Cooperative work in a Portuguese northern village

Abstract

Undeslying the analysis of a certain kind of work feast is the problem of knowing how certain local historical data can be used in order to fill up and enlarge the study of the current social relations. A second problem, more general, to be considered concerns the importance of history and the comparative method for studying the communities specifically Mediterranean. Though, in the present phase o fhis research, the author may only suggest hints for the analysis, the problems forwarded in this article are basic issues within a zone of anthropology that may dispose of a large set of archives, either local or national. The main question implicit in the analysis, made by the author, of the structure of cooperative work in a Portuguese village is as follows: considering the important ethnographic facts and the significative facts of the recent history, has this community ever been, in its past, as egalitarian as it seems to be nowadays? And this first question stirs another one: in which proportion even the Iberian communities more openly «egalitarian» have had any kind of stratification? These questions made it indispensable to collect and analyse data of local ground, so that one might establish a detailed comparison between specific Mediterranean communities, a task admittedly absent from the studies on the Mediterranean. Dealing with these questions the author paid attention to two elements of the social structure of a Portuguese community: the first being the free reciprocal work and corn thrashing in August as examples of a system of egalitarian relations among «equals» of the villagge and, secondly, two kinds of historical data that give evidence as to the existance, at least long time ago, of a social system straightly hierarchized and stratified.