Demófilo

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Antonio Machado (Alvarez) (see Spanish naming customs), better known by his pseudonym Demófilo (Santiago de Compostela, 1848 - Seville, 4 February 1893), was a writer, anthropologist and Spanish folklorist.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 Bibliography
4 External links

[edit] Biography

His mother, Cipriana Alvarez, was the niece of the famous writer Agustín Durán, author of the most famous collection of Spanish narrative ballads (romanzas) of the 19th century. His father, Antonio Machado, was a university professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Seville; in this city a he spent a large part of his life and here he studied Philosophy and Justice. His teacher Federico de Castro instilled in him an interest in Evolution and the philospohical ideas of Krause; later he became inclined toward the utilitarist social philosophy of Herbert Spencer. He temporarily occupied the chair of Metaphysics at the University of Seville and also held office as a magistrate. He was appointed professor of Folklore at the Free Institution of Education in Madrid and participated actively in the Monthly Magazine of Philosophy, Literature and Sciences (1869-1874), with his first works on popular literature. Driven by economic necessity, he travelled to Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1892 where he held the position of Recorder of Property, although he was already in very poor health, and died on his return to Spain, a year later, on 4 February 1893, when he was only forty-seven years old.

He and Ana Ruiz had five children among whom are poets Manuel and Antonio Machado. Because of his maternal heritage, he always felt a great interest in popular literature and in fact their children were almost weaned on the romances (narrative poems) of their relative Agustín Durán. From its creation in 1871, he belonged to the Sevillian Anthropological Society along with his father and founder of this institution, Antonio Machado. Under the pseudonym, Federico de Castro, he published, Popular stories, legends and customs in 1872. His interest in folklore helped shape the magazine La Enciclopedia (The Encyclopedia), (1877), published decennially; and in whose pages he created a permanent section on popular literature.

As a result of the creation of the first society of folklore in London in 1878, he conceived the idea of creating something similar in Spain. When the novelist and scholar of Spanish culture, Hugo Schuchardt, traveled to Spain in 1879, he established a friendship with him and they maintained a prolific correspondence on Spanish folklore. Finally on the 3rd November, 1881 he published Founding of the Organization for Spanish Folklore, "a society for the compilation and study of popular knowledge and tradition". Thus the society El Folclore Andaluz (The Folklore of Andalusia) came into being with the creation of regional and local societies based on linguistics, geographic and cultural peculiarities stemming from the different regions of the whole of Spain. In addition he established a monthly magazine of the same name in 1882 which was renamed El Folclore Bético-extremeño which is still in print in several facsimile editions.

The study of the Spanish town, one of the most important factors in the history of the country, has been completely neglected up to now.

The work of the Spanish town, the one of the first and more important of the factors of history mother country, completely has been neglected up to here, and by nobody studied; it diríase, or that in Spain has not existed town, or that its paper has limited only al tristísimo symbolized in that formula that has made consider to some of our concilios as the origin of our Cuts: omni populo asentiente, that is to say, average dozen of poor devils who moved the head affirmatively when to the bishop or the tycoon spoke who provided the sustenance to them. The serious lack of all the historians and specially of those of Spain to make specific its investigations to the knowledge of the facts that a person made or, when, a determined class, does more that the history, who in our opinion had to be the complex, not the sum, of biografias of all the individuals, you still gave much of being a science (Machado, 1882-83: 7).

Antonio Machado had because a very modern conception on the new science of the Folclore or, as he wrote, Folklore, and knew and had translated of English some of capital works of the anthropological discipline, like the one of Tylor, for example. In fact, it ventured his own definition of the discipline:

This is, for me, the science that intends the study of the indiferenciada or anonymous humanity, to start off from an age that can be considered infantile to the present time.

Machado had a very modern idea of which it was the town, very differentiated from the habitual Volkgeist or spirit of the hegeliano race:

An impersonal and fantastic being is not already for me the town, a species of entelequia of which men are certain organs to those who we therefore say of the town, but the average degree that is from the culture of an indetermine number of anonymous men, that is to say, who have not had the organic energy necessary to be different from the others the sufficient thing to have a different and own personality, reason that forces to them to accept and to adopt like his, completely his, produced by others (the Machado, 1883: 50).Machado he had a very modern idea of which it was the town, very differentiated from the habitual Volkgeist or spirit of the hegeliano race.

In Madrid it directed a book collection of and on folclore, the Library of Popular Traditions (1883-1888), that alzanzó eleven volumes. The society soon Andalusian they followed Castilian, Galician, Asturian and Catalan the frontier dweller. The friends of Antonio Machado and Alvarez infect themselves of their liking to folclore and they themselves become folkloristas, like Luis Romero and Espinosa.

