Professor Teresa San Román has passed away.

Teresa San Román Espinosa, born in 1940 in the Pontevedra town of La Guardia, held the chair of social anthropology in the Department between 1982 and 2010, where she was a point of reference and mainstay in the way of understanding and teaching anthropology from which the current Degree that we teach is the heir and its practical sequence of subjects that has earned us the accreditation of Excellence and the recognition of Teaching Excellence by the Faculty. For his way of doing and understanding anthropology from a demanding, rigorous and honest position, for his pioneering work with the gipsy community, for his theoretical proposals on marginalization and for his commitment to people and excluded communities, which led her to develop applied anthropology, San Román has been an indisputable reference for Spanish anthropology.

Teresa San Román began her studies studying history, with the intention of devoting herself to archaeology, but as soon as she started she decided to study anthropology. She studied at the University of London, where she completed her master's degree (1967) under the supervision of Phyllis Kaberry. She completed her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Carmelo Lisón and defended it at the UAB. His career has been based on the symbiosis between ethnography as a basis for theoretical construction and theory as a way of understanding ethnography, from which then, from a well-founded knowledge, he proposed proposals for applied anthropology, always based on listening to the communities and people with whom I worked, promoting an ethical and professional intervention focused on an intercultural proposal to face situations of exclusion and social risk. She was one of the first academics to propose the distinction between marginalization and culture and the need to make differentiated interventions based on values and social cohesion. Much of his research has focused on studying marginalization, poverty and racism, whether with communities in peripheral neighbourhoods of Madrid and Barcelona, with the Senegambian community or in the field of old age.

His work around ethnic minorities has been recognized with several awards: Rogeli Doucastella Award for Research in Social Sciences, Hidalgo Award for the professional career in the fight against racism, Civil Order Medal for Solidarity from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, April 8 Award of the Gypsy Culture Institute, Àlex Sellers Memorial Award (awarded by the UAB and Sabadell City Council), the Golden Cross of the Social Order of Social Solidarity of the Ministry of Employment and Social Security (2005), the distinction of Jaume Vicens Vives (2010) and the Gold Medal of the City of Barcelona for cultural, scientific, civic and sporting merit (2023). He was also an honorary member of the Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia. He was Awarded by the Gitano Secretariat Foundation (2011). This Sunday, this organization reminded on social networks that Sant Román "delivered a large part of his life in the gipsy village."

Just this year, the Department launched a Digital Ethnography and Anthropology Collection of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Publications Service of the Autonomous University of Barcelona), which is heir to and recovers in a renewed digital format and in open the collection of publications in anthropology created in 1998 by Teresa San Román. The first issue, published just a month ago, was a revised edition by the author of one of her most important works, which has become a classic, "The Walls of Separation. Essays on alterofobia and philanthropy", initially published in 1996.

In 2007, some students from the Anthropology of the Peoples of Spain subject gave him an interview where he explained his origins in the discipline, how he came to do his ethnography with the gipsy population and his theoretical contributions. The interview was published in the Department's digital magazine, Periphery, and is freely available for anyone who wants to get to know the figure of an anthropologist who has left a mark on us all and leaves us with a vast legacy.

https://revistes.uab.cat/periferia/article/view/v7-n2-molina-ricart-rodriguez

Thank you, Teresa!