniquely Spanish. In the late afternoon, between and P. When taken, the supper cena is a light meal—often of soup, eggs, fish, or cold meats—and is eaten by families together around P. This meal pattern is national except that in the Catalan area main meal hours are earlier, somewhat as in France P.

The family meals, comida and cena, are important gathering times. Even in congested urban areas, most working people travel home to the comida and return to work afterwards. Commercial and office hours are designed around the comida hours: most businesses are closed by or P. Banks and many offices have no afternoon hours. Food stores, butchers, and fishmongers may remain open longer in the mornings and not reopen until at least or not reopen at all and then remain open until about P. Virtually all commerce is closed by the family supper hour of P. Restaurant dining has become common in the urban middle, professional, and upper classes, where restaurants have made a few inroads on the home meals of some families; in general, however, family comida and cena hours are crucial aspects of family life throughout the nation.

Restaurants in urban areas date only from the mid-nineteenth century: the Swiss restaurateur opened his eponymous Lhardy in Madrid in Other kinds of establishments—taverns, houses specializing in specific kinds of drinks such as chocolate , and inns fondas offering meals to travelers are of course much older. But urban restaurants offering meals to those who could eat at home instead represented a new kind of social activity to those who could afford the price. Into the s, Spaniards who ate in restaurants did so mostly in families and mostly to eat together, at leisure and in public, and not to try new foods.

Menus were mostly of Spanish dishes from the same inventory home cooks also produced. Tomato gazpacho is one of the Spanish dishes that has an international presence, as do paellas and mountain serrano hams. Spain's contemporary version of the ancient refreshments barley-water French orgeat or almond-water is made from the tuber chufa and is called horchata. This beverage is produced mostly for Spanish consumption. Another beverage, sherry wine, which is produced around the southern town of Jerez de la Frontera, has international fame.

And it was Spaniards who first introduced Europeans to drinking chocolate. Chocolate parlors, like coffee-houses and wine cellars, are public gathering places that purvey and attract customers to drink specific beverages. Their product, hard cider, is also bottled and exported to other regions and abroad. Wine, however, is the most common accompaniment to meals in most of the nation, and beer is drunk mostly before or between meals. A number of desserts and sweets have a national presence, principally a group of milk desserts of the flan or caramel custard family. Cheese figures strongly as a dessert and is often served with quince paste.

Food Customs at Ceremonial Occasions. Eating and drinking together are Spaniards' principal ways of spending time together, either at everyday leisure moments, weekly on Sundays, or on special occasions. Special occasions include both general religious feast days such as Easter and Christmas and such family celebrations as birthdays, personal saints' days, baptisms, First Communions, and weddings. Many of these involve invited guests, and in small villages there may be at least token food offerings to the whole populace. Food is the principal currency of social exchange. The contents of special meals vary. Some feature dishes from the daily inventory at their most elaborate and numerous, with the most select ingredients.

Some respond to the Church's required abstentions principally from meat on particular days such as Christmas Eve and during Lent. Salt cod and eel are especially important in meatless dishes. Some purely secular festivals of rural families accompany the execution of major tasks: the sheepshearing, the pig slaughter, or the threshing of the grain harvest. In some regions, a funeral meal follows a burial; this is hosted by the family of the deceased for their kin and other invited guests. This meatless meal is in most places a thing of the past, and the Church has discouraged funeral banquets, but it was an important tradition in the north, in Basque, and in other regions. Basic Economy. Spain has been a heavily agrarian, pastoral, and mercantile nation.

As of the middle of the twentieth century the nation was principally rural. Today, industry is more highly developed, and Spain is a member of the European Economic Community and participates substantially in the global economy. Farmers' voluntary reorganization of the land base and the mechanization of agriculture both accomplished with government assistance have combined to modernize farming in much of the nation; these developments have in turn promoted migration from rural areas into Spain's cities, which grew significantly in the twentieth century.

With the development of industry following World War II, cities offer industrial and other blue- and white-collar employment to the descendants of farm families. The Spanish countryside as a whole has been largely self-sufficient. Local production varies greatly, even within regions, so regional and inter-regional markets are important vehicles of exchange, as has been a long tradition of interregional peddling by rural groups who came to specialize in purveying goods of different kinds away from their homes. Land Tenure and Property. The chief factors that differentiate Spanish property and land tenure regimes are estate size and their partibility or impartibility.

