Andalusian and Arabic Culture: a Comparative Study of Popular Sayings and Proverbs from an Anthropological Prespective.

The study of Andalusian culture deals with cultural manifestations of Andalusian roots, which still represents the elements of contemporary Seville culture; as is well known, language is one of the most essential elements of culture and linguistic expressions and sayings are considered to be a source for the study of culture. This study is important because it includes two of the most prominent fields of humanistic studies, the first is the field of anthropological studies, and the second is the field of linguistic studies. It is considered one of the first anthropological studies and is one of the few studies dealing with contemporary Andalusian society.  The methodology is based on a field study of the society of Seville, with the traditional ethnographic approach: direct observation and the use of interviews, in addition to analyzing the content of linguistic expressions and sayings. We relied on Malinowski's theory of context to solve the "problem of meaning". This study confirmed the similarity between Andalusian culture and Arab culture in its different aspects: customs, traditions and patterns of thought, behavior and knowledge. Hence, the study agreed with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding the relationship between culture, language, and thought.  Thus, the filed work in Seville society was able to achieve the aim of the study by establishing the true similarity between Andalusian culture and Arab culture.