Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community 9780691226842, 0691094586, 0691028583

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Shaping Modern Times in Rural France

Shaping Modern Times in Rural France THE TRANSFORMATION AND REPRODUCTION OF AN AVEYRONNAIS COMMUNITY

Susan Carol Rogers

PRINCETON PRINCETON,

UNIVERSITY NEW

JERSEY

PRESS

Copyright © 1991 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rogers, Susan Carol. Shaping modern times in rural France : the transformation and reproduction of an Aveyronnais community / Susan Carol Rogers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Ethnology—France—Sainte Foy (Aveyron). 2. Sainte Foy (Aveyron, France)—Social conditions. 3. Sainte Foy (Aveyron, France)—Economic conditions. 4. Family—France— Sainte Foy (Aveyron). 5. Social change. I. Title. GN585.F8R64

1991

306'.0944'74—dc20

90-8989

ISBN 0-691-09458-6—ISBN 0-691-02858-3 (alk. paper: pbk.) This book has been composed in Linotron Times Roman Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To Lindsay, Caitrin, and Shannon

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgments PROLOGUE

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The Setting The Questions

xiii 3 19 20 32

CHAPTER TWO

Variations on a Theme: Cultural Specificities and Economic Change in Ste Foy, Aveyron The Aveyron: A French Hinterland Ste Foy: The Riches of Roquefort Conclusions CHAPTER THREE

Ste Foy's Soul: The Principles of the Ostal System Essential Elements Management of Adversity Negotiations of Difference Conclusions CHAPTER FOUR

Ties That Cut and Bind: Ostals in the Community Interactions Among Ostals Bourg and Campagne Conclusions CHAPTER FIVE

Real Ostals in a Changing World Terms of Analysis Patterns of Change Conclusions

46 47 58 72 74 75 88 94 98 101 102 114 125 127 128 136 ] 51

viii • Contents CHAPTER SIX

New Crises: structures and Change in Me Foy The Bride Shortage, 1960-1975 The Municipal Crisis of1975 Conclusions CHAPTER SEVEN

Conclusions

Closing Scenes On France On Family History On Social Change and Culture in the Modern World

154 154 166 186 188 188 192 200 207

APPENDIX 1

Estimations of Ostal Domestic Life Cycles APPENDIX 2

216

Succession of Households on a Ste Foyan Hamlet

218

Bibliography—Aveyron

221

General Index

222 229

Illustrations

MAP

Rouergue/Aveyron in southern France

2

FIGURES

P. 1. Bourg of Ste Foy, 1975 P.2. An isolated farm (ostal) in Ste Foy's outlying countryside P.3. Fair day in Ste Foy, 1975: Monthly sheep auction P.4. Fair day in Ste Foy, 1975: Monthly market 1.1. Rural French classic: A Ste Foyan pepe (grandpa) 2.1. Old cheese dairy in Ste Foy 2.2. New consolidated cheese dairy in the county seat 3.1. A Ste Foyan ostal 3.2. Posing for a wedding portrait 3.3. Ste Foyan family 4.1. Hog butchering: Day one, men's work 4.2. Hog butchering: Day two, women's work 4.3. Hog butchering: Day three, household self-sufficiency 4.4. Evolution of campagne, bourg, and large hamlet populations 4.5. Leaving mass 4.6. A bourg street 5.1. Ostal household composition 5.2. Phases of stem family domestic life cycle 5.3. Multigenerational transfers of ostals 5.4. Households with hired labor 6.1. Sex ratios in Ste Foy, 1975 6.2. Net migration from Ste Foy 6.3. Celibacy rates in Ste Foy 7.1. Fair day in Ste Foy, 1990: Monthly sheep auction 7.2. Bourg of Ste Foy, 1990 A.I. Estimations of ostal domestic life cycles A.2. Succession of households on a Ste Foyan hamlet

4 10 13 14 25 63 64 76 84 89 105 106 107 116 117 122 136 137 141 144 155 159 162 189 191 216 219

Tables

2.1. Percentage of French and Aveyronnais Populations Living in Urban Areas 2.2. Percentage of French and Aveyronnais Working Populations Engaged in Agriculture 2.3. Number of Farms in Ste Foy by Size Category 5.1. Households Following Full Ostal Domestic Cycle 5.2. Numbers of Ostals Practicing Cohabitation 5.3. Transfers of Ostal Ownership 6.1. Exchange Migration Between Ste Foy and Other Rural Townships 6.2. Destinations of Migrants from Ste Foy

51 52 67 138 139 142 160 161

Acknowledgments

IT HAS BEEN awhile since I began to look at French experiences of modern times and, through them, to understand and create my own. I have accumulated an impressive stock of debts along the way. My first thanks go to the people of the Aveyronnais community I have called "Ste Foy." They will, I think, recognize themselves, and I hope that they will understand why I have chosen not to use the real names of their community, farms, or families. The ethnographic enterprise is above all an indiscreet one, requiring the ethnographer to intrude uninvited into the lives of others, hoping to be accepted despite intentions to report to all the world what she has seen and heard. I never hid my purposes from the people of' 'Ste Foy." Indeed, it would have been difficult to find another plausible explanation for an American scholar's settling for a year in a remote French farming community and subsequent periodic reappearances over the following decade or two. In fact, I did stay there partly because I liked the place and quite a lot of people living there, and I keep going back because I care about what happens to them. Nonetheless, the library-bound copy of the thesis I wrote about "Ste Foy" that sits—perhaps proudly, but certainly not for being especially well read—in the local archives, and the copy of this book that will undoubtedly be given a place next to it, are testimony that my personal trajectory has gained a great deal more momentum from "Ste Foy" than vice versa. In effect, I have taken the power to create an image of "Ste Foyans" and their community for a larger public. By using pseudonyms for the community and its families and farms, I mean to return to them at least a small part of the power to decide whether or not to reveal themselves. Of course, anyone who knows the Aveyron well will be able to identify which community I have written about, and anyone who knows this community well will recognize the particular individuals I have described. I hope that my descriptions do not offend, but in case they do, I have not named (real) names and have changed a few personal details. All this means, of course, that I cannot thank by name the many people of "Ste Foy" to whom I owe my gratitude. I would have understood a great deal less about France, the Aveyron, and "Ste Foy," and would be infinitely less attached to all of these, without the endless hours—and years—of tolerance and friendship they graciously offered. I would like particularly to thank the mayor, the present and two previous town clerks, my landlords—Maria in the bourg and those at Perbencous—my good friends at Le Verdier, those at Puot, La Grange, Chante-Coucou, La Salvetat, and Lo Berry, the pork butchers,

xiv

• Acknowledgments

bakers, grocers, blacksmith, and cheese dairymen in the bourg, and all the others who graciously admitted an uninvited stranger into their midst, making her stay as pleasurable as it was instructive. I would also like to thank another group of involuntary hosts: the people of the Lorraine village I have called "Grand Frault." Explicitly, they barely figure in the present study, but they are very much responsible for launching my interests in anthropology and the study of France. My gratitude to them is deep and lasting. Although most people in "Grand Frault," like those in "Ste Foy," are inclined to reserve the title of teacher for those of higher status than themselves, they have, for me, been teachers in the best and fullest sense. Without them, I would understand little of rural France, and would have much less to pass along to my own students. I have also had the benefit of a number of teachers in stricter senses of the term. Joan Scott, Niels Braroe, Ethel Albert, and Louise Tilly all pushed, prodded, and encouraged me at various critical points at my beginnings. In France, Claude Karnoouh initially introduced me to rural France and has, for nearly twenty years now, provided invaluable friendship, inspiration, and moral support; Henri Mendras and Isac Chiva have proffered invaluable advice, contacts, and insights from the Lorraine to the Aveyron and on out the other end. To Robert Bages I owe my initial introduction to "Ste Foy," and to Andre Burguiere, my introduction to the riches of French rural history. Gilbert and Ariane Orsini gave me the means to experience and understand something of French life in Paris during the four years after I finished my field work, and created an environment in which I could begin to make sense of "Ste Foy." Winifred Weekes-Vagliani provided both friendship and an intellectually profitable livelihood during those years. Carol Anderson, Lisa Groger, Maria and Andrei Derevenco, Guy Barbichon, Jean-Frangois Loubiere, and Sylvie Ardourel all contributed in a variety of important ways both to my Parisian experience and to the initial analysis I developed of "Ste Foy" during that time. For the courage, inspiration, and impetus to return to my "Ste Foy" material and develop the present study, I am indebted to my colleagues at New York University. Without them, I might possibly have written a book someday, and it might have been about "Ste Foy." But this particular book most certainly would not have been written in the absence of their stimulation. From those at the Institute of French Studies who decided that an anthropologist must be included in their number—Nicholas Wahl, Michel Beaujour, Martin Schain, Jean-Philippe Antoine, Thomas Bishop, and Tony Judt—I have learned a great deal about various Frances I had not seen before. My colleagues in the anthropology department have, without exception, been remarkably supportive despite my prolonged stays on the other side of the street in French Studies. In particular, I want to thank Annette Weiner for her unflagging support; Fred Myers and Faye Ginsburg for their friendship, many

Acknowledgments

• xv

summers of comradeship, and shared adventurous sufferings, as well as countless kinds of material and intellectual contributions; T. O. Beidelman for his careful reading of this text in its various renditions, his incisive comments, and his constant encouragement; and Owen Lynch for his close reading, helpful comments, and supportive collegiality. I am fortunate to have been able to ask a number of colleagues to read earlier versions of this text. I have benefited from their suggestions, although I am of course solely responsible for the final outcome. Deborah Reed-Danahay, Linda Girdner, Lisa Groger, T. O. Beidelman, Michel Beaujour, and Owen Lynch all brought various valuable perspectives to my writing. In somewhat more diffuse ways, I am thankful to Louise Lennihan, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Tim Mitchell for making my writing period in Princeton as productive and pleasant as it was. I am also grateful to my students, especially David Beriss, Melissa Clegg, Susan Terrio, Mark Ingram, and Linda Rusiecki, who, in myriad satisfying ways, give as well as take. My comrades-inarms in the founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe gave me— in low moments as in high—a helpfully broader vision of what I was about. To my parents, Donald and Jean Rogers, I of course owe a great deal, but perhaps nothing more important than thanks for their having imbued me with the confidence needed to undertake the unusual. I might also add a belated thanks to Roseanne Soffer, who—altogether against my will—first taught me about the pleasures of the pains of thinking straight and writing clearly. Whatever other skills I may have acquired, photography is not among them. I am extremely grateful for Roland Bra's compensation for this lack. He generously began taking photographs for me while I was conducting my fieldwork, and has continued doing so to the present. Many of the photographs in this volume are his, and I deeply appreciate this invaluable gift. I am also grateful to Eric Freudenthal for the patience and skill he invested in creating the charts and graphs that illustrate this book. Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful for the material support I have been given for this project. The Joint Committee on Western Europe of the Social Science Research Council, through a dissertation fellowship (1974— 1976), funded my initial fieldwork in "Ste Foy," as well as a year of study in French rural history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. New York University provided funds for a return trip to "Ste Foy" in 1985, and a Mellon Presidential Fellowship for a semester of released time to write (1988). Their investments have certainly been profitable for me and will, I hope, yield larger returns as well.

Shaping Modern Times in Rural France

\

LLoire

River Switzerland

Atlanti Ocean

FRANCE

Brive-La Gaillard AQUTTAINE SOUTHWEST

GASCONY

Toulouse

. LANGUEDOC^ Marseilles Mediterranean Sea

Spain AveyronlRouergue in southern France. Broken line indicates approximate linguistic frontiers of the Langue d' Oc dialects. Boldface indicates major regions; capital letters indicate former provinces. Scale: One inch equals approximately 100 kilometers.

PROLOGUE

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

THE PATRON SAINT FESTIVAL

on 15 August 1975, the tiny village of Ste Foy roars into life as some sixty motorcyclists registered to compete in the afternoon races rip through the village to the couderc, the open central square. The mayor directs traffic, his two adolescent daughters stand by to serve drinks from a table set up on the couderc, and a few other people scurry about seeing that all is in order. Colored lights have been strung up around the square, and loudspeakers have been strategically placed to broadcast pop music, but no one has been able to get them to work. Clusters of Ste Foyans—mostly men and children—stand around to watch. Most of the women are at home, finishing preparations for the family feasts, soon to be served. A kind of excitement is in the air, composed of the macho arrogance of the cyclists, the hyperactivity of the mayor's group of festivity organizers, and the palpably fascinated tolerance (mixed with skepticism, intimidation, pride, and resentment) of the spectators. A few speeches are made, a lot of toasts are offered, and then everyone scatters: Ste Foyans home to big family meals, and everyone else to wherever they go for the two hours before the races are to start on the course carved into the hilly terrain just outside the village. Once the races begin, the roar of motorcycles will dominate the afternoon, the final crescendo of the motorcycle buzz that has been building all summer as cyclists have come to Ste Foy to train for the race. "Never mind," say Ste Foyans, "after today you won't hear them that much. Most of them won't be back here until next summer." Two of the competitors live in Ste Foy, sons of two of the largest farm owners. This elicits very little comment from anyone. The race will draw several thousand spectators, including the busy organizers of Ste Foy. Most Ste Foyans, though, do not go. "Oh we went one year. But once you've seen one motorcycle race you've seen them all. All that dust and noise, who needs it?" They prefer to spend festival day with reunited members of the extended family, gathered around the table for an elaborate and leisurely meal composed of the homeproduced dishes for which the region is justly renowned. As the afternoon wears on, family groups divide and drift apart: the aunts out to the kitchen to clean up, the uncles off to the barn, that clutch of cousins outside to stroll around where they used to play, the other bunch off to see whom they can find at the cafe. Children attach themselves to whoever will tolerate them. In the evening, younger members of the family will go to the dance at the couderc. AT NOON

Prologue

Fig. P. 1. Bourg ofSte Foy, 1975. In the foreground is the township's motorcycle race course. (R. Bru)

Some of the adults will sit up late talking with family members they rarely see and will perhaps look in on the dance later. Others will go home to bed, another year's patron saint festival over. Ste Foy's patron saint day used to be in the dreary late fall, after the harvest and before the winter ewe-milking season had begun. A kind of Thanksgiving holiday, the fete votive was the occasion for family reunions around a gargantuan feast, the one regular occasion of the year when native Ste Foyans returned to the community and scattered kin regrouped around the paternal table. The day began with a mass, bringing together all present and former parishioners (except some of the women, who remained at home to finish preparations for the meal). Hours at table followed, with dish after dish of the best of the regional cuisine being served up. In the evening, everyone went to the community dance, organized by la classe, all of the Ste Foy an young men in their eighteenth year and therefore to be called up for military service in the following year. Like the morning mass, the evening dance brought together all former and present Ste Foyans. Old acquaintances were renewed, courting proceeded under whatever familial eyes cared to pay attention, and everyone danced the regional bourree, as well as the polka, waltz, and whatever other dances might be in vogue. Ste Foyans like to have a good time, and eating and dancing are among the best ways they know.

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 5

In the early 1960s, it was decided that the Virgin Mary would be a better patron because her festival day falls in mid-August, at the height of the tourist season. August was a much more convenient time for native sons and daughters who had moved away to return home. A few enterprising Ste Foyans looked beyond returning migrants to imagine an August festival as a first step toward developing a tourist trade in Ste Foy, something for which a November festival was useless. At about the same time that Ste Foy traded in its patron saint, a group of Ste Foyan men formed a festival committee to take over the responsibility of organizing community festivities surrounding the fete. They claimed that the festival would be better if it were put in the hands of adults with more resources, a greater sense of responsibility, and better organizational skills than could ever be expected from a group of eighteen-year-olds. No one had any serious objections, and the festival committee moved into action. Over the years, committee members organized ever more elaborate festivities: they added an additional dance on the eve of the festival, hired better-known "pop" bands or disc jockeys, and advertised heavily in the region. They measured their success by the spiraling costs and receipts of the festival and the number of outsiders attending it. Meanwhile, another new organization composed of virtually the same individuals, the Syndicat d'Initiative (a kind of tourist promotion board/chamber of commerce), took the initiative to create a motorcycle race course on the outskirts of the village. Beginning in 1972, an arrangement was made with the motorcycle club of Rodez for an annual race, as a centerpiece of Ste Foy's patron saint festival. The first year's races were almost rained out and not very successful, but for a number of years afterward, the race grew, drawing an ever-increasing number of contestants and spectators from a wider and wider radius. In 1975 a second competition was scheduled on the day following the festival proper: a tournament of boules, a form of lawn bowling popular throughout southern France. This addition was strategic from various perspectives. August 15 happened to fall on a Friday that year, so it was feasible to take advantage of the weekend and extend the festival by a day. By 1975 "traditional" rural activities had become fashionable in France. Ste Foy was well situated to ply the tourist trade on two registers: the well-established "modern" motorcycle race and a new "traditional" boules tournament. Finally, by 1975 the public side of the festival was dominated by the motorcycle race and the pop music dances, activities in which few Ste Foyans felt at all implicated. Boules did interest a large number of local men and boys, and was an effective way to reassociate Ste Foyans with their festival. In 1976, for a similar series of reasons, a third dance was added as well: a bal a papa held the evening after the boules tournament and featuring "traditional" (i.e., not pop) mu-

6

•

Prologue

sic—the indigenous bourree as well as polkas, waltzes, and other "old style" dance music. Ste Foy's patron saint day festival has been elaborated and reworked over the past decades, in attempts to use an old form to attract new audiences and then to recoup old audiences. For most Ste Foyans, the fete remains most important as an occasion for private family reunions, a function whose appeal intensified over the 1955-1975 period when increasing numbers of Ste Foy natives were migrating farther from home. Most Ste Foyans shrug off the public festivities: "It's sort of too bad that the fete is really organized more just for outsiders and young people now. It used to be a village fete. But there you are." On the whole, they are inclined to ignore the new festival with only lukewarm regrets, and to use the fete day much as they always have. Members of the festival committee have rather stronger opinions about it. They are proud to have created an event that has put Ste Foy on the map, drawing thousands from as far away as Toulouse and Montpellier and operating with a substantial budget. They express disgust for those Ste Foyans who are, they say, too backward, narrow-minded, or egotistic to appreciate what has been wrought. "It's always the same few people who do all the work every year. Most of the others can't even be bothered to show up for anything." Local shopkeepers have equally sharp feelings about the new fete, shaped by dashed expectations: "They said this would be a boon to local business. Well, maybe some of the cafes get something out of it. But you don't catch many of those people who come here coming into our shops. It's all a lot of trouble and noise and mess that doesn't benefit more than a few people around here." The fete goes on, rearranged by some, used in various ways by various groups, the object of conflict, pride, and complacency, an institution that has certainly changed but that nonetheless remains quite Ste Foyan. GETTING THERE

The train trip from Paris to Rodez, the capital and largest city (population 25,000) of the Aveyron, takes eight hours: five hours south on the Toulouse train, then a change at Brive-La-Gaillarde, some two hundred kilometers north of Toulouse. From Brive to Rodez, 150 kilometers southeast, it takes another three hours by the swaying, bumpy one-car train, the Micheline, which stops in many of the tiny towns and villages along the way. At Capdenac-Gare, the train enters the Aveyron, and continues the sixty-five kilometers further to the capital. The countryside is beautiful and deserted. Rugged stone cliffs have been cut by tiny rivers; the main sign of life as the train creeps along are nonetoo-lively herds of pastured cows and sheep. From time to time, an ancient stone house surrounded by dilapidated farm buildings comes into sight. Someone might stop work to watch the train go by. Sometimes the farms look big and prosperous, but almost always as if they belonged to an earlier century.

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 7

The villages at which the train stops are sometimes no more than a train station flanked by one or two houses; these are villages composed almost exclusively of outlying farms, sometimes visible in the distance, more often hidden by hills, cliffs, forests. In the spring and summer, there are flowers everywhere: growing wild in the pastures, on flowering bushes and trees, all around the farmhouses, brightening the ancient-looking stone structures. In the winter, it is bitterly cold and damp, with little sign of life at all. Sometimes the landscape is enveloped in a fog so dense that nothing is visible. Decazeville is an astonishing sight in the midst of this rural placidity. The nineteenth-century steel and coal mining town seems no less archaic than the rest, but its dreary soot-covered rows of workers' houses and the rusting steelworks next to the station seem strangely out of place. Decazeville disappears as abruptly as it appeared, and the quietly dramatic countryside takes over again. The land flattens out as Rodez approaches. The green is replaced by rock-strewn land with sparse stubbly growth. Finally, Rodez comes into sight, perched on a hill crowned by an imposing square turreted cathedral, built between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and visible for miles around. On the outskirts of Rodez, there are modern concrete houses and apartment buildings, identical to those found throughout France. The train station is outside of town. Buses wait to carry passengers up the hill to the center of Rodez. There, the streets are old and winding, often cobblestoned. On Saturdays they are clogged with people from the surrounding region who have come to the weekly outdoor market: the cattle auction below the cathedral, food vendors overflowing the squares behind the cathedral. Banks, stores, and offices are crowded, doing a large part of their week's business on market day. Many of the buildings—stores, apartments, offices, and schools—have been renovated. Almost without exception, they are very old. Some of the renovations seem pretentious and oddly out of place: a modernistic fountain set in the midst of the cobblestones, whose water is permanently shut off because it overflowed in the summer and froze in the winter; the huge, uninviting expanse of brick that slopes up to the cathedral, replacing the former tree-filled square and contrasting with the sense of closed, narrow space that characterizes the rest of the city. The trip on to Ste Foy requires a good car and a good map. It is not far in terms of mileage, but takes forty-five minutes if the weather is clear and if one knows the road well enough to careen at local speeds; otherwise it may take much longer. It is on the way to nowhere, not a place one would happen to pass through. The busy highway leading south out of Rodez through the tract housing and suburban stores of its recently built up outskirts soon narrows into the winding country road through the eastern edge of the Aveyron's Segala region. The road is beautiful, passing through lushly green woods and farmland, over narrow bridges crossing small streams, sharply turning as it goes up and down steep hills, occasionally coming out on a breathtaking overview

8

• Prologue

of farm-dotted rolling landscape. Around one bend is an enormous crumbling old stone abbey clinging to the side of the road; around another is a small village center, a big old cafe on one side (almost in the road) and on the other, a riding stables doing booming business during the summer tourist season. Turning off this "main" road at a 300-degree angle up a steep hill and through a corner of a dense state forest is the narrow east-west road occupied by Ste Foy alone. Once out of the forest, one is in the township (commune) of Ste Foy, a territory covering about twelve square miles. The road continues to twist and turn through farm- and pastureland. On one side is Griac, the hill whose top is the high point of the township (900 meters elevation). A few farms and hamlets are visible on either side, across fields separated from the road by hedges. A tiny crumbling stone shack, a former cheese dairy, is the only building close to the road. During spring, summer, and early fall, the motorist is likely to be slowed to a halt by a flock of sheep in the road on their way to pasture. The shepherd—an old woman dressed in black, a leathery old man, a middle-aged adult, or a child—sometimes on a motorbike and always aided by a sheepdog, drives them to the side of the road and stands watching the intruder with a disconcertingly penetrating gaze. A smile and wave from the motorist are always returned, but the eyes continue to pierce until the car is out of sight. After a final descent, the bourg, home to three hundred Ste Foyans, comes into sight. At first view, it is a jumble of old stone buildings, faded posters advertising dances, festivals, and bingo games in Ste Foy and neighboring communities, and two new small billboards: one welcoming visitors to the township, and the other warning gypsies away. Further along, past the cemetery, garage, and newly enlarged cheese dairy (bustling with activity from December through June, closed down the rest of the year) is the couderc, a large empty plot of land owned by the township. Once a month, sheep pens are set up and parking areas marked off on the couderc for the sheep auction held there. Otherwise, except for an infrequent Saturday night dance in a tent set up for the occasion, or a game of boules played by a group of men on a summer evening or a Sunday, the couderc is usually deserted. Frozen, muddy, or dusty, according to season, its lack of vegetation makes it seem all the more vast and empty. If one continues on the road through the couderc, the bourg is soon left behind, and one is again in farmland, gradually descending to the low point of the township (700 meters). On either side of the couderc is a cafe and a row of houses. Beyond one row are fields and pastureland; beyond the other is the rest of the bourg. Several streets descend into the bourg, quickly multiplying into a web of narrow unnamed streets, apparently going every which way, and often built on a steep incline. The houses, made of stone, are close to each other and to the street, though not necessarily aligned with it. The houses of the larger farms of the bourg form one side of a courtyard, surrounded on the other side

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 9

by detached farm buildings and separated from the street by a stone wall. Other houses have barns attached to them, and in some sections of the village are long curving rows of attached houses, barns, stores, and workshops. Small open spaces in front of the church, the post office, and in several other places are actually the junctions and widening of several streets. An aerial photograph of the bourg renders this confusing maze comprehensible. The oldest parts of the village are built in a roughly semicircular form, with the remaining tower of an old castle (abandoned for centuries) and the church at one of the higher points, rather than in the center. Another section is laid out to one side, and the dozen or so big new stucco houses, built since World War II, are scattered about the periphery. Many of the old stone buildings wedged into the center of the village have been abandoned in favor of the space available on the outskirts. Six neighborhoods, indistinguishable to an outsider, are identified by Ste Foyans. These are named after a particular building, place, or function found in each. Three are designated by French names and three by names in the local Languedocian dialect: L'ecole (school), Laposte (post office), Laplace (public square), Lo castel (castle), Lo barry (outskirts), Lo couderc. The new houses are considered part of the closest existing neighborhood. The neighborhood names are important as place names, and help to identify particular households by their geographical location, but the neighborhoods themselves have little or no existence as coherent social groups. A number of tiny unmarked roads lead out from the bourg to the twentyone isolated farms and nineteen hamlets of the community, where about five hundred Ste Foyans live. Two of the hamlets comprise sixteen households each, while the others are much smaller, composed of only two to five farm households. Each farm includes a house and several outbuildings—barns, stables, sheds—all grouped around a central yard. In some hamlets, the buildings of one farm are built very close to those of another, but more often they are well separated. On most farms there is a mixture of old stone buildings and recently built concrete or stucco structures. In only a few cases have no additions or improvements been made to the old buildings; in fewer still, a new or remodeled house and outbuildings have completely replaced the old structures. As in the bourg, old buildings are most often simply abandoned and new ones built outside of the original circular or semicircular arrangement. Formerly, each farm had its own well or pump. Today, all have running water drawn from the community's reservoir. The township has also provided paved roads leading to each farmhouse, as well as electricity throughout this outlying area. Ste Foyans proudly refer to their community as one that is "holding on" {qui se tient). It stands in marked contrast, not only to the severely depopulated villages in the valleys just to its south, but to a number of smaller communities in its immediate area, which have declined dramatically with the ex-

10 • Prologue

Fig. P.2. An isolated farm (ostal) in Ste Foy's outlying countryside (R. Bru)

odus of their young people over the decades since World War II. Ste Foy's population includes a number of young families, sons and daughters of generations of Ste Foyans who have elected to remain in their native community. The cafes, groceries, bakeries, garages, the post office, and the electrician's shop in the bourg all attest to an active, relatively self-sufficient community life. All of these establishments are small. But many have remodeled modern exteriors, and they all do at least enough business to remain open. A number of voluntary organizations in the community—sporting club, family association, festival committee, Syndicat d'Initiative, and others—seem to indicate an active interest in maintaining and improving the community by collective effort. The many new houses and other buildings scattered throughout the township suggest considerable prosperity and investment in the future. Ste Foy remains as distinctly Aveyronnais and as predominantly agricultural as it has ever been, but it is also a lively community participating quite successfully in the twentieth century and looking forward to the twenty-first. TELLING STORIES

One of the most popular activities organized by Ste Foy's Association Familiale is an annual one-day bus trip, initiated in the early 1970s. Most Ste Foyans have traveled very little outside of the region, are not very inclined to do so on their own, and worry about the consequences of abandoning their daily

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 11

responsibilities (farm, family, or business) for too long. A one-day group outing to see a bit of the world is an attractive prospect, though, and each year's trip draws a full busload, dominated by older people, but including a good number of younger couples and a sprinkling of adolescents. The 1975 trip covered well over 500 kilometers between the 4:00 A.M. departure one summer day and the 2:00 A.M. return the next. The itinerary took the group due south to a Mediterranean beach in Roussillon, with stops at a winery near Perpignon and an African game reserve on the way down, and at a restaurant for a banquet on the way back. At the beach, it turns out that only a half dozen of the travelers have brought swimsuits and go into the water, and only the bus driver knows how to swim. Most of the men go off to nearby cafes; some of the women come stand on the beach, limiting their movements in an attempt to keep sand out of their shoes; most of the older women remain in sight of the bus, standing in the shade of a building next to the parking lot. Most of the day is spent riding on the bus, and that is the part that is most relaxed and enjoyable. People move about constantly, exchanging seats, making jokes for the entertainment of everyone, commenting on the landscape and crops going by outside. It is when the group has to leave the bus and enter someone else's world that it becomes subdued and timid, only to burst back into action when safely on the road again. After the long evening meal everyone is tired, and it is still a long way home. The bus is quiet for the first time all day, warm, and dark. Alphonse Castelnau starts telling stories in the Ste Foy dialect (patois). A farmer in his fifties considered one of the best storytellers of the community, he runs through a repertoire of conventionalized stories, embellishing them with his own touches. Sometimes someone adds a rejoinder or tries his hand at telling a story of his own. Almost all of the stories are funny, playing on an impossible predicament into which a very stupid peasant has gotten himself or in which a clever peasant has outwitted an arrogant person or animal. Everyone already knows the punchlines (and the rejoinders, too), but the pleasure in hearing them again, and in hearing the lilting dialect, is palpable. Ste Foy proceeds drowsily north along Route Nationale 112. Ste Foyans, like many other people, talk a great deal about the "old days." Most of them use a construction of the past to measure an inferior present or to legitimate present activities with reference to continuities with the past. In this view things have, on the whole, fallen apart and the loss can be calculated against an idealized past. "It's true we used to be poorer—very poor—but we were happier in those days. You used to hear singing from these hills and now all you hear is the noise of tractors." "People used to watch out for each other and help out. Now all anyone cares about is getting ahead of everyone else." Some Ste Foyans use perceived change to measure improvement. In this view present activities can be legitimated by assertions of a rupture with the past.

12 • Prologue

"People here used to be all closed in on themselves and backward. Now that there's more chance to get out and about, some of us have evolved and the others are going to have to catch up." One institution that seems unanimously missed is the veillee. In Ste Foy, as throughout rural France, veillees were informal evening gatherings of neighbors or kin during the winter months when night fell before bedtime. Several households would get together by the hearth of one of them and pass the time playing cards, knitting, roasting chestnuts, and—in places like Ste Foy with a strong oral tradition—listening to the best storyteller in the group spin familiar yarns. However change-in-general is interpreted, the veillee is a frequently cited example of a real loss, although I have never heard of any conscious attempts to revive it. In Ste Foy, as among many social scientists, the conventional explanation for its disappearance is the arrival of television (coupled with the rise of "modern individualism"), providing evening entertainment for each household and creating a propensity to stay home. A slightly closer look at Ste Foy, at least, indicates that the abandonment of veillees predated the arrival of television. Indeed, the first televisions, in the late 1950s, prompted a brief revival of veillee-like activity. Neighbors and relatives would spend the evening together at the homes of the first television owners, again sitting in the near-dark, telling jokes, exchanging gossip, roasting chestnuts, knitting, and enjoying common entertainment. Before long, virtually all households had acquired their own television and everyone went back to spending the evening at home. Alphonse Castelnau's story-telling on the Association Familiale trip hardly constituted a "real" veillee. It occurred, after all, on a bus that had made a day-long journey all over southwestern France, visiting a Mediterranean beach and an African game reserve. There were too many people on the bus, and they were not bound together by the ties of close kinship or neighborhood, even if under the circumstances the bond of shared Ste Foyenness temporarily felt unusually strong. Nonetheless, Castelnau's impulse to launch into patois story-telling among a familiar crowd after a long day's effort, when there was not much else to do in the dark, clearly resonated with his audience. It was the perfect end to a day that could be reconstructed as wonderful. The patois stories in the context of a day filled with beach, lions, tigers, and a long bus ride summarizes Ste Foy in a way that neither the stories nor the lions and tigers alone can; Ste Foyans participate fully in the wider world and have left much of their past behind them, but they have done so largely on their own terms and have by no means severed their ties to an old identity. THE MONTHLY FAIR

Preparations for the fair (foire), held on a set day every month, begin the day before. Sheep pens are set up on the couderc, the large and usually empty expanse on one side of the bourg.