Much of the southern half of Spain, roughly south of the River Tajo, is characterized by latifundios, or large estates, on which a single owner employs farm laborers who have little or no property of their own. Large estates date at least from Roman times and have given rise to a significant separation of social classes: one class consisting of the relatively leisured latifundio owners and the other class comprising the landless agrarian laborers who work for them, usually on short-term contracts, and live most of the time in the fairly large centers known as agro-towns. In the north, by contrast, properties are small minifundios and are lived on—usually in pueblo communities—and worked principally by the families of their owners or secondarily by families who live on and work the estates on long-term leases.

The north of Spain, dominated by minifundios, is crosscut by a difference in inheritance laws whereby in some areas estates are impartible and in others are divisible among heirs. Most of the nation is governed by Castilian law, which fosters the division of the bulk of an estate among all heirs, male and female, with a general though variable stress on equality of shares. There is a deep tradition in the northeast, however, whereby estates are passed undivided to a single heir not everywhere or always necessarily a male or the firstborn , while other heirs receive only some settlement at marriage or have to remain single in order to stay on the familial property.

The passage of estates undivided down the generations is a touchstone of cultural identity where it is practiced just as estate division is deeply valued elsewhere , and as part of a separate and ancient legal system, the protection of impartibility has been central to these regions' contentions with Castile over the centuries. Spanish civil law recognizes stem-family succession in the regions where it is traditional through codified exceptions to the Castilian law followed in the rest of the nation.

Nonetheless, the tradition of estate impartibility along the linguistic distinctions of the Basque and Catalan regions have long combined with other issues to make the political union of these two regions with the rest of Spain the most fragile seam in the national fabric. Commercial Activities. Among Spain's traditional export products are olive oil, canned artichokes and asparagus, conserved fish sardines, anchovies, tuna, saltcod , oranges including the bitter or "Seville" oranges used in marmalade , wines including sherry , paprika made from peppers in various regions, almonds, saffron, and cured pork products. Cured serrano ham and the paprika-and-garlic sausage called chorizo have particular renown in Europe.

Historically, Spain held a world monopoly on merino sheep and their wool; Spain's wool and textile production including cotton is still important, as is that of lumber, cork, and the age-old work of shipbuilding. There is coal mining in the north, especially in the region of Asturias, and metal and other mineral extraction in different regions. The Canary Islands' production of tobacco and bananas is important, as is that of esparto grass on the eastern meseta for the manufacture of traditional footgear and other items. Even though Spain no longer participates in Atlantic cod fishery, Spain's fisheries are nonetheless important for both national consumption and for export, and canneries are present in coastal areas. There is increasingly rapid transport of seafood to the nation's interior to satisfy Spaniards' high demand for quality fresh fish and shellfish.

Leather and leather goods have longstanding and continuing importance, as do furniture and paper manufacture. Several different regions supply both utilitarian and decorative ceramics and ceramic tiles, along with art ceramics; others supply traditional cloth handiwork, both lace and embroidery, while others are known for specific metal crafts—such as the knife manufacture associated with Albacete and the decorative damascene work on metal for which Toledo is famed. Major Industries. Spain's heavy industry has developed since the end of the Civil War, with investments by Germany and Italy, and after the middle of the twentieth century with investments by the United States. The basis for these developments is old, however: iron mining and arms and munitions manufacture have been important for centuries, principally in the north.

Spain's arms and munitions production is still important today, along with the manufacture of agricultural machinery, automobiles, and other kinds of equipment. Most industry is concentrated around major cities in the north and east—Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, and Zaragoza. These industries have attracted migrants from the largely agrarian south, where there are sharp inequalities in land ownership not characteristic of the north, while other landless southerners have made systematic labor migrations into industrial areas of Europe—France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland. The most far-reaching development in Spain's economy since the s has been in the multifaceted tourist industry.

The number of tourists who visit Spain each year is roughly equal to Spain's resident population. Much of the influx is seasonal, between March and October, but the winter season is important in a number of areas—for winter sports in mountain zones and for the warmth of the southern coasts and the Balearic and Canary Islands. The hotel, restaurant, and other service sectors related to tourism constitute Spain's most significant industry, and it is one whose effects are felt in every corner of the nation.

