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| ISBN-13: | 9780253221933 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/16/2010 |
| Series: | New Anthropologies of Europe |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Sales rank: | 678,196 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Corsican Fragments
Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork
By Matei Candea
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2010 Mathieu CandeaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35474-7
CHAPTER 1
Arbitrary Location
Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods ...); they study in villages.
— GEERTZ 1973
The village is a thousand shards of broken mirrors.
— GALIBERT 2004
Crucetta
The house known as "the Englishwoman's house" (la maison de l'anglaise) stands empty. "The Englishwoman," l'anglaise, died two years before my arrival in the Corsican village I will call "Crucetta," and the ocher house with blistered light-green shutters has recently acquired new owners: the Viltanés, a family from the Continent, who plan to spend their summer holidays here once they have "done the place up." Next summer, the shutters will be painted bright blue, and the vines will be luxuriant and neat over the metal pergola. Two brothers and two sisters, holding nets for crabs and salt-encrusted snorkels, will be chasing each other up and down the stone staircase. But for now, the house is empty, save for the last remnants of a solitary life. Langlaise, unlike the Viltanes, had lived in this house all year 'round, for over twenty years. She had been a painter of some local fame, and when her son came to take away her canvases, some in the neighborhood felt that he was plundering the cultural heritage of Crucetta. His action certainly left people with no compunction when it came to claiming what he did discard.
Which brings me to the reason for my visit. My neighbor Petru, who since my arrival in the neighborhood has taken me under his wing, has decided that I am doubly qualified, as a bookish type and one hailing from England, to take my pick of the leftover jumble of reading materials which has been unceremoniously dumped in a mildewed, shelf-less bookcase in what was once a living room.
Petru is a young man of eighty-three, with twinkling eyes and wispy white hair escaping from under his trademark cloth cap. He is one of the last active shepherds in a village which was once a flourishing agricultural center at the heart of the lush Balagne region — "the granary of Corsica." Petru is the last shepherd in Crucetta to use a donkey for travel and transport, day in, day out; others long ago abandoned the heavy wooden saddle for a pickup truck or the iconic Citroen C15 minivan. Increasingly, however, Petru's donkeys' primary use seems to be to give rides to the children of summer residents, among whom the shepherd is something of a celebrity. For those who have invested in a summer house at the heart of this Corsican village, Petru is the perfect mix of rugged authenticity and knowing humor. His body speaks of his trade: short, dense, and still surprisingly powerful, matured with age into a careful slowness which contrasts starkly with the fragile hesitancy of elderly city-dwellers. Petru's hands are brown, coarse, and careful, hands that can still milk a ewe or dig a ditch at an age when others find it hard to hold a remote control. The middle finger of his left hand was bent out of shape by some unmentioned accident. When he stops to wipe the sweat from his brow, the skin of his forehead above the line of his ever-present cap is startlingly white. Petru's voice, too, captivates the seekers of authenticity. Its peculiar timbre is noticeable first, deep like whispering gravel. And then the language itself — for Petru is one of the last old men whose French is clearly a somewhat forced second to his Corsican; his French grammar and pronunciation are like borrowed clothes stretched over an uncompliant body. Petru thus embodies a certain ideal of Corsican autochthony which pleases tourists no less than cultural activists.
But real authenticity can be slightly dry fare when it is unseasoned by some ironic twist. And the holiday makers clearly enjoy the fact that Petru sees straight through their romantic foibles, the fact that he can, with one comically exaggerated expression of astonishment and admiration (slack jaw, raised eyebrows), pour gentle scorn on their keenness to hang rusty sheep shears on their whitewashed walls or rest their aperitifs on an old threshing stone. L'anglaise too, despite her long-term, full-time residence, seems to have gone in for this sort of thing, and her walls are decorated with traditional farming implements in various states of disrepair. And indeed, hearing Petru talk about her, it seems that for all their erstwhile closeness, they, too, had lived past each other in some important ways. The painter used to walk every morning along a dirt track which led away from the village. I, too, came to walk that path. After picking through some brambles and sheep droppings, the path suddenly opens up onto a little ridge from which one is hit, all at once, by the formidable expanse of the valley below and, beyond it, a forbidding mountain range. Dusty greens and pale ochers, sharp grey peaks and the gentle froth of trees in the distance; the smell of myrtle, rosemary, and rockrose; and the occasional bells and barks of unseen dogs and their flocks, carried uncannily close by some unfelt breeze. A bench had been placed there, beside the thin metal cross, ensconced in a stone base, which gives this spot its name: a crucetta, the little cross. The English painter had loved a crucetta so much that she had asked for her ashes to be scattered from that spot into the valley below.
