Entrepreneurship and regional development in Europe: A comparative, socio-anthropological case study in Germany and Spain
Richard Pfeilstetter
University of Seville, rgp@us.es
Abstract
This paper summarises the design, data and results of our research on the emergence and consolidation of forms of institutionalisation based on innovative entrepreneurial action in rural European territorial contexts. The investigation was conducted between the years 2006 and 2010. We present data obtained in two territorial references, the regions of Los Pedroches in Andalusia, Spain and Mühldorf in Bavaria, Germany. The paper explores the contributions of social anthropology to prevailing economic entrepreneurship theory by focusing on intangible, cultural variables that influence the implementation of local entrepreneurial initiatives. Presenting data from a case study of two European rural areas of different levels of economic development, the text argues that entrepreneurial research needs to incorporate qualitative data on the sociocultural preconditions of emerging innovative institutions. The research emphasises the need for a broader concept of entrepreneurial behaviour that is able to overcome the reductionist idea of firm creation, and presents a theoretical model for actor-based territorial development studies founded on the combined social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu.
KEYWORDS: entrepreneurship; anthropology of development; regional development
Introduction
The context from which our research emerged is the growing preoccupation of administration, academics, and politics with regard to the ways of measuring intangible or non-economic variables in development processes. The growing criticism of the reduction of Gross Domestic Product as the only indicator of wealth has produced new ways of thinking about development, which has led to new concepts such as sustainable development or social capital. Meanwhile, nobody doubts the importance of incorporating sociocul-tural data for measuring grades of development and design of development strategies, but there is no consensus over the importance of sociocultural data or how to quantify and incorporate it. The popularity of social capital as a concept, as well as its wide variety of
ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS 19 (1): 45-57. ISSN 1408-032X
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definitions and applications, illustrates this problem well (Pfeilstetter 2008). Our research offers an example for how to measure relevant socio-cultural data for development by employing anthropological fieldwork methodology.
The consideration of social and cultural variables in development research gives increased importance to a perspective focused on actors. Recently, the entrepreneur has become one of the most popular key players responsible for socio-economic change in small territories. Other disciplines such as economics, sociology and psychology have already accumulated experience with entrepreneurship as a field of research (Shane & Venkataraman 2000); however, in social anthropology the term essentially only appears in combination with classical groups of interest or marginalised collectives like specific ethnic groups, gender studies, etc. (Pfeilstetter 2011). In contradistinction to this tendency, our research sustains a general concept of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour, interested not only in the economic or psychological implications of the term.
Another justification of our research lies in the emergence of development studies within Europe with a regional, comparative perspective. The European Union organises its rural development programs, the different successive LEADER programs, for example, focused on economically weak and strong regions within the national and continental contexts. This relatively new institutional scenario gives greater importance to research perspectives from below and beyond the nation-state. In this sense, our research overcomes the predominant focus on quantifiable taxes of development within and between political-administrative territories. In contrast, it is a comparative case study of local conditions and results of entrepreneurship between middle European and peripheral south European regions. Moreover, the current financial crisis in Europe elevates the importance of north-south comparison in development theory and practice.
The theories of Bourdieu and Luhmann applied on actor-based regional development studies
Our research dealt with three central concepts: the entrepreneur as a privileged agent for development, the region as a spatial reference capable of qualitative field work, and the idea of development itself as a particular type of social change. Next is a short but necessary reductionist overview on current discussions in social sciences related to these three topics. Special emphasis is given to how social anthropology and a theoretical model based simultaneously on Niklas Luhmann's and Pierre Bourdieu's social theory can supply new ways of thinking about entrepreneurship and regional development. The episte-mological, basic research that justifies the convenience and congruence of such a theoretical model was the exclusive objective of a previous paper (Pfeilstetter 2012).
Economically and psychological conceptualisations of the entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship in specialised literature is mostly reduced to the creation of firms by individuals embedded in a politically liberal capitalist market environment (Austin, Stevenson &Wei-Skillern 2006). Not only had common sense led to this reductionist notion but
also the predominance of economics and business administration as academic disciplines in entrepreneurship studies. Likewise, entrepreneurial behaviour is mainly described in specialised literature as being economically motivated, or the result of a special kind of personality, explored and reiterated by psychologically founded academic research. From a socio-anthropological point of view, human motivation in general and entrepreneurial behaviour in particular cannot be explained only by rational economic calculation or by psychological variables. Individual action has to be understood by attending to an analysis of the social and cultural environment, which works as a guideline for social behaviour. Therefore, the actor itself is a product and producer of this socio-cultural structure. Essentially, this is what one of the most influent sociologist of the last century, Pierre Bourdieu (1972), means with his habitus concept.