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 13

Early in the morning of fair day, hundreds of sheep farmers from the area and dealers from all of southern France converge on the couderc. Most of the farmers arrive in small baches (distant cousin to the pick-up truck) full of sheep or lambs, which are put into the couderc pens. The dealers have enormous trailer trucks designed for livestock transport. The two cafes bordering the couderc do a brisk business. At 7:00 A.M. the gong sounds and the livestock auction gets under way. Each farmer stands by his pen as the dealers, wearing distinctive black smocks, move from one pen to another, feeling the animals, marking small notebooks, hopping out of a pen to make an offer to a waiting farmer. Farmer and dealer shout back and forth at each other, or make quiet staccato comments, offers, and counteroffers. Sometimes one of them turns dramatically away to stomp off, to be called back by the other or let go with a shrug of the shoulders. The deal is concluded when the farmer accepts a bit of paper on which the dealer has written his final offer. An eye is kept out for how others are faring, and sometimes a group collects to watch a ne-

Fig. P.3. Fair day in Ste Foy, 1975: Monthly sheep auction on the couderc. The two men in the foreground negotiate a deal (merchant on the left, identifiable by his black smock), while a farmer begins loading his sheep into the transport truck behind them. (S. Rogers)

14 • Prologue

gotiation under way; this is a spectator sport. Everything is said in the local dialect or by gesture in a highly specialized language known only to buyers and sellers of the region's sheep. After an hour or so (more at the winter height of the season, less in the slow summer period), the auction is over. The pens are emptied as most of the sheep are loaded into the big transport trucks. A few are put back in baches to return home. Farmers line up by the transport trucks, bits of paper in hand, to collect what they have negotiated from the dealers. The couderc cafes are jammed with farmers and dealers, ready to sit down to a hearty breakfast of tripe and gros rouge (wine) and engage in boisterous assessment of the morning's deals. Meanwhile, dozens of ambulatory merchants' trucks have pulled into Ste Foy and set up temporary shop. Farm suppliers, the farm credit bank, poultry wholesalers, and merchants of shoes, clothing, baked goods, fruits and vegetables, groceries, or hardware line the streets below the couderc. Men with nothing to sell at the livestock auction, women, and children who have finished their chores (or been let out of school) all converge on the village to do errands and catch up on the latest news from friends, neighbors, and relatives. Women buy chicks from the poultry wholesaler and sell him chickens, eggs, and rabbits. Men gather in the two cafes in the lower part of the village. People stand in chatting clusters everywhere. If the weather is good, there is a carnival atmosphere and the streets are jammed with people strolling about to look at goods on display and visit with each other. By noontime the streets have emptied. The merchants are packing up to

Fig. P.4. Fair day in Ste Foy, 1975: Monthly market. Ambulatory clothing and vegetable merchants from the region display their wares at the lower end of the bourg (La Place). (S. Rogers)

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 15

leave. Fair-goers have gone home for the midday meal and the afternoon's work. The village goes quiet again for another month. By 1975 the fair, which had functioned in Ste Foy as long as anyone could remember, was still an important and lively event in the community's social and economic life. One of a cycle of fairs in the region, it was known as the site of one of the best sheep auctions. A neighboring village had one of the best cattle auctions of the area at its monthly fair. The county seat's fair had both cattle and sheep auctions, but whether or not its sheep auction could rival Ste Foy's was a matter of some dispute. Another nearby village had both a sheep and a cattle auction, but everyone agreed that these were largely inferior to the others. Still, most Ste Foyans believed that the fair's future was limited. Farmers were beginning to sell their livestock to marketing cooperatives, whose agents would, by simple telephone request, come directly to the farm to pick up the animals, for which they paid a set price. Many local farmers conceded that this was a less entertaining and colorful system, but a far more convenient one. On the average, prices received from the cooperatives were comparable to those to be expected from the auction—sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but about the same overall. As to the market part of the fair, there was a clear consensus that it could not survive much longer. Virtually every Ste Foyan household had at least one car, and it was easy enough to get to the shopping malls and supermarkets in the area where prices were lower and the selection greater. The 1975 fairs seemed at least as vigorous as any that anyone could remember, but signs of their imminent demise were seen everywhere. In the late 1970s a departemental commission undertook to revise the calendar of fairs in the area in a more ' 'rational'' manner. In effect, they replaced the old system of designating fair day in a particular community by, for example, "the fourth of each month" with, for example, "the first Thursday of each month." This reform prompted considerably more uproar in the communities concerned—including Ste Foy—than might have been expected on behalf of a dying institution. After lengthy negotiation and heated threats on all sides, the reform was put in place. By the end of the 1980s, Ste Foy's fair, like others in the area, remained at least as important as ever. More sheep than ever were being sold at auction on the couderc, and a weekly lamb auction during the height of the lambing season had been added. The mayor's idea to rationalize operations by setting up a phone bank and an indoor place for farmer-dealer negotiations in the community hall was quickly quashed. Ambulatory merchants continue to draw large crowds on fair day. Ste Foyans still have the possibility of selling livestock in the barn to agents from the cooperative and of shopping in malls and supermarkets. They sometimes exercise the first option and often exercise the second. In fact, one of the area supermarkets is in the county seat and does its largest volume of busi-

16 • Prologue

ness on fair day there. Nevertheless, the fair thrives, both socially and economically, not as a quaint relic (for which few Ste Foyans would have much interest) but as an old institution well integrated into Ste Foyans' thoroughly modern lives. These images were selected to suggest that by 1975, the end of France's "thirty glorious years" of economic growth and development, the small and out-of-the-way farming community of Ste Foy hardly fit the stereotype of the "traditional peasant village." Ste Foyans hosted motorcycle races, took trips to the beach, and shopped in supermarkets. But they also took seriously their patron saint day as an occasion for family get-togethers, told each other stories in the local dialect, and traded sheep in the apparantly archaic chaos of the local fair. The meaning of the second set of activities has shifted over time with change in their context and in the range of choices from which they are selected. Nonetheless, the persistence of such activity as a meaningful part of Ste Foyan existence, by no means crowded out by the pop music, television, and market sophistication that have also become part of their lives, suggests that Ste Foyans have neither severed their ties to the past nor lost their specific identity. These pictures are also meant to suggest that Ste Foyans think a great deal about and disagree among themselves about how different they are from what they used to be and about what their ties are or should be to the world beyond the community. They do not usually think of themselves as an especially homogeneous group, partly because they are rather more quick to talk about matters over which they disagree, inclining to take for granted or reduce to cliches what they are likely to agree upon. They draw fine social distinctions among themselves, to which they attribute considerable difference of perspective: farmers are different from artisans or shopkeepers, those from "big farm" families are different from those from "farm laborer" families, those who live in the village are different from those living on outlying farms and hamlets. From an outside perspective, Ste Foy does appear to be a rather homogeneous community. Almost everyone who lives there grew up in Ste Foy or its immediate area and is descended from families in the area for generations. From time to time foreign immigrants have settled in the community: some Spaniards and Poles came as farm laborers in the 1920s and 1930s; more recently, a Moroccan family was recruited by one of Ste Foy's hamlets because it included enough school-aged children to keep the hamlet's primary school open. Such immigrants have seldom stayed long, though, and when they do, they are permanently marked as different, known not by their names but as "La Polonaise" or "Le Marocain." There have been virtually no migrants from other parts of France and no influx of "summer people" here. The few "Parisians" who come for summer vacation or to retire all turn out to be Ste

Snapshots from a Moving Picture

• 17

Foy natives who had migrated to Paris. Standards of living are quite uniformly comfortable: no one is extremely wealthy or very poor. Status differences cover a narrow range, barely visible to the unpracticed eye. Almost all Ste Foyans fall into one of two adjacent French social categories: a majority are peasants and a minority petty-bourgeois. They generally share quite consciously many of the characteristics stereotypically associated with natives of the rough Aveyronnais backwater: extreme frugality, fierce loyalty to place, a dedication to hard work as intense as their love of good food and good times, a sharply hierarchical view of the world combined with well-developed skills for manipulating and outwitting it, and a high regard for verbal versatility accompanying a propensity to display it in dispute, self-promotion, and entertainment. In some ways Ste Foy seems the picture-postcard image of a quaint rural French community. In other ways it seems essentially similar to any other small town in the postindustrial west. It is the manner in which these various threads are interwoven that gives Ste Foy its distinctive character and that is the subject of this study.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction to Ste Foy came in the spring of 1975 when I visited the community as a potential site for my dissertation research project on genderbased power distribution in farm communities and households. Ste Foy came very close to being exactly the kind of community I was looking for, and in the summer of 1975 I moved there for a year of ethnographic research in the conventional participant-observation mode. The facts of life in Ste Foy quickly wreaked havoc with the thesis I had intended to develop. I did in the end use data collected in Ste Foy to write a study on gender (1979), although it was rather less elegant than had been promised by my initial working hypotheses, themselves drawn from my earlier fieldwork in a rural community in northeastern France (1975). Patterns of gender-based power distribution, I concluded, are not after all a matter of a few simple variables, but are complex systems deeply embedded in the social structures and cultural meanings of which they are a part. That gender and power are organized very differently in Ste Foy than in the community I had previously studied follows logically from the profound sociocultural differences to be found between the two (1979, 1985). This solution, however, raises another problem which serves as the starting point of the present study: how can two altogether modern farm communities in contemporary France be so different from one another? When I first observed them in the 1970s, both had long been thoroughly integrated into the centralized French state and shared the same institutions, laws, and national history. Both had been transformed by the large-scale historical forces we gloss as "modernization" or "penetration by international capital" and, as small French agricultural communities, had experienced such transformations under roughly similar conditions. Why, then, were they not more alike? By what processes can generally shared, obviously consequential transformations involve the reproduction of equally consequential sociocultural specificities? If the intuitively appealing commonsense notion that "modernization" (or other large-scale change) necessarily implies homogenization is empirically unfounded, then by what mechanisms are distinguishable identities in fact preserved or created in the course of such change? I mean to explore such questions here by looking in detail at some elements of change in Ste Foy, especially during the postwar decades ending in 1975, a period of particularly rapid economic change there, as throughout France. This case study has been shaped by and is meant to contribute to current disMY INTRODUCTION

20

• Chapter One

cussions among historians—especially those concerned with French social history—and among sociocultural anthropologists as they grapple with two sides of a similar problem. On the one hand, historians, as students of change, have been engaged in lively debate about how (and if) social structures and cultural diversity might fit into the chain of historic causality. For anthropologists, on the other hand, the appropriate connections to be drawn between structure and change are no less problematic, but as students of sociocultural specificities, their problem is how to analyze and account for contingent or logical patterns of change. I will return to some of these issues below, but first I will describe something of my experience in Ste Foy, especially as it shaped my thinking along these lines. THE SETTING

Choosing Fieldsites As is usually the case, my choice of a fieldsite resulted from a mixture of chance and carefully reasoned selection. By the time I arrived in Ste Foy I had already completed six months of fieldwork in a community in the Lorraine and a year of studying French rural history at the distinguished Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, as well as my formal training for the Ph.D. in the United States. I considered myself familiar with the practical and theoretical sides of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in rural France, and had written in my grant proposal that rural France was an ideal laboratory for social research. Its highly diverse regions are distinguishable by a wide array of well-documented variables, permitting the selection of a region for study based on whatever combination seems theoretically most interesting. For my study, I meant to confirm the hypotheses I had developed in the Lorraine by locating a community that shared those variables I took to be causally significant but that differed along a maximum of other dimensions. The sharply differentiated but ultimately balanced distribution of power between men and women that I had observed in the Lorraine could be traced, I thought, to the fact that I had studied a small community dominated by family farms. That had several significant implications: for example, the household unit was also a unit of production such that family and work relationships largely overlapped, and all community members—men as well as women—were positioned as structured inferiors with respect to the national society of which they were a part. The village in the Lorraine had successfully adapted to contemporary French conditions, as evidenced by its reasonably healthy economy and demography. Its church and primary school still functioned; unlike many rural French communities, it was neither severely depopulated nor peopled mainly by the elderly or vacation residents from elsewhere. I was not especially interested in observing the last remnants of a bygone era, so, using an active church

Introduction

• 21

and local school and a reasonably stable population size as readily visible indicators, I meant to find a second community that had fared as well. Within the domain of viable small-farm communities in France, the list of variables is long (cf. Jollivet and Mendras 1971). I aimed for maximum contrast: a community different from the Lorraine, at least historically, in terms of inheritance, residence, settlement patterns, language, association with behavioral stereotypes, geography, connections with church and state, and manner of maintaining its agricultural economy under recent conditions. The Lorraine village is in one of the "open field" regions found in much of the northern half of France and, as such, is strongly marked by an old communal tradition (Lamarche, Rogers, and Karnoouh 1980; Zonabend 1984; Bloch 1966). Typical of such regions, it is organized as a nucleated settlement. Its outlying farmland has been redivided among all community members over countless generations in a system of egalitarian inheritance and neolocal residence. Since time immemorial, each adult couple has formed its own household upon marriage and, from the inheritance of each partner, its own farm, to be redivided as their children come of age and marry. People there self-consciously fit the stereotype of the reserved, taciturn northeasterner, spontaneously contrasting themselves with the "soft," voluble style of southerners. The local patois, abandoned several generations ago, was a dialect of modern French; local history is strongly colored by the wars that have regularly brought invading and liberating armies across their flat fields (still dotted with remnants of bunkers from the Maginot Line). As suspicious of powerful outsiders as they are intolerant of insiders who try to assert superior power or status, they have long held both the Catholic church and the French state at arm's length. They are lukewarm Catholics, neither devout nor anticlerical. Similarly, they neither oppose nor expect very much from the French state, consistently voting on the nonoppositional right, but generally preferring to manage their own internal disputes and problems without appeal to outside authorities. The local economy thrived during the postwar period, thanks to plentiful jobs (until the 1980s) in nearby steel mills, together with the strong value attached to land ownership as a critical determinant of community membership. Those households abandoning farming have remained in the community, sending their men out to work in the mills and continuing in effect to work their land by proxy, by renting it to neighbors and kin who have continued to farm. These have thereby had inexpensive access to enough land to build prosperous dairy/grain farms. The fixed land base of the community, supplemented by off-farm employment opportunities, has thus been sufficient to support a stable community under changing economic conditions. Ste Foy was chosen in contradistinction to this set of characteristics. Having drawn up this kind of profile, it was possible to construct its opposite. The result, I decided in consultation with a number of Parisian specialists of rural France, described parts of central or southwestern France. Parisian researchers

22 • Chapter One

are apt to work anywhere in France, but experts based in the provincial universities work in the region served by their university. The region I had identified was attached to the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, so I traveled there for suggestions about an appropriate fieldsite. Robert Bages, a rural sociologist in Toulouse, knew Ste Foy as one of several communities included in a study he had recently undertaken (Bages 1972) and thought it might be suitable. We took an afternoon to drive the 150 kilometers northeast of Toulouse to visit the community, and he introduced me to the usual round of local notables: the mayor, schoolteacher, and town clerk. (The priest happened to be gone for the day.) These men agreed to my moving to Ste Foy to study ' 'women's work" for a year, and, based on what I saw and heard from them and Bages, that seemed a good idea. Ste Foy, located in the southern half of France, has none of the "open field" characteristics of the Lorraine, and no extant trace of the "commons" found in some other regions. Here, the key unit is clearly the farm (ostal), not the community. Farms in Ste Foy are scattered about the township's territory in a dispersed settlement pattern, each a compact unit of its own contiguous land. Ste Foyan farms are meant to be passed from father to son in a system of male primogeniture inheritance and worked in smooth transition by a succession of stem family households: the eldest son inherits the farm and brings his bride to live in the paternal household, expecting his own eldest son to do the same in turn. Ste Foyans distinguish themselves sharply from northerners, who they believe to be cold and forbidding, but also dispense themselves from some of the excesses they associate with true meridional behavioral styles. The local patois, still in use, is, like that in the rest of southern France, a dialect of the Langue d'Oc, only a cousin of modern French. Tucked away in a semimountainous region, as far from any national borders as it is from any centers of power, Ste Foy's local history is a great deal more marked by inaccessibility than by invasion of any kind. Highly sensitive to status distinctions, both within the community and beyond it, Ste Foyans make an art of patronage, based on clearcut hierarchies, and are apt to be intolerant of those who fail to live up or down to their station in life. They are devout Catholics, political conservatives, and, though inclined to be suspicious of the French state and its agents, take pride in their skill at extracting favors from them. Appeals to outside authorities have long been a favored way of keeping each other in line. The local economy has thrived over the last generation because of the possibility of producing ewe's milk under contract to Roquefort cheese firms. A lucrative, labor-intensive specialty production requiring little land or capital investment, this type of farming can comfortably support as many inhabitants and farms as were once meagerly supported by the subsistence economy of the past. My choice of Ste Foy, then, was a highly rational one, aided by good contacts and conceived as part of a careful research design meant to permit strong

Introduction

• 23

conclusions about the determinants of gender status. If gender had been defined and ordered similarly in the two communities, as I expected, then I would have been able to argue that the characteristics they shared were decisive, while the array of variables distinguishing them could be dismissed as insignificant. As it turned out, my controlled comparison design was inappropriately specified: gender distinctions and hierarchies were drawn and acted upon very differently in the two communities, but there were too many other differences between the two for me to be able to explain very neatly why this should be. I had misconstrued the complexities of gender systems, but I had also seriously underestimated the depth and persistence of sociocultural variation within rural France, misunderstanding the significance of those lists of variables by which the French hexagon is divisible. If Ste Foy was not, after all, such an inspired choice for my original purposes, it is a strategic one, ex post facto, for the present purpose. The interplay between sociocultural specificities and large-scale change of a conventional sort is particularly discernible in this setting because both have been present in especially apparent forms, quite obvious to Ste Foyans and accessible to any outside observer. First, like a number of other predominantly rural regions in France, Ste Foy's, the Rouergue, has its own well-defined (if perhaps somewhat mythical) sociocultural identity. Rouergats, in their own view and that of others, are distinguishable from other French by, for example, their distinctive cuisine, folk tales and dances, and styles of behaving in the homeland (payslpais) and as migrants elsewhere. The ostal type of farm and family organization can be taken as a key element of this identity. Indeed, its local version is the subject of a great deal of canonical comment by contemporary Ste Foyans. Two of its characteristics—stem family households and male primogeniture inheritance—set it very clearly at odds with French law and with social and cultural norms elsewhere in France. These characteristics also conveniently make it possible to track over time the extent to which the ostal system has actually been practiced: local census and cadastral records provide data on measurable change in patterns of household composition and inheritance practices from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Second, I began my fieldwork in Ste Foy, as it turned out, just at the close of a period that has come to be conventionally considered as one of unprecedented economic growth and development in France. During the "thirty glorious years" after World War II, France, by a wide array of measures, left its position as a chronic laggard among the industrial powers of the world. By the onset of the recessionary period beginning in the mid-1970s, it had become a consumer economy as urbanized, wealthy, and dominated by a sophisticated service sector as any (Fourastie 1979; Parodi 1981; Marceau 1977). Ste Foy participated in this transformation, experiencing it in a particularly accelerated version. This community began the postwar era as one that was a great deal

24

• Chapter One

poorer, more isolated, and closer to a subsistence economy than the French average. By 1975 it had caught up and became a very prosperous community, thoroughly integrated into national and international markets and enjoying a standard of living comparable to that now found anywhere in France. The immediate cause of this local transformation (the possibility of shifting to lucrative contract production for Roquefort) was such that change occurred in a relatively uncomplicated and nondisruptive manner, not involving, for example, dramatic population shifts into or out of the community, or radical changes in economic activity. Ste Foy in 1975 was, as it had been in 1945 and back into the past, a predominantly agricultural community with almost the same size population composed of the same families as before, but now living under very different conditions. What I was able to observe in 1975, then, was an end point of a period of extraordinarily rapid change, one which was conveniently (from an analytical perspective) simplified, though no less consequential for that, and had been vividly experienced in the immediate past by everyone living in the community. Finally, Ste Foy is the kind of community that has loomed large in the polemic about the costs or benefits of this kind of change, particularly in France. As a small rural community, it is the sort of place that has often been romanticized as a locus of a golden past of harmonious gemeinschaft and oneness with nature, or the soul of the nation, tragically ground away by the brutalizing forces of modern uniformity (e.g., Sand 1846; Bazin 1900; Giono 1930; Helias 1978). Just as frequently, such places have been portrayed as unwholesomely brutish, ridiculous, or backward—if rescuable by the civilizing sources of modern enlightenment, then mercifully so (e.g., Balzac 1844; Zola 1887; Chevalier 1934; Morin 1970). In both conventions, the rural community emerges as a highly charged emblem of the homogenizing powers of modern life (whether presented as the state, modernity, or capital). It is appropriate, then, that evidence for an opposing position be drawn from such a place. Ste Foy would intuitively seem to be exactly the sort of place that must, for better or worse, either have remained essentially untouched by such large-scale forces, thereby staying virtually unchanged, or else have been transformed by them so as to have lost much trace of any specific identity. It therefore provides a good vantage point from which to turn intuition on its head: what if, in just such a place, large-scale forces can be shown to have had a transformative effect that includes the reproduction of a specific identity? This kind of argument obviates the need to present either a seductively harmonious or repulsively brutish image of the place; Ste Foy, as we shall see, is indeed neither. I would undoubtedly never have thought about Ste Foy in the terms I have, if I had not first imagined it and then gone to live there with the Lorraine firmly in mind as a counterpoint, or if Ste Foyans had behaved in a manner more in line with my expectations of them. The salient features I originally used to

Fig. 1.1. Rural French classic: A Ste Foyan pepe (grandpa) (R. Bru)

26

• Chapter One

define Ste Foy as an appropriate subject of study do in part describe the community and help to locate it within the domain of rural French communities. That subject, though, was one I did not altogether control. As I came to know Ste Foy and sought to make sense of what I observed there, a new set of questions—a new object—was generated, one requiring a somewhat different subject. I could then recast Ste Foy as this subject by designating as salient a different selection of its characteristics. As I mean to illustrate in the succeeding chapters, there exists a remarkable human capacity to act—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not—on an apparently uncontrollable reality in a manner consistent with specific ideas of the appropriate, simultaneously adjusting those ideas and managing that reality, such that both are redefined and reproduced in the process. In this respect, Ste Foyans are no different from anyone else, including myself. Doing Fieldwork In the year that I lived in Ste Foy, I came to know many, though not all, Ste Foyans quite well. During the next four years, I lived in Paris and returned about once a year for a week or so. In the summer of 1985, ten years after I had first gone to Ste Foy and five years after my last visit, I went back for a month, and then returned for another brief visit in the summer of 1989. Several Ste Foyans visited me in Paris and one in the United States; I have remained in touch with a few by letter and very occasionally someone sends me a birth announcement, wedding picture, or newspaper clipping. Each time I have gone back, I have been surprised by the details people remember about me from my year there, and struck too by the ease with which they resume conversation with me, filling me in on their latest health problems or quarrel with a neighbor, as if I had left only a few weeks before. In fact, although I made a more indelible mark on local memory than I might have expected, I have no real existence outside of Ste Foy for any but a very few people there. That is how it seems to me, too, when I am there: thousands of details come back to mind—every twist in the road to someone's farm, the names of family dogs, complicated stories (complete with all the proper names) about distant cousins—crowding out the reality of whatever I might have been doing since I was last there. Although certainly not exotic in any conventional way, Ste Foy is indeed a different world. It is no easier to make the world of universities, big cities, and authorship of books make sense in Ste Foy than vice versa, and there is considerably less reason to try: no one is very interested, beyond a polite question or two. I learned about this different world by the conventional ethnographic method of participant-observation, a kind of total immersion by which, in principle, one absorbs at least enough to get along in the ambient surroundings. By being constantly in contact with, learning to participate in, observing,

Introduction

• 27

and soliciting information about the ordinary and extraordinary life of the group under study over a relatively substantial amount of time (usually at least a year), one expects to have entered and watched their world sufficiently to understand something about how it works. Exactly how this is done depends a great deal on the personality of the fieldworker, the kinds of information of particular interest to him or her, and the nature and levels of tolerance of the group being studied. In my case, my living arrangements were taken in hand by the president of the local Syndicat d'Initiative at the suggestion of the town clerk. He arranged for me to rent a house in the bourg that was owned by a Ste Foy native who had migrated to Paris and used the house only during summer vacations. Because I planned to arrive during the summer, he also made arrangements for me to lodge with an elderly woman in the bourg for the month before the house became available. This plan was altogether satisfactory: during my initial month I was "broken in" by my landlady, who proved to be an acute and articulate observer of Ste Foy an life as well as a person I liked very much. Subsequently, I welcomed the bit of privacy afforded by moving into a house by myself. Small communities inevitably have a fishbowl quality, and a single, young American woman who has turned up uninvited from nowhere is apt to be particularly conspicuous. I meant to spend most of my time getting to know as many Ste Foyans as I could. This was not without its difficulties. Some of the local leaders with whom I had initially made contact belonged to a self-styled forward-looking bourg elite and were interested in recruiting me to their number or at least in shaping my vision of Ste Foy. They led me to understand that they could provide me with all the information and introductions I would need and that it would be a waste of my time to bother very much with the general run of Ste Foyan farm families. As it became clear that I was not inclined to follow this advice, their overtures diminished considerably, although I maintained cordial relations with most of these individuals and their families, and came to know several very well. No one else seemed inclined to make any particular a priori claim on me. Because I was living in the bourg, I easily made the casual acquaintance of most of the shopkeepers, artisans, and others living there, all of whom were perfectly willing to chat amiably when we met in a shop or on the street. In the taciturn Lorraine, no one had been likely to say very much unless they were willing to say a great deal. Ste Foyans seemed much friendlier and more open, until it became clear that a chatting relationship could go on indefinitely and carried no promise of further intimacy. Talk can be an even more effective barrier than silence. I did nonetheless eventually develop quite close relationships with a dozen or so bourg families. I aimed to know well something resembling a cross-section of bourg residents (considering age, gender, occupation, and social status) and was generally successful in doing

28

• Chapter One

so, although intangible considerations of mutual compatibility and interest were most determinant. My first priority in any case was to establish relationships with Ste Foyan farm families, almost all of whom lived out in the countryside on isolated farms and hamlets. The practical difficulties I encountered suggested that Ste Foy was a "community" only in the narrowest administrative sense. As a resident of the bourg, 1 had almost no occasion for casual encounters with those living in the outlying countryside, nor were they very likely to have heard of my existence. (In the tightly knit nucleated settlement where I had worked in the Lorraine, everyone knew a great deal about me within days of my arrival, and I might well see almost anyone just in the course of walking from my house at one end of the village toward the grocery store at the other end.) The only place where bourg and country residents seemed to mix in any sustained and informal way was in the bourg cafes, but these were clearly marked as male territory. It was normally inappropriate for me to go into a cafe at all, and it was never a very comfortable place to be. Most women did come into the bourg every week for church, but there was a marked absence of socializing there; as soon as the mass was over, the farm women were apt to hurry back to their cars and wait there for their men to finish in the cafes so they could drive back out to the country. Monthly fair day in the bourg provided a good opportunity to catch up with people one already knew, but was too crowded and bustling for much else. I found it personally impossible to be so forward as to deliberately initiate any connections myself, which would have required driving out to a farm and presenting myself on someone's doorstep, unannounced and unknown. Fortunately, the Association Familiale's annual one-day outing was scheduled soon after my arrival in Ste Foy, and I was invited to come along. This amounted to a rare occasion for bourg and country residents to spend a day together in close quarters. By the end of the day, I had met members of a number of Ste Foyan farm families, most of whom invited me to come visit their farms. I took advantage of these invitations, and found that in general, contact with one farm was enough to make me known by the others in the immediate vicinity. Very frequently, when I went to visit a farm, a neighbor would "happen" to stop by, or I would be told that the family down the road had said they would like me to visit them too. Very few Ste Foyans had telephones—and neither did I—but local communication networks, though extremely fragmented territorially, were quite effective. In the end, I came to know as many Ste Foyans living in the countryside as in the bourg. There, too, I knew about a dozen families particularly well, roughly representing a cross-section by age and status, but ultimately selected—or self-selected—because we especially liked each other. My network was quite unusual by Ste Foyan standards, insofar as it cut across the range of status, factional, and territorial distinctions of the community. Indeed, this is a part of my persona that has stuck in Ste Foyan memories: when I have returned, I

Introduction

• 29

have often been treated to stories (long since forgotten by me) about, for example, that time I was able to explain to so-and-so (native of Ste Foy) exactly where the such-and-such farm is. Most of my time in Ste Foy was spent visiting, with varying frequency, the households I came to know there. This usually involved stopping by unannounced, sometimes for a quick coffee with whoever was home, sometimes for a full day of talk, work, and several meals with various or all members of the household. In many families, 1 came to be associated most closely with one or another member of the household—a grandparent, husband, wife, or one of the children. I was apt to be cordially received by whoever was available, but the person most attached to me was expected to monopolize my attention as soon as he or she arrived home. The families I knew best invited me to participate in a variety of special occasions, of a work nature (e.g., annual pig slaughter and feast), family celebration (e.g., baptismal or engagement banquet), or calendrical holiday (e.g., Easter or Pentecost). I also participated in a number of public events (e.g., patron saint's day festivities, open town council meetings, and monthly fairs). I never administered any formal questionnaires or tape-recorded any conversations, and only rarely took notes while I was talking to anyone. When I went to visit I usually had in mind some reason for going to see that person or family and a list of topics 1 wanted to discuss, based on some line of inquiry I was pursuing. My interviews, though, were apt to be conversations, never more than semidirected and sometimes not directed (by me) at all. If, when I happened by, someone wanted to talk about the latest atrocity committed by her mother-in-law or the disaster out in the lamb barn, then that is what we talked about; my questions about her views of the new mayor could wait for another day. In fact, her comments might suggest some mother-in-law topics to be probed the next day on a visit to someone else. Over the course of the year, I was able to acquire a sense of Ste Foy, defined by some combination of my interests and sensibilities with Ste Foyan preoccupations, and grounded in a number of personal relationships built up layer by layer and sometimes coming to be almost like close friendships or kin ties. I supplemented this work with some archival research on local records. Having spent the previous year studying French rural history, I was convinced that my study would benefit from a historical dimension. In particular, I wanted to collect background information on changing demographic trends over time (birth, marriage, death, and migration rates), on historical patterns of household constitution and composition, and on inheritance practices. I allocated, therefore, a modest amount of time to consulting local cadastral records, censuses (listes nominatives), and birth/marriage/death registers (etat civil) going back to the mid-nineteenth century when Ste Foy split from a neighboring township and its own records began. The town clerk took considerable interest in what I was doing. He happened to be spending a good deal

30

• Chapter One

of time sorting and classifying local documents in preparation for a move to Ste Foy's new town hall, and often brought to my attention records he thought I would find interesting. I usually spent my mornings in the town hall copying out old records and, although I gave lower priority to this activity than to talking with contemporary Ste Foyans, it shaped my local identity in important ways. First, my apparent rootlessness was considered uncomfortably peculiar, but was partly compensated for by the familiarity I acquired with people and events in Ste Foy's past. Conversation in Ste Foy is apt to be peppered with references to the past, and many people make a sport of being able to trace back complicated genealogical connections among Ste Foyans, dead or alive. I never could match the best of the local genealogists, but I became knowledgeable enough to participate. I came to know almost as well as many who had been the father, son, or younger brother of whom, who had married whom, when the X farm had gone over to the Y family. I often ran across an entry in the archives suggesting that there was some more colorful story behind it, and 1 soon discovered whom to ask about the various alternative versions of what had happened. I learned a great deal from these multivocal elaborations, and many people enjoyed the chance to display their considerable story-telling skills and memory of people or incidents they had heard about or seen. Further, my work in the archives was, in the consideration of many Ste Foyans, the closest I came to doing any real work at all. In their view, it was altogether appropriate for a well-educated, urban, American doctor's daughter with soft white hands, a good command of the French language, and presumably a large if invisible fortune to spend her time going around to visit people. Such activity was understood as a leisure-time distraction suited to someone of high status who need not do, and probably never had done, real work. The mystery of why I should have come all the way to Ste Foy to pursue my leisure was undoubtedly chalked up to the oddities of the leisured class. In any event, Ste Foyans highly value hard work—as do I—and I found it validating in this setting that at least the time I spent in the archives was recognized as vaguely resembling work. Three puzzles emerged for me in Ste Foy. The first and most massive was, as I have suggested, that it was so different from the village I knew in the Lorraine. I had learned how one lives in a French farming community, and was quite prepared, for example, for people's interest in watching television game shows and in complaining about the government, the Common Market, the weather, and especially each other. But I had to unlearn quite a lot. Life in Ste Foy was organized from altogether different premises about how the world works, what can be expected of one's fellows, how to define and place oneself and others, the meaning of the community, and the significance of an array of personal traits. That is, although sharing in some sense a historical moment and a similar niche in a national order (and, for that matter, in a world system),

Introduction

• 31

the two were nonetheless strikingly different in terms of social structure and systems of cultural meaning. The other two puzzles were somewhat more tangible, but no less confounding. As I copied out local census data, I found, as I expected, evidence in the older records that the ostal system as described by contemporary Ste Foyans had indeed been practiced as far back in time as I had chosen to go. I did not, however, expect to find, as I did, that the incidence of stem family households and male primogeniture inheritance associated with the "archaic" ostal system had substantially increased over time. Everything I knew about family history led me to expect the opposite, and Ste Foyans themselves claimed that the ostal system had, in practice, fallen into disarray with the coming of modernity: "People here used to do such-and-such, but nowadays there are no rules left." The apparently backward evolution of Ste Foy's distinctive family system provides a specific example of the larger question. Intuitively, it seems reasonable to suppose that as Ste Foy became more prosperous and deeply implicated in various kinds of French institutions, its ostal system would have withered away, succumbing to ambient pressures as expressed in French law (first promulgated in the early nineteenth century) forbidding impartible inheritance, dominant French social and cultural norms (dating at least from the late nineteenth century) favoring nuclear family households, or postwar agricultural policies aimed at breaking up extended family farm households. That household composition and inheritance patterns evolved in a way consistent with reinforcement of the ' 'traditional" ostal system at the same time that the community was undergoing rapid "modernization" demands some explanation. As an added twist, contemporary Ste Foyans' perceptions of ostal evolution are a great deal more consistent with the conventional received wisdom of modernization theory and family history than with the behavioral traces recorded in their local archives. The third enigma offered by Ste Foy was a great deal more immediate: I happened to arrive in the midst of what everyone was calling "the municipal crisis" (crise municipale). The mayor had been thrown out of office a few months before, after serving four years of his third six-year term, and the prefect of the Aveyron had just suspended the town council. The township was in a kind of receivership until special elections were held several months later. In the interim, the place was in an uproar, dominated by a dizzying array of accusations and counteraccusations about what "la crise" was about and who had caused it. Everyone had a great deal to say about what was, was not, or should be going on and seemed inclined to take advantage of the climate of conflict to air grievances of all sorts. I chose to remain neutral, forgoing the advantages of becoming a trusted ally of any one camp in exchange for those of becoming the enemy of no one. The immediate challenge for me lay in sorting out how the various factional lines were drawn, so that I could navigate in that environment. At a more abstract level, the problem was one of finding

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• Chapter One

the sense in this episode, which, for a time, overwhelmed Ste Foy. It might be explained structurally as an idiosyncratic or periodic surfacing of endemic conflict, normally kept more or less latent, into a generalized and very public brawl. Perhaps because I was there during this crisis, I understand Ste Foyan life to be organized in a way that inevitably generates a great deal of tension; it makes some sense that this might sporadically surface in an air-clearing cataclysm. On the other hand, the outcome of the 1975 crisis could be read historically, as a partially successful attempt at radical change in the local social order. The assurance and accuracy with which virtually everyone (except me) predicted its immediate outcome suggests that it was an inevitable paroxysmal resolution or turning point, coming out of the tensions generated by the previous decades of rapid economic change in the community. As a highly disruptive series of events coming at the close of a period of transformation, the crisis is difficult to fit into the neat and inexorable order we like to read into both social structures and processes of change. Further, it is impossible to make any sense of these events without taking into account the particular willful individuals who initiated, stoked, or shaped them in a clearly intentional effort to redefine Ste Foy or an equally conscious attempt to resist this challenge. To the problem of sorting out the connections or disconnections between sociocultural structures and large-scale processes of change, then, is added the issue of how particular events, human agency, and individual intentions fit in. Who, after all, are the actors—persistent structures, pervasive forces, willful people? These three puzzles are puzzling only within particular frames of reference. I shall briefly sketch several of these before returning to the particulars of Ste Foy. THE QUESTIONS

Sociocultural Structures and Historical Causality Eugen Weber's seminal work Peasants Into Frenchmen^ offers a useful example of one conventional conception of the place of "culture" in lines of historical causality. It also illustrates a standard solution to a central problem in modern French history (i.e., identity): how to reconcile the existence of two apparently incompatible Frances. One is the paradigmatic nation-state, defined and managed from the center and consolidated by legislative decree, uniform national institutions, and hegemonic modes of thought. The other is the France composed of predominantly rural provinces, regions, and locali1 It is interesting to note that Weber's title became, in the French translation of his work, La Fin des terroirs. The English-language title implies a process by which diverse and backward peoples (peasants) were transformed into a single rational and modern people (Frenchmen). The French title implies a definitive end (fin) of territorially defined cultural diversity.