For Petru, by contrast, a crucetta is first and foremost a sheepfold, which stands some yards up the hill from the little ridge: a low dry-stone double arch with a solid wooden pen attached, a place one reaches not by the little path, but by walking through dry, dusty olive groves behind scattering sheep. Petru has about as little use for the bench as the painter had for the pungent sheepfold: a crucetta, in sum, was two very different places, and the difference between them was stark. When he described the painter's last wishes, Petru explained with somewhat amused disdain that she had asked to be "burned and thrown away, over there, at the cross." A strange thing to wish for, indeed, to a man whose vision of death involves orderly and impressive white vaults collating over generations the dust of entire families down in the "little village" by the church. Over time, I became a regular at both of those places, the sheepfold and the bench; both together, and the difference between them, motivated my choice of pseudonym for the village of "Crucetta."
In Crucetta, the mirage of a holistic account for a whole village dissipates and we are left with something rather different: Petru and l'anglaise lived side by side, lived together, in a place that was also two places, their realities splitting off from each other in subtle but profound ways. Nor were they alone: the village in which l'anglaise lived did not quite map onto the village the Viltanés were about to move into — and neither of those corresponded particularly well to the village in which a number of migrants from North Africa eked out a discreet and fleeting existence for some months of the year. As Petru led me through the maison de l'anglaise and his various memories of her, I began to glimpse the multiplicity of disjunctive lives and understandings which brushed past each other in the neighborhood in which I had just settled. I started to think of my uneasy trawling through the dead woman's castaway books as in some ways a disturbingly apt metaphor for the work of ethnography in Crucetta: here I was, collecting fragments of intimacy.
* * *
On the one hand English villages are imagined as centers that remain fixed. They form a focus for long-term attachment, containing folk intermeshed in an intricate web of connections, each place a discrete unit looking outward. On the other hand they appear to be vanishing institutions. They vanish either because they are left behind, with people moving out to worlds that have nothing to do with the village, or because they are submerged, invaded by people moving in from elsewhere who turn it into a different kind of place, creating a radical fragmentation between a communal then and an anonymous now. (Strathern 2004, p. 23; cf. Strathern 1981)
My opening vignette could seem a straightforward instance of this familiar story, of the fragmentation introduced into a previously whole place by accelerated movement. The contrast between Petru and l'anglaise seems to bring up the classic opposition between rooted insiders, who are shaped and molded by their local knowledge, and more or less ephemeral outsiders, strangers, add-ons, whose link to landscape (rather than land) is romantic and superficial. But look again, and the account separates itself from itself: the ashes of the English painter fly over the valley from the little cross and mingle — infinitesimal, dispersed — with the land, the dust, the trees, the river. In the most literal and physical of ways, l'anglaise has become a part of the place, complicating easy distinctions between insiders and outsiders, persons and places, metaphorical and real connections. Such distinctions clean up and hierarchize, they allow one to specify what the story is about. But by the same token, they fail to capture the things in between, complications upon complications which are of necessity edited out of seemingly complete and meaningful accounts.
And yet there were some overarching coherences to Crucetta. For the view of villages described by Strathern is one which inhabitants of Crucetta themselves articulated on more than one occasion, as they reflected on the past and present of the village in which they lived. I am including in this generalizing category ("inhabitants of Crucetta") people such as Petru, for whom this "communal then" was an intimate memory, as well as people such as the Viltanés, for whom this past was a romantic horizon which they themselves had never experienced. As Strathern noted, people "share their villages" even when they seem to be living diffèrent, indeed incommensurable, lives. That is to say, these different people, with their different attachments and relationships to place, share their ideas about what a village is, and this in turn makes them similar. "But those similar ideas disguise themselves by appearing as ideas about dissimilarity: they are ideas about how different everyone is from one another, how different places are" (2004, p. 25).
One could scale up this insight to talk about another kind of similarity and difference: "cultural difference," too, is a shared trope among inhabitants of Crucetta, particularly when they feel it divides them from one another. One difference in particular is salient here, that between Corsicans and the continental French, a constant topic of discussion and implicit reference in the village. Yet, at the very moment at which people stress their cultural differences, they are still living together in a world in which there are cultural differences. At the moment at which they articulate their different — indeed, perhaps irreconcilable — attachments to the island of Corsica, they are living together in a world in which Corsica is a common point of reference, a unitary object, a salient entity.
This book is an attempt to find an anthropological footing in this rather destabilizing situation, in which differences are similarities and similarities are differences. The problem, put simply, is this: how can one produce an account which keeps in view both the fact that there are real differences among people and places, that intimacies, even in a small village, are multiple and fragmented, and the fact that these differences are bridged by shared, conventional ways of thinking about difference? Or, to put the problem conversely: how can one produce an account which acknowledges the fact that entities which are daily brought up to explain differences and similarities among people, such as "(being from) the village," "Corsicanness," or "French culture," are enacted constructions rather than timeless essences, while still taking difference seriously? This problem echoes an ambiguity at the heart of the anthropological endeavor, which constantly oscillates between difference and similarity as philosophical, heuristic, and ethical frames of reference, but which also derives in part from the location of my ethnography.