The idea of territory as administrative space or community
In contrast, studies on entrepreneurship mainly choose a spatial dimension that correlates with administrative categories for their investigation. Towns and cities, counties, states, and nations serve as geographic references in which entrepreneurial behaviour is located and registered. The advantages of what may be called the 'nation-state administrative view' on territory are the existence of statistical data, consequently the possibility of comparison between regions, and finally the possibility of avoiding difficult and always reproachable decisions on territories defined by distinct variables rather than legal national divisions of space (Allen, Masse & Cochrane 1998). The problem with this kind of space-conceptualisation is that it takes non-scientific, political categories for granted and applies them as objective categories. In contrast, we can find a community-based regional focus of entrepreneurship studies in specialised literature. Their concept of space relies on the idea of local societies, which constitute a microcosm of kinship, friendship, pertinence to a cultural community based on corporal and spatial proximity in neighbourhoods, quarters, districts, towns, villages, etc. The problem with this notion of space, predominant in many anthropological research settings, is the reification of community in order to obtain a coherent target for academic inquiries. This symbiosis between local society and space is impossible to sustain because empirical data always demonstrates multiple, socially constructed boundaries of ethnic groups (Barth 1969).
Empiricism and academicism in development research
Development, commonly understood as planned social change, is not only difficult to define but even more so to measure. The world's largest institutions related to development politics, such as the World Bank or the United Nations, have pluralised their indicators, which had historically only taken into GDP account. The UN Human Development Index and the UN Agenda 21 are examples for this paradigmatic change:
Commonly used indicators such as the gross national product (GNP) and measurements of individual resource or pollution flows do not provide adequate indications of sustainability. Methods for assessing interactions between different sectoral environmental, demographic, social and developmental
parameters are not sufficiently developed or applied. Indicators of sustainable development need to be developed to provide solid bases for decision making at all levels and to contribute to a self-regulating sustainability of integrated environment and development systems (Agenda 21, paragraph 40.4).
However, the new consensuses on the requirement of social, cultural and psychological variables to complete the material indicators for wealth have yet to establish any agreement on how to calculate grades of development today. Administrations and institutions related to development have established indicators and indexes on, for example, social capital or environmental issues and introduced them into their empirical, macro-structural, mathematical models on global or country based grades of development. The report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe on 'Measuring sustainable development' (2009) is a good example of such an approach. Academic experts on this, we may call them soft indicators of development, and generally criticise these holistic models in allusion to the complexity of social, cultural and environmental variables. While institutionalised development politics is in need of expertise and data to enable making decisions, even if there are still doubts about their validity, social scientists in the academic world can maintain a complete distance to development programs by merely criticising and evaluating the intervention done by others. Both actors, as we can see, have their specific way of conceptualising development in ways that have a great deal to do with their professional position.
A theoretical model based on Luhmann and Bourdieu
Facing this conceptual landscape, we decided to choose a macro-theoretical framework able to incorporate all of the three main theoretical issues underlying our research. Therefore, we decided to develop a theoretical model based on the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann. The first articulations of such a model had already been conducted in previous work (Nassehi & Nollmann 2004). Further developed and applied to our research topics, this larger theoretical framework promised to overcome several problems in actor-centred regional development studies.
We conceptualised the idea of space or territory according to Bourdieu and Luh-mann's theories of social fields and systems. Under this perspective, territoriality is no longer solely a question of administrative, juridical limits nor a synonym for a community. Social fields and systems understand and think of space as a social construct constituted by self-referential communication and social positions within this space competing for specific forms of capital, e.g. money, power, fame, etc. Moreover, the agency in the form of the entrepreneur is conceptualised in a more abstract term: Habitus as a personality formed by and oriented towards social structure. This is, put otherwise, socialisation as a continual process of interaction between agency, and structure. This is a theoretical foundation for a distinct approach on entrepreneurship. Ultimately, we think of development not as a cumulus of data on material and non-material indicators at a macro-structural level. Rather, we conceptualise development according to the idea of conflict articulated by Bourdieu: social change is a conflict (as a sociological category) between central and
peripheral positions within a social field. Therefore, innovative entrepreneurial behaviour leads to the development of a region as a result of actors (individuals and groups with certain socialised habitus) that create dissent among local social and cultural settled ways of thinking, speaking and acting. We can say that communication in Luhmann's sense is fundamental to society and subsequently the tool for social change.