Introduction

• 33

ties, well documented in the history of prerevolutionary France and widely diverse in terms of geography, cultural traditions, social organization, and behavioral styles. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Weber argues, France was an administrative, but not a cultural, unity. It was instead a heterogeneous collection of diverse sociocultural traditions, each elaborated largely in response to "want and insecurity" and kept alive by "custom and inertia." However vital these local and regional cultures might once have been, they were, in the context of the nineteenth century, anachronistic, static survivals of miserable and ignorant isolation. During the decades surrounding the turn of this century, a number of processes were set in motion, generally initiated by the centralized state, but gathering a momentum of their own down a path commonly associated with conventional modernization theory. In particular, the development of an efficient transportation network gave rural folk increased access to markets and contact with more modern ways of life; the establishment of a national system of free and obligatory primary education led to the spread of a national language and provided exposure to a dominant national civilization; universal male military service provided direct experience with people and places beyond the confines of a local world. With new economic opportunities and exposure to a less parochial world—that is, in the context of a widened set of choices—the old local cultures naturally disintegrated, giving way to "the dominant civilization of Paris" as a unified, liberating national culture. The paradox of the two Frances is thus resolved by placing them in sequence: diverse France gave way over time as modern centralized France gathered force. Other scholars have used essentially the same kind of reasoning to describe the eventual collapse of local and regional cultures in France in their encounters with different large-scale forces of change. For example, wide participation in national political institutions and the establishment of a railroad system in the mid-nineteenth century (cf. Agulhon 1982; McPhee 1988; Tilly 1979) or the rapid adoption of new technologies and reorganization of agriculture in the 1950s (e.g., Mendras 1979; Wright 1964) have been said to have the same effect. There is no doubt that railroads, voting rights, accessible markets, public schools, and modern farm technologies, for example, all penetrated the French countryside at various points in time, were more or less managed by the centralized state, and helped to drive consequential change. Exactly what the consequences were, in terms of local and regional sociocultural specificities, is rather more problematic. Weber's argument (like those of others) rests on several assumptions about the nature of "local or regional cultures" with respect to historical change. In particular, he sees the diverse sociocultural systems characterizing rural France as fragile and static ' 'poor choices,'' so brittle as to be reducible to dust

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• Chapter One

in the face of significant change bringing other options. Analysts more critical of the process have been inclined to see it less as a matter of poor choices and better options than as one of weak forces obliterated by the powerful. Either way, the effects of large-scale change, for better or worse, have been taken to be uniform, and the hegemonic powers of a "civilization" or polity such as that seated in Paris understood as ultimately overwhelming. That is, as a result of the kinds of change described by Weber and others—a breakdown of isolation and the promise of new prosperity associated with modernity—rural folk everywhere would necessarily abandon their diverse old ways and subscribe instead to the single, uniform model offered or imposed from the center. These premises are consistent with a commonsense notion of "culture" as something that is relatively inert, conservative, and particularly characteristic of—or important within—exotic, old-fashioned, or backward societies, those least like " u s . " Rooted in custom or tradition, "culture" is conceived as contrasted with rationality or modernity. For example, cultural proclivities or peculiarities in the Third World are often seen as obstacles to the success of (rational) development projects undertaken there. In the American Midwest, Amish farmers, with their quaint and archaic ways, are apt to be understood as products of a distinctive culture, while neighboring modern farmers are not. Anthropologists, as students of culture, are expected to be interested in odd, out-of-the-way groups, but to have little of significance to study among " u s . " Understood along these lines, "culture" is neither forceful nor dynamic enough to be a significant force of change; it can only brake or divert the orderly march of such processes as industrialization, modernization, and national integration. In a context such as contemporary France, which is incontestably fully industrialized, modern, and nationally integrated, it intuitively stands to reason that "traditional" cultural diversity characteristic of the ancien regime must have withered away by some process. Indeed, a measure of France's modernity might be the disappearance of any significant trace of local cultural specificities from even the remotest hinterlands. In fact, there can be little doubt that rural France has been transformed over the last two centuries, in part as a result of the forces described by Weber and others. If it is assumed that "culture" is essentially static, that the reproduction of sociocultural specificities is incompatible with significant change, then local and regional cultural diversity must necessarily have disappeared from France. On the other hand, it is unreasonable to suppose that this happened repeatedly at each period of accelerated economic or political change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If Weber could make a plausible case for the disappearance of regional cultures around the turn of this century, they must have survived the well-documented transformations of the mid-nineteenth century after all. But if Mendras could make an equally plausible case set in the 1950s and 1960s, then the transformations described by Weber must not have had the homogenizing effect he claims. Furthermore,

Introduction

• 35

my observations of marked cultural differences in rural France of the 1970s, a generation after Mendras's period (several generations after the close of Weber's), and in settings that are not poor, isolated, backward, or untouched by substantial change, suggest that Mendras's conclusions are no better founded than Weber's. Rather, it would appear that "culture" is a great deal more dynamic, resilient, and compatible with "modernity" than Weber and others (including "common sense") would have it. Consequential and large-scale transformations, it seems, can be absorbed in ways consistent with the reproduction of sociocultural difference, limiting the hegemony of a "dominant" centralized power and its institutions. If I was surprised that Ste Foy was as different from the Lorraine as it turned out to be, it was because I had generally subscribed to the notion that sociocultural specificities are necessarily ground down over time by the weight of powerful large-scale forces. My skepticism toward the "end of rural cultures" literature extended only so far as the idea that cultural systems are less fragile or retrograde than is often assumed, so that the processes by which they are dismantled are apt to be much longer and more discontinuous than many historians and sociologists claim. I was inclined to read each of those periods of accelerated change in French rural history, for example, as another round of chipping-away, rather than as a neat finishing-off. Although I took with some seriousness that list of variables defining regional differences in contemporary France, I assumed them to have a distinct half-life, to be progressively and inevitably absorbed into some kind of generally shared "French culture." My observations in Ste Foy, however, underline the considerable regenerative and absorptive capacity of specific sociocultural systems. Much of what I learned about rural France in the Lorraine, for example, proved not to apply in Ste Foy, and would have been equally inapplicable, though in different ways, had I gone to Brittany, Alsace, Vendee, Provence, or elsewhere. Ste Foy's cultural specificity (like that elsewhere) might well have been adapted to a shared context of want and insecurity—although, as I shall show below, it appears to have persisted despite being singularly ill-adapted to such a context—but it accommodates at least as well an environment of comfortable prosperity. Given a widened range of choice, Ste Foyans have opted in significant measure for closer conformity to local notions of the appropriate, incorporating new elements quite selectively, and then in forms amenable to local structures. This suggests that culture is neither an impediment nor a victim of change; a specific cultural system is as unlikely to be static as it is to self-destruct (or be destructible). Historical change includes processes of sociocultural reproduction, such that large-scale transformative forces are absorbed and shaped to trace variant trajectories. As a result, (cultural) difference over place remains no less salient than (historical) difference over time. The two kinds of difference do not stand in opposition, but are inextricably intertwined. It fol-

36

• Chapter One

lows then, that France, for example, is as culturally diverse today as it ever has been, that the "cracked mirror" of regional diversity has never in fact been altogether superseded by a uniform, centrally denned and managed "French civilization."2 My primary concern in this study is not to address the issue of how a coherent French identity has nonetheless been constructed, although I shall briefly return to this issue in the concluding chapter. Certainly, the writing of histories positing the destruction of any meaningful cultural diversity has been one important mechanism. (That such a construction has somehow been successfully accomplished is suggested by the fact that no one I knew in the Lorraine or in Ste Foy had any doubts about their own Frenchness, even though in each place, my descriptions of the other were considered more than a bit odd and only mildly interesting.) What I mean to do instead is to relocate the place of culture in historical causality by illustrating through one particular case how sociocultural specificity can be reproduced in the context of large-scale and highly consequential transformation. The particular interest of a French example is that the argument is an especially strong one if it can be shown that even within France—that indubitably modern and heavyhandedly centralized nation-state with clear pretensions to "civilizational" hegemony—change proceeds in a manner that preserves and reproduces sociocultural specificities. History of the Family "Sociocultural systems" are elusive beasts and, insofar as they are defined by the norms, values, and systems of meaning carried in people's heads, their persistence, transformation, or disappearance is difficult to trace over time with much assurance. This is especially the case with respect to groups having little inclination or ability to preserve a written record of their thoughts about themselves and their worlds. One institution which has been understood to reflect or embody sociocultural specificities in a widespread, amply documented, and readily comparable manner is the family. The domain of family and kinship, of course, has always been one of the most basic and important areas of inquiry within the discipline of anthropology. The family, especially as manifested in household composition and inheritance practices, has more recently reemerged as an important subject to historians and anthropologists 2 One of the best known presentations of such a position is Le Bras and Todd's provocative U Invention cle la France (1981). They muster an impressive array of data to demonstrate the depth and persistence of regional diversity in France down to the present. Although they persuasively pose the problem, however, the explanation they propose is less convincing. The root cause of such diversity and the motor driving its persistence, they argue, can be found in their extremely simplified typology of family systems historically found in rural France and the psychodynamics they claim to be associated with these. While variation in family structure certainly did—and to some extent still does—reflect sociocultural diversity in France, the dynamic by which the latter continues to be reproduced demands subtler and more persuasive explication.

Introduction

• 37

of Europe interested in sociocultural variations over time or place. In part, this interest can be traced to practical considerations. In much of Europe, parish or census records offer systematic information about who lives with whom. Property, tax, and testamentary records provide data series about who owns what and to whom it is transferred. Journals and other types of documents frequently yield insights into more qualitative dimensions of family relationships. In interview situations, it is usually quite easy to engage people in discussion about their families. There are theoretical reasons as well. For example, virtually everyone in the world has from birth an array of relatives, but kin ties everywhere are defined and ordered subject to reasonably clear and culture-specific rules. Comparative examination of these rules or their behavioral traces provides insights into variations over time or place in premises of social structure and cultural meaning. Further, the ways in which family ties are conceived and organized have direct or indirect effects on many other domains of life. Information about family or household organization may therefore reveal clues about a great deal more as well. This is perhaps particularly obvious in—though certainly not specific to—small rural communities dominated by family farms and inhabited by the same families over generations. It was once taken as common knowledge that most people in preindustrial societies, in Europe as elsewhere, lived in large, extended family households. With the psychic, economic, and political transformations associated with industrialization or modernization, so it was thought, kin ties became less important, enduring, and dense, and households shrank to their "modern" nuclear form. An early and influential proponent of this view was Frederic Le Play, a mid-nineteenth-century French sociologist. Drawing on case studies from much of Europe (but especially France), he created a typology of family systems, identifying a particularly sharp distinction between, on one hand, the unstable and disorganized nuclear family characteristic of modern society and, on the other, various forms of large, enduring, patriarchal extended families predominant in preindustrial Europe. He found surviving examples of the latter in areas yet relatively untouched by industrialization or urbanization, and devoted particular attention in his writings to the "stem family" (famille souche) system he identified in the Pyrenees (e.g., 1871). Le Play believed that the "older" family systems—especially the stem family forms—were far superior to their modern successor, and decried the forces he considered responsible for their demise, especially the French state and its legislation forbidding impartible inheritance. Subsequent sociologists and historians of the family have not all shared his negative judgment about this transition and have debated the exact nature of the processes by which it was brought about (e.g., the relative weight of economic, legislative, and educative forces). Nevertheless, the general schema was generally accepted, and indeed can be taken as an example of the line of reasoning sketched in the previous section. If the various extended family systems of the preindustrial era are taken as expres-

38

• Chapter One

sions or reflections of a premodern and traditional cultural diversity, then they might logically be expected to have collapsed under the weight of large-scale transformations, converging into the single type of family organization associated with modernity (Goode 1963; Shorter 1975). This received wisdom was challenged by the work of Peter Laslett and his associates beginning in the late 1960s (Laslett 1965; Laslett and Wall 1972). Using English parish records to examine patterns of household composition over time, he argued that the image of the preindustrial extended household was largely mythical and that industrialization or modernization had had a great deal less effect on family organization than was commonly believed. Marshaling evidence that most people had lived in nuclear family households before, during, and after the industrial revolution, he claimed that the nuclear form was not so specifically modern after all. The stem family was rather more a figment of Le Play's nostalgic imagination than a significant historical reality, and the various transformational forces supposed to have fundamentally altered family organization had not had such a radical effect in that domain after all. Laslett's claims generated a great deal of spirited response, a perhaps disproportionate amount of which has revolved around the fact or fiction of the stem family. At least three kinds of scholarly activity and debate were inspired. First, a variety of methodological and interpretive issues were raised about limits to the conclusions that can be drawn about family systems from records of household composition at one point in time. Such data amount to behavioral traces of only one dimension of family life, which, in itself, reveals little about the dynamic structure or the conceptual underpinnings of the family system. Therefore, it was argued, a given percentage (even a rather high one) of nuclear family households within a population is insufficient evidence that the family system is necessarily organized around a nuclear model.3 For example, Berkner (1972, 1975, 1977), in an influential critique, established that households have life cycles shaped by the family systems in which they are embedded and by demographic and other constraints. He showed that the structure of stem family systems is such that households alternate between extended phases (older couple, married heir, his/her children) and a nuclear phase (older couple deceased, heir's heir not yet married). Thus one would 3 More radical critiques have been made, by Berkner (1975), Stone (1981), Kertzer (1984) and others, suggesting that, for a variety of reasons, the household may not be a relevant unit of analysis for studies of family systems at all. For example, recorded patterns of household composition may sometimes be more revealing of the priorities and perceptions of census-takers or historians in their construction of arbitrary categories than of family organization or people's experience of family life. Such criticisms have a great deal of merit, but I have sidestepped them here because in the family system of primary interest to me (Ste Foy's), the household as recorded by census-takers is without doubt a central, locally recognized institution, quite appropriate as a unit of analysis. Laslett's typology of household composition, on the other hand, is not very well suited to this setting, and I have not used it.

Introduction

• 39

expect to find a significant number of nuclear family households in the context of a stem family system; the number of households of a particular type, considered in the absence of other evidence, reveals very little about the nature of family structure. As Laslett and his associates conceded, their observations establishing the frequency of nuclear family households in preindustrial Europe are not necessarily incompatible with the existence of various kinds of extended family systems. Another, related line of attack involved reexamining the evidence for a diversity of family systems in preindustrial Europe. Among French historians in particular it was close to an article of faith that prerevolutionary France was characterized by a high degree of sociocultural diversity, marked in part by an intricate patchwork of different inheritance and family systems (Yver 1966; Le Roy Ladurie 1972). Le Play's idea that the nuclear family and egalitarian inheritance had been an invention of the Napoleonic era had long since been discredited. There was good evidence that in parts of northern France (including the Lorraine) such systems far predated nineteenth-century legislation, urbanization, or industrialization. This was consistent with Laslett's assertions, but the notion that family organization was essentially uniform throughout prerevolutionary France was quite unacceptable, and a number of scholars undertook regional or comparative studies to demonstrate the range of diversity (e.g., Collomp 1974, 1983; Flandrin 1979). Here, too, Laslett and his associates revised their original position in light of new and generally accepted evidence that although nuclear family systems seemed to have been widespread in much of preindustrial northern Europe (including large parts of England), various other kinds of family organization, including stem family systems, had indeed existed elsewhere. Finally, a number of scholars undertook close investigation of the impact on family organization of forces once assumed to have generated radical transformation. What had once been taken for granted became an interesting research question. Laslett's original attack on the transformative powers of forces associated with industrialization was largely based on the position that these could not have had the homogenizing effects generally assumed because family organization had already been substantially uniform across preindustrial Europe. This logic was undermined by the reassertion of a prior existence of diverse family systems. If Laslett was right about the impotence of those large-scale forces to transform family systems, it follows that he was as wrong to assume modern homogeneity as he had been to claim preindustrial uniformity. A more intuitively appealing alternative is that he was correct to assume relatively little variation in modern family organization and therefore had underestimated the transformative powers of large-scale forces of change. Some scholars have mustered evidence in support of the former position, demonstrating, for example, that changes in French inheritance law had relatively little effect (pace Le Play) on how peasant small-holders transferred their prop-

40

• Chapter One

erty (e.g., Claverie and Lamaison 1982). Others have favored the latter position, showing, for example, that radical changes in family organization result when people move from a rural, agricultural environment to an urban, industrial one (e.g., Aries 1976). Still others have come down in the middle, suggesting that changing conditions of life associated with industrialization, urbanization, or the introduction of new legal or economic institutions affect family organization, but in ways that are as much determined by prior habits as by new contexts. However uniform the cause, the effects are apt to be variable (e.g., Lehning 1980; Shaffer 1982; Tilly and Scott 1978). If we take family organization to be a reflection or manifestation of sociocultural specificity, the question comes back around to that raised in more general form in the section above: Do specific sociocultural forms stand in opposition to largescale transformative forces, the former necessarily braking or being obliterated by the latter? Or can "culture" more usefully be understood as an active and positive element of the process of change, reproducing itself in variant but no less distinctive forms over time and shaping the effects of transformative forces along an array of trajectories? I set out for my year of research in Ste Foy in the midst of the earliest debates generated by the work of Laslett and his associates. They were ringing especially loudly in my ears because I had spent the previous year (19741975) in Paris participating in research seminars on rural French history, where a great deal of (mostly hostile) attention was paid to his then-unrevised assumptions and conclusions.4 The fact that the fieldsite I had selected was located squarely in that part of France associated with the disputed stem family form enhanced its attractiveness. The Laslett-inspired debates, though, seemed to me to be clearly situated in history, relevant only to the background of my study. I was inclined to believe that the stem family had in fact once existed there, and that this constituted a significant enough antecedent to the problem of primary interest to me (contemporary gender definitions and status) to warrant some investigation. However, I supposed that this family form no longer existed to any significant extent. My interest in documenting its prior existence came mainly from my commitment to demonstrating that such historical specificities had little impact on contemporary social organization. I was, therefore, thoroughly unprepared for my findings that Ste Foy's 4 During that year, I had what in retrospect seems a historically interesting opportunity to participate in a seminar of French historians to which Laslett was invited as a guest speaker. As I recall, the French members of the seminar looked forward to that session with swords sharpened. To everyone's disappointment, Laslett was clever enough to speak on a topic—American black family organization, I believe—in which no one present had any particular stake or knowledge. He also insisted on speaking his extremely accented and rudimentary French so that it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying. (I distinctly remember his refusal to accede to repeated requests to switch to English.) That particular confrontation was forestalled, prompting frustration but a grudging admiration for his astuteness.

Introduction

• 41

version of a stem family system not only existed in the past, but was thriving under contemporary conditions. History was not so readily relegated to the background, but insinuated itself in an unexpectedly overbearing way on the observable present. However convincing the evidence for the persistence of a stem family system in Ste Foy, the case of one small and rather unimportant French community is weak grounds on which to base sweeping generalizations about the resilience of cultural forms and the heterogeneous effects of large-scale transformational forces. In the years since my first encounter with Ste Foy, however, the burgeoning literature on European family systems has yielded evidence that the evolution I observed in Ste Foy may, after all, be more appropriately understood as exemplary than as odd. In particular, conclusions consistent with mine have been reached by a number of anthropologists who have traced family systems down to the present, and have therefore been able to combine, as I have done, examination of historical records and observations of contemporary life, and to interpret these in light of considerable bodies of cross-cultural data and well-developed theory within anthropology. For example, variants of a stem family form, historically associated with a number of regions within Ireland and the northern parts of Portugal, Spain, and Italy, as well as southwestern and parts of southeastern France, have been shown to have persisted elsewhere across this considerable territory, as a preferred model and in practice (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1979; O'Neill 1985; Douglass 1988a; Pitkin 1985; Bourdieu 1962; Assier-Andrieu 1981; Lamaison 1988; cf. Douglass 1988b). More generally, the reproduction of distinctive patterns of family organization in new, but not radically different or any less distinctive, ways has become increasingly well documented. For instance, where old patterns of household composition have been abandoned to accommodate a new organization of work or the constraints of urban housing, patterns of extrahousehold relationships may be organized in a way that substantially reproduces the well-established family system (e.g., Segalen 1984; Kertzer 1984). Anthropologists, because they are not limited to the written record, often have easier access than do historians to information about the very broad range of elements constituting family systems (e.g., patterns of extrahousehold kin relationships, marital strategies, meanings and expectations associated with various kin ties) and can, as a result, develop finer analyses of change and continuity than are apt to be readily discernible from the historical record alone. When they have done so, change over time is evident, but in a way strongly nuanced by considerable continuities, yielding persistent diversity over place. Historical Change in Sociocultural Analysis In fact, historical change has long been at least as problematic to anthropologists as culture has been to historians, and there has been a parallel impulse to

42

• Chapter One

either write it out of the picture as impotent or irrelevant, or to further problematize it as a source of disruption and disorder. From time to time throughout the history of anthropology, the relationship between history and anthropology (or change and structure) has reemerged as a subject of substantial interest, debate, and manifesto. Over the last decade, this matter has again become the subject of a great deal of attention, as anthropologists try to define and grapple with the problem of how "history" could, should, or should not be incorporated into social or cultural analysis (e.g., Sahlins 1985; Cohn 1981; Sider 1986; Silverman 1979). At the time I began my research in France, the issue did not seem so salient as a matter of theory. I thought I needed to pay some attention to "history," but this seemed dictated more by the place where I planned to work than by the problem I meant to explore there. I knew rural French people to have a strong sense of history, expressed in their inclination to define themselves largely with reference to their perceptions of the past. 1 thought it important to attend to their perceptions, and to have some mastery of historians' history of the same phenomena. I also supposed that contemporary rural France had, in some sense, been shaped by its recorded past, and that the large and rich extant literature on rural French history would therefore be of some relevance, especially that considerable part of it documenting the regionally diverse social and cultural identities of the preindustrial era. I was interested in these studies much as I was interested in ethnographic monographs treating other rural areas in Europe: as descriptions of societies having some similarities to the one I meant to examine and belonging in the same domain as my study. Knowing something about peasant life in sixteenth-century Languedoc, for example, seemed a great deal more useful than knowing much about the succession of political regimes in nineteenth-century France. 1 understood "history," then, as background, certainly relevant in the context of rural France but not necessarily elsewhere, and useful in the form of relatively timeless descriptions of past sociocultural organization rather than as a chronological sequence of events or processes leading toward the present. However, history as I confronted it in Ste Foy kept pushing its way to the foreground in two ways. I could make no sense out of what I observed there without making a great deal more reference than I had originally thought necessary to its specific past and to ongoing (and recently accelerated) processes of change experienced there. "History" in both these senses emerged as more than background or even context. Instead, it asserted itself as an integral part of local sociocultural structure as I could discern it. This suggests, as many scholars in the meantime have proposed, that we cannot adequately understand sociocultural structures without taking seriously their historical dimensions. Just as historians have been stymied in their attempts to handle "culture" by their own culture-bound notions about its relevance to modern life, so anthropologists' difficulties with "history" can be traced to the fetters of history

Introduction

• 43

in the form of the intellectual apparatus bequeathed in our discipline. In particular, the heritage of functionalism weighs heavy. The anthropological enterprise as developed two or three generations ago rests largely on discovering how an exotic society works by identifying its unfamiliar and largely implicit structure of social organization or cultural meaning, understood as expressed through interlocking institutions and arenas of behavior. Normally, everything is expected to be neatly related to everything else in discoverable ways resting on an equilibrium relatively impermeable to change. Where change does occur (e.g., in societies experiencing colonization), it is most readily understood as externally imposed rather than internally generated, and as constituting a transitional phase between two equilibrium states. That is, change has been understood as an abnormal and not necessarily interesting phenomenon. It disrupts the timeless and "authentic" equilibrium of sociocultural order, much as "culture" has been understood by some historians to get in the way of a normal progression of change. Alternatively, change may be understood as mere illusion. There exists a large ' 'plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose'' literature in anthropology, demonstrations of the persistence of the "real" essence of a society (its underlying logic of social organization or cultural meaning) despite apparent change. Here, change-over-time is revealed on close scrutiny to be superficial and easily overwhelmed by transcendent structure, much as "culture" is often seen by historians to be swept away by transcendent forces of change. Functionalism is as easy to caricature and discredit as is modernization theory, and just as difficult a habit of thought to displace. Hardly anyone would deny that "history"—both in the sense of a past and in the sense of changeover-time—is apt to be a more important feature of societies than the classical functionalist paradigm can readily accommodate. A static equilibrium model of society, changeable only by external forces that interfere with its reproduction, is now widely recognized as unsatisfactory. It is rather less clear, though, how to conceive and describe society otherwise. Merely injecting some historical data into the picture is clearly insufficient, because it is possible to do so without upsetting an image of static equilibrium. For example, one may provide an introductory chapter presenting a teleological overview of past events, processes of change, and conditions of life, leading up to an ethnographic present in which time is made to stand still. Another strategy is to stop time by integrating descriptions of past and present, selected to emphasize an essential continuity; history as picture of the past can thus be used to obviate the need to consider history as change-over-time. Or local accounts of change-over-time (especially, though not exclusively, in the form of oral histories) can be interpreted as charters for the present, reconstructions of the past more appropriately understood to reflect the preoccupations, values, and meanings of those telling such tales, than as literal accounts of what' 'really'' happened. These kinds of' 'historical" data may thus be treated as information

44

• Chapter One

about (possibly static) structure and meaning rather than about (necessarily dynamic) change through time. All of these strategies can be useful, and I have employed them to some extent in the present study, but they do little to set structure in motion. If structure is not so easily overrun by history, it surely cannot remain unmoved either. This brings us back around to the project of conceptualizing sociocultural reproduction and historical transformation as deeply interpenetrating, rather than as mutually exclusive, processes.5 This time, the argument is that sociocultural reproduction occurs not in the preservation of an inert state of equilibrium but in a living process generated out of chronic structural disequilibrium in interaction with a changing environment. The appropriate metaphor is a biological rather than a technological one. That is, sociocultural structures are not reproduced like photocopies of documents, in virtually identical form and in any number at any time. Rather, they are reproduced as parents reproduce themselves in their children, creating offspring who are closely related in a variety of definitive ways but also possess varying degrees of (sometimes conflictual) difference and are shaped by only partially overlapping histories and circumstances. In this sense, reproduction does not imply the evacuation of historical change, but embeddedness within it. What I could observe in Ste Foy, for example, is best explained as the product of ongoing interplay, a kind of mutual acting-upon, among Ste Foyans' notions of appropriate order and meaning, internal tensions and contradictions contained in these, and the shifting range of possibility available in practice. Ste Foyans, like everyone else, perceive and use practical circumstances in terms largely defined by their sense of the appropriate, playing, as occasion warrants, on the ambiguities of both. In this sense, structure shapes historical context and constrains historical change. As a result, particular trajectories of change—the effects of a "shared" history—are quite different, for example, in Ste Foy and the Lorraine. At the same time, social order, cultural meaning, and the location of contradiction within them shift in the course of practical realization. Structure is thus a product of historical context and change. As a result, Ste Foy in 1975, for example, was quite different, not only from the Lorraine, but from itself of 1875. Time stops as rarely as cultures wither away. In the dynamic interplay among external forces, structural ambiguities, and chronic misfit between the appropriate and the possible, the ultimate agent is neither "structure" nor "history," but the individuals acting within and upon them. Human imagination is constrained by the limits of structured history 5 The conceptual framework sketched in this section is my version of some ambient ideas now current in the discipline of anthropology, especially as these have been shaped or reflected by Giddens' notion of structuration (1979), Sahlins' synthesis of structure and history (1985), and Ortner's summary and agenda for the incorporation of agency in ethnographic analysis (1984). Rohlen's study of Japanese high schools (1983) provides an especially useful—and relatively rare—example of the application of such a framework in a fully developed ethnographic analysis.

Introduction

• 45

and historically situated structure. At the same time, it is by virtue of the considerable human capacity to creatively rework and redefine both the appropriate and the possible that those limits shift in an ongoing process of reproductive transformation. People act on their world with varying degrees of intentionality. Novel improvisations may be purposely engineered, stumbled upon accidently, or invented unconsciously; they may have intended, unintended, or unrecognized consequences, or little effect at all. Persistent (but not inert) structures, pervasive (but not overwhelming) forces, and the willful (but not unconstrained) acts of individuals are thus interwoven in a kind of moving tapestry. The task here is to examine how, by looking at the way one such tapestry is woven. From this perspective, too, a contemporary French case constitutes an especially useful example. First, there exist large amounts of information of many sorts about the past and about processes of change over rather long periods of time, together with the possibility of observing the present. It is therefore feasible to bring conventional historical and ethnographic data to bear directly upon each other, tracing with some assurance transformational reproductive processes through a substantial period of time up close to the present. This is apt to be more difficult to accomplish quite so directly in settings located entirely in the past (e.g., Sahlins 1985; Sider 1987) or in those where the historical record is thinner (e.g., Rosaldo 1980; Staler 1985). Second, the French case does not involve the confrontation of radically different groups, as has, for example, European contact and colonization in the Third World. There is in France a parallel imbalance of power between, on the one hand, the hegemonic impulses of a forceful center more or less committed to Jacobin uniformity across its territory and, on the other, the specific identity and interests of the hinterlands. Nonetheless, there is no "radical other" in this story to generate much conscious resistance or brute force. Aveyronnais farmers, Lorraine farmers, and powerful Parisians are all quite different from each other, but in the global scheme of things, these differences are relatively subtle. Identification of a dynamic by which such distinctions are simultaneously reproduced and transformed over quite ordinary courses of change would suggest that such processes are widely at work, generating distinctive trajectories of change, not only among "exotic" groups or under extreme circumstances, but under mundane conditions among those most like " u s " as well.