A Multi-Sited Research Project Capsizes
This account is not the one I had originally set out to write. I had arrived in Crucetta in September 2002 with the aim of studying bilingual (Corsican-French) education, a recently established educational practice which had been pioneered in a number of local primary schools. I chose Crucetta as the central base for my research as I was told that its bilingual school had a very high profile on the island. This was due to the sterling efforts of its schoolmaster, Pascal, a man who had been an impassioned advocate of Corsican language and culture since his youth in the 1970s. Pascal, when I first met him, was an energetic fifty-something with a cropped beard and an infectious laugh. He sported wire half-moon glasses which spent most of the time either hanging from a string around his neck or tucked up onto his balding pate. With his gruff kindness and meticulous elocution, he reminded me of some of my own favorite schoolmasters, those stalwarts of the Éducation Nationale who, in a primary school near Paris, helped to shape this Romanian immigrant into a fluent French-speaker. Like them, Pascal loved the French singer Georges Brassens, with his impeccable use of the subjunctive and irreverent sallies against all forms of established order. Like them, he instilled in his pupils an eagerness to learn as much as knowledge itself. Unlike my own schoolmasters, however, Pascal did this in two languages.
Bilingual education was the latest outcome of a complex tango between the French state and local cultural activists, which had over the past thirty years progressively introduced "regional languages and cultures" into the national educational curriculum in a number of French regions (Jaffe 1999, 2005, 2007; McDonald 1989). The government's increasingly liberal policies on regional language and culture provided the legal structure and the empty forms which teachers such as Pascal filled in with inventive teaching materials and curriculum elements. These teaching materials were often devised ad hoc by teachers and shared as photocopies or electronic files with colleagues from a few valleys away. This interface of formal and informal, state and non-state, nation and region, has long been a feature of French regionalist education (McDonald 1989).
In Corsica, however, the question of regional language and culture has taken on a rather more urgent note than in other French regions. Since the 1970s, Corsica has been in the forefront of the French news and of the government's preoccupations in part due to a number of well-equipped and extremely determined paramilitary organizations which regularly apply plastic explosives to public buildings and the second homes of continental French residents; machine-gun the facades of town halls, courts, and police stations; and issue emphatic statements denouncing what they term the "French colonial state." Alongside these and in a complex relationship with them, official Corsican nationalist parties take part in local elections on platforms ranging from hardline demands for independence to softer calls for greater autonomy within France (Hossay 2004; Loughlin 1989). Beyond nationalism proper, there is a broader circle of regionalist enthusiasts and activists promoting Corsican language and culture (McKechnie 1993; Jaffe 1999) who have an often ambivalent relationship to the frankly independentist, let alone the explicitly violent sections of Corsican nationalism. Hence, the rather complex position of bilingual schoolteachers, who are often located in some way within or on the margins of this extended (and, internally, very diverse) regionalist/nationalist universe — and yet are employees of the French state (Candea, forthcoming A).
Within this complex and contested situation, my original plan was to study the ethical self-formation of both teachers and pupils in a bilingual schooling context. I had envisaged this as a multi-sited study (Marcus 1995; Candea 2007). Crucetta's primary school was one of a number of such institutions across the island, which were linked by thick networks of bilingual schoolteachers such as Pascal, who met periodically at training seminars and network meetings; by contrast, the kinds of spaces within which educational policy was made, contested, and applied mapped other trajectories, from Crucetta to the regional administrative headquarters and all the way to the Parisian headquarters of the National Education Ministry. I had come prepared to "follow" (cf. Marcus 1995) these complex assemblages and trajectories through various sites, of which Crucetta's primary school was only one. Within this framework, I had thought of the village of Crucetta — rather summarily, in retrospect — as one more "site," another place in which these processes and trajectories played themselves out. I had come prepared to ask (among other things) how and to what extent technologies of the self, linguistic forms, and definitions of culture which were promoted in a school setting converged with or diverged from those promoted at home "in the village" (for an excellent study in this vein, see Reed-Danahay 1996).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Corsican Fragments by Matei Candea. Copyright © 2010 Mathieu Candea. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Prologue: Roadmap 1
1 Arbitrary Location 9
2 Mystery 39
3 Place 69
4 Things 85
5 People 97
6 Languages 119
7 Knowing 145
8 Anonymous Introduction 163
Notes 179
Bibliography 185
Index 197
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