Lisón Tolosana, Carmelo (1929-2020)

Born in 1929 in Aragon, Carmelo Lisón Tolosana is a Spanish social anthropologist trained in Oxford, under the guidance of Mary Douglas, Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt. He spent his entire career as a teacher and researcher at the Complutense University in Madrid, where he introduced this discipline at the turning point of the Franco era. The author of a prolific, ambitious ethnographic and theoretical work that combines the methodologies of anthropology and history in an innovative way, he favours field surveys in Galicia and Aragon, paying particular attention to his interlocutors’ discourses, following an original hermeneutics and language pragmatics.

Keywords: Folklore | History | Linguistics | Social and cultural anthropology | Hermeneutics | Pragmatics | Spain | Galicia | Aragon | Japan | Folk mythology | Witchcraft | Death | Exorcism