The historiography of flamenco is haunted by the spectre of primordialism, which is to say, the notion that identities, manners of being in the world, ethnic groups, nations, and cultural identities are “ancient”, “natural”, and “fixed” features of human existence rather than modern social constructs. It is intimately linked to the idea of the hermetic in flamencology, the notion that flamenco is its own thing, its own world, and as inward-facing, as subject to internal laws that are radically disconnected form the social or the cultural. For generations, both popular and scholarly discourses have framed the art form through a lens of kind of defensive essentialism, thus positioning it as an unchanging “repository” of subaltern anguish, without understanding the causes of that anguish.
Yet this romanticised view conceals a more complex and interesting reality: flamenco offers us some striking ways to theorise the social and aesthetic together as, to quote Georgina Born, mutually constituted. A rigorous, grounded, evidence-based critical historiography must therefore dismantle the myth of static continuity, replacing it with an analytical framework that foregrounds some of the ways in which socio-economic shifts, political instrumentalisation, and technological mediation have continually redefined the boundaries of the genre. And yet, it must also account for the ongoing fidelity of flamenco to this hermetic paradigm. In other words, the critique of hermeticism is itself often a symptom of a desire to take control of flamenco.
The Invention of the Primitive
Nineteenth-century travel writing and early costumbrista literature played a foundational role in inventing flamenco as a timeless, hermetically sealed tradition. We cannot simply expunge this tradition: we must include it, and engage with it as a constitutive idea, a constitutive affective regime. Although writers such as George Borrow and Estébanez Calderón constructed an exoticised Andalusian imaginary that severed performance practices from their messy socioeconomic realities, flamenco practitioners themselves engaged in practices that underpinned this move. The strategy of hermeticism, for example, could be understood not just as the construction by a few genteel costumbristas of an exotic mystical terrain, but also as an emic strategy, a response by flamenco practitioners themselves to the widespread and intense antiflamenquismo we have already noted in the word of, for example, Eugenio Noel.
This historiographical turn towards the internal Andalusian exotic (by Demófilo and the costumbristas that preceded him) served a specific ideological function, framing the gitano (Iberian Rom) performer as a romantic outsider untouched by modernity. But it also stands as a strategy of double-coding where outsiders hear one thing and insiders another. If this terrain is distant, cut off, like a kind of wildlife reserve, it can also be constituted as closed off from its detractors, as alien to, impenetrable to, and radically at odds with, bourgeois criticism of its emotional worlds. This hermeticism is both a turn to a tragic exoticism and a defence mechanism.
Certainly, the historical record reveals that the birth of the café cantante era between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by intense commercialisation and urban proletarianisation. Performers responded directly to the demands of an emerging urban entertainment economy. The crystallisation of distinct palos during this period was a turn to a stylised notion of the ancient, both as a kind of unearthing of ancient folkloric artefacts, and as the product of professionalisation, stylistic competition, via the intense theatricality of the commercial stage. In other words, it is the interaction between hermeticism and commercialisation that drives flamenco innovation and its particular mode of vernacular agency. Flamenco, we might say, is the means by which the aesthetic and the social contest each other.
The Mid-Century State and the Tensions of Hermeticism
During the mid-twentieth century, the tension between internal hermeticism and broader socio-cultural contexts became acutely pronounced under state-sponsored curation. Rather than imposing an external constraint entirely divorced from the art form’s internal dynamics, official cultural bodies and nationalist platforms sought to capture and institutionalise flamenco’s inward-facing identity, and to expand that introspection to a national habit. The mid-century ideology of purismo operated by seizing upon the romantic tropes of primordial purity, transforming an organic, emic defence mechanism into an instrument of national-popular unity.
In this environment, the mid-century historiography of flamenco exposed, as we explored above, a deep friction between the lived socio-cultural pressures of the period and a state-enforced demand for aesthetic fixity or rigidity (the idea that the “tradition” arrives to us complete, so t speak). The official apparatus of the state weaponised the myth of an isolated Andalusian essence against contemporary social realities, pathologising stylistic evolution as contamination while attempting to police the boundaries of performance within the framework of nacionalflamenco. Consequently, the mid-century record bears witness to the ways in which the hermetic paradigm was repeatedly pulled between, on the one hand, its function as a protective shelter for marginal communities and, on the other, its co-opting to a centralised fascist imagination of folk expressivity.
Towards an Immanent Historiography
Overcoming these fractious complexities requires an immanent critique of flamenco historiography – one that refuses to treat tradition and innovation as binary opposites. By examining how economic pressures, technological shifts, and ideological demands have shaped historical iterations of flamenco, scholarship can finally account for flamenco not as a museum piece, but as a dynamic, historically contingent practice of cultural survival, that uses hermetic strategies to insulate itself against external attacks from (sometimes well-meaning) commentators.
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