Furanchos and adegas: exploring symmetry through wine cultures in Galicia and Alentejo

Abstract

This textual and visual piece exceeds the traditional paper form to explore popular winemaking and drinking cultures in Galicia and Alentejo. It does not illustrate our fieldwork, but evocates alternative geographies of production and consumption that coexist with the standard commercial and legal wine market. In our quotidian learning by doing and living, we understand symmetrically the cultures we are part of, and by extension our practice of cultural geography. Through a combination of documentary and ethnographic approaches, we reveal geographies of practice that enact diverse forms of being together at the verge of disappearance. Symmetry eventually emerged, but only as the practice of research, not as a discursive rhetoric nor as an alternative form of representation.