Figure 1: Combined theoretical model from Bourdieu and Luhmann applied on agency based regional development studies
In Figure 1, we visualised the theoretical model underlying our research. We recognise three constitutive, related dimensions of our research and different grades of theoretical abstraction within these dimensions. Our research design decided to opt for the most general categories in order to overcome some of the theoretical difficulties with classifications used ordinarily in actor-based regional development studies.
Qualitative and comparative research design in two rural European regions
Using this model, our research defines three main research objectives: 1) social and cultural practices underlying emergence and institutionalisation of local innovative initiatives; 2) the socio-cultural conditions under which these processes take place; 3) grades of impact on the local social and cultural structure accompanying the consolidation of new organisations.
For an empirical reference, we decided to analyse rural regions in Europe that had been targeted by European development programs. These regions are particularly salient for development research because of their underdevelopment in relation to their immediate national and regional environment. At the same time, a direct comparison between these regions enables us to compare an economically strong, developed rural region with a weak rural region, both of which are located within a common socio-political-juridical and economical context, in this case the European Union and the euro area. We have opted to focus on southern Bavaria, the strongest area within Germany, the strongest
European economy and a central European region, and compare it with one of the weakest developed regions in Europe, i.e. southern Spain, particularly northern Andalucía. The regions of Los Pedroches and Mühldorf were selected as the scenarios for our research because they fulfilled all of these criteria. At the same time, there was the practical possibility for prolonged residence, indispensable for anthropological fieldwork, in both regions (see map one and two).
regions of Los Pedroches and Mühldorf
Our empirical research was conducted in four intervals between May 2007 and December 2010 both in Germany and Spain. We applied three principle research methodologies: as a first step, we conducted quantitative research of secondary data in both territories to obtain an approximate knowledge of the specific territorialised conditions of social structure, local culture, economy, politics, population, geography, history etc. General non-directive interviews where organised with key actors of both regions in the fields of religion, economy, politics, and civil society, to name a few.
Next, in order to understand the motivations for entrepreneurial action that lead to the consolidation of innovative institutions, we performed an intensive case study of twenty-four initiatives, twelve from each region. As third and fourth steps, we analysed the consolidation of the initiatives in relation to their own territorial context and then compared to the territorial counterpart that we have paired. Both steps drew upon the theoretical comparative analysis from data obtained in the previous stages of our research. In Figure 3, we visually summarise our research design. It illustrates the relation between methodology, empirical references and the different types of data we produced. In conjunction with Figure 1, we can consider the theoretical foundation of our research design.
Figure 3: Research design and methodological model
Empirical data on entrepreneurship and development in Spain and Germany
By analysing secondary data on general structural conditions in both territories, we identified fields of differences and similarities between the two regions. Consequently, we could then compare the entrepreneurial behaviours to obtain generalisable knowledge about rural development in Europe throughout emerging innovative organisations.
Rural regions in Europe can be understood as a socio-geographic variable between the community and the state. The Spanish-German example shows that the administrative structure of the member states is not always comparable due to different geographic scales and different competencies assigned to these regions. The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) utilised by the European Union makes note of this inability:
For practical reasons to do with data availability and the implementation of regional policies, the NUTS nomenclature is based primarily on the institutional divisions currently in force in the Member States (normative criteria). . NUTS excludes specific territorial units and local units in favour of regional units of a general nature (European Commission 2010)
The Spanish mancomunidad is hardly articulated as an administrative structure; yet, in the specific case of Los Pedroches it has both strong socio-cultural as well as ecological significance. The German Landkreis is a historically consolidated political and administrative level. However, in the case of Mühldorf, we believe Upper Bavaria represents a more relevant socio-cultural sphere for the population. This is mainly because Mühldorf does not represent a valid criterion for ecological or historical classification of space.
