30 October 2026
Bilbao
On October 29, anthropologist and writer Joseba Zulaika inaugurated the lecture series Euskal Gaiak Zertan Dira Gaur? / Basque Studies Today at the University of Deusto with a lecture entitled Basque Studies Today: Critical Perspectives and Future Agendas. Organized by the Institute of Basque Studies, the series seeks to establish a forum for critical inquiry into the present and future of Basque Studies, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue and fresh perspectives on the cultural, political, and intellectual questions shaping contemporary Basque society.
For Zulaika, returning to Deusto carried particular significance. It was here, during his years as a Philosophy student, that the intellectual journey leading him toward anthropology and writing first began to take shape. His return evoked a sense of déjà vu, but also an opportunity to reconsider the formative experiences of the past in light of the present. Drawing on the idea of deferred action, he reflected on how events acquire new meanings over time and how certain formative experiences continue to shape the subjects we become. Such events, he suggested, call for fidelity—not through the uncritical repetition of inherited commitments, but through their reinterpretation in changing historical circumstances.
Culture as a Site of Power: Rethinking the Basque Experience
The concept of culture provided a central point of departure for the lecture. Bringing anthropology into conversation with cultural studies, Zulaika drew on the intellectual legacies of Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci to examine culture not as a fixed repository of collective identity, but as a contested terrain in which meanings, identities, and relations of power are continually negotiated.
Bilbao offered a particularly compelling case study. Zulaika approached the Guggenheim Museum as a transformative historical event, one that reshaped not only the city's international image but also the meanings and expectations attached to culture itself. Beyond the museum's physical presence, the transformation of Bilbao illustrates the growing significance of cultural institutions, symbolic capital, and intangible forms of value in contemporary societies.
He also emphasized the importance of ethnography as an intellectual practice that acknowledges the researcher's own involvement and subjectivity. Rather than claiming an impossible position of complete detachment, ethnographic inquiry can make the relationship between the observer and the observed part of the process of understanding culture.
This perspective is especially relevant to Basque Studies. Zulaika highlighted the value of a diasporic gaze: the ability to look at the Basque Country from elsewhere, to question familiar assumptions, and to recognize the wider significance of Basque experiences. The Basque Country, he argued, offers subjects of considerable interest to international audiences. In a world shaped by mobility, cultural encounters, and overlapping affiliations, identities are rarely singular. We are all, in a sense, Basque and something else.
From Antagonism to Impasse: Rethinking the Possibilities of the Present
One of the most significant dimensions of the lecture concerned the reflections developed in Zulaika's Aberriaren inpaseak (Alberdania, 2024). The history of modern Basque society has been profoundly shaped by conflict, competing aspirations, and the political logic of antagonism. Antagonism, Zulaika observed, has historically been one of the defining formulas of revolutionary transformation. Yet the categories through which earlier generations understood political struggle no longer adequately account for the complexities of the present.
Underlying this historical transition is a question at once political and existential: Where are we going?
In exploring the contradictions of the Basque experience, Zulaika invoked Gregory Bateson's concept of the double bind: a situation in which contradictory demands leave the subject facing an untenable choice, regardless of the alternative selected. The concept offers a way of approaching the paradoxes of a history shaped by competing commitments, unresolved expectations, and conflicting imperatives.
Yet Zulaika's argument also points toward a significant transformation in the capacity of Basque society to acknowledge such contradictions. The present impasse does not simply signal the failure of historical aspirations. Although many of those aspirations have not been fully realized, their significance has not necessarily been exhausted. Contemporary Basque society may now be better equipped to accommodate the complexity that earlier antagonistic frameworks struggled to contain.
The impasse, in this sense, is neither a definitive defeat nor a condition of mere paralysis. It can become a space for reflection, reconsideration, and waiting: a historical interval in which inherited certainties are reassessed and new possibilities begin to emerge. Rather than demanding immediate resolution, it allows time to rethink the terms of political and cultural aspiration while remaining open to a future breakthrough whose precise form cannot yet be anticipated.
This understanding also gives renewed significance to the question of redemption. The unrealized aspirations of the past need not be understood exclusively through the language of failure. Their meaning may remain open to reinterpretation, even when the historical circumstances in which they first emerged have fundamentally changed.
Closely connected to this argument is the position of the faithful subject. Fidelity to a formative historical event does not require the indefinite reproduction of its original political or cultural expressions. On the contrary, remaining faithful to an initial transformative impulse may demand precisely the capacity to rethink it. Fidelity, from this perspective, is not synonymous with repetition; it is the effort to preserve the transformative potential of an inherited commitment under new historical conditions.
The Basque Language: Between Historical Achievement and a Sense of Emergency
Zulaika also addressed the changing condition of the Basque language, reflecting on the tension between the achievements of language revitalization and the profound uncertainties surrounding its future.
His longstanding commitment to Euskara remains central to this reflection. Yet he characterized the present situation as one of urgency, noting that both the language and the social conditions governing its use have undergone significant transformations.
The prospect that most children will know Basque in the near future marks an extraordinary historical achievement. Nevertheless, the expansion of linguistic competence does not automatically ensure the vitality of a language in everyday social life. The distinction between knowing a language and living through it raises questions that cannot be answered simply by extending the strategies of previous decades.
Here again, the question of fidelity becomes crucial. Remaining faithful to the original aspirations of Basque-language revitalization requires recognizing how profoundly the circumstances have changed. The challenge is not to abandon earlier commitments, but to rethink the forms they must take if they are to remain meaningful and effective.
Basque Studies in a Changing World
In an intellectual landscape increasingly shaped by the internet and artificial intelligence, Zulaika also called attention to the need to reconsider the questions, methods, and conceptual frameworks through which Basque culture is studied.
The Basque experience offers far more than a collection of locally significant cultural phenomena. Its history of political conflict, linguistic revitalization, cultural transformation, and diasporic exchange raises questions of broader relevance to contemporary debates about identity, power, belonging, and historical change.
The future of Basque Studies, therefore, cannot depend solely on the accumulation of knowledge about the Basque Country. It also requires a willingness to interrogate inherited categories, engage with wider theoretical debates, and recognize the critical potential of the Basque experience within a global intellectual conversation.
Ultimately, Zulaika's lecture suggested that one of the central challenges facing Basque Studies is to reconcile fidelity to historical aspirations with an openness to the complexity of the present. Moving beyond the established logic of antagonism does not necessarily mean abandoning the past. It may instead create the conditions for understanding it differently and imagining futures that earlier frameworks could not accommodate.
The question, then, is not simply where we come from, but where we are going—and what new forms of thought we need in order to imagine that future.
With this question as a point of departure, the Institute of Basque Studies at the University of Deusto has launched Euskal Gaiak Zertan Dira Gaur? / Basque Studies Today as a forum for critical reflection on the changing horizons of Basque culture and scholarship.
