Carmelo Lisón Tolosana. An anthropological vocation

Abstract

Carmelo Lisón, founder of the RAS, was too the founder of the Social Anthropology Department at the Complutense University of Madrid. He gave to Spanish Anthropology a British shape. In doing so, he brought up to date Social Anthropology in Spain. His doctoral research at home in the sixties, and his long fieldwork research all over Galicia (1964-1975), coming back again and again during XX and XXI, gave him a great ethnographical experience. Probably, his ethnographical records are the greatest on a European cultural tradition. From ecology to mind and believes, and from institutions and social structure to illness, cultural values, ritual and myths, Lisón has studied human culture as an ambiguous symbolic and semantic system that is always immersed in the social making of the history. His interpretive anthropology comes from his own ethnographical experience with people on the field as a long conversation, in the line of Gadamer, Benedict, Hume, Vico, Cassirer, Needham, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas and Lienhardt, among others.