Les Pràctiques educatives de l'escoltisme de Mallorca durant la dictadura franquista a través de les fotografies = Educational scouting practices in Mallorca during the Franco dictatorship seen through photographs

Abstract

During the Franco dictatorship, the Catholic Boy and Girl Scout movement in Mallorca represented an educational and cultural alternative to the regime's official youth movements. The educational model that the scouts advocated aimed to train young and girls with critical skills, responsibility and the capacity to develop for themselves values contrary to the submission the dictatorship aimed to instil. Based on a compilation of more than 5000 photographs of Catholic guides and scouts in Mallorca from their reintroduction in 1956 after the Spanish Civil War until now, this article reviews the information these graphic sources contribute towards knowledge of this youth movement's activities and culture. The article also aims to contribute to the debate on the use of photographs as historical documents, in this case by analysing the images of an extra-curricular educational movement. The analysis of the photographic corpus that has been located demonstrates that, despite the many amateur photographers who took part and the diverse situations, periods and circumstances to which these photographs attest, they tend to share an iconic code and symbolic function that reinforces aspects considered basic to the scouting culture and method throughout this period. This photographic corpus demonstrates the importance to the Mallorcan scouts of those days of activities in nature and the discovery of a social and cultural reality that was overlooked in the schools of those years. Furthermore, it proves that photographs are additional source of historical documentation that needs the hands of historians or the other similar interpretative techniques all historical documents require, yet photographs can complement other sources and provide information that is difficult to obtain from other documents. This article particularly focuses on the photographic depiction of the post-war Mallorcan Catholic scout movement from its inception until the late 1960s.