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From intentional community to ecovillage: tracing the Rainbow movement in Spain

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Abstract

The Rainbow is a global community that emerged with the hippie movement in the 1960s. Although it originated and largely developed in the USA, it soon expanded to Europe. Due to the political context in Spain, the Rainbow was weak there until the reestablishment of democracy in 1975, when it was spurred by the creation of various communes throughout the country. This paper explores the issue of heritage in one of the earliest and most iconic Rainbow villages in Spain, Matavenero, asking whether notions of heritage emerge in Rainbow contexts. In doing so, it contributes to critical geography of heritage and intentional communities by inquiring into the narratives about the past developed by the community and their use of space and material culture in ways that reproduce forms of segmentarity. Drawing on ethnographic methods and long-term ethnography, the paper demonstrates the absence of the notion of heritage as generally understood in Western capitalist culture and develops the concept of “a-patrimonial” processes to explain this phenomenon.

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  1. Watch documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSRYI2Wf0kc&t=2383s.

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Acknowledgements

Funding sources: Spanish national research project HAR2013-47889-C3-3-P: Poder central y poderes locales entre la antigüedad tardía y la Alta Edad Media, 400-900 D.C. El Norte de Hispania y su contexto europeo and the Spanish national research project CSO2017-85188-R: La construcción social de la calidad alimentaria: mediaciones entre la producción y el consumo en una economía basada en el conocimiento.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Heritage Sciences, CSIC, Avenida de Vigo s/n, 15771, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Pablo Alonso González

  2. IPNA-CSIC, Avenida del Astrofísico, 3, 38206, La Laguna, Spain

    Pablo Alonso González

  3. Group of Territorial Research (GET), University of A Coruña, Campus Elviña, A Coruña, Spain

    Eva Parga Dans

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  1. Pablo Alonso González
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Correspondence to Pablo Alonso González.

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Alonso González, P., Parga Dans, E. From intentional community to ecovillage: tracing the Rainbow movement in Spain. GeoJournal 84, 1219–1237 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9917-9

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