There was a copistería in front of the Faculty of Sciences that had hung on the wall, one after another, all the ons of one of the wildest engineering in the entire Spanish university system. I used to look at them while waiting. And I know it may seem boring, but there was nothing more fascinating than seeing how the people of the cloister were changing, but the surnames did not.
Yes, yes. It is an exaggeration, an easy stereotype. But it is also true. And not only in college: Endogamy is one of those recurrent phenomena of the social life of our country.
A long history. As They explained a few years ago Professor Javier Barnes and economist Fernando Faces, “that in Spain the rules of the game for the contests and awards of contracts are based on norms of a century and a half ago, of 1870, it gives us an idea of how much we need to renew ourselves.” It is not a bug, it is a feature.
It is a well -known anthropological technology to reinforce the power of a group of people. And that is why not only affects The municipalities, Companies or the university: endogamy came to provoke The extinction of the Habsburg Dynasty Branch. What we did not know is that it was something so old.
When was innovamy invented? We do not know, but we are close to discovering it. After analyzing 24 buried individuals In the Zaragoza necropolis of the Castellets II, an international team of specialists has found a possible response to all this.
And it is that up to two thirds of the individuals were related to each other. But there were not only parents and children, there were kinships of fifth and sixth grade. That means that Mequinenza’s mound was used as a mausoleum of an extensive family, as a kind of central funeral node of a dense filiation structure.
It is the first direct evidence of inbreeding practices at the end of the era of bronze in the peninsular. What does this mean? That the peninsular of that time were discovering the most basic version of Endogamy: leaders who consolidate their status marrying each other.
“Such levels of consanguinity had not registered in previous periods of the Iberian Prehistory,” The researchers say.
The big change. Metals have always been metals. “Prehistory is the period of the history of humanity from our origins to the appearance of the first bureaucratic states,” Archaeologist Rodrigo Villalobos explained. And what we are seeing in Mequinenza is how these states begin to take shape.
This allows us to know things about Endogamy, of course. Nothing new in ethnographic terms, but something key that affects us today.
Endogamy is still alive because it is an extremely effective method to ensure the stability of social structures. It has associated costs, but They are long -term costs. In the medium term, they are usually more than assumable.
But beyond: the interesting thing is that, like supports the investigationendogamic practices are practical sensitive “Legal systems and administrative practices”. It is not an irreformable curse. This leads us to a deeper question: do we really want to change it?
Image | Meressa Chartrand
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