This has to do not only with the actual presence of tourists and the opening of areas of touristic interest, but also with expanded markets for Spanish products abroad as well as at home. A growing international acquaintance with Spanish foodways has enhanced the demand for certain Spanish foodstuffs and wines. Spanish leather goods, ceramics, and other crafts have a heightened and increasingly global market. Additionally, the consciousness of touristic interest even in remote regions and not always with the help of professional promoters has broadened local people's awareness of the interest in their own cultural heritage.

Consequently, a variety of festivals and local products now enjoy expanded markets that often make real differences in local economies. The market for Spain's local and regional folk culture is not dependent just on international tourism; internal tourism, once reserved for the wealthy, is now promoted by television and the growth of automobile A cart outside a rural building in Castillo.

Stone is a popular building material in Spain, providing strength, insulation, and privacy. Spain is a member of the European Economic Community Common Market and has its heaviest trading relationship there, especially with Britain, and with the United States, Japan and the Ibero-American nations with which Spain also has deep historical ties and some trade relationships which date from the period of her New World empire. Among Spain's major exports are leather and textile goods; the commercialized foodstuffs named earlier; items of stone, ceramic, and tile; metals; and various kinds of manufactured equipment.

Probably Spain's most significant dependence on outside sources is for crude oil, and energy costs are high for Spanish consumers. Division of Labor. Once a predominantly agrarian and commercial nation, Spain was transformed during the twentieth century into a modern, industrial member of the global economic community. With land reform and mechanization, the agrarian sector has shrunk and the commercial, industrial, and service sectors of the economy have grown in size, significance, and global interconnection. Because the tourist industry is Spain's greatest and this rests on various forms of services, the service sector of the economy has seen particular growth since the s. Classes and Castes. The apex of Spain's social pyramid is occupied by the royal family, followed by the titled nobility and aristocratic families.

But through history, Spaniards have been critical of their rulers. If only he had a good lord! In today's modern and democratic Spain, the circles around the royal family, titled nobility, and old aristocrats are ever widened by individuals who are endowed with social standing by virtue of achievements in business, public life, or cultural activity. Wealth, including new wealth, and family connections to contemporary forms of power count for a great deal, but so do older concepts of family eminence. Spain's middle class has burgeoned, its development having not suffered under Franco, and because the disdain for commercial activity that marked the ancien regime, and made nobles who kept their titles refrain from manual labor and most kinds of commerce, is long gone.

Many heirs to noble titles choose not to pay the cost of claiming and maintaining them, but this does not deny them social esteem. Many titled nobles make their livings in middle-class professions without loss of social esteem. The bases on which Spaniards accord esteem have expanded enormously since the demise of the feudal regime in the mid-nineteenth century. Entrepreneurial and professional success are admired, as are new and old money, rags-to-riches success, and descent from and connection to eminent families. Spain's class system is marked by modern Euro-American models of success; upward mobility is possible for most aspirants. Education through at least the lowest levels of university training are today a principal vehicle of mobility, and Spain's national system of public universities expanded greatly to accommodate demand in the last third of the twentieth century.

After family eminence combined with some level of inherited wealth, education is increasingly the sine qua non of social advancement. The models of social success that are emulated are various, but all involve the trappings of material comfort and leisure as well as styles that are urbane and sometimes have global referents rather than simply Spanish ones. While Spain has a landed gentry—particularly in the southern latifundio regions where landlords are leisured employers rather than farmers themselves—the gentry itself values urbanity; increasingly these families have removed themselves to the urban settings of provincial or national capitals. The wide base of the social pyramid is composed, as in western societies generally, of manual laborers, rural or urban workers in the lower echelons of the service sector, and petty tradesmen.

The rural-urban difference is important here. Self-employed farming has always been an honored trade others that do not involve food production were once seen as more dubious , but rusticity is not highly valued. Therefore, Spanish farmers, along with country tradesmen, share the disadvantage of having a rustic rather than an urbane image; urbanity must be gained with some effort through education and emulative self-styling if one is to move upward in society from rural beginnings.

At the margins of Spanish society are individuals and groups whose trades involve itinerancy, proximity to animals, and the lack of a fixed base in a pueblo community. Chief in this category are Spain's Roma or Gypsies though some settle permanently and other groups who are not necessarily of foreign origin but who shun the values Spaniards cherish and follow more of the model that contemporary Spaniards associate with Gypsies. Symbols of Social Stratification. The outward signs of social differences are embodied in the degrees to which people can display their material worth through their homes especially fashionable addresses and furnishings, dress, jewelry and other possessions, fashionable forms of leisure, and the degrees to which their behavior reflects education, urbane sophistication, and travel.