This incongruence between the two cases leads to distinct possibilities and restrictions for entrepreneurship within these socio-geographical environments. Generally, we could say that strong, low-scale administrative articulation on a regional level, as in the
German case, as well as cultural and ecologically grown regional identification, as in Los Pedroches, is an essential resource for the emerging institutionalisation of new ideas for the entrepreneur. When we compare the political conditions between both territories, it is necessary to note that entrepreneurial activity in Mühldorf as in Los Pedroches must deal with local and regional governments that have been invariant for decades. Political power is reproduced within the same parties and people over long periods of time, which explains the need for good networking among entrepreneurs, who need institutional support for the creation of new institutions. Ideological orientations of "left" and "right", progressive or conservative in local governments, in fact, have little importance on local politics.
Taking into account the macro-socio-geographical conditions of rural entrepre-neurship in Europe, our comparative case study shows the difference between core and peripheral positions. These spatial positions largely determine the demographic and economic development in rural areas. Meanwhile, the local self-perception of the populations in both regions is that of the "countryside", suggesting that they are less developed in relation to the different urban scales of reference. Mühldorf, situated in the centre of Europe and within the economically strong, developed south of Germany relies on positive demographic development, plain employment tax policies, and mainly distributes its work force in industry and services. In contrast, Los Pedroches is part of the peripheral south of Europe, is located in historically underdeveloped Andalusia, and has had to support a rural exodus in its recent history. A quarter of the active population is unemployed, and agriculture and livestock are the principle economic resources of the region. Both are European rural scenarios, yet they produce different expectations, possibilities, and ways of understanding innovation.
By analysing the self-perception of both regions that is promoted by the administration, represented by major institutions and cultivated by the population, we found that in the German case the identification as "rural" comes in direct opposition to the urban surrounding. Mühldorf recognises the advantages of its countryside lifestyle and its geographic proximity to urban surroundings. Thus, Mühldorf understands its capacity for development largely in the relation between urban and rural structure. In the Spanish case, proximity to urban centres does not exist, and rurality in this way is a fact, not a development strategy. In Los Pedroches, local ecological and cultural elements are used as a resource for tourism and commercialising food products and constitute the main driving force for local identification and institutionalised promotion of the region.
Taking a look at the institutions dedicated to the promotion of entrepreneurship in its communities, the German case shows us the existence of a system of political, administrative and associative self-organisation. Three principal actors exist to offer logistical support for entrepreneurs: elected regional government, national administration at the regional level, and professional organisations. In the Spanish case by contrast, we see a less strengthened professional network, the absence of a regional government, and a strong municipal articulation of local politics.
Next, we will consider these distinct entrepreneurial environments in order to present the data related to our case study of concrete initiatives and their processes of consolidation. The results show differing innovative impacts on the social and economic
structures of each location. However, we would first like to present some general observations on the actors of institutionalised innovation in both territories. Our case study showed that most of the entrepreneurs had accumulated work experience before they took the decision to create a new institution. This contrasts with the common assumption that the typical entrepreneur is a young individual. Most of the emerging institutions that we analysed were managed by individuals with a family and either living or working experience in more than just one place. Therefore, they commonly returned to their places of origin or are new residents of the region, which can be attributed to various, mainly personal but sometimes also economic, reasons. Entrepreneurs in our case study have a high level of formal education, are actively involved in local and regional public life (in culture, sports, politics, etc.), and represent a lifestyle more common to modern urban life than to the idea of local settled traditional rural attitude. The entrepreneurs we got to know both in Andalusia and Bavaria had high communicative and empathic capacities. For this reason, they are able to interact with different social systems, whether academic, politic, administrative or economic.
In the end, we could distinguish two main types of living circumstances that are favourable for entrepreneurship. First, we encountered the new institution in the form of family project that is formed and sustained by a group of people who are related through economic ties and often associated with one or two households, for example a family business. This includes new businesses initiated by children of families with an already settled business. The second setting that we established is the female entrepreneur who, once finished with maternity leave and its subsequent interruption of the professional career, searches for a self-satisfying occupation that is compatible with family life or offers a means of self-realisation. In each of our cases in both Germany and Spain, en-trepreneurship within the familiar context represents a general strategy for confronting subsistence. Individuals and families traditionally related to firm creation do not tend to perceive themselves as entrepreneurs. Thus, the creation of a new institution is not an explicit decision, rather more of a "normal" way of life. This data confirmed the idea of entrepreneurship is a specific socialised and non-reflexive habitus.