CHAPTER TWO

Variations on a Theme: Cultural Specificities and Economic Change in Ste Foy, Aveyron

kind of change marking the recent history of Ste Foy and its region is its spectacular economic transformation during the postwar decades. Like all of France, Ste Foy, with its region, has undergone a long process of economic development which accelerated dramatically over the thirty years following World War II. In broad outline, the transformations occurring in Ste Foy and its departement of the Aveyron were similar to those occurring in all of France, and indeed are consistent with patterns conventionally associated with economic development in general. In detail, the Aveyron experienced a particular variant, as a function of its own character and of its situation within France. By the same token, Ste Foy's transformation was a specific variation on that of the Aveyron as a whole. By some measures, the postwar transformation of Ste Foy and the Aveyron was even more dramatic than that in France "on average." Long one of the poorest and most isolated regions of France, the Aveyron of 1975 still had a per capita income somewhat lower than the national average. Nevertheless, the gap had substantially closed in such terms as income, standards of living, education levels, and participation in various national institutions. By the end of France's "thirty glorious years" the Aveyron had achieved a degree of prosperity and integration with the nation-state that stood in clear contrast to its past, relative both to itself and to previous discrepancies with the rest of France. Within the Aveyron, Ste Foy's region of the Segala was transformed during the postwar period from one of the poorest and most backward areas of this poor departement to one of the most prosperous. As elsewhere in the eastern Segala, the immediate cause of Ste Foy's change in fortune was its farmers' turn to lucrative specialty production of ewe's milk under contract to Roquefort cheese firms. For some time the local agricultural economy had been moving very slowly away from subsistence production. It was rapidly transformed with the move to production for sophisticated agribusiness firms having substantial worldwide markets. Ste Foy therefore provides a particularly clear example of the transformative processes engaged by large-scale historical change. Whether framed in terms of modernization, absorption into a world capitalist system, or tightened integration with the nation-state, the forces of change experienced in Ste Foy over the last several generations have been massive, obvious, and consequential. THE MOST OBVIOUS

Economic Change in Ste Foy

• 47

The interplay between historical context and sociocultural specificity is particularly visible in postwar Ste Foy, not only because of the accelerated change in historical conditions experienced there but because, as an Aveyronnais community, it bears widely recognizable local and regional characteristics. Aveyronnais identity is a very specific version of the French, marked most obviously by language (patois), religion (very devout Catholicism), distinctive patterns of migration, and particular styles of behavior, social organization, and worldview. It is possible, then, to identify and tag some important features of Ste Foyan social structure and systems of meaning that set it apart from much of the rest of France and track these through the process of historical change. In this chapter I shall sketch the changing context of Ste Foyan life, beginning with a description of some salient features characterizing the Aveyron. I will then describe in somewhat more detail Ste Foy's own recent economic history. Finally, I will introduce and place into this context the local structures that will be the focus of the subsequent chapters: the manner in which Ste Foyans conceive and order family farms (ostals) and the community itself. THE AVEYRON: A FRENCH HINTERLAND

The Aveyron does not have a very well defined or widely familiar identity in France, except as a backwater somewhere in the south. Tucked away on the western edge of the Massif Central (France's mountainous center), the eastern edge of the southwestern plains, and the northern edge of the Midi (mediterranean France), the Aveyron has some affinity with all of those regions, but clear affiliation with none of them. Averyonnais sometimes situate themselves as "Midi moins le quart."1 When the departements were created at the time of the French Revolution as new administrative units to replace the Old Regime provinces, the Aveyron was one of the few defined by its old provincial borders. The largely forgotten, tiny province of Rouergue became the equally forgotten departement of the Aveyron, one of the biggest French departements, of about half the size of New Jersey. Throughout most of its long history, the Aveyron/Rouergue2 has 1

This is a pun, meaning 3A Mediterranean or a quarter to twelve noon. As is generally the case in France, the old provincial name (Rouergue) continues to be commonly used by locals and other French, even though it has not corresponded to any official entity for about two centuries. As a general rule, the provincial name is most apt to be used to describe "traditional" features of a place, while departemental names are more readily used with reference to "modern" or administrative matters. For example, most of the Parisian restaurants specializing in the cuisine from this area use "Rouergue'' rather than ' 'Aveyron'' in their names. On the other hand, current political figures, unless trying to cultivate some kind of nostalgic appeal, would be more likely to identify themselves as "Aveyronnais" than as "Rouergat," and "Aveyron" is used in the name of the departemental section of the farm credit bank (Credit Agricole de 1'Aveyron) . 2

48

• Chapter Two

been isolated and poor, largely because of its rugged natural environment and its place at the margins of the manmade environment. Landlocked, it has been effectively sealed off by the old volcanic Aubrac mountains in its north, the deep gorges of the Tarn Valley in its south, and the dry, sterile limestone plateaus (causses) along its eastern flank. None of the royal roads or major waterways built under the Old Regime crossed it, and neither do any of the major train lines or highways built since the Revolution. Its terrain and poor soils and its weakly developed internal transportation networks and eccentricity with respect to national networks long kept it relatively autarkic, dominated by barely subsistence agriculture, and of very little interest to any of a succession of political regimes. Under the Old Regime, aristocratic land owned in the Rouergue seems most often to have been used as poor consolation or exile for younger sons of a nobility based elsewhere. During the nineteenth century the Aveyron was considered a punishment post for French administrators, at least one of whom found its population comparable to James Fenimore Cooper's Mohicans in terms of its savagery, exoticism, and fearsome incomprehensibility (Beteille 1973, 200-201). The Rouergue/Aveyron does indeed appear to have been difficult to administer. Largely cut off from centers of power, the population maintained further distance by resisting agents of the centralized state, whether monarchy, empire, or republic. Tax evasion, draft dodging, and military desertion were honed to fine arts over the centuries in a context comprising habits of behavior and a natural environment that later, under the Vichy regime, proved well suited both to French Resistance forces and to a thriving black market. Mandatory public education, established in France in the 1880s, inspired little cooperation or participation until well into the twentieth century. State attempts to replace local patois with standard French failed utterly for close to a century; only beginning with the generations born since World War II have all Aveyronnais spoken French as their first language. The Patois The Aveyron's status as one of the last pockets of France to be penetrated by the French language is perhaps the most obvious indicator, cause, or effect, of its specificity. Like all of France south of the Loire River, the indigenous language was historically part of the Langue d'Oc family, a set of Romance dialects linguistically distinct from standard French (itself descended from the Langue d'Oil dialects historically spoken north of the Loire).3 Because few of the Langue d'Oc dialects have ever had a written form, they developed in localized variants, although these are conventionally grouped into several sets, roughly corresponding to provinces of the Old Regime (e.g., Provencal, Gas3

See map, p. 2. Oc and Oil refer to the term for "yes" in each set of dialects.

Economic Change in Ste Foy

• 49

con, Languedocian, Auvergnat). Auvergnat dialects were spoken in some parts of the Rouergue/Aveyron, and Languedocian in others. During the nineteenth century, the French state attempted to stamp out the various patois4 spoken within its territory, thus unifying its citizenry through a common language. These attempts had an extremely belated effect in the Aveyron. As in other domains, Aveyronnais lagged behind, remaining cut off from, or resisting, trends occurring elsewhere in France. In much of the rural Aveyron, it is only since World War II that parents have insisted on speaking French to their children at home. By 1975, it was still very common to encounter elderly Aveyronnais who had great difficulty communicating in French, and although most adults spoke it fluently, many had learned it as a second language. Certain activities, especially those associated with agriculture, continued to be conducted exclusively in the patois. Aveyronnais men who have served in the military derive enormous and unending pleasure from stories of their use of the patois to identify fellow natives of the region and to ridicule or outwit commanding officers from the north. On the other hand, Aveyronnais native speakers of the dialect are inclined to see their language as a deformed pseudolanguage inferior to standard French, and themselves thereby linguistically marked as uneducated social inferiors within a national hierarchy. This attitude, together with their consciousness of the necessity to manage in a larger world, largely accounts for the postwar shift in the linguistic socialization of children after generations of failed efforts by the state. During the 1970s attempts were made to revitalize the Langue d'Oc dialects as part of a regionalist movement based in the urban south (especially Toulouse). A standardized written form of the Languedocian dialects was developed (Occitan) and introduced into school curricula and television programming throughout the south. This only reinforced the sense of inferiority among many native speakers in the rural Aveyron. Finding it difficult to understand the new standardized version of Occitan, they took this as further evidence that their language was indeed deformed and uncouth, inferior not only to standard Parisian French but to "proper" Toulousain Occitan as well. Language thus has served—and continues to serve—as a source of specific regional identity, in some contexts marking off an in-group distinct from and resistant to dominant centralizing powers, but in other contexts defining a low-status out-group position with respect to the well-recognized powers of such centers. 4 This term carries highly negative connotations in France, as an illiterate, uncouth form of speech, standing in direct opposition to the extremely high value placed on true "language" (especially well-turned standard French). Because patois is, significantly, the term most commonly used for regional dialects by native speakers as well as others, I have used it here, although it is repudiated, equally significantly, by regionalists who have tried to revalorize such dialects within France.

50

• Chapter Two

Church and State Thus, in the case of language as in most other domains, the Aveyron's specific identity is meaningful in terms of its relationship with the French nation. Its heritage of resistance, isolation, or peculiarity is traceable not to any misty origin as an independent entity but to at least two millenia as a chronic hinterland, always on the edges of some superior power, the French nation-state being that power in its modern history.5 Perhaps for this reason, Aveyronnais have never been inclined to shun all state-sponsored institutions, but rather to be highly selective both in those they consider to warrant participation and in the ways they choose to participate. For example, there is considerable evidence that under the Old Regime and especially since the early nineteenth century, they have made heavy use of the state judicial apparatus, forever taking each other to court and habitually insisting that any agreement be ratified by contract drawn up by proper legal authorities. This trait is the subject of a proverb still widely cited in the Aveyron: "If peasants weren't so foolish, lawyers would go shoeless."6 An observer of early nineteenth century Aveyron noted: "It must be admitted that Aveyronnais are a quite litigious people. . . . Everything becomes subject to litigation between two proud and stubborn neighbors; the consequences are disastrous. The property and subsistence of families are dissipated in legal costs. Sometimes obstinate landowners squander a pasture to pay for litigation over a trickle of water, a field in litigation over its boundaries."7 If the Aveyron's ties with the French state have historically been somewhat ambivalent, its ties with the Catholic church have not: the church has long been strongly present. It owned considerable land in the Rouergue under the Old Regime, and much has found its way back to the church since the Revo5

Actually, Rouergal/Aveyronnais origins are sometimes traced to the Rutenes, a Celtic people who established themselves over a territory roughly corresponding to modern-day Aveyron sometime well before their first recorded contact with the Romans in 121 B.C. (Natives of Rodez, once the capital of the Rutenes and known to the Romans as Ruteni, are still referred to as Ruthenois.) In 52 B.C., the Rutenes were conquered by Caesar's armies and their territory attached to the Gallo-Roman province of Aquitaine. There followed an unbroken Rouergat history as a remote outpost of distant powers, including live centuries of Roman rule. Its attachment to France may be dated to 1270, when the count of Toulouse lost control of the territory, and the king of France acquired both the count of Rouergue (an invention of Charlemagne) and the bishop of Rode/ as direct vassals (Enjalbert 1979). 6 "Se n'erou lous sots / Lous aboucats pourtariou d'csclops," translated into French by Ste Foyans as "Si les paysans etaient moins sots, les avocats porteraient des sabots." Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French to English are my own. 7 "Cc sont, il faut convenir, des gens bien processifs, que nos Aveyronnais. . . . Entre deux voisins fiers et entetes, tout devient objet de proces; il en resulte les consequences les plus desastreuses. La fortune et la subsistance des families sont dissipees en frais de justice. Quelquefois des proprietaires obstines mangent le pre pour plaider sur un filet d'eau, le champ pour disputer les bornes" (Monteil 1802, 2:244; cf. Beteille 1973).

Economic Change in Ste Foy

• 51

lution. The countryside is dotted with old abbeys, monasteries, seminaries, and Catholic retreat centers, some abandoned, some still in use. At the turn of this century, Catholic clergy and nuns comprised fully one quarter of the population of Rodez, Aveyron's capital and largest city (Mergoil 1982). The bishop's palace and its public square at the center of Rodez rival the City Hall and its square in size and splendor, testimony to centuries of rivalry between the church and a succession of state regimes, bloody at times and never definitively won by the state. As in the rest of France, the church has steadily weakened in the Aveyron since World War II, as measured by such indicators as declining rates of church attendance, enrollments in Catholic schools, participation in religious pilgrimages, number of priests per capita, and percentage of population joining religious orders. Nonetheless, by these same indicators, the Aveyron continues to stand out as one of the most devoutly Catholic regions of France (e.g. Cholvy 1979). Agricultural Development Like much of France south and west of an imaginary line drawn between Le Havre and Marseilles, the Aveyron is, as it has long been, predominantly rural and agricultural. There have never been any Aveyronnais cities of national importance, and by 1975 there were only eight towns meeting the generous census definition of "urban" (populations over 2,000) (Beteille 1983, 125). The Aveyron's urban population increased slowly throughout much of the nineteenth century and much more rapidly during the postwar decades, but has always remained well below national averages (see table 2.1). Two Aveyronnais industrial centers developed during the nineteenth century, but began to decline in the twentieth and were moribund by 1975. Both the leather-working center of Millau and the mining and steel industry of Decazeville fell prey to international competition, archaic technology, and poor transportation. Postwar growth of the capital city of Rodez accounts for most of the Aveyron's urbanization during this period. An administrative center, the growth of its metropolitan area from a 1946 population of 27,000 to 41,500 in 1975 correTABLE 2.1

Percentage of French and Aveyronnais Populations Living in Urban Areasa 1856

1901

1946

1975

France

27

41

56

73

Aveyron

18

26

31

41

Sources: Dupeux 1972, 19; Pinchemel 1980, 145; Eveche de Rodez 1960, 12; Kayser 1983, 46. a Based on French census definition of urban as settlements having over 2,000 inhabitants.

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sponds to the rapid postwar expansion of the French tertiary sector (Kayser 1983, 54). Most of Rodez's population now, as in its more modest past, works in small-scale commerce, government or church administration, educational institutions, or other professional activities servicing the whole departement. The Aveyron's economy has always been dominated by agriculture and has become an even more exclusively agricultural economy than during some periods in the past. But, as is the case for French agriculture in general, the Aveyron's, especially during the postwar period, has become one that requires and can sustain a wide array of support services. A decline in the percentage of the working population directly engaged in agricultural production is, like rates of urbanization, a conventional measure of economic development. By this standard, too, the Aveyron has experienced an evolution parallel to that in the rest of France. A decline that was slow over the century prior to World War II accelerated rapidly during the postwar decades, although the departement's economy, unlike the nation's, remains dominated by agriculture (see table 2.2). The very high percentage of agriculturalists in nineteenth-century Aveyron reflects the departement's subsistence economy. A majority of Aveyronnais— most of them peasant small-holders—eked out a livelihood from small bits of poor land. Markets and market centers were weakly developed, very little money was in circulation, and such exchange as did occur was largely in the form of local barter of goods and services. Slowly, improved transportation and the introduction of new crops and technologies permitted intensification of production, especially in the form of increasing animal production (cattle and sheep) for market. Until well into the twentieth century, this evolution had the effect of exacerbating distinctions between an agricultural elite—absentee owners of large estates and peasant owners of substantial farms (pages)—increasingly engaged in market-oriented production using relatively modern technologies, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the mass of farmers engaged primarily in subsistence production. By the interwar period, most Aveyronnais farmers were producing some goods for market, and after World War II those farms without sufficient resources to buy and sell in a marketdominated economy quickly disappeared. By 1975, the relatively high perTABLE 2.2

Percentage of French and Aveyronnais Working Populations Engaged in Agriculture 1856

1901

1946

1975

France

51

45

36

9

Aveyron

80

63

49

28

Sources: Dupaquier 1988, 249-50; Parodi 1981, 80; Eveche de Rodez 1960, 12; Kayser 1983, 46.

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centage of agriculturalists in the Aveyron (compared to the national average) reflected the area's specialization in food production within a complex national and international exchange system, rather than an economy still close to subsistence. This shift to a market-oriented agriculture generated the growth of nonfarm employment until, by 1975, substantially more Aveyronnais earned their livelihoods by delivering various goods and services to agriculture than by farming directly. The same evolution led to the depopulation of large swatches of the Aveyron in another slow process that accelerated after World War II. In particular, those areas unsuited to intensive mechanized agriculture—mountainous regions, terraced river valleys, sterile limestone plateaus (causses)— had begun to be abandoned in the late nineteenth century and virtually emptied during the postwar decades. By the same token, this period saw the abandonment of some types of production which had once fed the Aveyron but for which other regions were better suited. For example, Aveyron wheat had succumbed to cheaper "imports" from the Paris basin or abroad by the late nineteenth century, and Breton or Northern potatoes had all but replaced local production by the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, Aveyron's agricultural economy turned increasingly toward specialization in livestock production until, by 1975, animal products accounted for 90 percent of marketed agricultural goods. Over half of all farm land was still being used for field crops by this date, but almost all of these served as on-farm animal fodder, rather than being marketed. The Aveyron had become France's leading producer of sheep, raised primarily for ewe's milk for Roquefort cheese, with lamb as an important by-product. Cattle (for veal, beef, and some dairy products) provide the largest share of the departement's agricultural revenues (Kayser 1983, 52). Some goods are produced under contract with agribusiness firms: ewe's milk for Roquefort is the most important and well-established example, but since the 1960s, some confinement calves and hogs,8 as well as a few specialty crops (such as strawberries, gherkins, tobacco, and hybrid seed corn) have been produced under contract arrangements. In general, the type of agriculture that has flourished in the Aveyron since World War II is highly specialized, labor-intensive, feasible on 8 Confinement livestock refers to a capital-intensive method of production (hors-sol) developed especially since the 1960s. Animals raised this way are confined to highly specialized indoor facilities and fed carefully calibrated amounts of food and other health- or growth-inducing substances. Typically this type of production is done under contract with food-processing or animal feed corporations. Labor is furnished by the producer, all or some of the capital may be supplied by the corporation, and little or no land is required. In the United States and much of Western Europe, confinement methods are now used for most poultry and much swine production. In France, such methods have been most widely adopted in Brittany, but met with some resistance elsewhere as unhealthy, unnatural, or not "real farming." Especially in England, animal rights activists have mobilized against confinement methods, but this kind of opposition has not been very significant in France.

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small farms having relatively poor soils, and tightly integrated into national and international markets. Migration Although this kind of agriculture has made Aveyronnais farmers much more prosperous than their predecessors were and supports many more nonfarmers than in the past, the contemporary Aveyronnais economy cannot support as many people as its old subsistence economy did. Further, the Aveyron, like elsewhere in France's rural, agricultural periphery, has helped fuel economic growth in France as a whole not only by its growing dependence on goods and services produced elsewhere, but by its function as a source of labor needed elsewhere. A central characteristic of the Aveyron since the latter half of the nineteenth century and especially during the postwar decades has been outmigration and steady population decline as its agriculture shed its labor force, absorbed primarily by those regions of France (especially the Paris area) experiencing substantial industrialization and urbanization. The Aveyron reached its historical population maximum in 1886, rather later than some less isolated, Catholic, and prolific areas of rural France. Between then and 1975, its population declined by about one third. This population loss was due in part to war losses and an interwar drop in fertility rates, but primarily to great waves of out-migration, peaking during the thirty years prior to World War 1 and again during the thirty years after World War II. The intercensus period of 1975-1981 was the first in over a century in which the population remained stable. Indeed, if the Aveyron as a place does not have a widely recognizable identity in France, Aveyronnais as people do: as the archetypical provincial in Paris, stereotyped as the typical cafe owner or, more recently, the typical heavy-accented postal worker. In fact, Aveyronnais in Paris are a particularly visible and coherent group. They are certainly no more numerous than are natives of other regions of France, but, more than most others, they have tended self-consciously to maintain close ties with their origins, to be quite well organized (or clannish), and to have monopolized certain kinds of employment. Most notably, approximately three quarters of all cafes in Paris are owned by Aveyronnais natives or their descendants, and a similar proportion of the cafe supply business is controlled by people with Aveyronnais roots. Aveyronnais involvement in the Paris cafe business dates from the earliest waves of migration in the late nineteenth century and is related to the Amicaliste (mutual aid society) movement, which has been particularly strong among migrants from the Aveyron. Of the several thousand Aveyronnais who left for Paris each year during the decades surrounding the turn of the century, most were poor, unskilled, and unable to speak French. Insofar as they conformed to the Aveyronnais stereotype (as many of them apparently did), they

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were extremely hardworking and thrifty, fiercely devoted to a dream of selfemployment and property ownership, and highly skilled at recognizing and attaching themselves to useful persons in positions of superior power. Many of them began with menial urban work, as, for example, coal and water porters, worked their way up to become dealers in coal (bougnats), acquired storefront coal depot/cafes, and moved on up the ladder by acquiring everlarger or better-situated cafes. Some of the most prestigious and well-established cafes in Paris today (Brasserie Lipp, for example) are owned, as many French and certainly all Aveyronnais know, by Aveyronnais and have ancestral founders who may at least be alleged to have moved up this conventional ladder. Once the Aveyronnais hold on the Paris cafe business was established, subsequent migrants were more likely to begin as hired help in the cafe of a relative or former neighbor, move up to manage (or marry the manager) of another Aveyronnais cafe, and eventually acquire one—often the first of a succession—of their own (Beteille 1974, 1978). This process was facilited by the Amicales, organizations regrouping the natives of a single Aveyronnais community (or occasionally a county). Amicales operate as conduits for business pointers and contacts, loans, and cheap and reliable labor, generally providing a basis for the elaborate patron-client system within the Aveyronnais community in Paris and between it and "le pays" (the homeland). Many Amicales have one or several "honorary presidents" and sometimes an entire "honorary board" comprising distinguished personages with more or less clear connections to the hometown. Amicales often finance projects such as church renovations back in home communities that sometimes have fewer full-time residents than its Paris Amicale has members. Such financial sponsorship permits Amicale members to maintain their explicit raison d'etre (the shared hometown) and their links with it, as well as to display their collective success in Paris with highly resonant noblesse oblige gestures. Amicale events in Paris, typically annual dinner dances, provide an occasion for "compatriots" to meet more or less ostentatiously and for them to entertain and consolidate ties with well-placed persons of use to the cafe business: a carefully chosen guest of honor is invited to virtually all Amicale events, rounding out the list of successful native sons. The Amicales have also effectively served as a marriage market, helping to ensure a high rate of intramarriage within the "Aveyronnais of Paris" community and the continued salience of an Aveyronnais identity, even for those who are, strictly speaking, a generation or two removed from the Aveyron as a land of birth (Abeles 1977; cf. Beteille 1978, 1974). The "migrant" community (including children and grandchildren of those who actually migrated) is also held together by several pan-Aveyronnais organizations in Paris, most of them founded in the early 1950s: an Aveyronnais parish attached to the archdiocese of Rodez, a residence hall for young Aveyronnais, and several folklore societies, for example. The founding of these kinds of organizations after World War II suggests

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that migration to Paris continued to be an important fact of Aveyronnais life, though one which had acquired a somewhat different tenor. Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s migration rates surpassed the high levels reached in the decades prior to World War I. By the postwar period, though, Aveyronnais migrants had considerable, even if second-hand, contact with Paris, spoke fluent French, and often had at least some secondary education. Further, during this period salaried jobs in Paris were plentiful, as the French tertiary sector, especially public service, underwent dramatic expansion centered primarily in the Paris area. Postwar migrants from the Aveyron were no more drawn to wage labor or the working class than their predecessors had been. Although they certainly did not abandon the cafe business, they flocked in even greater number to the civil service, especially the postal service but also the police and other services with a large demand for semiskilled labor. For postwar migrants, it would appear, the prospect of self-employment was less attractive than the newly accessible security and status of salaried employment, as well as the possibility of a transfer back to the south before retirement age. (One of the first acts in Paris for many has been to put themselves on the waiting list for a transfer south.) Enduring ties to the Aveyron seem no weaker under these circumstances than at any time in the past, although the Amicales have rather less appeal to this generation of migrants as a way to express or maintain them. The reasons are multiple: postwar migrants were likely to have an informal network of friends and relatives already in place in Paris; the business contacts, loans, and informal employment exchange available through the Amicales are of little relevance to a career in the lower levels of the civil service; regular vacations and improved transportation make it easier than in the past to maintain ties with the Aveyron through frequent trips back; and the expectation that Paris will only be a temporary residence at the beginning of a career, rather than the place one spends a whole working life seeking a fortune, diminishes the perceived necessity of institutionalized assertions of Aveyronnais identity. Nonetheless, the Amicale movement shows no signs of disappearing. The 1972 directory of the Federation des Amicales Aveyronnaises lists some seventy active Amicales in Paris, a real but not devastating decline from the one hundred groups at the turn of the century. Of the seventy still functioning by the end of the postwar wave of migration, two thirds (forty-six) had been founded prior to World War I. Seven new Amicales (including Ste Foy's) were founded during the postwar decades, generally regrouping natives of those areas of the Aveyron experiencing relatively little migration prior to that period. Their potential members include many more civil servants than cafe owners, and they struggle for organizational survival amidst complaints by their founders (usually cafe owners) about the shameful indifference oifonctionnaires (civil servants) and complaints by others about the narrow-minded indifference of cafe owners to anything unrelated to cafes. The Amicale move-

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ment has provided and continues to provide an effective and culturally appropriate means for Aveyronnais in Paris to consolidate their control of the cafe business there, to maintain their ties with the homeland, and to display success to compatriots in both places. Among many of those migrating during the postwar decades, ties with the Aveyron and dependence on Paris remained, in many ways, equally strong and closely linked, but took a somewhat different form. The use made of Paris shifted with postwar changes both in the opportunities offered by the capital and in the skills and expectations brought there by Aveyronnais migrants. Since 1975, migration out of the Aveyron has virtually ceased, cut off by the center's slackened need for labor from its hinterlands and the dwindling opportunities it offers (reflected by sluggish national growth and chronically high urban unemployment), on one hand, and, on the other, by the relatively attractive standards of living and life-style now readily available to those remaining in the Aveyron. Ties with the Aveyron remain strong, and links with Paris have taken yet other forms. The Aveyronnais experience of migration within France suggests a number of interesting parallels to features more commonly associated with international labor migration to France and other "core" areas of the world. Most striking are the various mechanisms operating to permit resistance to full assimilation in the receiving community through maintenance of strong attachments to a "homeland." 9 In a pattern common to labor migrations, the distinction between "workplace" and "home" is pushed to a logical extreme, with a working life—rather than a workday—prompting departure from home and requiring completion before a return; in the interim, "home" provides a powerful source of identity as well as a primary locus of both emotional and financial investment (e.g., in vacation or retirement homes and land) (cf. Brettell 1982). On one hand, such parallels are hardly surprising: Aveyronnais migration to Paris, no less than that of Portuguese and North Africans to France or Jamaicans to the United States, constitutes a classic form of labor migration. That is, it has generally involved the movement of people from poor hinterlands to core areas in search of better opportunities to earn a livelihood or make a fortune, with the ultimate intention of sending or bringing it back home. On the other hand, Aveyronnais are— and consider themselves to * It should be emphasized that at least in recent history, such resistance has not generally taken oppositional forms. During the 1970s, one peak period of regionalist activity in France, there were several southern regionalist (Occitane) organizations in Paris which were mobilized around one or another critical stance toward the French nation or state, and which recruited some Aveyronnais migrants. However, the large majority of Aveyronnais migrants, and in particular, the Amicale movement, remained indifferent or actively hostile to such activity. For the most part, maintaining ties with the Aveyron and espousing any form of anti-French regionalism have been conceived as altogether distinguishable. To most migrants, Aveyronnais identity is considered preferable to Parisian identity, but in no way opposed to Frenchness.

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be—as French as anyone else in Paris. Further, by the postwar era, they had become indistinguishable from Parisians along those dimensions once most obviously setting them apart: especially language (discounting accent), but also education levels, social status, and, at least for the descendants of migrants, literally rural origins. Under such conditions, one might expect the salience of a specifically Aveyronnais identity to have faded away, particularly in a national context in which cultural pluralism is not especially emphasized or valued. In fact, many migrants and their descendants take on an identity as "Parisians" only when they return to visit or retire in the Aveyron. Even then, their presence is legitimated by the fact that they are "really" Aveyronnais. The Aveyron exercises a strong hold on its children, and they have been remarkably inventive in finding ways to maintain and express their attachments to this backwater over generations of changing circumstances (Abeles 1980). STE FOY: THE RICHES OF ROQUEFORT

In some respects, Ste Foy fits this description neatly as a typical Aveyronnais community. Deeply marked by a long history of poverty and isolation, it remains, as it has always been, a devoutly Catholic, predominantly agricultural community where the local dialect is understood by all and continues to be widely spoken, at least by those born before World War II. Like other Aveyronnais, most Ste Foyans can evoke a time when sugar, coffee, and leather shoes were luxuries; one's wedding dress or suit was meant to serve a lifetime, carefully saved to be used for burial; chestnut mash was a staple with which to survive the winter months; children were sent on the long walk to school only when they were not needed for farm work, and never before All Saints Day or after Easter; Rodez was a long day's journey away, a trip to the ' 'city'' made rarely by some and, by many, never. By 1975, virtually all Ste Foyans lived in comfortable new or renovated homes, as fully outfitted as any in France with automatic washing machines, freezers, coffee grinders, dishwashers, and television sets. If their diet remains dominated by the home-processed pork-based local cuisine, it is out of choice, not necessity; those "traditional'' foods associated with poverty, such as chestnut mash and rye bread, have long since been banished. Ste Foyan children all complete their primary education in one of the village schools and go on for at least some secondary education in Rodez. Everyone has access to a car, and even though the hour's trip to Rodez is still not to be taken lightly, it is by no means a rarity. Ste Foy, though, like some other communities in its immediate vicinity, stands out as one that has fared unusually well through this transformation. Agricultural innovations and the impact of well-organized markets arrived relatively late here, and did not have the effect of rendering agriculture unfeasible. Barely productive subsistence agriculture was instead transformed into

Economic Change in Ste Foy

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highly lucrative specialty production, able to support almost as many people as ever at much higher standards of living. Periphery of a Hinterland Ste Foy's region of the Segala, named for rye (seigle), the staple once grown there, was long considered outlandishly backward and crude by other Aveyronnais, its very name strongly connoting poverty of soil and diet. The Segala is a humid, high plateau area, broken by hills, shallow river and stream beds, and thick forests. The dark green broom (genet) plant with its bright yellow flowers, characteristic of the area, gives a false sense of a lush and productive countryside. Broom was long the curse of the Segala: a useless, aggressive, and deep-rooted weed impossible to remove permanently with manual techniques, it is associated with soils too acidic to produce much else. A kind of exaggerated microcosm of the Aveyron as a whole, the Segala's natural environment was especially unproductive and unpromising and, located in the heart of the Aveyron, much of it was virtually cut off from even the poor transportation networks within and leading out of the departement. In parts of this area, and certainly in Ste Foy, the clearly demarcated agrarian social hierarchy was truncated: Aveyronnais elites were largely absent from the Segala. By the time of the Revolution, any aristocracy based in Ste Foy's vicinity had long since disappeared, and nineteenth-century records give little indication of estates owned by an absentee nobility or bourgeoisie. There was not much of a local notability either; in Ste Foy, for example, there has never been a resident notaire (notary public/lawyer), veterinarian, or pharmacist, and the first doctor did not move in until 1977, only to move out again within a year. A few pages comprised the local elite, capping a land-based hierarchy distinguishable by fine degrees of impoverishment: peasant small-holders, artisans with tiny bits of land, and landless laborers. For all of these reasons—unpromising natural resources, physical isolation, and relative absence of social groups in a position to know about or be able to risk technical innovations—agricultural change penetrated the Segala even more slowly than elsewhere. Closed in on itself and relatively impervious to disruptive change, the Segala was less affected by the prewar migrations that depopulated much of the Aveyron. For example, Ste Foy's nineteenth-century population maximum of 1,000 was reduced, as everywhere in rural France, by war losses during the two World Wars, but migration was not a significant cause of population loss until the 1960s. Ste Foyans then migrated in substantial number, but by the time this wave of migration ended in the mid-1970s, Ste Foy's population of 800 was still at 80 percent of its historical maximum, hardly the debilitating loss experienced elsewhere in rural Aveyron.

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Agricultural Transformations Two kinds of agricultural change shaped the rapid postwar evolution of this area. First, several technical innovations permitted the reclamation of its vast wastelands. The practice of using lime to correct soil acidity, a technique known in much of France since the mid-nineteenth century, became widely accessible and generally practiced in the Segala between the two World Wars. Its acidic soils were rendered far more productive, bringing an end to the area's destiny as marginal farmland. Then, in the 1950s, the introduction and rapid spread of tractors permitted permanent clearance of broom. This, together with the availability of techniques for mechanically draining humid bottomlands, significantly increased the amount of pasture and arable land available. Although farm mechanization and intensification forced the abandonment of agriculture in those parts of the Aveyron ill suited to it, it had the opposite effect in the Segala: the region was transformed from one singularly inhospitable to agriculture to one well suited to it. Further, as elsewhere, the tiniest farms in the Segala were rendered inviable in the shift from subsistence to market-oriented agriculture. However, because both the amounts of usable land available and its productivity were increasing significantly at the same time, the total number of farms and farmers could remain relatively more stable than elsewhere. Much of the population that did leave agriculture could, at least for a time, be absorbed locally as full-time artisans or shopkeepers serving a growing demand for purchased goods and services (Calmes 1980). The effects of these technical changes would undoubtedly have been less pronounced, especially in Ste Foy's area of the eastern Segala, in the absence of a second factor: organizational changes occurring within the Roquefort cheese industry. By the turn of this century, Ste Foy and its area had been drawn into the expanding radius of ewe's milk suppliers for the growing Roquefort processing firms. During the interwar period and especially after World War II, as the area's resource base was transformed and its agriculture poised to move well beyond subsistence, the Roquefort firms moved into a position to pay premium prices for as much ewe's milk as could be produced. The eastern Segala, now physically well suited for sheep raising and having maintained a sufficient population and enough relatively small farms to embrace this labor-intensive activity, was able to move rapidly from predominantly subsistence agriculture to highly lucrative specialty production of ewe's milk for sale. Roquefort Cheese Production Long the largest food processing industry in the Aveyron, Roquefort cheese manufacture is centered in the village of Roquefort, on the causse to the east of the Segala. The cheese's distinctiveness derives from its being made from

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ewe's milk produced within a well-defined radius and its being finished in the natural caves at Roquefort. Roquefort cheese has a long and colorful past as a widely distributed delicacy, amply surrounded by appealing legend. Some find evidence in Pliny of its renown during the Roman era. There exists rather better documentation of its prestige during the Middle Ages, when its story was intertwined with Knights Templar, Cistercian monks, the Parlement of Toulouse, and a patent granted by King Charles VI in 1411. By at least the late eighteenth century, it was being exported to North America, where it was, for generations, the only French cheese available. If the finished product was distributed to a far-flung international elite, though, its production was narrowly local. Ewe's milk and semifinished cheeses were produced on the estates and large farms of the causses in the immediate vicinity of the village of Roquefort in southeastern Rouergue/ Aveyron. The cheeses were then sold to the succession of feudal lords, bourgeois entrepreneurs, and private corporations owning the caves and managing the distribution of cheeses finished there. The Segala, although nearby (Ste Foy is about fifty kilometers from Roquefort) was unaffected by this activity. Mutton and lamb (like dairy products and beef) have never been a part of the Segali diet, and sheep were raised only by those few Segali sufficiently prosperous to be involved in a type of production directed exclusively to the market. Their sheep, in the event, were raised for wool or meat. During France's spurt of economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century, both supplies of and demand for Roquefort cheese increased spectacularly (from annual sales of about 300 metric tons in 1820 to 2,700 in 1860) as a result of technical innovations in the breeding and feeding of milk-producing ewes and improvements in transportation that facilitated national and international marketing of the finished cheeses (Dumay 1982, 179). This period also saw the beginnings of the industry's concentration, related in part to the development of the French banking system. La Societe des Caves et Producteurs Reunis (known locally as La Societe), still the dominant Roquefort firm, was founded in 1842 and took over a growing proportion of the caves and processing activity until, by 1882, it controlled fully two thirds of all production. La Societe aggressively promoted the development and dissemination of technical innovations which enhanced productivity both among milk producers and in the finishing process at the caves. Between 1875 and 1885, ever-increasing demand for the cheese and a drive for greater control over the cheese-making process led La Societe, soon followed by the smaller Roquefort firms, to set up dairies throughout the causses and in adjacent areas, including the eastern Segala. Rather than purchase semifinished cheeses from milk producers, the Roquefort firms purchased raw milk under contract, processed it in their local dairies, and then transported it for finishing to the Roquefort caves. The new system assured greater uniformity of the cheeses and, through implantation of Roquefort-controlled dairies and dairy workers throughout the countryside,

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made it feasible for the Roquefort firms to manage suppliers in a considerably larger territory than before. Also, this shift away from on-farm processing meant that small-holders unable to produce enough milk to warrant involvement in cheese processing could become potential suppliers (Pourrat 1956). In Segali communities like Ste Foy, the arrival of the Roquefort dairies and their demand for ewe's milk was of little significance over the decades surrounding the turn of the century. It did coincide with a drop in the market price for wool and mutton, so that the new market opportunity was welcomed by those in a position to raise sheep. Few farmers, though, were involved in much sheep production, and most were operating too close to the subsistence level to be able to take on either the constraints imposed by a Roquefort contract or the risks involved in raising, against highly volatile milk prices, the fragile Lacaune ewes bred for milk production. During the 1920s a series of pressure groups were formed to regularize the status of Roquefort cheese and to consolidate the positions of the various parties involved in its production. Ewe's milk producers under contract to Roquefort firms formed a union in 1922 to ameliorate contract conditions and force stabilization of raw milk prices. In 1928 the Roquefort firms established a cartel to divide up the milk supply territory among themselves and to set prices paid for milk and charged for finished cheeses. Then, in 1930, a confederation of producers and firms was established to acquire and protect exclusive legal rights to the production and name of Roquefort cheese, and to promote and defend its mystique as a high-priced luxury product. Under the conditions resulting from these moves, ewe's milk prices were stabilized at a relatively high level and its production became more attractive to small producers (Pourrat 1956). During the interwar period, then, as farmers in the Ste Foy area found themselves able to increase their production for market, ewe's milk was one of the goods they chose to produce for sale. During this period, though, ewe's milk was by no means the most important source of revenue. To these farmers breaking into a market economy, production of sheep and cattle for slaughter was at least as attractive, as it was long associated with those high-status farms prosperous enough to participate substantially in markets. Equally attractive was the sale of surplus field crops (especially potatoes), which could be used for home consumption as well as market sale. Nonetheless, by 1936 there were three Roquefort cheese dairies (each employing one dairy worker) in Ste Foy, which then had a total of about 950 inhabitants. After World War II, ewe's milk and Roquefort quickly became, as Ste Foyans are fond of pointing out, "the wealth of our homeland" (la richesse du pays). The postwar economic boom, technical advances facilitating transportation of the fragile cheese, government policies encouraging increased exports of agricultural goods, and the Roquefort firms' aggressive and successful campaigns to develop their national and international markets led to dramatic

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Fig. 2.1. Old cheese dairy in Ste Foy. The smallest of the three dairies operating in the township during the interwar period, this one was closed soon after World War II when the other two were expanded. (S. Rogers)

increases in the demand for the cheese. Because supplies of the cheese were limited by the amount of milk that could be produced within the legally specified Roquefort dairy region, cheese prices were kept high and its luxury status preserved. By the same token, farmers in the milk supply region were offered high prices (generally about three times the rate for cow's milk) for contracting to produce ewe's milk. Segali farmers were all the more attracted to this type of production because it required few new skills and little capital investment and could be done on a relatively small scale. The main requirement was readily available in the Segala: ample and dedicated labor prepared not only to milk twice daily during the January-to-June milking season but to provide constant care to the Lacaune sheep, as stupid as any breed of sheep and a great deal more fragile than most. Farmers in communities like Ste Foy, then, turned increasingly during the 1950s and 1960s to ewe's milk production, and were paid well for doing so. By 1975 ewe's milk was the main source of revenue on most Ste Foyan farms and fifteen dairy workers were employed in the community's two cheese dairies. The contract arrangement with the Roquefort firms does offend most Ste Foyans' sense of themselves as independent producers. Their contracts, for example, limit how much a herd may be expanded or contracted in size and regulate ewe care and feeding practices. Producers are not free to choose the Roquefort firm or dairy that will receive their milk; the cartel of firms decides

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that. The price paid per liter of milk is determined in part by the milk-to-cheese ratio of the dairy receiving it, that is, as much by the quality of one's neighbors' milk as by that of one's own. This system provides the Roquefort firms with a low-cost quality control network, but is generally considered unfair by producers and breeds considerable suspicion and resentment among neighbors. Ste Foyans like to complain about Roquefort contracts, but their complaints are muted by the legitimizing claim that "there have always been people here working under Roquefort contracts," and especially "but after all, they do pay us well for the trouble." It is largely thanks to Roquefort, they are quick to point out, that Ste Foy remains a vigorous community with almost as many inhabitants and farms as it ever had, and little need for its children to leave, unlike the severely depopulated communities elsewhere in the Aveyron. It was largely with Roquefort money that all Ste Foyan farmers bought themselves tractors and other field equipment in the 1950s and with which almost all of them built new, well-equipped houses or renovated the old ones by the end of the 1960s. Roquefort money is what has made Ste Foyan farmers prosperous enough to support the community's shops, cafes, and artisans, to hold enough young families for the local primary schools to remain open, and to keep the church full enough to retain its own priest.