A Spanish family's ability to take a month's vacation is famously important as a sign of economic well-being and social status. Comfortable, even luxurious, modes of travel—not necessarily by one's own automobile—also enhance people's social images. Spain is a parliamentary monarchy with a bicameral legislature. In the constitution that would govern Spain in its new era took effect. While organizing a parliamentary democracy, it also holds the king inviolable at the pinnacle of Spain's distribution of powers.

In the king helped to maintain the constitution in force in the face of an attempted right-wing coup; this promoted the continuance of orderly governance under the constitution despite other kinds of disruptions—separatist terrorism in the Basque and Catalan areas and a variety of political scandals involving government corruption. Spain has repeatedly seen orderly elections and changes of government and ruling party. The head of state, the prime minister, is a member of the majority party in a multiparty system. The years under the constitutional regime have brought Spain into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO and the European Community—and therefore, politically and economically closer to Europe—as well as into ever wider circles of global involvement.

The major change that has come about in Spain's political organization under the modern Apartments next to a marina in Malaga. Urban families often share bedrooms, and common rooms may be used for multiple purposes. Each of the autonomous regions has its own regional government, budget, and ministries; these replicate those at the national level. Some provinces are now separated from or grouped differently from their groupings in the historical kingdoms of traditional reference and so regional identities are in many cases being newly forged.

This process has its only parallel in modern times in the original formation of the provinces themselves in Leadership and Political Officials. Leadership is a personal achievement but can be aided by family connections. In Spain's multiparty system, shifts in party governance tend to bring about changes in officialdom at deeper levels in official entities and agencies than occur in the United States; that is, party membership is a correlate of government employment at deeper levels and in a greater number of spheres in Spain than in the United States. Spain's political culture in the post-Franco period, however, is still developing. The most local representative of national government is the secretario local, or civil recorder, in each municipality.

Municipalities might cover one or more villages, depending on local geography, and there is a recent trend toward consolidation. Alcaldes are local residents who are elected locally while the secretarios are government appointees who have undergone training and passed civil service examinations. The secretario is the local recorder of property transactions and keeper of the population rolls that feed the nation's decennial census. Social Problems and Control. Spain's justice system serves citizens from local levels, with justices of the peace and district courts, through the level of the nation's Supreme Court and a separate Supreme Court for constitutional interpretations.

The system is governed by civil and criminal law codes. Every Spanish locality is served by one or another police force. Urban areas have municipal police forces, while rural areas and small pueblos are covered by the Guardia Civil, or Civil Guard. The Civil Guard, which is a national police corps, also handles the policing of highway and other transit systems and deals with national security, smuggling and customs, national boundary security, and terrorism. Informal social controls are powerful forces in Spanish communities of all sizes. In tightly clustered villages, residents are always under their neighbors' observation, and potential criticism is a strong deterrent against culturally defined misconduct and the failure to adhere to expected standards. Many village communities rarely if ever activate the official systems of justice and law enforcement; gossip and censure within the community, and surveillance of all by all, are often sufficient.

This is true even in urban neighborhoods though not in entire large towns and cities because Spaniards are socialized to observe and comment upon one another and to establish neighborly consciousness and relationships wherever they live. The anonymity of an American high-rise community, for example, is relatively foreign to Spain. But it is also true that larger Spanish populations resort to their police forces frequently and, today, are additionally plagued by the increased street crime and burglary that characterize modern times in much of the world.

Military Activity. Spain's armed forces—trained for land, sea, and air—are today engaged primarily in peacetime duties and internationally in such peacekeeping forces as those of the United Nations and in NATO actions. Spain entered the twentieth century having lost its colonies in the New World and the Pacific in the Spanish-American War or, as it is known in Spain, the War of Troubles in Morocco and deep unrest at home engaged the military from into the s.

Spain did not enter World War I. The Civil War raged from to The remainder of the twentieth century has seen years of recovery, rebuilding, the maintenance by Franco of a strong military presence at home, and—after his death—of the increasing internationalization of Spain's involvements and cooperation, military and otherwise, with the rest of western Europe. Military officers have enjoyed high social status in Spain and, indeed, are usually drawn from the higher social classes, while the countryside and lower classes give their men to service when drafted.

