contradictions and alternatives.

Thinking and developing

these ideas in a project with a vocation to transfer and
transform from knowledge requires a complex method that
was designed for the case. Obtaining simple results requires
complex analytical and research operations, which are briefly
summarised here.

The objective of The objective of the first phase of the Ecosocial Lab´s
the first phase of research is to learn about the traces of sustainable and
the Ecosocial Lab´s organic agricultural management that survive, and to serve
research is to learn the memory of the farming management of the territory.
about the traces A further objective is to identify the disturbing inertias of
of sustainable and sustainability that took root in the past. With the creation of a
organic agricultural cartography of the historical management of the territory we
management that compile a set of knowledge related to the management of the
survive, and to serve land, the interdependences, the commerce, the relation of the
the memory of the communal areas with the house and of the historical traces
farming management that can help to generate some new imaginaries starting
of the territory from a historical reconstruction of the communities and their
management of the agro-ecosystems.

There is no doubt that times have changed, but there is room

to recover management logics and world views that yielded
positive results and therefore have lasted over time. Although
today we identify them by the taste and not by the work:
the taste of turnip greens, potatoes, heather honey or pork
fattened with chestnuts.
The territory we are talking about, Barbanza, between the
rías (estuaries) of Noia and Arousa, is made up of eight
municipalities, 54 parishes and almost half a thousand villages,
consolidated as essential nuclei of the spatial organisation,
and 111 common land communities (private associations for
managing land resources that we will present in depth in later
chapters) are formally constituted in it.
Times have changed, Based on criteria of spatial, historical, social and
but there is room to environmental diversity, we have selected three areas in the
recover management region: the common lands of Baroña, the common lands of
logics and world Froxán and the brañas (wetlands) of Laíño, with their respective
views that yielded communities. For each case, the sources of documentation for
positive results and the research basically came from four different collections:
therefore have lasted official historical, administrative, economic and census
over time documentation from the Municipal Archives of Lousame,
Dodro and Porto do Son (1833-2000); records and inventories
of the communal lands (1855-2020); historical cadastres:
Ensenada (1756), Garay (1819), Madoz (1855); and cartography,
planimetry and historical orthophotography available and
locatable for the region (1900-2020). In addition to this, we The living memory of the
carried out fieldwork involving the communities, a journey residents of Barbanza, collected
through more than thirty
through the oral history of the memories of the management interviews, is one of the main
of the countryside. 56 people were interviewed in order to pillars of the Ecosocial Lab’s
investigate with them the practices, knowledge, conflicts research
and elements of cohesion of the communities, their values,
the commercial and labour relations of the households, their
relations with the environment and their transgenerational
complexity.
The documentation and mapping allowed for a conventional
but highly suggestive external approach to the communities
and their productive and social practices. The oral source once
again plays a fundamental role in tracing that memory, which
in many cases is forgotten, obscured or subordinated. With
the “prudence of the researcher” as an ethical commitment, It is not just a matter
the aim is to reconstruct the community’s memory, to recover of reconstructing
it against “the enormous arrogance of posterity”, to be able to the memory of the
extract all that information that is buried, domestic and hidden. community, but of
And with people’s memory also appear the letters, the writings, thinking about it in
the photographs of the world that was. It is not only a matter terms of eco-social
of making the memory of the community, but of thinking of it transition: what we
in terms of the eco-social transition. What aspects of the past can recover from the
can we recover to make it happen? That is why it is necessary past to contribute to
to study the relationships and interdependencies, between a socio-ecological
the house and the village, between the domestic and the transition?

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