Murky reasons

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For a company like this one can hardly find more than the worst reasons: digging out old curiosities, looking for traits that differentiate us from our neighbors and glorify them because they are ours and not others, traffic in the picturesque. Traditions, popular culture, folklore, ethnography, anthropology, ethnohistory. These and even more names are given to what interests us, to what this magazine is going to track in La Rioja.

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No sign

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And what does La Rioja have in particular? Our hallmarks are not very categorical. We did not win or lose them in any famous battle, we do not have an immemorial father, nor an invincible leader, nor a particular language, nor even an exclusive hat. Perhaps we live in a truly "historical" Community that is content to be the fruit of a story, rather than denying it or inventing it. The glosas, the wine, the jota, the ball game, the Way to Compostela, the Ebro, the Sonsierra and the Cameros are ours and they belong to others; We have received the consolation prize of being a melting pot, a crossroads or a potpourri.

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Lack of cultivation

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Well, it would be difficult for us to do this magazine otherwise - in another place. We run little risk of revealing a primordial essence, or of finding remote origins to our autonomous flag. Traditions are not cultivated in La Rioja; with what there are are wild ways of organizing the year, work, friendship, enmity or food.

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Against this and that

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Where it says wild, read particular, or plural, and it will be understood that this is a dissident magazine, not very enthusiastic about single progress or single thought: there are other things, and to see them just look around, and not just in front as they always command.

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Art of looking around

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The names of the places, the memories, the knowledge, the recipes, the crafts, the customs, the stories, the techniques, the devotions, the blasphemies, the manners ... there are all that around. We believe that it is alive, and capable of procreating. Some believe it to be a villager residue, or something from Spanish underdevelopment. As a half-Belgian Englishman put it, such a revolt against tradition is "a last-ditch effort of old age to persuade itself that it is still young." Revolt for revolt, we prefer others.