| dc.description.abstract | España Vaciada [the ‘Emptied Spain’] has become an everyday reference to the vast areas of rural interior Spain that have experienced immense depopulation since the 1960’s. Houses, fields and social relations have been left behind as people migrated to the cities in search of viable futures. This thesis seeks to investigate what becoming after abandonment might look like in such a rural depopulated site, with a focus on abandoned houses and olive trees, the rural remains that are still standing long after the owners have gone. I analyze how such remains materially and affectively shape constraints and possibilities for what can become after. This approach is inspired by recent anthropological literature on how the ‘past’ lives on in material remains and through these continues to affect human lives, bodies, actions, and possible futures. The empirical data for this thesis has been collected through five and a half months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oliete, a village in Teruel, one of the most depopulated provinces in Spain. Oliete is home to the association Apadrina un Olivo working to recuperate the 100.000 abandoned olive trees in the municipality. This thesis analyzes the daily operations and adoptive sponsorship system of this association as a creative attempt to make something new with the remains and explores how new practices and relations emerge from here. I apply a focus on kinship and the notion of kinning expanded to include materialities to better understand the relations to the more-than-human being made through this system. I further investigate local everyday home-making amid abandoned houses, as well as critically examine the concept of abandonment itself. The thesis demonstrates how those who once inhabited the houses and cultivated the trees have left traces behind inscribed in the materiality of the remains themselves through which they come to shape the material ground for what Oliete can become. The focus on houses and trees further serves as entry point for unfolding the larger social networks of veraneantes [summer-visitors] and padrinos [adoptive ‘parents’ of trees] that Oliete is entangled in. It is demonstrated how these social groups can come to co-constitute the material grounds in Oliete from a blurry position between absence and presence. Hence, it is argued that abandonment leaves nothing like an ‘empty’ landscape behind, but rather one full of absent presences and traces of those who were here before that continue to ‘live on’ together shaping the grounds on which the future must be built. This thesis argues that any attempt at becoming after must build on and negotiate with these remains and the absent and haunting presences residing in them. | eng |