Fig. 2.2. New consolidated cheese dairy in the county seat. Built in the early 1970s by the largest of the Roquefort firms, this dairy replaced a number of small local dairies, and processes much of the milk produced in Ste Foy and surrounding communities. (S. Rogers)

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The New Lucrative Agriculture The presence of Roquefort in Ste Foy, as elsewhere in the area, has changed the community quite radically in some important ways. In other ways, however, it has served to prevent drastic change, permitting certain kinds of continuity. Ste Foy remains a demographically healthy agricultural community, now as enmeshed in the dominant economy of national and international markets as it was once folded into its region's then predominantly subsistence economy. Farming in Ste Foy is very different from what it ever was in the past, yet some very old structures persist, albeit in modified form. The turn to ewe's milk production for Roquefort may be read as an intensification and generalization of a long-established association between sheep and cattle husbandry with production for market. Such activity, once the exclusive domain of the most prosperous farmers in Ste Foy, is practiced by all farmers there, now all quite prosperous. Although much more specialized than in the past, no Ste Foyan farmers have risked narrow specialization. For most, ewe's milk is the primary source of income, but not the only one. Most farms also sell milk lamb, another lucrative gourmet delicacy and a by-product of the ewe's milk production cycle.10 Further, everyone raises cattle as well as sheep for sale, and on a few farms, beef, veal, cow's milk, or mutton is the primary source of revenue. Field crops, now used almost exclusively for on-farm livestock feed, are also raised on all farms and, through the 1970s, preserved a relatively closed farming system: Ste Foyan farmers purchase very little feed for their livestock, adjusting herd sizes to the resources available on the farm.'' Finally, pork and poultry, long raised for home consumption, continue to be produced on all farms and by many nonfarm households for that purpose. Ste Foyans have not taken to eating those goods they associate with a market 10

Roquefort dairies collect milk between January and June, when the ewe's milk is allowed to dry up. The animals are inseminated in late summer and lamb in late fall. Some lambs are held to replenish the herd, but the rest are sold for slaughter. Allowed to suckle for about a month, these are sold as milk lamb in time for the resumption of the dairy season. Milk lamb, young lamb fed only ewe's milk, is one of the highest-priced meats on the French market. In 1976, the price paid to producers for ten milk lambs on-the-hoof was about the same as France's monthly minimum wage. The average Ste Foyan farm sold about one hundred of them a year, as a supplementary source of income. 11 By the late 1980s, this was no longer the case. Most Ste Foyan farmers now buy a substantial proportion of their feed, and the average herd size has almost doubled since 1975. The usual local explanation is that during several years of drought in the late 1970s farmers had been forced to buy supplementary feed and discovered that milk production could be economically increased by doing so. After the period of drought, they continued to buy extra feed and increased their herd size accordingly. This development, combined with ever-improving breeding techniques throughout the ewe's milk producing area, has prompted another wave of the recurrent fear of overproduction and plumeting milk prices. The Roquefort firms responded in 1987 by placing quotas on each farm's production, a highly unpopular (but apparently fatally accepted) measure meant to prevent any further increase in production.

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economy or selling those they associate with subsistence, and have been reluctant to buy much of what they or their livestock eat. For example, the one kind of sheep-related product that has entered the Ste Foyan diet in significant measure is Roquefort cheese, served at almost all meals.12 Milk producers with a Roquefort contract have, as one benefit, the possibility of buying at a very low price seconds, 2'/2-kilo wheels that failed to pass quality controls at the caves. All Ste Foyans have freezers well stocked with Roquefort, either purchased themselves or received in exchange for some service from a neighbor or relative holding a Roquefort contract. It is eaten as a high-quality food bargain, cheaper and better than any other cheese available, not as a "home-produced" item (which in fact it is not). It fits with the rule that cash outlays for food should be limited, rather than breaking the rule that one should not eat what can be sold. By the same token, foie gras n is the one poultry product that is regularly sold and almost never eaten in Ste Foy. Most Ste Foyan women force-feed ducks or geese in early winter (before milking season resumes) and make confit from their carcasses to serve at special family meals over the year. The livers, though, are almost always sold to processors of foie gras at one of the local fairs. They carry much too high a market price to be kept for home consumption, except in a year when an unusually important family event (e.g., a wedding) is expected. Because ewe's milk production is both lucrative and labor-intensive, it need not and cannot be done on a very large scale. The tiniest subsistence farms in Ste Foy disappeared during the interwar and immediate postwar period, but so did the several very large farms in the community, the land from both categories absorbed in small to medium-sized farms able to support a family under new conditions but requiring little or no nonfamily labor. By 1975 the average farm size in Ste Foy was twenty-seven hectares (about sixty-five acres), not substantially larger than the average in earlier periods. The difference was that this acreage, by 1975, included almost no wasteland and that most farms were close to the average size, rather than including, as in earlier periods, several that were many times larger and many that were much smaller. 12 The only other form of sheep ever eaten in Ste Foy is roast lamb, cooked very occasionally for festive get-togethers at a mechoui, a practice borrowed from North Africa and apparently introduced in Ste Foy by local men who did their military service there during the Algerian War. 13 Foie gras is made from the enlarged livers of force-fed ducks or geese. The feeding process takes several weeks for ducks and up to six weeks for geese. The animals are kept penned up during this period, and are fed one by one twice a day. This involves catching each animal and forcing a funnel and grinder down its throat, through which softened corn is administered. It takes considerable skill to know how much to feed and exactly how long to continue the feeding period. A great deal of patience and imperviousness to scratches and bites are also required to minister to aggressively resistant and ill-humored poultry. When the force-feeding has "taken," the livers are rich, fatty, and many times their normal size. The carcasses are also fatty and distinctively flavored, and may be cooked down to make confit. Stored in earthenware jars in its own fat, confit may be preserved unrefrigerated for almost a year.

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TABLE 2.3

Number of Farms in Ste Foy by Size Category

Hectares

1954

7970

under 10 10-20 20-50 50-100 over 100

41 45 44 12

9 34 52 7

143

103

Total no. farms Average size

1 (213 ha.)

23 ha.

1 (157 ha.)

27 ha.

Sources: Marty 1955, 39; 1970 agriculture census.

Most of the sheep herds in Ste Foy are also quite close to the relatively small average herd size for the community: about one hundred head in 1975.14 This amounts to a great many more sheep than ever lived there before, because now almost all farmers raise them, not just the wealthy few. From a strictly material perspective, Roquefort-fed prosperity has had a leveling effect in Ste Foy, one that has allowed virtually everyone to follow models once accessible only to the most wealthy. Nonetheless, just as fine grades of impoverishment and a keen sense of ongoing family history used to underpin a highly elaborated social hierarchy in Ste Foy, fine grades of prosperity and the same long memory for family origins underpin a no less elaborated local hierarchy today. The local social system is inscribed most self-consciously on two registers, both subject to considerable discussion, manipulation, and negotiation by Ste Foyans: the household and the community. At both levels, social order is built on sharp distinctions and a strongly hierarchical mode of organization, with the practices of the old prosperous pages families serving quite explicitly as the dominant model. Family Farms: The Ostal Ste Foyans are in notable consensus, at least in principle, about the parameters of the ' 'traditional'' pattern of family and household organization in their community, a local variant of the ostal system, which is or was found, not only throughout the Aveyron, but in much of central and southwestern France (e.g., Beteille 1973; Bourdieu 1962; Claverie and Lamaison 1982; Bonnin, 14 By way of comparison, one dairy cow is considered the equivalent of six or seven sheep for tax and various technical purposes. That is, in terms of sunk investment and the nonhuman resources required for care and feeding, a 100-head herd of ewes is similar to a fifteen-head dairy cow herd. Under current conditions in North America and much of Western Europe, it would be difficult to earn a livelihood from such a small dairy cow herd, and virtually impossible to live at Ste Foyan standards.

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Perrot, and de la Soudiere 1983; Flandrin 1979). This system is characterized by impartible inheritance (male primogeniture in the Ste Foyan version) and stem family household composition. The word ostal, from the local dialect,15 means "house" (as in House of Windsor) and refers to a farm in the sense of a conjunction between a specific named place and the family line associated with it. Its most common French translation is maison, but its meaning extends far beyond the mere building implied by contemporary standard French usage. Ste Foyans frequently identify someone, for example, by saying that she came from the house (ostal or maison, depending on which language is being spoken) of [family name] at [place name of a farm]. "> In principle, an ostal is passed from father to eldest son in a continuous male line and includes, at any point in time, a household composed of an older couple, their eldest son and heir, his wife and children, and the unmarried, noninheriting siblings of the owner and his son. Once practicable only by the most prosperous farm households, this pattern became much more common as Ste Foy became more prosperous during the interwar period. With postwar prosperity, it became the statistically dominant pattern among Ste Foyan farm households. This evolution appears to be in the "wrong" direction, running counter to much common knowledge held by social scientists and Ste Foyans alike about how "modernization" affects family and household structure. It has frequently been argued by historians of the European family that this type of household structure—with its rather rigid and elaborated series of hierarchies based on age, sex, birth order, and marital status—necessarily gives way under the pressures of "modernization" to the simpler and more individualist nuclear family household composed of a couple and its immature children. In rural France in particular, the ostal system flies in the face of a legal code, instituted under Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, mandating egalitarian inheritance as part of an attempt to break the power of a land-based aristocracy; a dominant French cultural code, traceable to the rise of the bour15 The pronunciation of this word varies regionally with dialectical variations in the Langue d'Oc, an essentially oral language with no standard orthography. I have chosen here to write the word as ostal, one of various spellings in the literature (also including, for example, oustal, ousta, houstau) as a version most closely representing Ste Foyan pronunciation. 16 See Flandrin 1979, 6-7, 11-14 for a discussion of the term house (maison) in seventeenthand eighteenth-century France. Appearing in the dictionaries of the period as a rough synonym for family, the house was used to designate a person with reference to the name of his or her ancestral estate, a usage generally reserved for the nobility. One would say of a great lord that "he is of the house of [estate name]," but of a bourgeois, "he is of the family of [patronym]." Usage rules were not, however, without ambiguity, and this use of house was attacked as an affectation by at least one commentator of the period. Meanwhile, in parts of southwestern France, identification by house was not reserved for elites. Noted an early seventeenth century observer of rural life in the Pyrenees: "The most beggerly men and women in the villages style themselves lord or lady of such-and-such a house, and these are houses that each one has in his village, even though they be no more than pigsties" (cited in Flandrin 1979, 13; his translation).

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geoisie by the late nineteenth century, whereby close relations between parents and their adult children are expected and desirable, but their coresidence is not; and French agricultural policies instituted in the 1960s to actively discourage the coresidence of young farm couples and their parents as part of attempts to modernize French agriculture by extricating it from the influence of older generations. It might be expected that Ste Foy's "traditional" ostal system would have withered away, if not by some universal force of modernity, then at least under the weight of increasing embeddedness in a French society whose legal, cultural, and economic institutions promote a rather different family system associated with nuclear family households. The persistence of the ostal system in Ste Foy cannot easily be attributed to any kind of overt resistance to dominant French culture on the part of Ste Foyans in general, or to the protection of their self-interest by those Ste Foyans benefiting most obviously from this system, ostal patriarchs and their eldest sons. Ste Foyans generally do not perceive the ostal system as so persistent and couch many of their descriptive and prescriptive statements about it in the past tense: "The eldest son [aine] always used to marry someone from the same size ostal as his, but nowadays anybody can marry anybody; there are no rules left," or "cohabitation [coresidence of mother-in-law and daughterin-law] used to be very common here, but it's not done so much anymore." The frequency with which they talk about families and households in terms of the ostal system, though, suggests that it remains a very powerful model. It has, furthermore, been increasingly put into practice as material constraints on culturally appropriate behavior have relaxed over the last several generations. Ste Foyans see the ostal system falling into disarray because in their reconstruction of "in the old days" as a standard they overstate both the degree to which its rules were observed then and the degree to which they are violated "nowadays." Despite local perceptions to the contrary, there are indeed "rules left"; they are now acted upon by most Ste Foyans as well as talked about by all, and cohabitation has in fact become a great deal more frequent than it ever was in the past. Community Struggles The manner in which groups and individuals are defined and ordered within the community poses a rather different set of dilemmas. On one hand, there exists a great deal less consensus about the proper order of things or about the appropriateness of the past as a positive standard. Substantial practical problems result, both for Ste Foyans, faced with persistent and often bitter conflict played out on shifting sands, and for the social scientist, confronted with a dizzying array of claims and counterclaims instead of the neat and aesthetically pleasing rules and regulations by which everyone defines the principles of the ostal system. On the other hand, this domain appears to pose fewer

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conceptual problems insofar as Ste Foy's trajectory seems—at least at first glance—to fit neatly with common knowledge about processes of "modernization." At this level, Ste Foy's evolution is in the "right" direction, even if it has been messy. With the ' 'modernization'' of Ste Foy, groups of nonfarmers in the community have brought a series of challenges to the hegemony of the old pages families, making their claims with reference to a version of the "modern" urban, national structures within which Ste Foy must operate and in opposition to the "traditional" agriculture-based local structures legitimizing the old guard. The ensuant struggles could be read as a classic example of the bitter and sometimes protracted process by which an obsolete indigenous order ultimately succumbs to one that is more in line with increasingly dominant forces defined well beyond the community. Many Ste Foyans find appealing the argument put forward by some leading nonfarming citizens: If Ste Foy is to survive as the modern community it claims to be, it must operate successfully in a world that is dominated by an urban and commercial mode, not a rural and agricultural one. In that case, so the argument goes, it is perverse and ultimately self-defeating for the community to continue to be run by the old farming elite, with its narrow self-serving interests and old-fashioned vision. Such a position, however radical it might appear, has not been used in Ste Foy to introduce an altogether alien social order or to make a clean break with the past. Its local promoters, in fact, resemble in some striking ways the group they are trying to displace. Whether consciously or not, they build their case on an astute reweaving of some well-established grounds for legitimate claims to high status and power in the community with some new grounds drawn from a broader vision of modernity. In particular, this group is led by the small band of local artisans who have, in the context of the postwar economy, been able to build successful businesses by developing a regional clientele. Like the old elite, they own and operate prosperous family enterprises, are affiliated (usually by birth or marriage) with the "good" families of the community, carefully flaunt highly visible signs of wealth, show ample evidence of having good contacts with powerful persons outside the community, and demonstrate their ability to distribute favors as patrons within it. In all that, their claims are as strong as those of the leading Ste Foyan farmers and are expressed in the same terms. Such a challenge is particularly potent because they share with virtually all Ste Foyans the views that any society is pyramidal in structure, with room for only one group at the top, and that the social distinction between farmers and nonfarmers is unbridgeable. That is, the possibility of a coalition or merger of the old farming elite and the new artisanal one is virtually impossible to imagine. In the terms of the local ostal system, though, the artisanal elite suffers a fatal weakness: because comprised of nonfarmers, it is associated with the category of younger (i.e., disinherited) sons, born to a low status which can

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never be fully compensated for by acquired accoutrements of status. It is ultimately around this point that their counterclaims turn. If the frame of reference is shifted to a modern, urban system, then it is, on the contrary, nonfarmers who belong at the top of the pyramid, and farmers, however successful they may be, who are left behind in the dust of the new age. Because both frames of reference make sense in Ste Foy despite their considerable points of incompatibility, the struggle between the two of them is acute and promises no obvious resolution. The new artisanal elite makes strategic use of elements of a "modern" countermodel, but it also bases its claims heavily on "traditional" local understandings of legitimate grounds for high status and power. This would suggest that the old indigenous system is in no danger of withering away altogether: there are clear attempts to reframe long-established terms of reference, but no neat replacement of old forms with new. Further, the "new" elite, like most Ste Foyans, see a direct causal link between economic dominance and local political and social control. When Ste Foyans say, as they often do, "Roquefort est la richesse du pays," they mean that agricultural production is the economic mainstay of the community. (This phrase might also be taken to mean that Ste Foy survives as a vigorous, prosperous community by grace of a predominantly commercial world of urban consumers, but Ste Foyans never seem to interpret it that way.) An important strategy for dislodging the old agricultural elite, then, has consisted of attempts to diversify the local economy. These efforts have, however, been consistently thwarted from both within and outside of the community: tourism has never been successfully implanted; the big regional cheese dairy was built elsewhere, as was the consolidated secondary school; the village housing development failed to attract any "outsiders" who might have supported efforts to move the community in new directions—the few lots sold went to native sons and daughters. It would appear that Ste Foy is too small, too physically isolated, too internally divided about its own interests, and too entrenched in what is, after all, a profitable farm economy for there to be much likelihood of its ever becoming anything but a predominantly agricultural community. If local expectations of cause and effect are well founded (or self-fulfilling), the inability of the new artisanal elite to weaken the relative economic weight of production agriculture in Ste Foy would mean that the farming elite and the old indigenous social order on which they rest their claims to dominance will remain in place, no matter how persistent or astute the challenges to them. At the same time, however, the old order is necessarily newly colored by the emergence of such challenges, secreted by the transformations Ste Foy has undergone. Its dynamic could not remain unchanged once well-established accoutrements of high status and legitimate power became accessible to groups that had held unambiguously low status. Neither can it carry quite the same meaning in a context in which nonlocal urban frames of reference have acquired considerable appeal and plausibility.

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The tensions resulting from Ste Foy's particular configuration of change and continuity have generated lively, often bitter debate within the community, clearly in evidence by the early 1960s, reaching new heights of open conflict in 1975, and showing no sign of abatement a decade later. Conflict and turmoil in Ste Foy are most certainly not unique to the postwar period of its history. Nonetheless, the particular lines of dispute drawn during this period and its persistent bitterness offer insights into specifically Ste Foyan ways of redefining itself and rearranging its connections with the rest of the world as France's "thirty glorious years" of dramatic economic transformation came to a close. If Ste Foy emerged from this period as a community quite different in many important ways from what it had been, it nonetheless remained discernibly Ste Foyan, its social and cultural specificities by no means ground away under the weight of change and modernization. CONCLUSIONS

The "thirty glorious years" following World War II stand out in French economic history as a period of unusually rapid and sustained economic growth. Some of the most visible markers and reflections of this acceleration of change are to be found in the agricultural sector, in the form of a precipitous drop in the number of French farms and farmers, abandonment of marginal farmlands, and tightened integration of production agriculture into national and international markets. In connection with these processes, many rural French communities declined and all but disappeared as a result of massive out-migration. Others, in regions where nonfarm employment is plentiful, ceased to be predominantly agricultural, as most of their inhabitants turned to off-farm jobs, abandoning agriculture altogether or farming only part time. Communities like Ste Foy, where agriculture could be adapted to a thoroughly market-dominated economy and where this took the form of labor-intensive specialty production capable of employing and supporting the same size population as before, were relatively less affected by postwar waves of geographical or occupational mobility. Even if natives of such communities generally continued living in the same place and doing the same kind of work as previous generations, though, the context and conditions of their lives and work changed quite radically. Ste Foy and the many other French communities that remained viable farm communities by the end of the postwar decades have done so precisely because they changed, no less—though in somewhat different ways—than any others. Ste Foy, as a community deep in the French hinterlands, provides a particularly striking example. Though by no means a static isolate prior to this period, it was, by any number of measures, notably backward and cut off relative even to most of its classically peripheral departement of the Aveyron, and certainly relative to much of the rest of France. It emerged from the postwar period as a very prosperous community, thoroughly enmeshed in international

Economic Change in Ste Foy • 73

markets and enjoying a standard of living comparable to that anywhere in France. By 1975 Ste Foy was, by any number of conventional measures, neither backward nor especially cut off from much in the world. The distance traveled in the time of a generation or two was remarkable by any standard. Still, the Ste Foy of 1975, for all its dishwashers, television sets, and dependence on the ups and downs of a global economy, remained—and continues to be—discernibly its own specific self. The number of home freezers per capita may resemble that anywhere in rural France—and in large parts of the Western world—but local patterns of family and household structure remain at least as different from those anywhere else as they ever have been. The same pressures toward a new kind of integration into a wider universe have been brought to bear here as elsewhere, but in conjunction with local understandings about how the world works and how it should be ordered, they have generated a specific pattern of tensions, ambiguities, contradictions, and resolutions. It is certainly true that Ste Foy cannot be adequately understood without reference to patterns of change it shares with many other places. But it is equally true that the effects of these changes take a particular form in Ste Foy, undecipherable without reference to the community's social and cultural specificities. These have not, in fact, been washed away under "larger" pressures, but have shaped and continue to shape the impact of those pressures and the manner in which the community evolves. While the case of Ste Foy is unique in detail—indeed, that is the point— what is argued here may be made to apply at other levels as well. That is, the Aveyron, for all its dramatic transformations, remains Aveyronnais—quite unlike other, equally modern regions of France. France itself, notwithstanding claims about its "Americanization," and different as it is from what it used to be, is still as distinctively French as it ever has been. It is a central argument of this book that however universal the process glossed as "modernization" may be, its effects are far from universal. The "modern" world is no more homogeneous than was the world peopled largely by subsistence agriculturalists. A detailed look at Ste Foy enables us to see how we can become "modern," quite different in important ways from what we once were, and yet still remain as distinguishable as ever from other, equally "modern" people. What distinguishes us ultimately is the basic concepts we use to order and understand the universe in which we live, concepts that not only color our perceptions and experience of that universe but also consequentially shape it. In the chapters that follow I shall lay out some of the principles by which Ste Foyans define and order social life, beginning with the key structure around which life in Ste Foy is organized: the ostal.

CHAPTER THREE

Ste Foy's Soul: The Principles of the Ostal System STE FOYANS think and talk a great deal about family dynamics; events and developments in their own or other families past and present provide both a focus for much of their attention and a source of explanation for a great deal that happens or fails to happen in Ste Foy and beyond. I originally intended to devote some attention to family and household structure in my study of Ste Foy, but this domain quickly pushed its way to greater prominence than I had anticipated, propelled by Ste Foyans' preoccupation with it. By their own accounting, Ste Foyans are largely denned in terms of their families and family organization. By the standards of old and common knowledge about modern Western families, Ste Foyan family organization is more than a little peculiar and provides a very convenient example of the nonhomogenizing processes of "modernization." In this chapter I shall lay out the formal parameters of the ostal system, the logical set of rules by which Ste Foyans define appropriate family organization. These are presented here, as they are by Ste Foyans, as a timeless and unchanging structure. Ste Foyans do not talk in terms of "structure," nor do they refer to an "ostal system" per se, but they do reiterate and explain the various rules defining it, using these frequently and explicitly as a way to guide and interpret behavior. Sometimes they lay out rules in a very straightforward manner. More often, these are presented as the moral of stories— many undoubtedly apocryphal—about persons and events past or present. Insofar as Ste Foyans tell stories about what used to be as a way of illustrating what should be, they articulate ostal rules in a temporal mode. They do not, however, understand the ostal system as having or being produced by a history. Ste Foyans certainly recognize that its rules may be more or less closely followed by particular individuals, under specific circumstances, or at different moments in time, and generally suppose that, for better or worse, they were more carefully respected in the past than in the present. But they take the rules themselves as absolutes, standing above shifting circumstances. Like the Ten Commandments, the rules defining the ostal system provide standards of behavior whose force and legitimacy depend on perceived stability. If they are truly valid, they must be so for all time.1 The use of illustrative stories from 1 This point can be illustrated in the breach with reference to the dismay with which some Ste Foyans have taken the reforms of Vatican II. "They always said we'd be struck by lightning if we ever touched the communion host, and then all of a sudden they started putting it right in your hands. So now you don't know what to believe, because they might just turn around and change

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various points in time effectively renders ostal rules timeless. By using the past to draw models for the present, Ste Foyans underline and reiterate the notion that these standards remain essentially unchanged. In the abstract, ostal rules are remarkably coherent and clear, forming an elegant and internally logical system. Although, as we shall see later, there is ample room for conflict over interpretations of these rales in practice, there exists considerable consensus about what they are in principle, and about their legitimacy as a standard of behavior. As a model for the organization of individual households, the ostal system as denned by contemporary Ste Foyans seems too perfectly constructed to be susceptible to the winds of change. Here I shall describe this apparently inert and certainly powerful filter through which Ste Foyans perceive and order their universe, saving for later the many problems it generates. ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS

The Ostal The model ostal or "house" is an indivisible unit that is continuous over time and comprises a farm and a family. It is composed of a dwelling and farm buildings, the land surrounding them, the animals and equipment belonging to it, and the family that simultaneously owns, lives on, and works the farm. This family includes the household currently in possession and residence, but also those generations bearing the same patronym that precede and succeed it. An ostal can include only one household at a time, but outlives any particular household. Although an ostal involves a particular farm, the farmhouse may be rebuilt or replaced, farm buildings abandoned or added, landholdings readjusted, without affecting the ostal's identity or existence. The essence of an ostal is the conjunction of a particular location in space, designated by a place name, and a particular male line, designated by a family name. All clusters of inhabited space—each isolated farm, hamlet, and the bourg—are designated by a formal place name (lieu-dit). Farms in the bourg or large hamlets, which share a place name with several other farms, are generally further designated by an informal farm name. These names are permanent: no matter who lives on the farm or what happens to it, the place name remains the same. An ostal is designated by its place name and patronym, and survives as long as these two elements remain together. This naming practice is used not only for the farm but for the persons living there who share the owner's patronym (e.g., Henri Noel [patronym] a la Gamasse [place name]). Normally, the only persons living on an ostal who do not bear its patronym are hired hands. Such low-status it on you." For Ste Foyans as for anyone else, guides to behavior which are perceived as changeable are apt to inspire more skepticism or confusion than those taken as permanently fixed.

