Antonio Machado y Álvarez (Santiago de Compostela, 1846 - Seville, 1893) was born to parents of a liberal-patriotic, progressive and positivistic persuasion. His father, Antonio Machado y Núñez, taught natural history at the University of Seville, where he introduced the Darwinian theory of evolution; he rose to become dean and rector and also pursued a career in local politics as a leader of the liberal left; he was an active participant in the revolution of September 1868. His mother, Cipriana Álvarez Durán was the daughter of a soldier who had distinguished himself in the War of Independence and during the Liberal Triennium; she was also the niece of Agustín Durán, the compiler of the Romancero General.

Between 1862 and 1871, young Machado studied law and philosophy at the universities of Seville and Madrid; he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy and literature in 1873. These were the intellectually and politically effervescent years of the Revolutionary Sexennium (1868-74). His interest in popular culture was nourished, first by his mother and then by his teacher Federico de Castro, who encouraged the collection and study of popular songs and tales. His first articles were published between 1869 and 1872 in the monthly journal founded by his father at the University of Seville, Revista Mensual de Filosofía, Literatura y Ciencias. These breathed the spirit of Krausism (a liberal form of scientific rationalism, of which de Castro was an adept) and his grand-uncle’s cultural patriotism: the popular cultural heritage was to be studied both as the nation’s informal archive and expression of its character, and as a means to regain national authenticity.

The 1870s were dominated by family life (a marriage, two sons) and a budding legal career as lawyer and magistrate. Machado returned to his folklore research at the behest of a group of friends who founded a popular literature section for the journal La Enciclopedia in 1879. In the process he distanced himself from his earlier Krausism and began to take a more evolutionary view of popular culture. His contacts and correspondence with Hugo Schuchardt, Austrian professor, Romance philologist and evolutionary linguist, placed him in contact with an important group of European folklorists, including the Sicilian Giuseppe Pitrè, the Breton Henri Gaidoz, the French hispanicist Théodore de Puymaigre and the German philologist Reinhold Köhler. It was during this period and under these influences that Machado published his emblematic works: Colección de enigmas y adivinanzas en forma de diccionario and Colección de cantes flamencos recogidos y anotados (Seville, 1880 and 1881).

On learning, in 1880, from the Revue celtique that a Folk-Lore Society had been founded in London, Machado got in touch with its secretary, Laurence Gomme, to become a member. He adopted the English model for his own folklore society, adapting it to the Spanish situation; in its remit, folklore should be a tool for the scientific reconstruction of Spanish history and culture. These principles were laid down in the pamphlet Bases del Folk-Lore Español (Seville, late 1881). He envisaged his society, El Folk-Lore Español, to work along the lines of its British example but in a federated, regionally diversified organizational structure. The motivation was partly patriotic, partly scientific: to establish folklore as a discipline and a tool for the (re)construction of Spanish history and culture. Convinced that methodical collecting made the difference between folklore as a hobby and folklore as a discipline, Machado developed a methodological toolkit for collecting, inventorizing, classifying, describing and archiving the immense corpus of data – on language, literary texts, practices, and beliefs. In order to achieve trustworthy fidelity in documenting popular culture he devised questionnaires, classification catalogues, as well as protocols for fieldwork, the use of photography, stenography or musical notation in folklore journals or in the national or regional press.

Between 1881 and 1886, Machado unfolded intense theoretical, methodological, editorial and proselytising activities to establish and expand a network of folklore societies across the country. Machado drew on a network of friends and acquaintances (writers, scholars, university professors and teachers from the Institución Libre de Enseñanza) to promote various regional societies. The first (1881) was El Folk-Lore Andaluz, followed by El Folk-Lore Frexnense (Extremadura, 1882), El Folk-Lore Castellano (1883), El Folk-Lore Gallego and El Folk-Lore Vasco-Navarro (both 1884). This is where the proliferation of regional centres stalled.

During the same period, Machado founded and directed two folklore journals, El Folk-Lore Andaluz (1882) and El Folk-Lore Español: Biblioteca de las Tradiciones Populares Españolas (1883), as outlets for the work of the regional folklore branches as well as societies and national and international collaborators.

Folklore for Machado cannot be an exclusive enterprise of the intellectual elite; it requires the participation of all Spaniards regardless of class, age or gender. Awareness of the traditional heritage, shaped as it is by the wealth of regional and social diversity, will foster a common bond and national unity, also across regional and linguistic differences. These aims and methods he publicized in the regional and national press. The approach as propounded by Machado was nation-building but not nostalgic: Machado’s folklore brings together tradition and progress under the overriding patriotic function of both.

Machado also saw folklore as a transnational (in this case: pan-Latin) bonding agent. His correspondence with Pitrè and with the Portuguese man of letters Teófilo Braga testifies to an ambitious scheme for the federation of the folklorists of the Latin countries. As early as 1881, he proposed to Pitrè to organise a symposium of Latin folklorists, as a preamble to the creation of a confederation of folklore societies of the Latin countries; the aim was to form a progressive and democratic counterweight to the more backward-looking British model, which saw popular culture in terms of its pastness. In 1882, he wrote in a similar vein to the Breton/French folklorist Paul Sébillot.

In 1889 these initiatives bore fruit in the International Congress of Popular Traditions held in Paris at the Trocadéro Palace (venue of that year’s World Fair), organized by the Société des traditions populaires. Although Machado was a member of the patronage committee, he did not attend. Since 1887, his health had been declining as a result of the financial and practical difficulties he encountered in constituting his federation of regional folklore societies; lack of state support for a projected folklore museum in Madrid further affected his precarious health and finances. Machado withdrew from these outreach activities and, while continuing to sit on the council of the Folk-Lore Society in 1887-88, devoted himself to translating W.G. Black’s Popular Medicine and E.B. Tylor’s Anthropology.

Financially ruined and with a large family to support, Machado accepted, despite his poor state of health, a legal position in Puerto Rico offered to him in 1892 by the Minister of Overseas Territories. Mortally ill, he returned to Seville in early 1893, where he died.