Josep M. Comelles : una vida transitant per una antropologia en transformació

El febrer de 2019 el Projecte Entrevistes va poder conversar llargament amb Josep Maria Comelles, un dels antropòlegs pioners en l'antropologia mèdica a Espanya i referent internacional pels seus estudis sobre les institucions psiquiàtriques. En l'entrevista Comelles ens descriu la seva infància i adolescència, per entendre el camí que el va portar de la medicina a l'antropologia. Però també ofereix la seva mirada antropològica a temes com l'homeopatia, el tractament de la salut mental o la situació de l'antropologia espanyola en el context global. Tot un recorregut per la vida i pensament d'un autor que expressa allò que pensa sempre amb llibertat.In February 2019, the Projecte Entrevistes had a large conversation with Josep Maria Comelles, pioneering anthropologist in Medical Anthropology in Spain and an international reference for his studies on psychiatric institutions. In the interview, Comelles describes their childhood and adolescence, which is fundamental to understand the path that will bring him from medicine to anthropology. He also offers his anthropological view on issues such as homeopathy, treatment of mental health or the situation of Spanish Anthropology in the global context. A whole journey through the life and thought of an author that always express freely his opinion

Reversal of economic fortunes: institutions and the changing ascendancy of Barcelona and Madrid as economic hubs

This paper looks at the divergent economic trajectories of Barcelona and Madrid since Spain's transition to democracy. It highlights how Barcelona, the city that was better positioned four decades ago to emerge as the main Spanish economic hub, has lost out to Madrid. We argue that the contrasting trajectories of the two cities have less to do with the pull of Madrid as the capital of Spain, with the development of new infrastructure in the country, or with agglomeration economies, and more with institutional factors. A growing societal divide in Barcelona along economic, social, and identity lines has led to a greater breakdown of trust and to the development of strong groups with limited capacity to bridge with one another than in Madrid. This has entailed the emergence of negative externalities that have limited the economic potential for growth in Barcelona and facilitated the rise of Madrid as the main economic hub within Spain

Is the coexistence of Catalan and Spanish possible in Catalonia?

We study the stability of Catalan and Spanish coexistence in Catalonia, a key political and economic European region. Recent, abundant empirical data of language use is analyzed within an analytic model of population dynamics. This model contemplates the possibilities of both long-term language coexistence and decline. The data needs to be interpreted under different circumstances. The most likely scenario, we find, is a sustained coexistence. Extreme cases still lead to the decline of one of the tongues–we delimit when this can happen. Asymptotic behavior is often an unreliable predictor in complex social systems; we make an attempt at forecasting fractions of speakers towards 2030. These also suggest sustained coexistence, but some counterintuitive dynamics are unveiled. Model parameters estimated from the data convey relevant information about the prestige and interlinguistic similarity of both tongues. We quantify these parameters rigorously for these languages for the first time. Remarkably, Spanish is found to have a larger prestige in areas which historically had larger Catalan monolingual communities. With limited, spatially-segregated data we examine more fine grained dynamics, thus better addressing the likely outcomes. Differences in model parameters across regions reveal how the two languages are perceived in more urban or rural environments