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Fig. 3.1. A Ste Foyan ostal. The sign indicates its place name. (R. Bru)

individuals are referred to by their own names, without reference to a place name. A person's identification with an ostal derives from living in its named place as well as from bearing its patronym. If Henri Noel moves to Le Cambou, for example, he becomes Noel au Cambou, no matter that he was born and raised at La Gamasse and that his father and brother still live there. By the same token, a given ostal changes identity when the patronym of the household living there changes. For example, when all the Noels leave the farm at La Gamasse and are replaced there by the Prades family, a new ostal is established. An individual who was part of a particular ostal when he or she died continues to be referred to by that ostal's patronym and place name after death, marking a continued association with an ongoing group. On the other hand, if his or her ostal no longer exists, this naming practice marks disassociation both from current owners of the farm and from descendants living elsewhere. For example, Noel a la Gamasse (deceased) is distinguished both from his successor in space, Prades a la Gamasse, because of genealogical discontinuity, and from his direct descendant, Noel au Cambou, because of spatial discontinuity. In effect, each ostal is inextricably associated with a kind of patriline, defined with reference to common genealogical and spatial roots. Ste Foyans define themselves and their ostals with reference to the direct paternal ascen-

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dant of the current owner who first acquired the farm. Ostals founded more than about four generations ago are said to have always existed. Strictly speaking, this kind of social identification applies only to ostals and those living on them. In practice, though, it is often extended to others in Ste Foy, albeit in a rather weakened form. In particular, the bourg of Ste Foy is divided into six named neighborhoods which have no official existence and no salience or coherence as social units. The neighborhood names, however, are frequently used in combination with a patronym to identify nonfarm households or persons within the bourg (e.g., Mme Hersan au Couderc). In this way Ste Foyans who are not part of ostals may be referred to in a way similar to those who are, although in the former case there is no particular implication or imperative of any continuity beyond the lifetime of a particular household. The use of neighborhood names allows more specific spatial identification than would the use of the bourg's official place name (Ste Foy), shared by all three hundred bourg residents. At the same time, neighborhood names are a great deal less specific than the place names designating ostals. No ostal shares its place name with as many other households as do the bourg's nonfarm households. Each of the several ostals in the bourg has its own informal place name and is rarely referred to by either a neighborhood name or the bourg name. When my parents came to visit me in Ste Foy, I took them to a bingo game in the bourg one evening. The winner of each round of bingo was announced in the usual manner of family name plus place name, such as "Mme Boudou de la Salvetat." When my father won one round, the announcer easily fit him into the local format: "And the winner is . . . . M. Rogers de l'Amerique!" The twin importance of patronym and place name in the identity of persons and farms in Ste Foy distinguishes its ostal system from some stem family systems found elsewhere. This would suggest that, as has been well established for nuclear family systems, the more obvious formal similarities among stem family systems may mask considerable variation in underlying dynamic or function. In particular, a pattern more commonly reported in the literature is one in which identification by place name supersedes that by family name. For instance, in both the Spanish Basque system described by Douglass (1975) and, at the other end and on the other side of the Pyrenees, the French Catalonian system described by Assier-Andrieu (1981), the place names used to designate farms (bassariak and casas, respectively) are as permanent as those used for Ste Foyan ostals. But in the two Pyrenean systems, these names go unmodified by a family name. By the same token, members of a basseria or casa household are designated by the farm name instead of a patronym, not in conjunction with the patronym, as in Ste Foy. That is, in marked contrast to ostals, bassariak and casas do not change identity in the case of patronymic

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discontinuity of successive households, and members of these Pyrenean households are defined with reference to all previous residents (i.e., those sharing the place name), whether genealogically related or not. Flandrin (1979, 79) draws a sharp distinction between two logically different kinds of family systems historically found in France and usually associated with extended family households. One includes those family systems based on the "house," emphasizing the preservation of an ancestral patrimony, characterized by impartible inheritance, and often associated with stem family households (as in the Pyrenees). The other includes those based instead on lineage, emphasizing ties of blood, and characterized by partible inheritance (as in Normandy). In the Ste Foyan ostal system, both principles are intertwined, generating a particular kind of logic. This system is driven, no less than are the basseria, casa, or other "house" systems, by the imperative to preserve farm integrity and continuity over time. But because ostals are defined genealogically as well as spatially, the practical and logical obstacles to achieving this take a somewhat different form. A de-emphasis on blood ties might facilitate farm integrity insofar as it obviates claims from multiple heirs based on "mere" descent from the farm owner; it would surely facilitate farm continuity by rendering inconsequential the patronymic or genealogical continuity of successive households. This neat solution to the problem of preserving "house" integrity and continuity has been forgone in the ostal system, with its strong emphasis on patronymically marked blood ties. The continuity and integrity of Ste Foyan ostals require maintaining a family line in a given place while preventing it from broadening beyond very narrow bounds. The logic underlying most of the rules elaborated around the ostal system can be read in these terms. Residence and Inheritance A major goal of all ostal owners is the preservation of the particular spatial and genealogical conjunction which defines his ostal. This means that at each generation, the ostal must be transferred intact to one heir: it may not be divided among several children of an owner. Further, the heir should be in a position to transfer, in his turn, the still-intact ostal to his own legitimate successor. Because only men can pass on their patronyms—a defining element of the ostal—sons are the only desirable heirs. Ste Foyans cite two alternative inheritance rules designating one son as heir: an ostal is inherited by the eldest son (1'aine) or an ostal is inherited by the son who remains in his parents' household. When pressed, they insist that these two apparently different rules are equivalent. Because social identity is defined by location in space as well as genealogy, an aine, by definition, cannot take up residence elsewhere either before or after he has inherited the ostal. A firstborn son who leaves his parents' household has, in effect, left the ostal

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line and can no longer be considered the aine. The next oldest brother still resident on the ostal moves up to replace him in this status. Birth order, like descent, is partly defined by location in space, and the oldest son who remains with his parents is the aine, whether or not he is "really" the firstborn. For much the same reason, the parents never move off the ostal. Because the continuity of the male line ought to be preserved and is partly defined by residence in a particular place, an ostal owner does not leave the ostal when his son reaches adulthood or even after he has taken over ownership of the farm. The parents of an heir are expected to remain part of the household for as long as they live. Meanwhile, the heir is also expected to spend his whole life there. To achieve full adult status and to ensure continuity of the line, he is obliged to marry and raise a legitimate son, who will in turn spend his life on the ostal. This means that the ideal ostal household comprises three generations, including at its center the older owner, his adult son and heir, and his young grandson, the future heir. These men are not equals. There can be only one head of the ostal at a time. A man's influence and authority increase with the number of years he has spent on the land and with his increasing embeddedness in the ostal line, as he becomes father and grandfather, as well as son, to its members. Ordinarily, then, the senior man is expected to be the active head of the ostal farm enterprise and household. Because the well-being of the ostal takes first priority, however, when the older man no longer considers himself to be the best one for this position, he delegates it to the son he has trained to succeed him— without necessarily losing his own influence or the respect due him as senior man on the ostal. The immediate reasons for stepping down—or appearing to step down—have shifted over time, but can always be constructed as serving the best interests of the ostal's continuity as judged by the older man. At one time the transfer of authority appears to have been timed mainly as a function of the older man's judgment of his competence as compared to that of his son, and was apt to be postponed as long as possible. In the mid-1960s the French government instituted a retirement pension for farmers, prompting many Ste Foyan farmers, though still considering themselves quite competent, to pass at least titular responsibility for the farm to their heirs in return for the added household income of a pension. During the same period, increasing numbers of young Ste Foyans began migrating out of the community, a trend that provided sufficient leverage on some ostals to make the older man agree to turn real management of the farm over to his heir, out of fear that the younger man would leave and cut short the ostal's future. In any event, the group of men at the core of the ostal, ranked more or less by age, are expected to be unified by the shared experience or expectation of spending a lifetime on the ostal as heirs and transmitters of a long line. As such, they share a deep commitment to maintaining the ostal's ties with its past and assuring its survival in the future. Ostal households do, of course,

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include other people besides fathers and their eldest sons. Much of the ostal system seems designed to neutralize the potential for disruption represented by those less embedded in the ostal and its patriline: noninheriting children and in-marrying women. Noninheriting Children All children of an ostal owner, born and raised on the ostal and bearing its patronym, are members of the ostal for as long as they live there. Since the promulgation of the Napoleonic Code, none can legally be denied a share of the parental property, but to preserve ostal integrity, all but one must be eliminated from the line. A clear distinction is therefore drawn among the children of an ostal owner. Only one—the aine—is a full member of the ostal line. He will spend his life in the ostal household, inheriting the farm and carrying the line from his antecedents, and transferring both to his descendants. He is distinguished from his younger brothers, who normally will not inherit the farm, although they are potential transmitters of the line and under certain circumstances may take the place of the eldest. Brothers are distinguished from sisters, who will not inherit the farm, cannot transmit the line, and therefore cannot fully replace a brother. Within sibling groups, then, a gender- and age-based hierarchy exists, with brothers superordinate to sisters and eldest brothers to younger brothers. Two main possibilities exist for noninheriting siblings. They may remain on the ostal, working as farmhands for the ostal owner: father, brother, and nephew successively. This may be an advantageous arrangement and is sometimes the only feasible one. From the perspective of the ostal owner, it provides an inexpensive labor force. Further, in retaining the right to residence on the ostal, noninheriting siblings forgo their legal right to be paid any share of the parental estate by taking their share in the form of room and board. This kind of arrangement also ensures a permanent home to any members of an ostal who might have difficulty providing for themselves (due to some physical or mental handicap, for example). Nonheirs retain their membership in the ostal group for as long as they continue to live there, but they may stay only so long as they remain unmarried. This virtually unbendable rule prevents them from becoming fully embedded in the ostal line. They are descended from it, but become collaterals rather than ascendants to it. Indeed, those remaining on the paternal ostal beyond marriage age take on the social identity of "auntie" or "uncle" and are apt to be called by the diminutive form of those kin terms {tata or tonton), not only by their own nieces and nephews, but by everyone else in the community as well (e.g., la tata Noel a la Gamasse). The prohibition of marriage for nonheirs remaining in the ostal household makes sense with respect to several premises of the ostal system. First, it is

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consistent with the imperative of genealogical unity and specificity. The aine/ heir must marry and father the ostal line's next generation, but the marriage and fatherhood of a younger brother still on the ostal would imply the branching of the line: Noel a la Gamasse can refer only to a single father-to-son strand, not two. Even more inimical to the ostal system would be the marriage and motherhood of a still-resident sister, as this would imply the establishment of a second line, one bearing her husband's patronym, on her father/brother/ nephew's ostal. Noel a la Gamasse and Prades a la Gamasse necessarily refer to two different ostals; there is no conceivable way for them to be one. Second, the marriage prohibition for resident nonheirs effectively reduces to the strictest minimum the number of outsiders allowed to join the household, consistent with the assumption that the introduction of outsiders necessarily entails the risk of disruption to the ostal. The ostal's intergenerational continuity requires that the aine/heir bring in a wife, but it would make little sense to unnecessarily increase the risk of disruption by recruiting more than the one outsider per generation needed to reproduce the ostal line. Finally, the hierarchical distinction drawn between eldest brothers and younger siblings is reinforced by reserving to the eldest, alone among all those remaining on the ostal, the right to marry and, by implication, to reach full maturity.2 The second possibility for noninheriting siblings, one that even more effectively removes them from the ostal line, is for them to leave the household. Because one's identity derives as much from location in space as from family affiliation, an individual who takes up residence elsewhere no longer belongs to the ostal line. For precisely the same reason that an aine/heir loses that status if he leaves the ostal, his brothers and sisters who move away may marry and have children without in any way threatening the integrity of the ostal line. An ostal owner's primary commitment is to the ostal and its line. He is under no particular obligation to help establish those of his children who leave it, and no one finds it especially noteworthy if they are left to fend as best as they can for themselves, either by marrying onto another ostal or by moving into the bourg or elsewhere to find employment. The ability to set up not only the ostal heir but also other children is taken as a mark of high status, a demonstration of the means to cover nonessential expenses. This may take a variety of forms: "placing" nonheirs as spouses on high-status ostals in the re2 In his analysis of the stem family system in French Catalonia, Assier-Andrieu (1981) argues that the underlying logic of apparently similar marriage rules there pertains less to the preservation of individual farm (casa) integrity than to the maintenance of a stable number of households in the community, necessary in that context because of the rights to communal lands and other common resources to which each household had access. This argument, while compelling for the Pyrenean valleys he describes, does not appear relevant to Ste Foy, where commons have not played the significant economic and social role they did in the Pyrenees. Further, Ste Foy's bourg provides a place for nonheirs to establish non-ostal households within the community; marriage rules in this context effectively prevent the division of an ostal among several households, but do not necessarily limit the number of households in the community.

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gion, for example, or providing them with unusual amounts of education or training. The daughters of the wealthiest ostal owners in the late nineteenth century, for instance, are easily spotted in the local records for their beautiful handwriting, learned during years at convent school and very different from the barely literate scrawls of most Ste Foyans of the day. In the 1970s the prestige of the highest-status ostals was marked partly in terms of the high level of training provided to daughters and younger sons: the daughter in medical school in one case, the daughter in veterinary school in another, the son of yet another working in Paris as a television editor (the daily appearance of his name on the screen being taken as evidence of a great deal of training and skill). Providing in this way for children leaving the ostal, though, is admired as a demonstration of considerable means, not as the fulfillment of any kind of moral imperative. The imperative is to keep the ostal going, and the needs of those leaving it ought to be met only if doing so does not interfere with the ostal's well-being. At least under certain conditions, those who leave the ostal are entitled to some compensation, in part to help secure their permanent departure. Daughters who leave to marry, especially those marrying onto another ostal, are provided with a dowry, as are sons who marry onto an ostal. (An ostal owner who manages to "place" all but his eldest son on other ostals may thus incur considerable expense.) These payments, in the form of movable goods or cash, are taken as a final settling of accounts. A person who has received a dowry is no longer considered to have any legitimate right to resume residence on the paternal ostal or to receive any further payments from it. Younger siblings who leave but do not receive a dowry may be given or, more often, promised, a share of the ostal's value, again in exchange for forgoing any subsequent claims. The promise of a payment does not appear to be taken very seriously by any of the parties involved, although the commitment to stay away does. In the early 1970s, for example, a farm subsidy program implemented by the French government included as one condition of eligibility that the farm have no outstanding debts to legal heirs. This generated an avalanche of back payments to several generations of "younger siblings,'' many of them quite elderly, who generally saw these more as unexpected windfalls than as an overdue debt. A final possibility for the daughters and younger sons of an ostal, rather more common in the past than today, is the priesthood or convent. This implies both leaving the ostal line and forgoing the possibility of marriage and legitimate parenthood. Priests, monks, and nuns are expected to remain more closely associated with the ostal than their brothers and sisters who leave it for a secular life. They are also expected to forgo their share of the paternal estate and to leave whatever wealth they amass themselves to the brother or nephew who is continuing the ostal line. "An ostal with sons and daughters in the church," say Ste Foyans, "is an ostal with money." This statement simulta-

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neously means that it requires money to set up sons or daughters in the religious life, that they give back more than they take away from the ostal, and that the prestige associated with wealth is inextricably intertwined with having close kin in the church. Today, the children of Ste Foy are more likely to be sent to professional school than to seminary or convent. Nonetheless, the religious life remains a more readily conceivable option to Ste Foyans—as to many Aveyronnais—than to other French, as much because of their family system as because of their religiosity. The Milhac family provides an example of the various possibilities available to the children of an ostal, as well as the conflicts—to which I shall return—that can arise over these. M. Milhac a la Coste had one son and three daughters. The son, Paul, inherited the ostal, one daughter married onto a neighboring ostal, and another became a nun. Irma, the eldest child, remained unmarried and stayed on the ostal until after her father died and her brother married. She then went to work as a housekeeper for a family from the region that had settled in Toulouse. Some years later (in the late 1960s) her mother, still living on the ostal, became ill and Irma returned to help nurse her. After several years the mother died and Irma, close to retirement age herself and eligible for a pension, wanted to remain on the paternal ostal. She claimed her right to do so on the grounds that she had stayed with her mother until her death. Paul and his wife, however, insisted that she had no such right because she had left the ostal in the interim and had spent much of her adult life elsewhere. The married sister then stepped into the impasse, taking Irma's side in the dispute and upping the ante. According to her, the fact that Irma had been with both parents throughout their final illnesses and deaths most certainly did give her the right to remain on the paternal ostal, and she threatened to take Paul to court if he refused to recognize it. Irma had never received any share of their father's ostal and, as a matter of fact, neither of the other sisters had received her legal share, so Paul would surely have lost a suit over the inheritance settlement had his sisters decided to bring one against him. Paul, faced with the choice of accepting Irma's and her sister's inventive interpretation of the ostal system rules or of incurring the costs (probably more than his ostal could bear) of application of French inheritance law, was forced to back down. An apartment with a separate entrance was arranged for Irma in Paul's house. No legal action was ever brought, although Paul and his wife and son stopped speaking both to Irma and to everyone on the neighboring ostal where the married sister lived. Various minor accidents subsequently occurring on either Paul's ostal or his brother-in-law's were generally understood (justifiably or not) as caused by vindictive acts on the part of someone from the hostile ostal.

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Marriage As in any family system, marriage is a delicate matter, hedged by a number of rules and expectations that are, for the most part, taken for granted. In the context of the ostal system, marriage implies a particular kind of contradiction. On one hand, ostal identity and unity are intimately bound up with the group sharing its patronym and a lifelong association with its named place. On the other hand, its continuity requires that its aine/heir marry and father a legitimate son there. This means that at each generation, an outsider distinguishable from the ostal line by her former place of residence and (usually) her patronym3 must be admitted to the ostal's household. This personification

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Fig. 3.2. Posing for a wedding portrait. Family and guests line up for a formal picture immediately after the church ceremony. The bride and groom are in the front row center, flanked by their immediate families. (R. Bru) •' There are several family names that are very common in Ste Foy, so marriage between two individuals bearing the same patronym is not rare. It is said that everyone with the same last name used to be related, and a few Ste Foyans are able to trace back the genealogical connections. In general, though, it is agreed that kin ties going back three or four generations do not really count. That is, two people whose closest kin tie is that their great-grandfathers were brothers are petit cousins but not true kin. Even closer kin ties, though, do not necessarily preclude marriage. Marriages between first or second paternal cousins (i.e., between an aine and the daughter or granddaughter of a "younger son" of one or two generations back) are not unheard of. In effect, such marriages involve the reintegration of part of a branch once eliminated from the ostal line.

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of discontinuity is at once a crucial contributor and a serious threat to the ostal's survival. If its heir never marries, an ostal inevitably faces the ultimate disaster of extinction, but an inappropriate marriage creates the potential for an equally disastrous end. The rules surrounding both the selection of ostal brides and the definition of their place in the household they join can best be understood in terms of this concern. Simply put, the most appropriate bride for the heir to an ostal is a woman from an ostal of equivalent status. On one hand, a woman from a lower-status ostal would be an unsuitable mother to the line. Also, the dowry of such a bride would be too small: because ostal status is marked in part by conspicuous signs of wealth including the size of dowries provided to its children, what a bride brings to the marriage is a direct function of the status of her father/ brother's ostal, even if it does not amount to her legal share in it. On the other hand, although a woman from a higher-status ostal would bring an attractively large dowry, she would be too difficult to keep under control. An in-marrying woman ought to be subordinate to her husband's line, and, as an outsider, she normally is. If she is descended from a line of much higher status than her husband's, however, her superior social origins would in effect counterbalance her outsider status and the match would be altogether unacceptable. Further, under normal circumstances, no woman is expected to agree to a marriage that would not only take her away from home, but require her to live in one of lower rank. In fact, rank attaches to such a wide variety of characteristics that a large number of factors may enter into the calculation, canceling out one another to achieve the proper balance between optimal dowry size and a socially inferior bride. This provides Ste Foyans with endless opportunity for anticipatory or ex post facto discussion and debate about the suitability of a match. For example, location in space is an important factor for ranked status as well as for social identity. The "mountainous" communities to the north, reputed to have a harsher climate and poorer soils than Ste Foy, carry negative value, while the valleys to the south, with milder climates and richer soils, carry a positive value.4 All else equal, any marriages contracted outside of Ste Foy should involve the altitudinal descent of women: women from the mountains marry into Ste Foy and women from Ste Foy marry into the valley. A woman would never marry up in altitude, say Ste Foyans, unless there is some compensating Nonetheless, even in those marriages, the bride, though recognized as kin, is still an outsider to the ostal's place and line. That such marriages are not considered incestuous by Ste Foyans (even though they would be elsewhere in France or by the Catholic church) illustrates the degree to which a younger son's departure from an ostal distances him from its line. 4 This distinction appears to have persisted, even though under contemporary conditions agriculture has almost disappeared from both regions and the two are about equally depopulated and poor. As is often the case, here as elsewhere, the connotations of a distinction have outlived their empirical roots.

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factor, such as her coming from a small ostal and marrying onto a much larger one. By bringing to bear a number of such determinants of status, Ste Foyans can render acceptable an otherwise inappropriately unbalanced match. In the rare cases in which bride and groom are of incorrigibly unequal status, the sanctions may be harsh indeed, as in the following two stories, included in many Ste Foyans' repertoires of cautionary tales. Sometime in the distant past (around the turn of the century?), the daughter of one of the wealthiest ostal owners formed a liaison with a farm worker. She was sent away to school, but managed to stay in contact with her lover. (He hid notes in the wool sent to her to knit at school.) She eventually returned to Ste Foy and married him, whereupon her parents disinherited her and refused to see, speak to, or talk about her. She stayed in Ste Foy with her husband, but, unused to living in such poverty, she became very ill while pregnant with her first child. Her mother finally went to see her, but her father refused any contact with her and would not offer any help or let her back into his house. He finally gave in, only to learn that she had died minutes before. Her baby was saved, taken away from its father and raised by its maternal grandparents. The widower eventually contracted a more appropriate marriage with a farm servant and moved away. In the early 1960s Henri Fabre, the eldest son of a small ostal owner, began courting Berthe Ambroise, the daughter of one of Ste Foy's largest ostal owners. Henri was widely admired in Ste Foy as a personable, articulate, hardworking young man with a great deal of promise as a successful farmer. Thanks to his personal characteristics, he enjoyed considerably more respect than his social origins and age necessarily entitled him to. Even so, everyone, including the two families involved, considered a marriage between Henri and Berthe unthinkable. The two insisted on marrying anyway, and their families finally consented, but did so on the condition that the couple leave Ste Foy. A much smaller wedding was held than would normally be expected for the eldest son of even a small ostal and certainly for the daughter of a large one. Henri's younger brother took his place as aine/ heir on the Fabre ostal, and the newly married couple, penniless and with little formal training, moved to Paris. There they entered the cafe business, aiming to legitimize the match by acquiring as much propertied wealth as Berthe's father and brother. By their account, they have achieved this goal after fifteen years of working in, running, and then owning cafes, and they return regularly to Ste Foy to demonstrate it. They cannot be fully reintegrated, though, because they do not live there: they can only return for their vacations, and their children are Parisians, not Ste Foyans. In any case, many Ste Foyans remain skeptical, claiming that the couple probably has more debts than property despite their displays of success.

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Even an altogether suitable bride threatens potential disruption. She is assumed to be uncommitted, as an outsider, to ostal well-being, and she is feared to have the power to divert her husband's allegiance from the ostal line to herself, upsetting the ostal group. The ultimate danger is that she will persuade her husband to drive his parents out of the ostal or, even worse, to move away from the farm with her, in effect destroying the ostal. It is only as a mother, not as a wife, that an in-marrying woman has a clearly benevolent role to play on the ostal. Therefore, her responsibilities for ostal affairs and influence over her husband need to be minimized, at least until she has accumulated enough time as a mother to be well established on the ostal and thoroughly implicated in its interests. The practice of cohabitation means in effect that she is kept in check through a long apprenticeship to her mother-in-law, who remains in charge—often until death—of the feminine domains of the household. As in other family systems of this kind, the weeping bride under the thumb of a domineering mother-in-law, losing out to the older woman in competition for the affections and loyalty of the husband/son, is a central theme of Ste Foyan ostals. The mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship is generally assumed by Ste Foyans to be a particularly difficult one. Ostal women talk about their mothers-in-law with a roll of the eyes and are quick to complain: "I couldn't even put away a dish towel where I thought it should go; everything had to be done exactly as she'd always done it"; "Until she died, no question of ever inviting any of my own family over to the house"; "I think it's good for men to do some child care, but she doesn't, so every time I ask my husband to change the baby's diapers or anything, she swoops down and does it herself and I just end up looking lazy; he won't stand up to her and I don't dare." Even when some mutually satisfying division of labor is worked out, the chain of command remains clear. One young woman was horrified to learn at the time of her marriage that her mother-in-law had decided that she (the motherin-law) would continue to do most of the household work while the younger woman was to start and run a pig-farrowing operation on the ostal. "I'd never had to do any such thing in my life and couldn't imagine how I'd ever pull it off or why I would even want to try. I'd hated anything to do with livestock at my father's and that's not what I thought getting married would get me into. I didn't have much choice, though, and it's turned out fine—by now I wouldn't have it any other way." Most women's memories of their difficulties as daughters-in-law remain fresh, this in no way prevents them from becoming autocratic mothers-in-law in turn. Just as ostal men are ordered in an age-based hierarchy, so are ostal women. Although an in-marrying woman can never achieve the same formal status as her husband, she does, like him, acquire higher status and authority with the time she spends on the land and as she becomes an ascendant in the ostal line. Neither mother-in-law nor daughter-in-law will have spent her whole life on the ostal, but one has spent considerably more time there than the other; nei-

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ther is descended from the ostal line, but one has descendants in the line (at least her son, the heir), while the other has fewer or none at all. Both are ultimately outsiders to the ostal, but the older woman, over time and through her close ties to the ostal heir, is expected to have developed a loyalty to it and a commitment to its perpetuation far outstripping that of any newcomer. It therefore makes sense that responsibility for the feminine domains of the household (e.g., food production and preparation, child-rearing) be controlled by the mother-in-law, assisted by a daughter-in-law constrained to bow to the established habits of the household and defer to the better judgment of her elder. Autocratic mothers-in-law, however unpleasant, are further justified by Ste Foyans in terms of the inherently troublesome and querulous nature of women. Difficult relations between coresiding ostal women are understood as one example of the general rule that women are incapable of getting along with each other. Further, an autocrat is considered preferable to the only conceivable alternative: chaos. A domineering mother-in-law not only keeps in check the younger woman and the disharmony she may introduce into the household, but acts as a protective lightning rod to the ostal, channeling potential household conflict into the relationship between the two women who are not, after all, full members of the ostal. For example, a daughter-in-law is most apt to see her mother-in-law as the source of her personal frustrations, the failings of her husband, or other problems she has in the household: "My husband is so used to his mother's waiting on him all the time, he gets mad when I don't do it. And she was always going around patching up or covering up any scrapes he got into, so he never learned to be responsible for himself. In some ways, he's really a child, and it's mainly his mother's fault." It is through her ties with her son, the future heir, that a woman eventually becomes established on the ostal, making its interests her own. She is expected to develop mutual bonds of affection, obligation, and dependence with him in a privileged relationship that is often explicitly compared to that between the Virgin Mary and Christ. Such a relationship is not to be eclipsed when he marries; rather, as mother-in-law, she protects herself, her son, and the ostal by keeping the bride at bay, driving the younger woman in turn to look to her own son through whom she will eventually acquire her weight on the ostal. MANAGEMENT OF ADVERSITY

Inheritance by a Daughter It sometimes happens that a duly married and prolific ostal owner only has daughters. He considers himself to be—and is—greatly pitied because his ostal faces extinction: his grandson will eventually own the farm, but will bear

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Fig. 3.3. Ste Foyan family. Grandparents and daughter-in-law eye the future. (R. Bru)

a different patronym. Under these circumstances the ostal rules are given some different twists. One daughter is designated the heiress. She is usually not the eldest, because by the time hope for a son is abandoned, the eldest daughter is apt to be considered too old to begin training as heiress. In some ways an heiress is more like an eldest son than a daughter: in addition to inheriting her father's patronym, she will inherit his farm, marry and spend all of her life there, and transfer it to her son. In other ways, though, she is too much like a daughter to be a son: she is not denned as the ainee, cannot entirely replace her father as farm manager, and, most important, cannot transfer her father's patronym to her son. That means that she cannot transfer the ostal intact to the next generation; because its next heir will bear his father's patronym and not hers, the ostal will change identity when he acquires it. An heiress's husband plays an equally ambiguous role. In some ways he is like a daughter-in-law: he is the outsider who, bringing a dowry, marries onto the ostal for reproductive purposes; he is not descended from the ostal line but will live on the ostal as an adult and become an ascendant to its line. Still, he is not after all a daughter-in-law: he eventually replaces his father-in-law, not the outsider who preceded him, his mother-in-law. Most important, he will transfer his own patronym to his children, becoming the ascendant not of someone else's ostal line but of his son's newly established one.

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If an in-marrying daughter-in-law represents a potential threat to ostal survival, an in-marrying son-in-law spells its certain extinction, although the transition is a gradual one. Even before the son-in-law arrives, the old ostal begins to disintegrate. The stable core of men working the ostal over a lifetime in a long line of father-to-son transfers cannot exist on an ostal with only a daughter to inherit. The ostal nevertheless retains its old identity for another generation. As long as an in-marrying son-in-law runs the farm, it continues to be associated with his wife's patronym. Because he is essentially an outsider, he cannot give his name to the ostal. He keeps his own name, but is further designated as son-in-law to his wife's line (e.g., Henri Prades gendre [son-in-law] Noel a la Gamasse). Only when his own son takes over the ostal, having been born and raised there, is the shift from one line to the other complete, and the identity of the ostal and its members newly and unambiguously established (e.g., Georges Prades a la Gamasse). Matrimonial strategy for in-marrying grooms is no less delicate than that for in-marrying brides, but follows somewhat different rules. First, an heiress cannot marry the aine/heir of another ostal. The ostal structure does not allow for the merger of two ostals, and no one can leave his or her own ostal without giving up membership in it and any further claims to it. Heiresses therefore marry younger sons. The most appropriate mate for an heiress, unlike for aines/heirs, is one from a higher-status ostal. This makes sense from several perspectives. First, an in-marrying son-in-law is in a doubly subordinate position as an outsider and as a man playing a partly female role. This inappropriately weak position is redressed by superior social origins. Under these circumstances, a socially superior in-law implies a desirably vigorous and self-confident man, rather than an undesirably uppity and disruptive woman. Second, a son-in-law from a large ostal can be expected to bring a commensurately large dowry, serving as partial retribution for the imminent and inevitable demise of the ostal he joins. Finally, the ability to provide dowries for younger sons (necessary only when they marry heiresses) as well as for daughters is one conspicuous marker of high status. If an heiress marries someone of equal or lower status, this is generally taken as evidence of a premarital pregnancy, whether or not a birth follows soon after the marriage. The ostal system, with its strong emphasis on paternal lines, has no place for illegitimate children, and a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock is most unacceptable as an ostal bride. A woman who has been designated heiress, though, remains so as long as she stays on the ostal, and her children, although they must be legitimate, have claims to the ostal through their maternal, rather than paternal, line. If an unmarried heiress becomes pregnant, then the problem of legitimizing the premature conception through a timely marriage becomes more critical than finding a son-in-law with a substantial dowry. At the same time, a pregnant heiress is not an especially attractive bride for a high-status younger son: not only will his father-

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in-law's ostal never be altogether his, but the child who will eventually take it over may not be either. For a lower-status man, on the other hand, such a marriage may be his only chance of acquiring a farm. This is considered sufficient motivation for him to marry a woman who i s ' 'damaged goods'' and to become the social father to someone else's child. Alternatively, it is considered plausible that he "jumped the old man's daughter to get the farm." Both of these scenarios carry considerable social stigma for the families involved. Even when there is little evidence of either except a groom deemed inappropriate, Ste Foyans are apt to use one or the other explanation to make sense and express their disapproval of a match that should not have been made. Eldest sons are, without ambiguity, desirable as heirs, can be groomed as reliable and committed stewards of the family patrimony, and cannot so easily tarnish its honor by youthful peccadillos or susceptibility to opportunistic advances. Equally unambiguously, a daughter is an undesirable choice, and has considerably less to gain—or, alternatively, an unseemly wide berth for maneuver—by providing a succession that is distasteful for all concerned. The inherent disorder and discomfort implied by the statistically probable situation of an absence of suitable male heirs are illustrated in the following two stories. The Castelnaus had three daughters and no sons. The middle daughter, Veronique, was designated heiress of the ostal and, when she reached the minimum school-leaving age (fourteen in 1966), was taken out of school and came home to work full time. Her sisters stayed in school longer, the eldest, Solange, training to be a nurse. When Veronique was seventeen, her mother had a "surprise" fourth child, a son. Eight years later, Veronique secretly arranged with Solange to find a job in the hospital where Solange worked. When an opening came up, Veronique precipitously left the farm. Her parents were devastated: they needed Veronique's help on the farm and, even though they now had a son, they claimed that they had fully intended to keep their promise to turn it over to Veronique because they were too old to be able to keep the farm going until the son was old enough to take over. With her departure, the ostal was, according to them, finished. Veronique alleged that none of those claims was believable, except that her labor was needed on the farm for the time being. She was convinced that she was wasting away her life on a farm that would, in the end, go to her brother. Most Ste Foyans, though sympathetic to the father's plight, found Veronique's fears highly plausible. Many further speculated (based on no evidence except the obvious facts of the case) that she had met someone she wanted to marry but that he refused to marry onto an ostal that now belonged to her father and would probably go to her brother. At about the time Veronique left, her younger sister failed her secondary school exam and might (at least so it seemed to me) have taken Veronique's place on the farm. No Ste Foyans considered that alternative to merit a second thought:

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she had been sent to school and the farm was no place for her. In the end, a neighbor's son was hired to help out on the farm. Veronique stayed in Rodez and eventually married, the younger sister found a job in another town in the area and moved there, and the Castelnaus managed to keep their ostal going until their son took over at age eighteen. The Fabres also had three daughters and no sons, and designated their middle daughter, Camilla, as heiress to the ostal. Their eldest daughter, Marie, was sent through secondary school and on to postsecondary training, where, rather to her parents' horror, she chose to study agriculture. (Like most Ste Foyans, they believed that farming is best learned on a farm and that the whole point of going to school beyond the legal minimum is to leave agriculture.) Camilla, though, married the aine/heir of a substantial ostal and moved there, leaving no one to take over the Fabre ostal. Marie, meanwhile, had married the aine/heir of an ostal in a neighboring region and was living there. She and her husband, both committed to "modern" agriculture learned in school, were having difficulty getting along with his parents. They left his paternal ostal, letting his younger brother move up to the position of aine/heir, and came back to the Fabre ostal. M. and Mme Fabre, having expected for some time to have to settle for a son-in-law and daughter as successors, and then facing the probability of no successor at all, were not displeased with this arrangement and were willing to let the young couple manage the farm as they liked. They nonetheless found this turn of events mystifying and a bit regrettable: "All that education," they would say about their son-in-law and especially their daughter, "just to end up back on the farm." Premature Death of an Heir Another kind of accident of fate that can jeopardize an ostal's continuity is the untimely death of its aine/heir. If he has a son who is almost old enough to succeed him, his place may be temporarily held by his widow until the ostal can move on to the next generation. Otherwise, a deceased aine is replaced in that status by a younger brother still resident on the ostal, just as if the elder had moved away. Problems arise if he leaves a widow of childbearing age, particularly if she has young children. A new aine must take his place and something must be done with the widow, without violating the rules that only one outsider at each generation may live on the ostal, that there can only be one line there, and that children born to the ostal have rights to live there. In actual fact, this problem is faced even less frequently than are those of inappropriate marriages or lack of a male heir. In normal times, young adult men in Ste Foy have always been less likely to die than individuals in most other age and sex groups. For example, until early in this century, mortality

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rates for children and for women of childbearing age were a great deal higher than those for young men. It has only been during wartime that there is much likelihood at all of an ostal's having to deal with the untimely death of a married heir. That exception has, at times, been by no means insignificant. For instance, although most of Ste Foy's World War I casualities were single men, twelve married men, all under age forty-five and some of them ostal owners or heirs, were killed. Nonetheless, as for the special circumstances discussed above, Ste Foyans have elaborated rules for coping with this situation, not because it arises very often, but because when it does occur, it carries the devastating potential of unraveling the very core of the ostal. An in-marrying woman's right to live on an ostal is established by her marriage but is consolidated only by motherhood. If her husband dies before she has children, she has no further claim to remain. Her dowry can be returned and she must then go live elsewhere. The new aine/heir, her brother-in-law, still living on the ostal, is necessarily unmarried and, in his new status, must now marry. Because there can only be one outsider in the ostal at each generation, he must send his sister-in-law away if he wishes to marry someone else. Alternatively, he can choose to marry her, reestablishing her right to remain on the ostal as that generation's wife and mother. In that case, her dowry is not returned but is used in effect for the second marriage. If the widow has young children, then she cannot be sent away from the ostal. Her children, as descendants of the ostal line, have the right to remain there, as does she, an ascendant to it. In this case, her brother-in-law must marry her, taking over the wife and children as part of the ostal left by his deceased brother. No other solution makes any sense: if he married and had children by someone else, that would branch the ostal line. Worse, if she married someone else, she might either remove her children, who belong to the ostal, or bring her new husband to live there, establishing an altogether new line. The greatest fear is that she and her second husband might somehow manage to transfer the farm to one of their children, thereby destroying the old ostal altogether. Ste Foyans make vague and horrified reference to this sort of ostal theft having actually happened somewhere in a shadowy past. A similar rule applies to a widowed in-marrying son-in-law: if his children are still young, he must marry a sister-in-law who has remained on the ostal and can replace her sister as heiress. The reasons are essentially the same: the risk is too great that the ostal will be further jeopardized by a split in the line or by his remarriage to an outsider. The marriage of brothers- and sisters-in-law (levirate or sororate), although acceptable or prescribed in some other societies, has been defined as incestuous by the Roman Catholic church for centuries. In most regions of France, such marriages are prohibited by custom as well: where a brother-in-law or sister-in-law is considered to be a kind of brother or sister, marriage to them is repugnantly incestuous. In the context of Ste Foy's ostal system, though,

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such in-laws are not thought of as relatives at all, but as altogether marriageable outsiders. Generally very devout Catholics, Ste Foyans are not only familiar with the relevant clauses of canon law, but care about staying within the bounds of the canon. The imperatives of the ostal system, though, are even more important to them than are the church's rules.5 When the need arises in actual practice for such marriages (e.g., right after World War I), Ste Foyans have sought dispensations from the church, thus bowing to the logic of the ostal system without altogether disregarding the church. Such dispensations have been easier to obtain if the woman involved was pregnant and if it could be argued that no one but her brother-in-law would be willing to marry her, leaving as the only alternative to an incestuous marriage the more objectionable outcome of an illegitimate child (Flandrin 1975). The timing of first births to such marriages would suggest that this expedient was often used. NEGOTIATIONS OF DIFFERENCE

As suggested by the example of levirate and sororate marriages, Ste Foyans are fully aware of many of the points at which the ostal system diverges from culturally or legally dominant behavior in France. To some extent, they mask this divergence with the claim that, in practice, the ostal system is falling into disarray in a way that makes local behavior more in line (for better or worse) with dominant French models. They perceive, for example, a decline in the coresidence of parents and their married adult children (cohabitation), a practice they know to be considered old-fashioned and undesirable under normal circumstances by most French. On some points, though, they take their own rules to be morally superior in their distinctiveness, just as some Americans, for example, are well aware that divorce has become a widely acceptable practice in the United States, but consider it morally inappropriate for themselves or their group. Thus, for in5

In the other French family system with which I am most familiar, that found in rural northeastern France, such marriages are altogether unimaginable, not to mention unacceptable. There, the kinship system is a highly fluid and inclusive one, incorporating in-laws into the kin group such that brothers- and sisters-in-law become like brothers and sisters and therefore incestuous as marriage partners. Further, the inheritance system there is a partible, egalitarian one, in which all children are considered entitled to an equal part of the parental land. Marriage is expected to entail the regrouping of each partner's inheritance to form a viable source of income. Marriage to a widowed brother- or sister-in-law would involve the altogether unacceptable accumulation of two shares of the parents' estate in a single household. In this context, the levirate and sororate are forbidden as repulsive with respect to both kinship and inheritance rules. The fact that this attitude is consistent with canon law is a matter of some indifference in this region, whose inhabitants, although nominally Catholic, make a rather aggressive point of keeping the church at arm's length. It is altogether accidental and paradoxical—and potent testimony to the limits of external institutional rules—that the devout Catholics of Ste Foy find themselves at odds with the church's stance on this matter, while the skeptics of the northeast remain in absolute conformity to it (Rogers 1979, 1985; cf. Kamoouh 1973).