In both publications it counted on the intellectual aid, publishing and economic of Alexander Guichot and the collaboration, among others, of Luis Montoto, Francisco Rodriguez Marín and others. Also it publishes a Collection of enigmas and riddles and it is entered in the study of the flamenco one and the flamencología with the Collection of you sing flamenco, first anthology of this poetic expression.

George Black translated of English the work of William popular Medicine: a chapter in the history of the culture (Madrid: The Publishing Progress, 1888), classic of Edward B. Tylor Anthropology or Introduction to the study of the man and the civilization (Madrid: The Publishing Progress, 1887, reprinted three times more) and of the French, written down by he himself, the second edition of the Investigations about History and the Literature of Spain during the Average Age of Reinhart Dozy (Seville: Administration of the scientist-literary Library and Madrid: Bookstore of D. Victoriano Suárez, without year, but 1872, two vols. Activísima maintained one correspondence, among others with already mentioned Hugo Schuchardt, but also with the writers Teófilo Braga and Manuel Martinez Murguía.

[edit] Works

Obras Completas, ed. Enrique Baltanás, Sevilla, Biblioteca de Autores Sevillanos, 2005, 3 vols.
Biblioteca de las Tradiciones Populares Españolas, Sevilla: Francisco Álvarez y Cª, 1883-1886 (Madrid: Est. Tip. de Ricardo Fé) 1882 a 1888, once vols. Contiene: t. I: Introducción / Antonio Machado Álvarez. Fiestas y costumbres andaluzas / Montoto y Rautenstrauch. Cuentos populares / Antonio Machado Álvarez. II: El folk-Lore de Madrid / por Eugenio de Olavarria y Huarte. Juegos infantiles de Extremadura / recogidos y anotados por Sergio Hernández de Soto. De los maleficios y los demonios / de Juan Nyder, trad. del latín por J. Mª Montoto y Vigil. III: El mito del basilisco / Guichot. Continuación de los juegos infantiles de Extremadura / Sergio Hernández de Soto. De los maleficios y los demonios. IV: Folk-Lore gallego / E. Pardo Bazán y otros escritores de Galicia. Conclusión de los maleficios y continuación de fiestas y costumbres andaluzas. V: Estudios sobre literatura popular, primera parte / Antonio Machado Álvarez. VI: Apuntes para un mapa topográfico -tradicional de la villa de Burgillos perteneciente a la provincia de Badajoz / por Matías R. Martínez. Tradiciones de Extremadura / C.A.D. VII: Cancionero popular gallego y en particular de la provincia de La Coruña: tomo I / José Pérez Ballesteros. VIII. A rosa na vida dos povos / Cecilia Schmidt Branco. Folk-lore de Proaza / L. Giner Arivan. IX: Cancionero popular gallego y en particular de la provincia de La Coruña: tomo II / José Pérez Ballesteros. X. Cuentos populares de Extremadura / recogidos y anotados por Sergio Hernández de Soto. XI: Cancionero popular gallego y en particular de la provincia de La Coruña: tomo III / José Pérez Ballesteros. A partir del t. II el ed. pasa a ser Alejandro Guichot y Compañía. Posteriormente, desde el t. VII la colección es editada en Madrid en la Librería de Fernando Fé.
"El folclore del niño", en España, 1885-1886, tomos CV-CI
Colección de cantes flamencos, 1881; muy reimpreso, por ejemplo como Cantes flamencos recogidos y anotados M., Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1975.
Colección de enigmas y adivinanzas, 1833.
Estudios sobre la literatura popular, (tomo V de la biblioteca de Tradiciones Populares") Sevilla: Alejandro Guichot y Compañía, 1884.
Batallas del libre pensamiento, 1885.
Artículos varios, 1904, volumen I de sus Obras completas.
Under the pseudonym "Federico de Castro", Cuentos, leyendas y costumbres populares, (1872)
Adivinanzas francesas y españolas Sevilla, 1881 (Imp. de El Mercantil Sevillano)

[edit] Bibliography

Daniel Pineda Novo, Antonio Machado y Álvarez. Vida y obra del primer flamencólogo español. Madrid: Ed. Cinterco y Fundación Andaluza de Flamenco, 1991
Cartas a Schuchardt. La correspondencia inédita de los folkloristas y otros intelectuales espanoles con el romanista y linguista Hugo Schuchardt. Sevilla: Fundación Machado, 1996.　
Enrique Baltanás, Los Machado. Una familia, dos siglos de cultura española, Madrid: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2006.