I am an anthropologist educated in the following Spanish, Basque, Canadian and British universities: Complutense University of Madrid, University of Basque Country, University of Western Ontario, London School of Economics. 

Both as a researcher and lecturer, my academic career has been very much connected with the study of how local culture relates to community development. This is an issue that I have examined in contexts of social, economic and environmental change in Western and non-Western societies alike.

More recently, I have taken a special interest in how theories and practices of cultural heritage intersect with theories and practices of community development. Hence, I have analysed how constructions of cultural and natural heritage are interconnected with or detached from wider and more formal schemes, particularly from those where national and international institutions and development agencies propose to implement local culture in order to promote community development. As a visiting scholar, I have had the privilege to reflect on this matter in world-class research centres such as the Pitt-Rivers Museum (University of Oxford), the Scott Polar Research Institute (University of Cambridge), the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany), Wolfson College and the Institute of Social Anthropology (University of Oxford), and Pindo-Mirador Biological Station (Ecuador).  

I am particularly interested in the study of how community development, social identity, cultural heritage, environmental sustainability and social justice-oriented scholarship are interlinked. To that end, I have conducted prolonged fieldwork research among European communities of agropastoralists in the Pyrenees Mountains of southern Europe, as well as among hunter–gatherer communities in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. Also, I have carried out intensive library research on community development within the shifting cultural patterns of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, which I have explored vis à vis their access to and control of the exploitation of natural resources of their habitat. My knowledge of these three ecologically and culturally distinctive areas mentioned above allows me to undertake cross-cultural lines of argumentation in lectures and writings.

My approach to cultural heritage and community development is based on anthropological theories of social action and cultural critique that emphasize human agency and subjectivity. Subsequently, community-based qualitative methodologies have been central to my research. My expertise includes ethnographic fieldwork where I have been engaged in a wide body of arts-informed lines of inquiry, principally: community performance (dance-events, folk drama, ethno-theatre); literary genres (interpretive biography, autoethnography, histories of life, story-telling, folk song and poetry); and new media (indigenous radio stations and video production).

As a member of a cultural minority, I am a Basque anthropologist very much attentive to indigenous epistemologies, science and interpretations of knowledge. In addition, I am a practicing social anthropologist who has been involved in applied anthropological research and participatory action projects toward community development, which included the creation of an indigenous radio program and an indigenous audiovisual centre for the production of cultural documents. These were completed in mutual collaboration with indigenous cultural activists and practitioners of the Amazon.

In the Basque Country, I am the co-founder of Oilategitik, a village-oriented and village-run journal. Written in the Basque language, it is based in Alkiza, a rural community of three hundred inhabitants where I have been living since the late 1990’s on a small farm where I keep some sheep and grow my own organic produce.

Accordingly, my understanding of social anthropology in relation to cultural and community development is not just scholarly, but is also a profession of a whole range of creative ways to generate new kinds of knowledge of the everyday in the everyday. Supportive of this consideration comes my writing of poetry in Basque where I reflect on autobiographical and subjective experiences in nature, which I work upon in terms of cultural expressions of self-awareness. In English, I have published On the island of the native alone (enclosed with the application), a poem that comes from my participation in the Writing Life-Stories Workshop held at Wolfson College (Oxford University) during 2011-2012.

In sum, I am a professional anthropologist largely concerned with cultural development in rural and indigenous communities. Also, I am a prize-winning poet with extensive experience and training in public and engaged social science, as well as in the arts-oriented action/research methods. Today I am very much determined to expand my research on indigenous epistemologies and their analytical significance within the realm of Cultural Development and Community Studies. As main director of the Lera: Culture and Development University Research Team since 2008, I am thereafter extending my previous work on anthropological and interdisciplinary theories of cultural critique and the arts-related lines of inquiry into current social work practice and theory which relate to rural and indigenous communities.