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stance, although Ste Foyans perceive a general decline in the practice of cohabitation coincident with modernization, they are inclined to interpret a particular family's failure to practice it as immoral deviance, not as something justifiable with reference to "modern" standards of behavior. Under many circumstances, the most plausible explanation for the departure of an older couple from the household of their heir is that they have been shamelessly chased away by a grasping son or his wife. Mme Fabre grew up in a neighboring town and moved to her husband's farm when she married. By her own account, she spent most of her adult life in eager anticipation of the day she could leave the farm and move back to town. She and her husband did just that soon after their eldest son married and took over most responsibilities for the farm. The split-up of the household, according to all directly concerned, was perfectly amicable and longplanned. Most Ste Foyans, though, found that version of events impossible to believe and insisted that the older couple had been victimized by the villainous younger couple, driven out of the household by an escalating series of disputes orchestrated by the son and especially his wife. Another point on which Ste Foyans recognize the divergence between dominant French practice and their own code of conduct is the matter of inheritance practices. French law mandates that all children of a property owner inherit a '' fair share'' of their parents' property.6 The legal definition of a " fair share'' has undergone various changes since the principle of egalitarian inheritance was first promulgated as the law of the land in the early nineteenth century, but the Ste Foyan practice of male primogeniture has been clearly illegal for the nearly two centuries since. In fact, despite a history dating from the Napoleonic Code (1804) of a uniform national law regulating inheritance, the much longer French history of sharp regional variation in inheritance practices has persisted. Ste Foy's is not the only region where French law in this domain has essentially been disregarded, although its own pattern of divergence is different from that found elsewhere (Lamaison 1988). Under current law applicable to Ste Foy's region, the eldest son is entitled to one quarter of the farm, leaving the remaining three quarters of its appraised value to be distributed equally among all children (including him). He may keep the whole farm, but his siblings are owed a share of its value. In a family of six children, for example, the eldest son's legal share amounts to three eighths of the farm's value (one fourth + one eighth) and he owes one eighth 6 Note that the logic of French inheritance law is quite different from that of American law. In the United States, the law protects the rights of property owners to dispose of their possessions in any way they wish through a will. Only in the absence of a legal will does the law mandate any particular division. Under Franch Napoleonic law, on the other hand, it is the rights of potential heirs that are protected, through legal restrictions on how a property owner may distribute his or her estate.

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of its value to each of his five siblings. Ste Foyans generally refer to the eldest's quarter (le quart) with a wink. It is taken for granted that the calculations used to settle an estate are systematically based on extremely underestimated appraisals, so that the shares given to younger siblings, when paid at all, are minimal and the "quarter" reserved to the eldest is a very large one indeed. French inheritance law is rarely obeyed among Ste Foyan farmers because younger siblings almost never demand their legal due, through the courts or otherwise. This can by no means be explained by ignorance of the law or reluctance to use the legal system: Ste Foyans know very well that the arrangements made for the inheritance of most farms would be easy to contest successfully in court, and they are quick to appeal to legal authorities on a variety of other matters. Indeed, as in the case of Paul Milhac and his sisters, described earlier in this chapter, Ste Foyans sometimes use threats to challenge an inheritance settlement in court as a very effective means of coercion. As in that case, however, it is rarely the legal inheritance per se which is at issue, but rather some other right or duty having more moral standing within the community. That is, French inheritance law operates in Ste Foy, not to promote legal division of estates as intended by its framers, but as one means of enforcing various other behaviors locally considered appropriate. As far as inheritance practices are concerned, Ste Foyans generally consider that it is "right" for the eldest son to be the heir. Even if some daughters or younger sons do not share this belief, very few have judged the economic gain forthcoming from a disputed inheritance to be worth the social cost likely to be levied by family and community for transgressing the commonly held sense of the morally appropriate. For example, Joseph Veyrac, who grew up as the third of six children of a Ste Foyan farmer and in 1970 at age 25 moved to Rodez, where he works for a bank, says: We grew up knowing our older brother was going to get everything—that the farm was important and that he was important and that the rest of us weren't really. It marks you: from the time I was eight—no, from ever since I can remember—I knew that. So I never thought anything much was owed me. Anything I did get was a kind of generosity. We just settled the estate awhile ago and the shares we all got were ridiculous, completely rigged. I could get ten, twenty times that if I took it to court. But why bother? For one thing that would be the end of the farm if he [eldest brother] had to come up with what he's really supposed to pay us all. And then if I made trouble about it, nobody in the family would speak to me again. So what's the point? It's already something that I even got a token. As in the case of levirate and sororate marriages, the rules mandated by a larger institution in which Ste Foyans are clearly implicated run directly counter to Ste Foyan conceptions of the culturally appropriate. Ste Foyans

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certainly consider themselves law-abiding French citizens and good Catholics, and are no less familiar with French law than with canon law. They are specialists in neither, but no more ignorant of or inclined to ignore either than are any other groups of devoutly Catholic, reasonably well informed and prosperous rural French citizens. The weight of neither set of rules, though, has been sufficient to undermine those of the ostal system. Ste Foyans are French and Catholic in a distinctly Ste Foyan style and are adept at manipulating rules that make little sense in terms of their local system, bending them into more compatible shape, however contrary the results may be to the intentions of the original rule-makers. Ste Foyans know that male primogeniture inheritance is as clearly forbidden by the French state as is brother- and sister-in-law marriage by the Catholic church. They also know that in their own universe, both are essential, although the first concerns a principle habitually put in practice while the second concerns one practiced only under relatively rare circumstances. In both cases, there is considerable consensus about what is "right," which, while taking into account external rules and certainly not undermining anyone's sense of being French or Catholic, effectively perpetuates the local system and keeps at bay alien notions of the appropriate. Yet another way of managing differences between the ostal system and other kinds of family organization in France is to overlook them altogether. For example, in Ste Foy, the relationships between a mother and her eldest son and between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law are the focus of a great deal of attention and are expected to be highly charged, the first in a strongly positive sense and the second in an equally strongly negative sense. These two relationships do not appear to be as sharply marked elsewhere in France; the Ste Foyan pattern is specific to particular kinds of family systems, and indeed is widely reported in societies with extended family structures similar to Ste Foy's. 7 Ste Foyans, though, like other people, are inclined to attribute their expectations about family relationships to "human nature," something they take to be universal, rather than to patterns of household composition or inheritance, something they know to be variable. They therefore have no reason to think that the "naturally" self-sacrificing mothers and "naturally" contentious women who loom so large in their ideas about family and household dynamics might be differently constructed elsewhere. When Mme Cranac heard that her eldest son, a postal worker living in Paris, had left his wife for another woman, she was distraught. Although she had never been to Paris before and was terrified of going there, she decided to go and try to bring about a reconciliation. She did persuade her son to return to his wife, and her description of his homecoming to the Paris apartment 7 There exists an abundant literature describing this feature of patrilineal, patrilocal societies in many parts of the world. See, e.g., Collier 1974, 92-95; Denich 1974, 250-60; Rosenfeld I960, 69; Wolf 1974, 167-71.

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had him on his knees, begging her (his mother's) forgiveness and showering her with gifts. I was struck that it was the mother and son who were presented as the main actors in the reconciliation of husband and wife, and asked where the wife was during this scene. "Marie?" said Mme Cranac, "oh, she was there too," and then resumed her interrupted story about her son's declarations to his mother. Ultimately the marriage ended in divorce, despite Mme Cranac's efforts (which also included a trip to Lourdes to seek divine intervention). After failing to convince herself that her son's behavior was somehow attributable to something that had happened to him during his military service in Africa (before his marriage), she broke off all ties with him. She claimed that even though he was her eldest, she would have strangled him in his cradle if she had known he would grow up to do such a thing. Meanwhile, she did her best to help her daughter-in-law and the children resettle in the Aveyron. Most Ste Foyans assumed that, whatever the merits of the case, she would lay blame for the shame of a divorce on her daughter-in-law. They found it astonishing and unnatural when they heard that she sided with "/a bru" (daughter-in-law) and was helping to support her and her children. Ste Foyans' ideas about family and household organization, then, are expressed within a context of known alternatives. To some extent, they mask or overlook differences between their notions and those to which other French people subscribe. To a significant degree, though, they define their families and households the way they do, not as the only way imaginable, but as the choice that makes the most sense or is the most honorable within the universe as they perceive it. Because their choices are often different from those of other French, it follows that their perceptions of a shared universe are different. Otherwise put, Ste Foyans express themselves in ways that are culturally appropriate to them, and their culture is not identical to that of other groups in France, however "modern" and economically integrated they have become. By no means considering themselves un-French—much less anti-French— they are nonetheless apt to notice, interpret, and act upon "French" ideas, rules, and institutions in ways that are frequently less consistent with the intentions of the framers of these than with the meanings and order of the ostal system. CONCLUSIONS

Ste Foy's ostal system has a kind of aesthetic appeal as a neat and elegant mode of organizing families and farms in a way that assures multigenerational continuity. Its internal logic is not only readily discernible but relentlessly consistent, providing in theory a clear solution to a wide range of problematic contingencies. Virtually all of its clauses derive from two basic principles.

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First, the continuity and integrity of the individual ostal unit must, above all, be preserved. Second, the world is divided into sharply distinguishable categories, defined along a large number of dimensions (age, sex, birth order, altitude, and so on), which are properly ordered in a clearly hierarchical mode. The elimination or suppression of some categories of persons in the interests of the first principle, by means of the second, is an integral part of the system's dynamic. The power and persistence of the ostal system can be read from the degree of local consensus about the rules defining it, its clarity and comprehensiveness as a guide to behavior, and the manner in which rules based on quite different premises are systematically ignored (e.g., national inheritance law), bent (canon law on incest), or twisted (national farmer pension policy) to fit the imperatives of the ostal system. As a matter of principle, the ostal system is a potent filter shaping expectations, providing standards against which to judge and interpret behavior, and bringing order to local life. This means that it is difficult to understand much about Ste Foy without reference to this structure. What is perhaps most remarkable about all this, though, is that as a matter of practice and for a variety of reasons, the ostal system has never worked especially well. As in any other human group, Ste Foyans' notions about what is right, proper, or expected are certainly consequential, but their behavior is only a rough approximation of such ideas. Consensus about what "ought" to be does not imply that Ste Foyans ever have acted or could act in lockstep, slavishly following a set of rales. There are a number of reasons to expect real behavior to diverge frequently from them. Idiosyncratic circumstances or personalities, for instance, may lead to situations inconsistent with the premises of the ostal system. Most Ste Foyans are inclined to think in a Ste Foyan sort of way, but they are all also individuals, with their own histories, predilections, and styles. For example, some women are not the least bit tyrannical as mothers-in-law and get along famously with their daughters-in-law. Ste Foyans (including the individuals concerned) may note such instances, seeing them as unusual, surprising, or objectionable, but they understand such behavior to be within the realm of the possible, at least within limits. Indeed, many of the stories Ste Foyans tell to illustrate or explicate the rules of the ostal system are about people who broke them. Transgressions and their consequences often make better stories and more effective morality tales than do accounts of behavior or events understood as unexceptional. Such stories offer ample evidence of many cases—real or imagined—in which behavior was not in line with ordinary expectations. At the same time, such stories draw their meaning from shared notions of what "ought to be"; divergent behavior, far from undermining such notions, can be used to reinforce and define them. Other sources of divergence are apt to be more clearly patterned and to contain more surely the germs of change. Shifting historical conditions (e.g.,

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particular economic or demographic circumstances) make it more or less feasible for many people to do what is "right," and may bring to the fore one or another practical difficulty unaccounted for in timeless principles. To the extent that these are acted upon in culturally meaningful ways, "inert" structure is simultaneously transformed and reproduced. We shall begin examining this process in the next chapter, with a look at how one of the most massive contradictions inherent in the ostal system has been handled. Namely, everything is, in principle, organized as if ostals could or should be autonomous units, and yet in fact they can function only in interdependence with other ostals and non-ostal groups. There is a clear paradox here. Consensus about ostal rules and their legitimacy as a standard of behavior is one compelling justification for thinking of Ste Foyans as forming an identifiable community. However, the content of those shared rules is such that "community" is highly problematic as a conceptual and practical matter. In particular, the emphasis on the autonomy and integrity of individual ostals which renders the system coherent makes connections among them a matter of considerable ambivalence. There are nonetheless a set of rules regulating and ordering extra-ostal relationships, largely derived from the premises defining intra-ostal relationships. Projected onto the community, however, the ostal model becomes more ambiguous and inconsistent. Ideas about appropriate extrahousehold links are ambivalent and internally contradictory enough to be open to explicit manipulation under changing circumstances. They are more difficult to construct convincingly as a compellingly timeless set of rules and are more susceptible to conscious redefinition or challenge on grounds of "changing times." Further, while shared commitment to the well-being of an individual ostal is likely to hold in check potential conflict among sharply differentiated members, commitment to the community as an entity is commensurately weak and there is little limit to potential conflict among its clearly differentiated and ambiguously ordered social categories. As elegant as the ostal system is as a model of household organization, it appears messy indeed when applied outside the family compound. It is this application which will be explored in the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ties That Cut and Bind: Ostals in the Community

FROM A NUMBER of perspectives, the ostal is the dominant or definitive collectivity in Ste Foy. Ste Foyans seem generally to think of the community as only a loosely connected and more or less accidental juxtaposition of relatively autonomous ostal units and people sent away from them. It is the identity and continuity of the individual ostal which is paramount and the management of relationships within it which requires the most careful attention and regulation. On the whole, the social identity of persons, the scandals, events, and tensions punctuating the local scene, as well as the normal proceedings of everyday life, are most readily explained and understood with reference to the ups and downs of some particular ostal or behavior interpreted against the rules of the ostal system. An early nineteenth century observer of bourgeois families in Rodez provides, with due adjustment made for hyperbolic disapproval of primogeniture and the shift in social class, an image roughly applicable to Ste Foy and its ostals:

Each family formed a little state, with its allies and enemies; in the middle was erected a throne, on which the eldest son sat; the younger sons were the masses. To be a firstborn son was sufficient to assure the right to the most pleasant existence; the advantages stemming from this stroke of luck replaced skill or profession: of a given family one might say ' 'this son is a lawyer, that one a doctor, the other one is the eldest." In all the rest of the departement, the eldest was ordinarily the heir also, but that was only a custom, which in Rodez had been elevated by public opinion to a right.'

In principle, the imperative for ostal autonomy is a great deal more compelling in Ste Foy than any drive toward community integration. Nonetheless, as distant and independent from each other as ostals are or aim to be, there are patterned interconnections among them. They are, for example, dependent on each other to meet their reproductive needs in the form of marriage exchange, as we have seen. They also may need to call on each other for critical resources (labor, equipment, money, land) unevenly distributed among them. Further, although most Ste Foyans are part of an ostal, not all are. Various more or less 1 "Chaque famille formait un petit etat qui avait ses allies, ses ennemis; un trone s'elevait au milieu, qui etait occupe par l'aine; les cadets etaient le peuple. Etre ne le premier suffisait pour avoir droit a l'existence la plus agreable; les avantages que donnait ce hasard tenaient lieu d'art ou profession: on disait, dans cette famille, un tel est avocat, un tel est medecin, un tel est aine. Dans tout le reste du departement, l'aine etait aussi ordinairement heritier, mais ce n'etait qu'une coutume dont l'opinion avait fait a Rodez un droit" (Monteil 1802, 1: 101-2).

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clear ideas shape relationships among ostal and non-ostal households and individuals. Indeed, one of the ways by which the integrity of individual ostals is preserved is through the elaboration of standards shaping their ties with each other and with non-ostal households. With the single exception of marriage exchange, however, Ste Foyans do not elaborate rules governing relations among ostals as fully as they do rules about relations within them, nor are they as inclined to illustrate those rules with often-repeated cautionary tales. This disparity is a reflection of their preoccupation with the organization of ostals as discrete units. Local ideas about proper relationships between ostals and non-ostal households are given even less attention of this sort. These are most clearly discernible through Ste Foyans' commentaries on specific current events, open to a much wider range of interpretation and more often explicitly situated in time than the more clear-cut and putatively inert ostal rules. In this chapter I will lay out the principles expressed or implied by Ste Foyans about what these relationships should be. Some of these do take an absolute and timeless form. In particular, community, like ostal, organization is ultimately based on sharp social distinctions and the creation of hierarchical order. This is expressed in important measure in the exchange networks that operate in Ste Foy, as elsewhere, as a key mechanism of community integration. Virtually all forms of reciprocity among Ste Foyan households carry strong connotations of relative rank: a few kinds of exchange (e.g., marriage) are understood to express equality of status, while most kinds (e.g., goods and services) are associated with clear difference of rank and operate in a classic patron-client mode. There exists a chronic tension between, on the one hand, the appropriateness of playing out one's status in the community by participating in neighborly exchange and, on the other, the inappropriateness of undermining household autonomy by doing so. As the range of real possibilities and practical imperatives has shifted over time, so have notions about acceptable resolutions of this dilemma. As a result, rules in this domain are understood as changeable, contingent on circumstance, and inevitably ambiguous. Change over time has also affected the distribution of locally recognized accoutrements of status, including access to goods, services, or powerful persons on which plausible claims to local patronage can be based. Ambiguity about when and how to participate in networks linking households under changing circumstances is thus compounded by competing and conflictual ideas about who most properly belongs at the apex of such networks. INTERACTIONS AMONG OSTALS

Status Distinctions Like the rules defining the internal structure of ostals, those shaping their external connections are fundamentally based on a clearly ranked social order.

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Just as eldest sons/younger sons, women from the valleys/women from the mountains, mothers-in-law/daughters-in-law are immediately recognizable as hierarchically ordered categories and the persons occupying such positions understood to be in relations of dominance/subordination, so are gros ostals/ petits ostals in general, or Cambert au Linas/Prades a la Salvetat in particular. The definitive category of ostal is les gros (large or fat ones), direct descendants of the pages of the old days. At the opposite end of the spectrum are les petits (small ones), and in between, any number of categories are elaborated as necessary: les bonnes (good-sized, without being large), les assez petits (smallish, without exactly being small), and so on. All are defined with reference to les gros, who are recognizable by their visibly flaunted wealth. This can take various forms. One Ste Foyan, enumerating the gros ostals of the old days, said of one: "Berlat au Crouzet was a gros. They had all the buildings that are there today. They didn't have that much land—not like Cambert au Linas [another gros ostal], but they had money. It was said that they had trunks full of gold pieces. One time at Prouzet's [cafe], pere Berlats du Crouzet told pere Cambert du Linas that for every 1,000 francs Cambert could put on the table, he could put 10,000!" Another owner of a gros ostal was—and still is—greatly admired for building two identically enormous farmhouses facing each other on his ostal. One of them has never been inhabited in the fifty years since it was built, but has served its purpose nonetheless. Possession of considerable wealth is not enough to qualify one as a gros: it must be conspicuously displayed in farm buildings, equipment, animals, or in provisions for ostal household members. An individual or family possessing wealth but hiding it is not considered gros at all: stories of people who lived in poverty and died on mattresses stuffed with money are told with fascinated disgust. Appropriate means of demonstrating wealth have shifted over time—as noted above, sending a daughter to medical school, for example, has replaced sending her to a few years of convent school—but the principle remains the same. One effect of postwar prosperity in Ste Foy has been a leveling of the most obvious measures of wealth and status. Land, equipment, farm animals, and presumably gross income are distributed much more equally among Ste Foy's ostals than they ever were in the past, and no one employs more than one or two farmhands anymore.2 Ste Foyans note this leveling with some regret. The glory days of Cambert a Linas are often referred to: "I remember when Cambert a Linas had fourteen hired hands! Fourteen farm workers and the Cam2

See table 2-3, illustrating shifts in land distribution over the postwar period. Note that the drop from 143 farms censused in Ste Foy in 1954 to 103 in 1970 is due almost entirely to the disappearance of farms having less than ten hectares (twenty-five acres). These were mainly tiny part-time farm operations of bourg residents, not ostals. At the same time, the number of large farms also declined: from twelve to seven in the 50-100 hectare (approximately 125—250 acres) category; the largest farm in Ste Foy had 213 hectares (526 acres) in 1954, but only 157 (388) in 1970.

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berts hardly had to work at all. Nowadays there's just one up there, and it's young Cambert has to work himself to the bone, even on Sunday when the hired hand has off!" A more equal distribution of real wealth, however, has not resulted in the collapse of the old status hierarchy. Rather, it has generated a proliferation of new status markers. Anyone can now afford a new tractor or a good-sized herd of sheep, but only the wealthiest families can send their children on trips abroad, buy horses, or redesign their houses to include a lavish living room as well as the conventional kitchen and dining room. Financial means are not necessarily the critical determinant of status or of legitimate access to its accoutrements. Just as a family that has but hides wealth has no legitimate claim to the status of a gros, so a family able to afford the accoutrements of high status—as many now are—is discouraged from acquiring them if it has no genealogical claim to such status. Even if not immediately visible to an outsider, some family lines are known to be ' 'better'' than others and pressures are considerable to remain in one's place. A farm worker's wife tearfully recalls her shame, and the taunts and criticism she and her husband endured, when, in the late 1950s, they bought and renovated a house for themselves in the bourg. They could well afford the house, but their acquisition of property was considered a pretension far overstepping the bounds of their station in life. For the same reason, the owner of a small ostal and his wife were reluctant, in the early 1970s, to allow their younger son to make a trip abroad with the money he had saved for that purpose, out of fear of "what everyone will say." The fact that the Cambert boy, son of a gros, had made such a trip only undermined the son's case. The determinants of ranked status are a great deal less readily observable than they once were in Ste Foy, but remain very real nevertheless. Matrimonial strategy operates in principle, as I have indicated, to preserve status distinctions among ostals. An appropriate match is one that can be construed as linking two ostals of equivalent rank. Ste Foyans can be quite creative in constructing such equivalence, but where that proves impossible, the sanctions may be extremely harsh, as in the examples recounted in chapter 3. As in virtually all societies, Ste Foyans define and maintain relevant social distinctions via rules about who may marry whom. In Ste Foy, ostal rank is one of the most salient social distinctions (as race, for example, or education level might be elsewhere). A marriage contracted between two ostal families, while not necessarily creating a lasting tie between them, normally expresses the rank of each by implication of shared status with the other or, in the case of in-marrying sons-in-law, by underlining the social superiority of the groom's ostal. Matches departing from this pattern are necessarily repudiated, both by the families concerned and by the community at large. At the same time, stories told about matches considered inappropriate serve to discourage others from crossing acceptable boundaries.

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Ties of Inequality: Exchange of Goods and Services While marriage links ostals of equivalent status, other kinds of ties bind those of unequal rank. These, like much else in Ste Foy, are inscribed in physical space. Ostals located at opposite ends of the community are unlikely to have much contact of this kind at all; in fact, it is claimed that there are slight dialectical variations in the patois spoken in different parts of Ste Foy. Ostals in a given part of the community's territory, though, may be attached to each other in a more or less dense network of labor, equipment, money, and information exchange. Neighbors are apt to be recruited, for example, when extra labor is needed for a few days of intense and pressing work, as for haying, sheepshearing, or the annual slaughter and processing of the household's hog. Sometimes equipment that is used only occasionally is owned by one ostal and lent to others in the neighborhood. The wealthiest ostals in each part of the community were once the major source of credit for their poorer neighbors.

Fig. 4.1. Hog butchering: Day one, men's work. A neighbor helps the senior man of an ostal butcher the household's annual hog. (S. Rogers)

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Fig. 4.2. Hog butchering: Day two, women's work. Ostal women process the household's annual supply of pork with the help of a neighbor. (S. Rogers)

Some still offer loans at competitive rates of interest (so it is claimed), but most Ste Foyans prefer not to have their ostal's finances in a neighbor's hands, and are much more inclined to use impersonal, outside sources of credit now available to them, such as the Credit Agricole bank or other state-sponsored institutions. In general, such exchanges mark unequal status: labor flows disproportionately from smaller ostals to larger ones, while capital, whether in the form of equipment or money, flows in the other direction (cf. Groger 1981). In fact, these ties appear to be quite brittle: Ste Foyans place rather more value on ostal autonomy than on good relations among them and are more inclined to associate neighborly relations with mistrust, jealousy, or nosiness than with generosity or altruistic assistance. Among any group of neighboring ostals, there are apt to be at least as many which are not on speaking terms with each other at any one time as are engaged in some form of exchange. Further, while there is some expectation that exchange relationships will continue over a considerable period of time, there is no expectation that they will last forever. Even ostals that are on friendly terms are inclined to be cautious about their involvement with each other, against the inevitable day when the tie is ruptured and a conflictive relationship, potentially at least as long-lived as any cooperative one, is set in place. When this happens, all members of both ostals are implicated: enmity, like amity, is acted upon collectively.

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Fig. 4.3. Hog butchering: Day three, household self-sufficiencv. Ostal members pose with a part of the coming year's supply of sausage. (S. Rogers)

Cunhac a Crouzet, a gros ostal, had some pastureland adjacent to land belonging to the small ostal owned by Ardourel a Bouzols. Catherine Cunhac was away at university, but sometimes tended the family flock when she came home for vacations. One summer (in the early 1970s) some adolescents decided to play a practical joke on the eldest Ardourel son, Francois, by sending him love letters signed with Catherine's name. Among other things, they wrote that Catherine's father disapproved of a liaison and had forbidden her to speak to Francois. Catherine was not in on the joke, and greeted Francois politely when she happened to see him but had no other contact with him, leading Fran§ois to believe that her reserve was against her wishes and in obedience to her father. Enraged, he sneaked onto the Cunhac ostal one night and slashed the tractor tires. Catherine's father was enraged in turn and called in the police to track down the culprit. He was convinced that someone from the Prades ostal next door, with whom the Cunhacs had been feuding for years, was responsible, and somehow the police dogs did initially track the wrongdoer to the Prades house. That false lead was eventually exposed, and a footprint led instead to Francois Ardourel. While a tire-slashing by a Prades would have made sense in the context of the Prades-Cunhac feud, the Ardourels had no particular relationship with the Cunhacs and it made no sense at all for Francois to have done such a thing. He was generally considered a bit "soft in the head" and this

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apparently unprovoked act was taken as confirmation that he was truly crazy. When the story of the bogus love letters became known, the fact that he had believed that a Cunhac daughter could really be interested in him was equally convincing evidence that he was crazy. (The story ends badly: the mayor, exercising his police powers, had Francois committed to a psychiatric hospital and called the regional volunteer fire department to take him away. The firemen, rarely having the opportunity to perform, arrived at the Ardourel ostal in full regalia, sirens blasting. Francois panicked, shut himself up in the house with a rifle, and threatened to shoot if anyone approached. One of the firemen did, and was shot dead. In the end, Francois was taken away as "criminally insane" instead of "for observation.") Ste Foyans say that "in the old days" there was a great deal more mutual aid and cooperation among ostals than there is now, and attribute the decline to "modern individualism": "All anyone cares about nowadays is getting ahead and tough luck for everyone else." Although impossible to measure, an evolution in this direction may well have occurred. In contrast to the situation in the past, most ostals are now sufficiently prosperous to meet their own ordinary needs and few have access to significantly more material resources than others. Particularly since World War II, a number of outside institutions have become available to all for help under unusual circumstances: state-sponsored old age pensions, health, fire, crop, and livestock insurance, and so on. Because substantial exchanges of goods and labor undermine the ideal of ostal autonomy and necessarily imply that one partner is inferior to the other, they are avoided as far as possible. Because as a practical matter they can be avoided to a greater extent under current conditions than in the past, they may very well be. In some ways, such an evolution runs counter to efforts by the French government—particularly right after World War II and again in the 1960s—to encourage farmers to set up various forms of machine cooperatives, formal labor exchanges, and group farming enterprises.3 At various times over the postwar decades, attractive incentives in the form of priority access to equipment in short supply, discounts, tax breaks, or special subsidies have been offered to those who formed and officially declared such groups in accordance with various state guidelines. A number of these have been declared in Ste Foy, but they come and go with the attractiveness of the relevant incentives. 3

The nature of such programs and the reasons for promoting them have varied somewhat over time with the evolution of French agriculture during this period. On the whole, though, they have been intended to facilitate the modernization, growth of productivity, and "economic efficiency" of French agriculture, while minimizing the political and social risks of reducing the agricultural labor force too rapidly. For example, if a group of farmers, each working too little land for the purchase of a full battery of modern equipment to be "economically rational," could be persuaded to buy it collectively, then at least the land-to-capital ratio would be optimal, even if individual farm size (or the land-to-labor ratio) remained too small in strictly economic terms (Groger 1979, 1981; Murphy 1977).

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Virtually all of them disappeared in the early 1970s when public officials began requiring real proof that they were actually functioning; few if any had ever existed except on paper. One form of cooperative farming has been successfully adopted, though only in appearance, on a few Ste Foyan ostals: GAEC (Groupement Agricole d'Exploitation en Commun), a program developed in the 1960s. GAECs are formal associations of two or several farmers who agree to pool their land and work the consolidated operation together. A few Ste Foyan ostal owners have followed the letter, though certainly not the spirit, of the law by dividing the farm between father and eldest son, declaring it as two farms, and entering an agreement to work the "two" together. In this way they do what they would have done anyway, but with the added state-sponsored financial benefits of being in a GAEC. A substantial proportion of the registered GAECs in France turn out, on close inspection, to be so-called false (faux) GAECs of this or another sort, all involving the presentation of locally customary practice in a way that fits the official guidelines for a new form of collective farming. As in many other matters, Ste Foyans are by no means alone in diverting the official intentions of this program, although they, like others, have done so in a specifically local way. On the whole, Ste Foyans have been quite happy to get the benefits distributed by the state to farmers forming cooperatives and have been adept at finding ways to do so, but they certainly do not share the interest of the Ministry of Agriculture in pooling farm resources. Faced with a choice between forgoing the special benefits for cooperating farmers and making a real commitment to any formalized pooling of capital or labor between ostals, they generally judge the former a much better alternative. Elsewhere in France, such cooperative endeavors have tended to work best when they group farmers of roughly equivalent status and means. To Ste Foyans, the idea of sharing or exchanging labor and capital among equals makes no sense at all. In certain ways, the informal exchanges linking ostals of unequal rank resemble some of the arrangements promoted by the French government. However, insofar as Ste Foyans believe that such relationships are becoming rarer (whether or not they in fact are) and understand them to be highly tenuous, subject to rupture at any time, it would be foolish to consider formalizing them in the kind of substantial, long-term commitment required for official recognition. All things considered, in the Ste Foyan context it makes most sense for each ostal to manage its farm operation as best as it can on its own, notwithstanding the programs and priorities established by the Ministry of Agriculture. Inequality II: Patronage and Electoral Politics A more intangible kind of linkage, about which Ste Foyans have much less ambivalence, is undoubtedly the most important and enduring tie binding ostals of unequal status. Owners of the largest ostals, as social superiors at least

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within the narrow constraints of the community, are assumed to have the best connections to well-placed persons within the community and beyond, and to have readiest access to various useful kinds of information. In their sharply hierarchical view of the world, Ste Foyans see themselves, both individually and collectively, near the bottom of the pecking order, and believe that the only fruitful manner of making their way is to maintain avenues of contact with well-positioned persons (pistons). Most are highly skilled in the art of pistonnage: believing that impersonal, formal channels are virtually useless, their response to a wide range of difficulties and opportunities is to think of someone who knows someone in a position to pull a string. Everyone has a network of carefully cultivated contacts in an array of potentially useful places: a cousin who works in the social security office in Rodez, an uncle who owns an apartment building in Paris, the local priest whose childhood friend is the (presumably wildly powerful) archbishop of Paris. For our overnight trip to Lourdes, Mrae Verdier was convinced that we would not find an appropriate hotel room or would be cheated unless we used a piston, despite my claim that because it was the off season and as we planned to arrive in the morning, we probably would be able to find a room easily. She sought out a farm laborer she knew (a man of equal status to her) to get the name and address of his sister, a hotel maid in Lourdes. When we arrived, she sent me off with the slip of paper he had given her to find the hotel and the sister, tell her we were from Ste Foy and had been sent by her brother, and ask her to get us a room. 1 was further instructed that if she could not get us a room in her hotel, I should ask her for an introduction to another one where she knew someone. (Operating under a different system, I went to the address marked, asked the desk clerk for a room, and, once that had been arranged, found the sister to say hello from her brother, but did not ask her for anything in particular. I saved myself some embarrassment, although it is possible that I also disrupted some elaborate exchange of favors.) Many Ste Foyans stay at this hotel when they go on pilgrimage to Lourdes because it is owned by a man from near Ste Foy and many of them know him or one of his employees. One of Ste Foy's leading citizens, someone from whom Mme Verdier has asked and received a number of favors, is a friend of the hotel owner. She knew of her patron's connection to the hotel and might have decided to get a room by asking him for an introduction to the owner. Apparently, she considered that her own more modest contacts would serve the purpose as well in this case, and that she would do better to save her capital with her higher-placed patron for situations she could not handle as easily without his pull. She may also have calculated that a room obtained through the owner rather than the maid might be expensive and fancy beyond our means.

