The Sound of Welsh Patagonia

An ethnographic study of the Welsh-Patagonians that live in the settlement of Y Wladfa.

In 1865, a group of 153 Welsh settlers emigrated to Argentina, following an offer from the Argentine government of one hundred square miles on which to live, with the hope of creating a little Wales away from Wales, free from the influence of the English. The Sound of Welsh Patagonia explores the historical and present-day implications of this emigration through an ethnographic account of how and why Welshness is created, sustained, and performed in the Chubut Province of Patagonia, Southern Argentina.

The monograph is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Gaiman and surrounding areas with a community of Welsh Patagonians who live in the Chubut Province. Drawing on data gathered from in-depth participant observation and interviews, it argues that the individual and collective subjectivity (of both the Welsh self and the broader community as Welsh) was performatively constituted in the settler colony through the dynamics of seeing and being seen, and through the dynamics of hearing and being heard. In making this argument, The Sound of Welsh Patagonia analyses a series of ethnographic encounters to consider the usefulness and limitations of concepts that have been developed to theorize the self, such as subjectivity, subjectivization, performance, performativity, and self-cultivation.