Attitudes about the corrida subtly reflect attitudes about a national culture. A cycle of important corridas de toros, celebrated from March to October, winds in a clockwise direction throughout Spain. No individual is one-dimensional. Although regionalism is a strong determinant, so is age, gender, political persuasion, worldview, and urban versus rural location. Even the identity of one's audience can influence attitudes toward the bulls.
Attitudes also depend on which format of the bulls is being discussed.
Spanish ambivalence is probably predicated on a perceived opposition between modernity and tradition, and the desire to have both. The theoretical analysis of these binary oppositions and their mediations through los toros is quite structuralist. Poststructuralist anthropology has criticized structuralism as privileging one voice relative to other voices. The recent trend in anthropology is to let the informants speak for themselves. In this study, I believe it is the Spaniards who are the true structuralists.