Our theoretical model for examining the various forms of entrepreneurship is upheld when we consider the economic and sociocultural stimulation for entrepreneur-ship that exists in each region. Entrepreneurship creates new products and services for the region. Likewise, it is an indispensable tool for control and improvement of public politics. Additionally, entrepreneurship stimulates public life by articulating and channelling different preoccupations of local civil society. Some of the initiatives of greater cultural, social and economic impact from a development point of view are unique and non-lucrative initiatives, however. For instance, the cases of the blogger-entrepreneur and the civic platform for improving public transportation infrastructure in Los Pedroches shows that at times these forms of entrepreneurial activity do not conform to traditional theories and definitions of entrepreneurship.
The impact that entrepreneurship has on the local socio-economic structure depends on the general complexity of the territory. In the Spanish case, we could see that a less complex structure of firms and associations, as well as low population density, leads
to fewer entrepreneurial initiatives and to a greater impact on local society of these fewer existing innovative initiatives. Two of the sociocultural initiatives we analysed in Los Pedroches generated a great deal of political transformation with significant economic results for the region. General systems theory applied on regional development like that proposed by Elías Zamora (2009) can explain not only the greater dependency on influences from outside of a less complex region but also the significant impact that emerging organisations may have on the local economic and sociocultural structure.
Conclusion: Results and ideas for promoting entrepreneurship in rural regions of Europe
When we first summarised the strictly academic results of our research, we reaffirmed the necessity of entrepreneur research on rural territories by applying a theoretical model based on Luhmann and Bourdieu. We assert that the use of a social system or field benefits the process of conceptualising space in rural development studies. It enables studies to integrate different lectures of territories by considering cultural, ecological, administrative, and economic dimensions. The hábitus or autopoiesis concepts with respect to entrepreneurial action force research to maintain a theoretical objectification of institutionalised innovation. This is because they require both an objective focus on the social positions of subjects within a field as well as the analysis of the institutional discourse during the process of consolidation. Our theoretical model conceptualises regional development as social evolution. It therefore focuses on conflicts over capital within a field as well as new forms of communication that bring complexity from outside the region to the local social structure. Entrepreneurial activity in this broader anthropological sense of the term is a core driver of social change. Our paradigm differs considerably from the more explicit psychological and economical entrepreneurship concepts commonly used in academia. It allows entrepreneurial research to incorporate the analysis of wider social and cultural implications that result from the consolidation of institutions. This consideration is often underrepresented in this field of knowledge due to the great epistemological difficulty of measuring this kind of data.
Qualitative data analysis of regional development in relation with the emergence of innovative institutions focuses on the socio-cultural preconditions of entrepreneurship, which are generally underestimated. In many ways, this is the regional and local context in which entrepreneurship happens. Likewise, one cannot truly evaluate and understand this dimension by analysing solely quantitative data. In other words, local and regional societies have their own particular structure of values, governance, networks, and education, which may be favourable to or slow down entrepreneurial behaviour. In this case, ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation are useful forms of analysing these social structures at play. However, the agency of entrepreneurship itself has to be understood as a socio-cultural product that additionally acts as a producer of local and regional culture and society. Qualitative case studies are the most effective means of understanding this deeper social and cultural motivation in the creation of new firms, networks, social movements or associations. In contrast, a quantitative approach often overestimates psychological and economical motivations of entrepreneurship. This kind of research
design relies on previously established dimensions of measurement and cannot obtain data through experiencing and coexisting with the phenomena that are supposed to be explored. The comparison of cultural variables underlying entrepreneurship in different geographic contexts allows us to see the diversity and particularity of entrepreneurial behaviour. From this perspective, we also gain an understanding of institutionalisation as a privileged mode of how modern societies process social change. As a result, the main sources of data under analysis in this context of entrepreneurial research draw upon the following: familiar circumstances, biographic particularities, social expectations, and personal networks. In addition, it is necessary to take into account the sense and logic social actors themselves relate to their actions as entrepreneurs, which is not merely a rational calculus or neural precondition.