In many places, men who reach draft age together form recognized social groups in their hometowns. At the end of the twentieth century, although young men are still subject to the draft, military service is open to women as well, and the armed forces are becoming increasingly voluntary. Spain's final draft lottery was held in the year Most of Spain's programs of social welfare, service, and development are in the hands of the state—including agencies of the regional governments—and of the Roman Catholic Church.

Church and state are separate today, but Catholicism is the religion of the great majority. The Church itself—and Catholic agencies—have a weighty presence in organizing social welfare and in sponsoring hospitals, schools, and aid projects of all sorts. Local, national, and international secular agencies are active as well, but none covers the spectrum of activities covered by the Church and the religious orders.

The state offers social security, extensive health care, and disability benefits to most Spaniards. Actual ministration to the sick and disadvantaged, however, often falls to Church agencies or institutions staffed by religious personnel. The importance of the Catholic Church in the spectrum of nongovernmental associations is great, both at parish levels and above. When based on shared locality, these groups are found from small villages to neighborhoods of large cities; nonlocal groups are based on common occupations or other shared experiences and interests.

They offer intimacy beyond the family and join individuals within or between neighborhoods and localities. The spectrum of secular groups of this kind is extended—but by no means dominated—by such religious groups as saints' confraternities, other kinds of brotherhoods, and voluntary church-based associations dedicated to a variety of social as well as devotional ends. In addition, large-scale regional, national, and international organizations have an increasing importance in Spanish society in the field of nongovernmental associations, an area that was once more completely dominated by Church-related organizations.

Division of Labor by Gender. The sexual division of labor varies by region and social class. In rural areas with a plow culture, men do most of the Tightly clustered towns are typical in Spain, where isolation in the countryside is often pitied. In areas such as the humid north coast, where one finds a greater emphasis on animal husbandry and horticulture, both sexes garden and tend cattle, sheep, and goats. Professional herding i. Women perform men's tasks when necessary but are least likely to drive a plow or tractor.

Men do women's tasks when necessary—and many men like to cook—but are least likely to do mending and, above all, laundry. Married men and women run their domestic economies and raise their children in partnership. It is traditional throughout Spain, however, that men and women pursue leisure separately, particularly in public places, where they gather with friends and neighbors of like sex and the same general age. The kinds of groups that enjoy leisure together form early in life. The separation of the sexes in leisure establishes the pattern on which the division of labor is enacted among the elite.

Where economic circumstances permit, men and women lead more separate lives than occurs among the peasantry, and then the traditional divisions of male from female tasks are less often breached. In public life, men more often pursue politics, and women maintain the family's religious observance and spend more time in child rearing and household management than men do. Where they have hired household help, the servants are likely women, and these are an old part of the nation's female work force, which is now expanding in new directions.

The traditional ideal of a sexual division of labor is best achieved by the leisured classes, whom peasants emulate when they can. The Relative Status of Women and Men. Spanish women under Castilian law inherit property equally with their brothers. They may also manage and dispose of it freely. This independence of control was traditionally relinquished to the husband upon marriage, but unmarried women or widows could wield the power of their properties independently. Today spouses are absolutely equal under the law. Royal and noble women succeed to family titles if they have no brothers.

In some areas of Spain, a woman may be heir to the family estate, but if she is not and instead marries an heir, she lives under the roof and rule of her husband and his parents. Nonetheless, women do not change their birth surnames at marriage in any part of Spain and can have public identities quite separate from those of their husbands.

Women were traditionally homemakers. Today they are found throughout the business, professional, and political worlds. In rural and working-class families, too, married women now often work outside the home and so experience both the independence and the frustrations of working women in countries where the female workforce emerged earlier. Spanish couples began controlling their family size long ago, and Spain now permits divorce, so more Spanish women are finding new kinds of freedom from their traditional roles as wives and mothers of large families.

There seem to be relatively few barriers to their advancement in most kinds of work. Despite women's traditional association with home-making, Spaniards have long accepted the independence of women and the prominence of some of them including their queens and noble women. Women's present emergence in the workforce, in the professions, and in government occurred in Spain without a marked feminist rebellion. Spaniards today marry for mutual attraction and shun the idea of arranged marriages. Class consciousness and material self-interest, however, lead people to socialize and marry largely within their own social classes or to aim for a match with a spouse who is better off. Traditionally, access to property was an important concern for farmers, with well-being often counting for more than love.

