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“A village of less than 1,000 people in the Pyrenees foothills generally evokes nostalgic themes in Catalan identity as well as in anthropological perspectives. Yet, by carefully teasing apart complex changes and contexts through decades of memories and engaged fieldwork, Robertson provides a rich ethnography that challenges reductionist models of tradition, European rural life, continental development, and anthropology as a field. The author brings Mieres to life through both pictorial detail and social investigation, as fairs give way to swap meets and celebrations lose older markers but incorporate new members and memberships within a shifting tension of rural autonomy, global markets, and metropolitan claims on ‘bedroom villages.’ This book--equally insightful with memories of repression and division during and after the Civil War (miseria) and with descriptions of contemporary ‘hippies,’ cell phones, and transnationalism--becomes a human, accessible text for students both in its evocation of people, lifeways, interpretations, and futures in this small but complicated village, and in its sense of the anthropologist as knowledgeable participant observer. A welcome addition—and challenge—to European studies bridging processes and memories in the 21st century. Recommended.”
—CHOICE
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