Cultures of Nature: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Wildlives in Francoist Spain

Cultures of Nature studies the diverse and conflicting ways in which Iberian wildlife was conceived, imagined, appropriated, managed, reshaped, and interacted with, as the object of modern cultural and economic practices in Spain during Francoism and the Spanish transition to democracy. The book highlights the (re-)emergence, transformation, and consolidation of modern cultures of nature during a period in which the territories governed by the Spanish state were subjected to processes of intense agro-industrialization and touristification under the relative control of the Francoist regime and the social and professional groups most intimately attached to it. It analyses a great variety of cultural objects and materials from twentieth-century Spain including narrative fiction, nonfiction, poetry, scientific and philosophical writing, feature and documentary films, photography, and hunting guides to provide a new cultural-environmental understanding of a metamorphic period in the history of human-wildlife relations. Iberian studies professor Daniel Ares-López proposes a new cultural- and environmental-critical approach to the study of wildlife and twentieth-century Spain that looks into the recent past to better understand the current socioenvironmental crisis and the failure of capitalist modernizing projects as civilizational endeavours in a multispecies world.