But marriage ties traditionally could not be broken and long courtships helped couples find compatibility before they took their marriage vows. Marriage is a partnership, although different input is expected of the two sexes, and the rearing of a family is regarded as central to it. Remarriage for widowed individuals beyond childbearing age was traditionally greeted with community ribaldry, since a sexual relationship was being entered into without the end of family-building.

These views and customs are becoming archaic. Divorce is now permitted; liaisons outside of marriage are increasingly common and accepted; and the economics of marriage for most people are freed from the ties to landed property that obtained when Spain was more heavily rural and agrarian. Domestic Unit. Most Spaniards live in nuclear-family households of parents and unmarried children, and this is widely held as ideal. A Spanish saying goes "casado casa quiere " "a married person wants a house". Older couples or unmarried adults tend to live on their own.

Two kinds of household formations produce stem families. Where estates are impartible, the married heir lives and raises his children on the parental estate and expects his heir to do likewise. In areas where estates are divided, an adult heir may nonetheless stay on with his or her parents on their house site. This is often the youngest child, who agrees to stay on in the aging parents' household, but such arrangements are not necessarily replicated generation after generation. Where two generations of married adults co-reside, it is often on impartible farms, and many heirs forsake farming these days in order to live independently and earn a salaried living in urban comfort.

This does not mean that the philosophy of estate impartibility is any weaker, however, in areas where it is traditional. In addition to land, rural estates include houses and outbuildings; animals; farm machinery; household goods, utensils, and tools; larder contents; furniture and clothing; jewelry; and cash. Nonfarm estates might include fewer types of property. Where estates go to a single heir, this usually includes animals, equipment, house and outbuildings, and most furnishings—the things that are essential for the farm effort. Some amounts of other types of property, especially liquid cash, can be separated and go to noninheriting children.

This kind of settlement with nonheirs is ordinary when a young heir takes over an estate at his parents' death. Sometimes—in any part of Spain—parents make premortem donations to their heirs, dividing estates according to custom and either keeping enough for their own maintenance or contracting for maintenance with the heirs. Maintenance is less a question in stem family households in which aging parents continue to live. Where there are multiple heirs, as in most of Spain, the majority of an estate is divided equally among them. This may involve lots containing very different types of property—some with more land and animals, others with more cash or other goods—all items are assigned a cash value so that lots are of equal value even if their contents differ.

In other local traditions, every kind of item, including a house, is divided equally. Castilian law allows for the free disposition of a portion of estates: some families use this to benefit disabled children, for example, but regions differ as do families as to how willing people are to dispense with the equal division of the entire estate. Some are meticulous about equal shares down to the last cent. Kin Groups. All Spaniards, including Basques, reckon kinship in effectively the same way: bilaterally and using an Eskimo-type terminology—the same as most Europeans and Americans.

Basques, however, have a concept of the kindred that joins certain relatives including some in-laws beyond the nuclear or extended family for particular purposes, notably funerary observances. This notion of the kindred is lacking elsewhere in Spain, where kinship relations beyond the household are nonetheless supremely important in social life. Family familia and relatives parientes are defined broadly without genealogical limits and inclusively embracing in-laws as well as blood relatives to create a large pool of relations beyond the limits of any single household or locality. Within this pool, people socialize as much by choice as by obligation, and obligations to relatives beyond the nuclear family are more moral than legal ones.

Although this field of relations is at best loosely structured and relations between kinsmen from different households must be viewed as voluntary, kinship networks are extraordinarily important in Spaniards' lives and serve as vital connectors in many realms, influencing such choices as those of residence, occupation, migration, and even marriage. Despite diminishing family size, the Spanish family as an instituted set of relationships remains extremely strong. Infant Care. Infants are breast- or bottle fed and weaned on cereal pap and other soft or mashed solid foods. Neither feeding patterns nor weaning and toilet training are rigid. Infants are treated with affection and good humor and scoldings are often accompanied by kisses.

The threat of social shame is a tool in teaching desirable conduct, but adults do not actually shame children in public. Teasing and taunting are not normal parts of adults' exchange with children. Infants of both sexes are carefully, even ornately, dressed. Sometimes strangers can detect their sex only by the presence of earrings on girl babies, whose ears are usually pierced in their first weeks of life.

