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Carmen Díez Mintegui and Margaret Bullen
The image of a supposed goddess Mari is built on the basis of mythology mainly gathered by the Basque ethnographer Joxemiel de Barandiarán. These myths concerned the Mother goddess and the Earth, which were present in the origin of a prehistoric Basque religion. This goes along with the representation of the strong Basque woman, connected to the idea that women stay put, much like caryatids who sink their roots into the soil, which is the Earth herself to sustain the social framework.1 This representation has two cultural pillars common to the Basque Country: ama lurra—Mother Earth—and etxea—the house as a physical home and as a metaphor for the people. All these topics have been the object of a number of analyses in traditional Basque ethnology, among which those of Barandiarán (1889–1991) and Julio Caro Baroja (1914–95) stand out, and there is important ideological and theoretical support to maintain this myth.2 Moreover, the existence of a Basque matriarchy is defended in public and private circles, especially whenever the topic of women’s inequality comes up and during moments of crisis and calls for change.
Matriarchy: Origin Myth, Justification to the Present European industrialization and new models of the social and sexual division of labor, as well as the modern nation-state were already consolidated by the second half of the nineteenth century. These developed simultaneously with racial theories from the new fields of physical and cultural anthropology and evolution that reconstructed the origin and history of humanity. These perspectives served to legitimize supposed Western superiority and its colonial imposition, as well as social orders and Western family models based on monogamy and patriarchal authority (considered a superior form of organization resulting from Western progress). Moreover, most evolutionist authors defended the matriarchal order as the primordial form of family social organization, there was also significant industrialization in the Basque Country, and physical anthropology had selected the supposed “Basque race” as one of its topics of study. As anthropologist Joseba Zulaika (1996) has shown all these aspects had a marked effect on the elaboration of Basque nationalism and identity. 1. Anthropologist Dolores Juliano (1993) utilizes the image of caryatids to refer to how in many analytical models women are structural supports, without being the object of any questioning or explanation. 2. In English, see Barandiarán (2007) and Caro Baroja (2009).