As a final point, I would like to propose some of ideas for promoting entrepreneurship in rural European regions, based on the relational evaluation of data both in Germany and Spain. The condition and self-identification of rurality is related to a socio-cultural hierarchy between the core and the periphery. In this distinction, the peripheral population does not share the idea of development as a road to converting itself into a centre, which would possibly distort the regional identity. However, there seems to be a certain consensus that infrastructures of communication with the centre should have maximum priority, whether the idea of centre materialises as the urban, industry, political-administrative epicentres, territories with plain employment policies, etc. or communication means public transport, internet infrastructure, etc. In the German as well as in the Spanish case, we could see that railroad and road mobility was the primordial force able to mobilise and agglutinate a critical mass of citizens. A key strategy for rapid superregional success will be entrepreneurial initiatives that work with the common interest of the population by channelling it in new social, political and/or economic institutions.
Secondly, our data showed us that innovative institutions often are founded by either immigrants or "returners", i.e. individuals who grew up or lived in the region then emigrated and returned. In both cases, the life and work experience of these individuals introduces ideas from outside to the region. The added advantage of returners is their ability to translate and embed entrepreneurial activity in the local social structure. This data made us think about the brain drain paradigm, which only focuses on the problems of emigration and not its possible advantages. Furthermore, the local administration should think about the possibility of active politics that promote both the emigration and attraction of human capital. Administrations should record and follow migratory movements of the population. The local territory can benefit by registering the professional and educational qualifications of its population and establishing a kind of voluntary "alumni" system. This would enable the region to organise and foment the introduction of complexity, in Luhmann's sense of social evolution, from outside the region by regressing population.
Finally, our research shed light on a stereotypical conception of the entrepreneur. The notion of the young individual with never-before-seen, revolutionary ideas is largely an ideological product of our time, a mythical cultural hero, rather than a representative empirical phenomenon. Also, we identified through our case study that the primary agents
of entrepreneurship were adult individuals with previous working experience. Therefore, a need exists to reorient public politics so that they foment entrepreneurship in the form of "senior entrepreneurs", with their own specific expectations and needs.
In conclusion, we can say that the solutions to such complex phenomena like rural development and entrepreneurship should not be expected from just one type of research. This paper demonstrates an anthropological approach in response to the general academic tendency towards economic, sociological and psychological investigation of entrepreneurship. In doing so, our investigation applied qualitative and comparative methodology in this field that we based on a theoretical model, which combined the theories of social systems and practices. In this sense, this study should be viewed and judged as a contribution to a wider and generalised understanding of entrepreneurship as a specific kind of human organisation that foments planned social change.
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Povzetek
Prispevek predstavlja zasnovo, podatke in rezultate našega raziskovanja pojava ter konsolidacije oblik institucionalizacije, ki temeljijo na inovativnih podjetniških akcijah v ruralnih evropskih kontekstih. Zbiranje podatkov je potekalo med letoma 2006 in 2010, v prispevku pa so predstavljeni podatki dveh regij, Los Pedroches v Andaluziji, Španija ter Mühldorf na Bavarskem, Nemčija. Prispevek proučuje doprinose socialne antropologije k prevladujočim teorijam gospodarskega podjetništva, s tem, da se osredotoča na neoprijemljive, kulturne spremenljivke, ki vplivajo na implementacijo lokalnih podjetniških iniciativ. S predstavitvijo podatkov dveh evropskih ruralnih regij na različnih stopnjah ekonomskega razvoja, želimo pokazati, da preučevanje podjetništva zahteva vključitev kvalitativnih podatkov o družbeno-kulturnih predpogojih vzhajajočih inovativnih institucij. Raziskava poudarja potrebo po širšem konceptu podjetniškega vedenja, s katerim je mogoče preseči zgolj redukcionistično idejo ustanovitve podjetja ter predstaviti teoretski model študij razvoja regij, ki se osredotoča na akterje in temelji na kombinaciji družbenih teorij Niklasa Luhmanna ter Pierra Bourdieuja.
KLJUČNE BESEDE: podjetništvo, antropologija razvoja, regionalni razvoj
CORRESPONDENCE: RICHARD PFEILSTETTER, Department for Social Anthropology, University of Seville, C/ Dña. María de Padilla s/n, E-41004 Sevilla, Spain. E-mail: rgp@us.es.