As they become toddlers, babies' clothes come to reflect their sex, as boys wear short pants and girls wear dresses. Toddlers of both sexes may sleep together at home and in public form mixed play groups. Their play becomes separate as they reach the ages of five or six, and they are also likely then to sleep in separate rooms or with older siblings of the same sex. At this stage, sex-appropriate behavior models are presented to them. Child Rearing and Education. The birth of children is seen as the chief purpose of marriage. Children of both sexes are valued and raised with affection, even adoration, by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and older siblings.

Children are expected to be loving in return; a modicum of obedience is expected, but displays of obstinacy or temper are not sternly punished. Upbringing is not rigid, but as they grow children are expected to understand the constraints upon the adults around them and to learn respect and helpfulness as they approach the age at which they begin school six. Children's environments are intensely social, not usually enhanced by large numbers of toys or children's furniture. Children are expected to take their pleasures and also learn from inclusion in the adult world, where they are involved in and witness to interactions from their earliest days. They are almost constantly surrounded by others and often also sleep as infants with their parents and later with older siblings.

Parents may depend on schoolteachers for discipline and use teachers' judgments—or those of priests—as part of their own approach to child training once children are of school age. Most Spaniards see schooling as crucial to their children's life chances, particularly if they are to leave traditional rural occupations as most do. The urban working classes, like most rural food producers, place high value on basic literacy and on schooling beyond the obligatory age of fourteen to ensure entry into the world of employed or self-employed modern Spaniards. Higher Education. For most Spaniards, vocational and academic secondary schooling is crucial, but they also hope to send their children to college if not for higher degrees as well.

The professions are much admired, as is knowledge in general. Most of Spain's university system is public and governed in accord with nationwide regulations; it is heavily enrolled and was vastly expanded in the last decades of the twentieth century. Basic norms of civility and propriety, such as definitions of accepted levels of dress or undress, are comparable to the rest of Europe and the West in general. A crucial aspect of spoken exchange in Spanish is selective use of the formal you usted, pl.

The formal form was once used by the young to their seniors even in the family but this is now uncommon. Outside of the family, the formal is used in situations of social distance and inequality, including age inequalities, and it is often used reciprocally by both parties as a sign of respect for social distance rather than a mark of one party's superiority. Table etiquette for most occasions is informal by many European standards.

People who eat together do so with relative intimacy and unpretension. Even in many restaurants, but especially at home, diners share certain kinds of dishes from a common platter: certain appetizers, salads, and traditionally paella. Verbal etiquette—to say to others "que aproveche " "may it benefit you" —is reserved for people who are not sharing food at the same table: it is an etiquette of separation rather than inclusion. Eaters may say to an outsider "Si le guste" "would you like some? Spaniards have long accepted the independence of women. Instead, in the latter case, the outsider would simply be told, "come and eat.

Religious Beliefs. Spain has been a profoundly Catholic country for centuries, and Catholicism was the official religion for most of recent history until after the death of Franco. Church and state were separated briefly under both the First and Second Republics, but their lasting separation did not begin until the constitution took effect. Even though their numbers have grown, non-Catholics in Spain today probably number less than 2 percent of the populace.

Under Franco, regulations concerning the practice of other religions relegated them to near invisibility even while they were not outlawed. Today non-Catholics practice openly. Although the vast majority of Spaniards are Catholics, there is great variance in the degree to which baptized Spaniards are observant and in the style of their devotions. The economic and political powers of the Church have promoted deep anticlericalism among many believing Catholics, often setting regions, smaller localities, or households, as well as different social classes, against one another. The differing politics of Spanish Catholicism give different sectors of the population different profiles even when basic religiosity itself is not at issue.

The complex Catholic tradition admits private forms of devotion along with the more public and collective forms, so that even small populations see and tolerate some internal diversity in religious practice. There are also nonbelievers. The current environment encourages a freer expression of nonbelief than has been usual except briefly in the last centuries, and some young parents do not baptize their children. This is not necessarily very common; the number of baptisms performed in Spain has shown some decline, but so has the birthrate. All Spaniards of whatever faith live in a Catholic environment—a landscape filled with shrines and churches; an artistic heritage rich in religious reference; language and customs in which folklore and religious lore converge; chiefly secular festivals that are enacted on a religious calendar; and a national history accurately construed as the defense of Christianity, with the Catholic Church a central presence from century to century.

