Nostalgic Tales of the Elderly and Their Reclaiming by Local Youth. The Example of Soule, a Valley in the Basque Pyrenees

The aim of this article is to analyze the nostalgic narratives of elderly people living in Soule (Xiberoa in Basque), a valley in the Basque Pyrenees. It is based on ethnographic research that has enabled me to retrieve the life stories of elderly people, whose strong need to tell talk about their past lives can be explained by their dismay at the economic, social, and cultural changes they have faced in the course of their lives. An analysis of the themes structuring these discourses can help make sense of the effects of the sudden and belated transition from a subsistence economy to economic, social, and cultural “modernity” experienced by this isolated mountain valley from the late 1970s onwards. Their most painful lamentations concern the loss of neighborhood ties, the landscape “dirtied” by the rarefaction of transhumant pastoralism, and the replacement of the Basque language of Soule by the French. The non-recognition of their own “country” is addressed in this article through an anthropological contextualization of their lamentations. More broadly, the aim is to consider the unprecedented effects of the nostalgic discourses of the elderly on a certain section of the region’s youth, who seek to remain living in Soule by reviving the economic, social and cultural structures of the “world before”, that of their grandparents. The troubled times seem to have transformed this long-despised peasant past into an ideal way of life for a youth disappointed by the great promises of modernity.