Students of Spain, visitors, and practitioners of other faiths must all understand this Catholic environment if they are to understand Spanish national culture. Religious Practitioners. In an overwhelmingly Catholic country, the religious practitioners are members of the Church hierarchy, the ordinary clergy, and members of the monastic orders both monks and nuns. The monastic orders are very important in sponsoring institutions of primary and secondary education. The clergy, of course, serve the entire population beginning at parish level. The hierarchy of religious officialdom has its pinnacle in the Vatican and the office of Pope. The clergy and officialdom of minority religions—Jewish, Muslim, various Protestant denominations, and others—are also present to openly serve their adherents.

They are, however, very few in number. Rituals and Holy Places. Spanish pueblos, from hamlets to large cities, and many neighborhoods within population centers, all have patron saints each of whose days occasions a public festival, or fiesta. These fiestas punctuate the year and, along with weddings, comprised the principal events of traditional social life, especially in rural areas. Fiestas are both religious and secular in nature and usually involve feasting on both public and household levels as well as the celebration of masses. Some populations sponsor bullfights or other public entertainments on major fiestas. Shrines, from caves or country huts to elaborate structures, and churches, from village parish churches to cathedrals, are the holy places of Spanish Catholicism.

Their fiestas are scattered through the year and do not involve the nation or necessarily even a whole town or region. Overarching Church fiestas that engage the whole populace are such official Church holidays as Easter, Christmas, or Corpus Cristi, for a few examples, and the day of Santiago the Apostle Saint James the Greater , the national patron, on 25 July. These national religious holidays are celebrated by formal masses but also with varied local traditions throughout the nation.

Catholic masses themselves are largely universal rituals not subject to significant local variance. Spaniards are covered by a national health care system which today serves virtually the entire population. Folklorists and ethnographers have studied a wealth of folk beliefs regarding causes and cures of illness, but it is rare that people in any corner of the nation forego their free medical coverage to depend solely on folk cures or curers. The use of herbal remedies and knowledgeable but medically untrained midwives or bonesetters may persist, but only alongside the widespread patronage of pharmacies and medical practitioners.

Scholars of folk medical systems and beliefs can find rich material in Spain, but this in no way marks Spaniards as primitive users unaware of the benefits of mainstream modern medicine. Many of Spain's major festivals have a dual quality whereby essentially secular festivals are enacted at times that have religious meaning as well. Every day of the year is associated with one or more saints or holy meanings in the Catholic calendar, yet some of the events that take place on specified religious holidays have a distinctly secular quality—bullfights on fiesta days; the king's official birthday A family enjoys vin cau, or mulled wine, after a large family meal. Meals, especially the midday comida and late-evening cena, are important gathering times in Spain.

Spain's most secular national holiday is 12 October, the celebration of Hispanidad, or the Hispanization of the New World following Columbus's landfall on that day in But true to form, many Spaniards also celebrate the very popular Virgin of El Pilar on 12 October, either because they are named for her, live around Zaragoza of which she is patroness , or belong to a guild or other group such as the Civil Guard of which she is the designated patroness. Support for the Arts. Spain's artistic production has recovered rapidly from the stultifying Franco years when many artists, writers, and musicians worked in exile. Madrid and Barcelona both count among Europe's stellar museum cities.

The arts receive both government and private support; major artists are treated as celebrities, and the humanities and fine arts are all firmly instituted in universities and professional academies, along with a multitude of local, regional, and national museums. Spanish writers from the Middle Ages to the present have contributed to the inventory of literary masterpieces of the West. There are early monuments of vernacular literature from the Middle Ages, as well, that enlighten the study of medieval Europe as a whole. Graphic Arts. Contemporary painters and sculptors have an avid following in Spain and elsewhere. The decorative arts also form a rich part of Spain's national heritage and are well displayed in museums in Spain and elsewhere.

Ceramic tile, other ceramic forms, lace work, weavings, embroidery, and other craft art often form the chief adornments in Spanish homes, are part of the traditional trousseau personal possessions of a bride , and are the treasures passed down the generations. More than painting and sculpture, these are forms to which even humble Spaniards have intense attachments and whose style and motifs often serve as emblems of national or regional identity. Performance Arts. Web Hosting. Free Options:. This easy-to-use platform will make it simple to recreate websites with built-in tools, however, there is no full publicly-facing option available. Making content publicly available requires hosting space such as the LAMP stack see below. Developers may create their own websites in Cascade Server, tailored to the specific needs of their units.

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