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All else being equal, the higher one's status, the more extensive and powerful one's contacts are presumed to be. High-status ostal owners, then, are potentially well positioned to provide patronage to their lower-status neighbors, and many are indeed skillful in creating and maintaining ties of obligation and dependence in this way. They incur the indebtedness of their neighbors and demonstrate their good contacts by passing along inside information about a new farm program, securing clever legal counsel for the ostal down the road, or lining up a well-paying job for the noninheriting child across the way. In return, they may expect a number of services. Not the least of these are votes for themselves or for their own patrons outside the community. Like other French communities of its size, Ste Foy is governed locally by a popularly elected thirteen-member4 town council {Conseil Municipal). This body is elected every six years and after each election chooses a mayor and two deputy mayors (makes adjoints) from among its members. The council's powers are narrowly limited by the French constitution, but membership on it provides some opportunity for local decision making and access to inside information on certain local matters. Perhaps most important in Ste Foy, it also brings potential access to official information and personages at higher administrative levels, as well as the official sanction of political office, useful in contacts outside the community. In national elections, the large majority of Ste Foyan voters have always supported right-of-center parties, but no candidates for local office have ever run as members of a national party; local elections are decided on strictly local matters. On the whole, the largest ostal owners have monopolized seats on the council, many of them passed from father to son along with the rest of the ostal. Although elections are community wide and there is no formal imperative that seats be distributed evenly around the community's territory, the council—and election slates—are carefully composed that way, with each elected member seen as the representative or boss of his section of the community. A candidate who has successfully cultivated a loyal clientele can count on enough votes for election and need not fear a serious challenge from his territory: no one would be foolhardy enough to risk the break in relations that would ensue. Indeed, in some elections it has been impossible to find as many as two candidates for each seat, and in the 1983 elections none of the incumbents faced any opposition at all. From the voters' perspective, it is in the best interests of everyone to send the highest-status neighbor with the best contacts to the council. Loyal clientele may legitimately continue to demand favors. Further, a relatively low status person would be less likely to be able to effectively defend his district's interests among his superiors on the council and, worse, even with the mantle of public office, would be less likely to have enough pull beyond the community to be able to do much for the collectivity or individuals within it. 4

The number was increased to fifteen under the national electoral law reform of 1983.

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In the 1976 cantonal elections (for seats in the departemental legislature in Rodez), one candidate was at an immediate disadvantage because he had no ties with any of Ste Foy's leading citizens. In response to his request for a public campaign meeting, he was given an extremely inconvenient time and place. Almost no one came. He definitively destroyed his chances for many votes in Ste Foy by basing his pitch on the fact that he was of modest means, "of the people," and therefore could understand the real problems of ordinary folk and was untainted by power or privilege. Virtually everyone in Ste Foy found it ridiculous that a candidate should provide such persuasive reasons for not voting him into office: "What could someone like that do for me? If that's all it took, I could just go up there myself!" His opponent, the incumbent, was an old friend of Ste Foy's mayor and had a well-attended campaign meeting. As far as I could tell, he had never done much for Ste Foy's section of the canton. For example, he had finished a very long rendition of how responsible he was for the installation of a direct-dial telephone system in most of the canton, before he remembered that Ste Foy remained one of the last communities in the Aveyron without direct dialing and with a seven-year wait list for private phones. What seemed to make a much bigger impression at the meeting, though, were his frequent references to his good friends, the president of the departemental legislature, various national legislators, the archbishop of Paris, and so on. He was reelected by a landslide, to no one's surprise. He probably also helped the mayor's own vote count in subsequent local elections by his effective recitation of the powerful network to which he could give his friend the mayor access. A chain of patronage, most readily visible in electoral politics, links individuals with varying amounts of status and power both within the community and beyond it. Ste Foy's largest ostal owners play a kind of linchpin role as patrons within the community and as clients of powerful men beyond it. As such, they are systematically returned to local public office, and are able to deliver blocks of votes to their own patrons. A great deal more than votes and public office is at stake, however. Within the logic of the system, no one is a dupe for long. A wide variety of services is expected in return for electoral support. Neither votes nor services come for free, and one may be withheld as readily as the other in the case of nondelivery along the chain. The candidate for cantonal representative may not have done much for Ste Foy's telephones, but he had undoubtedly made himself useful enough to Ste Foy's mayor and, through him, to a number of other Ste Foyans to have no fear for his electoral support; the election's outcome was such that the mayor could continue to demand services from him, some distributable to his own loyal clients. Within Ste Foy, large ostal owners are apt to be enmeshed in this kind of multitiered, more or less well managed tissue of dependency and obligation with their neighbors. They are able to get and to deliver local votes to the extent that

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they are well positioned to provide and demand a wide array of other goods and services. Francois Fabie, a poet who spent his adult life in Paris but who was born and raised very near Ste Foy in the mid-nineteenth century, published his memoirs in 1925. There he describes an incident that occurred during the national legislative elections of 1863 under Emperor Napoleon III. Fabie's paternal grandfather had been involved in costly litigation and, to cover the settlement expense, had borrowed money from a local patron, " M . , " using the family property as collateral. Fabie's father had inherited the debt along with the property and continued to pay it off little by little. Meanwhile, the Fabies were expected to provide a variety of small services to M.: to furnish his household with game, fish, and honey, for example. ML, by then the mayor, strongly supported Napoleon Ill's regime, as did the majority of voters in the region of the day. During the 1863 election he was especially committed to consolidating the local pro-regime vote in the face of growing Republican (on the left) and monarchist (on the right) opposition elsewhere in France. This involved informing the eligible voters among his clients (including those in the Fabie household) how they were to vote. Frangois Fabie had an unmarried paternal uncle who had remained in the household and who was a committed Republican as well as an avowed enemy of M. There was no Republican candidate running in the district, but the uncle announced his support for the monarchist opposition candidate and joined forces with the local priest (a Legitimist) to persuade voters to support the opposition, as a way of registering support for the monarchists, opposition to the Empire, or-—especially—opposition to M. M.'s attempts to persuade Fabie pere (as head of the household) to quash his brother were unsuccessful, and in the end the pro-regime candidate was defeated locally, although he carried the electoral district. M., furious, retaliated by calling in his old loan to the Fabies, demanding to be paid within a week. He knew quite well that they could not pay and was not interested in seizing their property. Rather, he wanted a public apology from the Fabies and their return to a suitably obedient and respectful stance. The Fabies succeeded in finding several other large ostal owners willing to lend them money to pay off M., further enraging him, but freeing themselves from all obligations to his household. In so doing (I presume) they incurred new obligations to their new patrons, themselves hostile to M. (Fabie 1925, 124, 135-39) Ste Foy's hotly contested local election of 1975 made a schism in the hamlet of Fournols when Paul Cassagnes a Fournols decided to run against his neighbor Noel. Noel had been on the town council for years, as had his father before him (and later, his son after him), and was the hitherto undisputed patron of his section of the community. The Noel and Cassagnes households were linked by a series of exchanges: they regularly helped each other with haying, sheepshearing, and so on. Noel was the Cassagnes' ma-

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jor source of information about community affairs and, as president of the local section of the farmers' union, a useful source of information and contacts on farm programs as well. In the 1975 local elections, Noel ran as part of the slate dominated by ten incumbent town councilors (including himself) who had turned against the former mayor and his two deputies. An opposition slate, allegedly backed by the former mayor, was composed entirely of new candidates. Its organizers had a great deal of difficulty recruiting enough candidates to challenge the established councilors, had to skip altogether a number of sections of the community where no one dared run against the incumbent, and ended up with a slate including almost no one likely to be taken as a very serious candidate. Paul Cassagnes' candidacy as part of this slate was kept a secret until the entire opposition was announced on the eve of the elections, although the visible nervousness of his mother and sister during the preceding weeks strongly suggested that someone in the Cassagnes household was planning to run. Paul Cassagnes is a noninheriting son who works outside of the community; as a member of a relatively low status ostal which he neither owns nor works on, he was unlikely to get many votes, even without a number of other personal and family characteristics which effectively disqualified him from a seat on the council. He was, like the rest of his slate, soundly defeated. Although Cassagnes was clearly not a very serious threat to Noel in terms of election results, his decision to run was taken seriously. All ties between the Noel and Cassagnes households were severed as soon as his candidacy became known. For some years, the two households exchanged little but "dirty looks"; Cassagne's mother and sister shrug and say "It used to be convenient when we'd help each other out and all, but oh well." Noel was angered, but claimed not to be surprised, by Cassagnes' decision to run for office. The reasons for a Cassagnes candidacy were never made explicit (to me), but appeared to be a step taken by the Cassagnes household to resolve festering conflicts with the Noel household by terminating the relationship altogether. It may also have been part of an effort to replace Noel with the former mayor (or one or another of his allies) as their patron. For either or both purposes, the election was a strategic route. Both the Noel and the Cassagnes households were undoubtedly inconvenienced by the rupture—and in positions to inconvenience each other further—but neither suffered mortally from it, and someone must have calculated that the alternatives were worse.

BOURG AND CAMPAGNE

Elements of Distinction Although the majority of Ste Foyans live on ostals, a substantial number of them do not. The ostal/non-ostal populations correspond almost exactly to the

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campagne (outlying countryside)/bourg distinction. Nearly all of Ste Foy's ostals are located in the campagne and virtually all of the campagne's five hundred residents live on ostals. Of the three hundred persons living in the bourg, on the other hand, almost no one is engaged in full-time farming. Those few ostal households located there carefully distinguish themselves from "those town-dwellers" (citadins), their neighbors, and are usually located in space with reference to their own place names. Ste Foyans draw a sharp distinction between bourg and campagne, rarely thinking of them as a unified whole. In fact, they generally use the name "Ste Foy" as a place name referring only to the bourg; having little occasion to refer to the whole township, they have no conventional way of doing so. (I, like the French state, have found it more convenient to depart from local usage and use the name "Ste Foy'' in its official sense of designating the township.) The distinction between bourg and campagne may be illustrated by a transitional category of settled space: Ste Foy's two largest hamlets, Fouillac and Esplas. These are sometimes referred to by Ste Foyans as villages (i.e., smaller versions of the bourg) and sometimes as hamlets (i.e., part of the campagne). In fact, they were once rather like the bourg, but have become more like the campagne. Prior to World War I, both villages included several ostals, but also a number of small shops, artisanal workshops, and households of day laborers. Each acquired a primary school in the late nineteenth century, and Fouillac had a church (and priest) while Esplas had a cheese dairy (and dairy workers). Both were centers providing a number of services to the surrounding countryside. Not the least of these was absorption of excess ostal population (e.g., younger sons) and provision of supplementary farm labor as needed. Village population fluctuated somewhat more than did that of the countryside and, indeed, functioned as a buffer allowing the ostal population in the campagne to remain relatively stable (see fig. 4-4). As Ste Foy's fortunes improved beginning in the interwar period and continuing after World War II, nonfarm households disappeared from Fouillac and Esplas, resulting in a steady population decline and occupational homogenization. (This pattern is typical of much of rural France, although it generally occurred earlier elsewhere.) By 1975 virtually the only residents left in these villages-turned-hamlets were those in ostal households. Each retained a primary school, Fouillac its church (though no resident priest) and cafe, and Esplas its cheese dairy, but neither continued to be the center it once was, or, except in size, very different from other hamlets in the township.5 During the period of this conversion, the bourg of Ste Foy prospered and evolved in the opposite direction. As its tiny subsistence farms disappeared, it became a primarily nonagricultural center, 5

For this reason, I have treated contemporary Fouillac and Esplas as part of the campagne except where otherwise noted (esp. in calculations of measurable change over time, as in fig. 4.4).

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500 450 -f 400 350300 250 200

-

^

-I vi)

A

WWII

WWi

1850

1870 "*" Campagne

1890

1910

1930

"~ Bourg

1950 ^

1970

[''ouillac and Ksplas

Fig. 4.4. Evolution of campagne, bourg, and large hamlet populations. Number of inhabitants over time. (Source: Local census)

focused more exclusively on serving the outlying countryside, and is now the only such center in the township. More Ties of Inequality: The Subordinate Bourg A settlement pattern with a clustered village surrounded by dispersed farms and hamlets is characteristic of many rural French regions, especially in the south. This kind of community is frequently dominated by its village in the sense that its local dignitaries—large landowners, doctors, veterinarians, lawyers, and so on—live there (e.g., Pitt-Rivers 1960). Ste Foy, like many other communities in its region, however, never had many dignitaries of this kind. The "castle" that gives its name to one of the bourg neighborhoods is only a moss-covered, broken-down tower used as storage space for the grocery store adjacent to it and, according to local records from the eighteenth century, had by then already been an abandoned ruin since well before living memory. None of the professionals typically comprising the nineteenth-century rural notability ever settled in Ste Foy: no lawyers, pharmacists, or veterinarians have ever lived there, for example. There have been priests and schoolteachers in the community, and they generally have lived in the bourg. Although some of them have acquired considerable local stature and influence, however, they have done so as allies or clients of one or several powerful ostal owners, not as weighty "bourgeois" in their own right. In a sense, the bourg has always been Ste Foy's main center of activity. The church and resident priest are located there (although the southern half of the township is divided between two other, smaller parishes), the town hall and the public and parochial primary schools are there (although part of the township is attached to another school district), the post office, most of the cafes,

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Fig. 4.5. Leaving mass. The trip into the bourg on Sunday mornings provides one occasion for campagne men to get together. (R. Bru)

the township's largest cheese dairy, the monthly fair, and, especially since World War II, a proliferation of small shops and workshops are all in the bourg, as are the homes of most of those working there. In another sense, though, Ste Foy's truly important activity is on its outlying farms. The bourg has long been considered an entity at the service of the campagne, existing for its convenience and at its will. The cheese dairy and monthly fair are obviously for, and depend directly upon, Ste Foyan farmers. The church, schools, shops, and workshops, too, remain open largely because of the relatively large and prosperous farm population they serve. Bourg activity has generally been for campagne dwellers and is necessarily organized to accommodate—more or less graciously—the needs and interests of a largely agricultural clientele, in terms of hours kept, goods stocked, services rendered, lessons taught, and so on. Meanwhile, gros ostal owners, associated with the campagne, have been the dominant social group in Ste Foy in the sense that they have monopolized the apex of local patron-client chains. They draw their clientele from among the bourg residents who serve them, as well as from their neighbors in the campagne. Until recently, there has not been a specifically bourg-based system of patronage. In terms of the distribution of town council seats, for example, local convention requires that of the mayor and his two deputies, one

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must be from the bourg, but this position has generally circulated among the several gros ostal owners who live in, but are not really of, the bourg. On the whole, the bourg seems to lack even the brittle social coherence discernible in the campagne. Bourg residents are likely to be attached to one or another patron in the campagne, but may have very limited contact with each other. Most notably, in contrast to the campagne, proximity in space does not serve as a basis for relationships between bourg households. Shared bourg residence certainly does not carry any expectation of identifiable ties and, although the bourg is divided into named neighborhoods, households within a particular neighborhood are almost never linked on that basis. The difference may lie in the fact that neighborly relationships (of amity or hostility) in the campagne are organized around a long-standing and clearly defined sense of rank order among neighboring families. In the bourg, however, most differences of rank are relatively slight, generally clustered around degrees of low status. Furthermore, bourg households are expected to be ephemeral, rather than one point in a long-lived family line associated with a particular location in space. Despite the fact that all households in the densely settled bourg necessarily have a number of neighbors, then, the conditions for creating neighborly relations are generally absent there.6 Bourg households are sometimes linked in ways that resemble the ties binding campagne neighbors, but such linkages are most often based on kinship. The tie between kin-related bourg households can be expected to have the same kind of multigenerational longevity as a spatially denned tie in the campagne. Further, a kin-based link between bourg households necessarily im6 This characteristic had a number of implications for fieldwork in Ste Foy. Based on "common knowledge" about rural communities as well as my earlier fieldwork in the Lorraine, I expected that I would be quickly integrated into the neighborhood where I lived and that news about me would spread rapidly through the bourg at least, if not through the campagne. In fact, although I eventually came to know quite well some of the people who happened to live near me in both of the bourg neighborhoods I lived in, it quickly became clear enough that no one felt any special claims on or obligations to me simply because I lived nearby. Further, it was striking to me that I had to continually repeat information about myself throughout my year in Ste Foy, and was often used as a source of information about others. In the campagne, any contact 1 had with someone in a given section was likely to become known throughout that section, but not elsewhere in the campagne. This stood in sharp contrast to my previous field experience in a Lorraine community about the same size as Ste Foy's bourg, where 1 was immediately absorbed into the tight neighborly relationships binding together households in that village's (unnamed) neighborhoods. Also, within days of my arrival there, virtually everyone knew about me, most people remained (sometimes excruciatingly) well informed of my movements and activities throughout my fieldstay, and I eventually identified two or three people to whom I should tell any information that I wished to be universally known within a day or two. There, ! quickly became aware of the village's two factions and was able to make an initial (and quite accurate) estimate of who belonged to which, according to who had heard that my name was "Suzanne" and who had heard that I was called "Suzie." In Ste Foy, on the other hand, where 1 stayed longer, 1 rarely met anyone who was quite sure what my name was until I told them. In neither community was the arrival of a foreigner so common as to inspire a blase response or one specially tailored to foreigners.

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plies that the partners to it are of equivalent social rank; the implication that one is necessarily socially superior to the other, unsavory where their relative rank is ambiguous, is sidestepped altogether. Although this means that the patron-client dimension is absent, such relationships otherwise resemble those of campagne neighbors in both content and fragility. Labor, goods, and services (e.g., help slaughtering the household hog, eggs, garden cuttings, various kinds of information, and so on) are apt to be exchanged in roughly equal measure. Such relationships are subject to highly charged rupture. Bourg households having close kin relationships are as frequently on nonspeaking terms as are campagne households in neighborly relationships. Behind the house 1 rented in the bourg was a large garden which belonged to two sisters, elderly daughters of a baker/grocer. One of them had inherited the bakery and the other the grocery. The garden plot had been divided between the two of them, and was worked by their husbands, both retired by now. Both of them spent a great deal of time in the garden during the season, and I spent a considerable amount of time talking with them there. For reasons no one seemed able to remember, they were not on speaking terms, and I never once saw them exchange a single word in all the time they worked essentially side by side in the two halves of the garden. I soon learned not to engage in conversation with one when the other was there, and to cut short any chat if the second turned up: the frost in the air became palpable. The bourg itself has been—and is generally considered—a kind of repository for individuals and families of insufficient means for an ostal (landless laborers, part-time farmers) or those eliminated from ostal lines (especially younger sons). For example, one response to efforts by bourg residents to organize a series of voluntary organizations in the 1960s (as reported by them in subsequent discussion of the resistance they had met) was "the rejects {repousses) are trying to take over!" Like the villages of Fouillac and Esplas, the bourg once furnished ostals with supplementary labor as needed. Seasonal and casual laborers could be recruited there and catastrophic population losses due to war or epidemic were largely absorbed by the bourg and villages. Although a number of ostal men were killed during World War I, for example, the campagne population in 1921 was identical to that in 1911, while those of the bourg, Fouillac, and Esplas dropped sharply between those dates (see fig. 4.4). It would appear that for those with a choice, staying on or moving to an ostal has generally been preferable to living in the bourg. The campagne has dominated Ste Foy in another sense: the ostal system associated with it has served as a model for the whole community, providing a measure by which the bourg has always and inevitably fallen short. As I have indicated, for example, a weakened version of the naming system used to identify ostals is generally applied to bourg households as well. Another

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defining element of an ostal is its possession of enough land to support—even poorly—a household and to comprise an enterprise worth passing from one generation to the next. Particularly in the past, many bourg households owned a few small and scattered bits of land, but rarely enough to provide even a minimal livelihood for a family at any one time, much less over time. Farmland near the bourg generally changed hands rapidly and only provided a supplement to bourg household subsistence. More generally, most bourg enterprises, unlike ostals, have been too small and precarious to support a household. Typically, the bourg household economy has depended on several sources of livelihood: the wife might run a small shop or cafe, for instance, take in foster children,7 or, in the old days, do wet-nursing; her husband might run a modest artisanal enterprise, farm part time, and do day labor; in the past, their children were often sent to work as shepherds on an outlying ostal. Bourg enterprises are apt to be ephemeral, often not lasting through the working life of their founders and, at least until recently, rarely being passed from parent to child. Those successful enough to last more than a generation have most frequently gone to a daughter or son-in-law. Sending the aine and family name off to better things has been a much more potent mark of success than maintaining patronymically marked continuity of a lowly bourg enterprise. That is, if male primogeniture is usually not practiced in the bourg, it is not because the ostal system has not been taken as standard there. On the contrary, the ostal logic is applied to the bourg; the expectation that ostal rules will not be altogether applicable there is understood as a marker and reflection of the bourg's inferior status. Bourg households' lack of the spatial, temporal, and economic unity valued in the context of the ostal system is further underlined by their composition. Because neither enterprises nor households in the bourg are associated with an ongoing patriline, there is no particular imperative for them to be organized in the stem family structure characterizing ostals; in households that are not really ostals, there is no reason for a three-generation core of men to remain together, no need for a coresident mother-in-law to keep a threatening daughter-in-law in line, no obligation to house unmarried nonheirs. For the same reason, and because the bourg receives individuals shed from narrow ostal patrilines, bourg households may group people who would never be expected to live together on an ostal: collateral kin (nieces, nephews, cousins) of the head of household, kin of both the household head and his or her spouse, relatives of nonadjacent generations (e.g., grandparents and grandchildren). By the same token, single-person households are neither rare nor taken to be especially remarkable in the bourg, but would be almost unimaginable on an ostal; in the bourg each adult is expected to have his or her own source(s) of 7 One Stc Foyan woman who has raised a succession of wards of the state says, only partly jokingly, that this is a more lucrative source of income than a sow.

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revenue in any case, while campagne enterprises are expected to be run as family group operations. The coresidence of several married couples of the same generation or of persons unrelated by blood or marriage is considered as inappropriate for the bourg as for an ostal, but the clear-cut rules ordering ostal households are largely relaxed in the bourg. Again the ostal rules appear to dominate nonetheless, in the sense that their inapplicability in the bourg seems most commonly understood as a mark of the bourg's inferiority rather than of the undesirability of the ostal system. Bourg residents are as likely as anyone else to take seriously ostal rules: Mme Fraysse, the daughter of an ostal owner, married a younger son from an ostal in a neighboring community. He set up a successful business in the bourg, was one of the founders of the bourg's voluntary associations, and was eventually elected to the town council. Mme Fraysse is an especially outspoken proponent of the minority view in Ste Foy that "modern" ways are superior to the old-fashioned, backward habits of most Ste Foyans. In particular, she claims strong disapproval of cohabitation and says she believes it much preferable that young couples set up independent households. Nonetheless, she believes at least as strongly that her brother, as heir to the family ostal, should be fully responsible for their widowed mother, who lives on the ostal with him, his wife, and his children. She is chronically outraged at what she considers his ill-treatment of their mother, and stopped speaking to her brother and his wife altogether when they went away for a few days and abandoned her. According to the brother, it is a strain to be solely responsible for a demanding elderly woman in poor health, and his sister, Mme Fraysse, refuses to help at all. He says that he had wanted to leave the mother with Mme Fraysse while he and his wife were away, but, heartless daughter/sister that she is, she refused to have her, claiming that it was not her responsibility. (In another version, Mme Fraysse agreed to come pick up her mother, but never did.) He says he did not abandon his mother at all, but left her (like the ewe herd) in the care of his adolescent children. In the end, another brother, a priest, came and took the mother to stay with him until his older brother returned home. The bourg has shared fully in Ste Foy's prosperity. As Ste Foyan farmers moved further away from subsistence agriculture, they have demanded more off-farm goods and services and been able to support a proliferating number of shops and workshops in the bourg. The number and variety of bourg enterprises grew steadily beginning in the interwar period and continuing through the postwar decades. By 1975, only a few older men were still engaged in part-time farming. A few bourg residents had salaried jobs outside of the community (e.g., bus driver, bank teller, insurance salesman), but most were involved in one or another of the local shops, either as artisans of a ' 'traditional'' or "modern" sort (e.g., cabinetmaker, mason, tailor, blacksmith/farm ma-

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Fig. 4.6. A bourg street. At street level are a cafe, a barn (rounded doorway), and a cabinetmaker's shop, each with the owner's residence upstairs. Compare the small bourg house/barn with the ostal complexes pictured on pages 10 and 76. (R. Bru)

chine repair, electrician, plumber, auto mechanic) or as shopkeepers (e.g., grocer, baker, pork butcher, cafe owner, farm supply dealer). Most of their enterprises remain too small to support an entire household. For example, four of the five cafes are run by women; one is single and lives alone, while the other three—who all inherited their businesses from their mothers—are married to men with other businesses: a plumber, a livestock wholesaler, a farm supplies dealer. Similarly, two of the three groceries are run by women whose husbands have other employment, the wife of one of the cabinetmakers works for the tailor, the wife of one of the garage owners works at the cheese dairy, the wife of one of the bakers runs a beauty shop, and so on.8 8

As suggested by this partial list, there are at least two of almost every kind of shop and workshop in Ste Foy, which, in this out-of-the-way community of eight hundred, partially explains why most of them are very small. This pattern might be an accommodation to the quarreling and cutting-off of speaking relationships between households which are as ubiquitous in the bourg as in the campagne. As long as one may choose between two bakers, blacksmiths, or electricians, for example, it is possible to cut off contact in case of a conflict with the business owner or any of his or her regular customers without losing access to supplies or services locally. Some Ste Foyans carefully divide their business among the various shops and tradesmen, but many have a strong preference for one, which is usually explained with reference to a dispute with someone associated with the other.

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The Old Order Challenged and Reconstituted Particularly since the mid-1960s, several bourg enterprises have, by developing a nonlocal clientele, successfully expanded considerably beyond the modest average size (e.g., cabinetmaker, cobbler/shoe salesman, tailor/pantsmaker, pork butcher, blacksmith/machine repair). All of them have become family enterprises: run by a man, assisted by his wife and generally by his eldest son, his wife, and any unmarried children still in the household. These families have adopted many of the prestige markers associated with large ostal owners: building or renovating large, elaborate houses, and providing expensive educations or travel for noninheriting children, for example. Nearly all such businesses whose founders are at retirement age have been or will be transferred to the aine and his wife, who, in some cases, have continued to live with the older couple in the house/workshop/shop complex associated with the business. Under conditions unknown in the bourg prior to the postwar period, the most successful bourg households/enterprises have achieved economic, spatial, and temporal unity. Given the option, they have become more like ostals than like other bourg enterprises along these dimensions. As we shall see in more detail later, some of the most successful bourg entrepreneurs have modeled themselves after large ostal owners along another dimension as well: by trying to set themselves up as patrons within the community and displaying their own powerful networks of patrons outside of it. Following the model, they have done so in part by becoming office holders in formal institutions. Effectively barred at the outset from the established route of seats on the town council, they created their own parallel institutions: the series of voluntary associations founded in Ste Foy in the early and mid-1960s. To some degree, these were used to redefine the community's ties with the rest of the world in order to transfer the role of mediator away from the agricultural campagne and to the commercial bourg. To this end, they introduced new activities (e.g., tourism, via the festival committee) and cultivated a new array of contacts through the creation of local chapters of primarily urban associations (e.g., family association). At the same time, association founders effectively used their organizations in a way strikingly similar to the way gros ostal owners have used the town council: to develop and display their contacts in high places and to cultivate a local clientele from among their neighbors. By 1975, bourg leaders had sufficiently established themselves as such and consolidated a local clientele to make a successful assault on the town council, after several earlier failed attempts. This raid generated enormous conflict in Ste Foy. After the dust settled, three of the largest ostal families had been (at least temporarily) knocked off the council; one of them, in the person of the mayor, was replaced by a bourg leader, chosen as the new mayor. In the two subsequent local elections (1977, 1983), several more bourg leaders were elected to a council which, though remaining numerically dominated by ostal

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owners, was headed by a man aggressively representing bourg interests. As they made inroads onto the town council, bourg leaders have been inclined to abandon the voluntary associations that got them there. Some of these organizations have all but disappeared, while others have been taken over and several new ones founded by challengers in the bourg, ready to use this nowestablished means of capturing local power. This sequence of events marks the process by which the once-clear relationship between bourg and campagne has become a matter of contention and disarray. Generally inclined to perceive the world in terms of sharply differentiated categories falling into ranked order, Ste Foyans continue to distinguish clearly between bourg and campagne. But while the campagne, with its ostals and gros ostal owners, was once the unambiguously dominant element of the pair, the rank order of the two has become confused and confusing. Ste Foyans disagree about what the proper order is or should be, but all share a general discomfort and a sense of living in a world gone topsy-turvy in the absence of any clear ranking: "You have to live in your times. This place's stayed backward and we had all that trouble because those big guys out on their farms don't care about anything but themselves. They didn't notice that the times have changed and the rest of us can't just be led around like sheep anymore." "There's too damn many sheep around here. Every time we clean up the bourg and plant flowers and things, somebody's sheep come through, eat the flowers, and mess it all up again." "The mayors here always used to be big farmers and everyone had a lot of respect for them. Now even some little artisan can be mayor." Such statements are revealing for their highly selective use of facts. To the degree that "those big guys out on their farms" have been dispatched at all, their successors are strikingly similar in personal and leadership style. However resentful bourg residents may be of farmers and their sheep, Ste Foy would no doubt have long since ceased to be a lively and viable community without them. To people notably uncommitted to participatory democracy, the prospect of "some little artisan" as mayor is certainly distressing. But the new mayor is hardly a little artisan, at least by Ste Foyan standards. Beginning as a tailor, he built up a substantial pants manufacture, employing a dozen seamstresses and supplying retailers in several departements. Further, an influential four-term mayor who served from 1935 to 1959 was actually a bourg baker (whose bakery eventually went to a son-in-law and then to the latter's son-inlaw). None of the bourg partisans ever takes him as a precedent and, when pressed on the point, most Ste Foyans either change the subject or claim that he was really a farmer. It was never altogether clear to me how someone who was a full-time and quite successful baker could "really" have been a farmer. He did own some land and might have farmed at one time prior to 1935; probably more to the point, he was closely allied to large ostal owners and never had any brief for specifically bourg interests. Apparently, the general rule that

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only big farmers can or should be mayors could be stretched to accommodate well-connected nonfarmers, but only on condition that the latter do not use the office to assert the ascendancy of the bourg (as the new mayor has done). Meanwhile, a "little artisan" would have no more chance of becoming mayor of Ste Foy than the populist candidate for the departemental legislature had of winning many votes there. Bourg leaders could emerge and make plausible claims in favor of themselves and their constituency only at that point in the economic evolution of the community when they had the means to model themselves after gros ostal owners. The timing of their emergence also coincided with general confusion over how Ste Foy and Ste Foyans, collectively and individually involved in an agriculture becoming thoroughly integrated into a predominantly urban world, might best define themselves and manage their affairs. Even so, after several decades of astute maneuvering, bourg leaders have been unable to accomplish the revolution of installing themselves securely on top. The campagne continues to be seen as sharply distinct from the bourg—perhaps all the more so as specifically bourg interests have found articulation—and gros ostal owners have by no means lost the legitimacy of their claim to local ascendancy. The relationship between campagne and bourg, between ostal and non-ostal households, has, over the postwar period, lost the kind of clear ordering that, at least in principle, regulates relations within and between ostals. The resulting disarray and the discomfort it generates in Ste Foy may be traced to the intertwining of change and continuity: important changes in the conditions of Ste Foyan life and in the context within which the community operates combined with the persistent salience of the ostal system and the perceptions of the world on which it rests. It has not been possible to dismiss either one, and neither appears able to be readily defeated. CONCLUSIONS

There is little reason to believe that Ste Foy has ever been an especially tightly integrated community, or that relationships there were ever less brittle or conflict-ridden than they are today. The ostal model that dominates the community favors ostal integrity at the cost of very extensive or enduring links among households. Ties among Ste Foyans seem to operate most smoothly where differences of rank are clearly marked (as within the ostal household) and to be most fragile where relative status is ambiguous. It may be that in the "old days," status distinctions between gros ostals and the others as well as those between campagne and bourg were clearer, and social relations in Ste Foy less contentious (if more coercive) as a result. It seems more likely, however, that the fine grades of poverty once distinguishing most Ste Foyans would have generated as much ambiguity about relative rank as do today's fine grades of prosperity. Further, there is no reason to believe that fierce jockeying for the

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positions at the top is a new invention, although the particular social categories laying claim to that place appear to have shifted over time. In general outline, then, the tenor of social life in Ste Foy seems more attributable to the imperatives, ambiguities, and contradictions inherent in the local structure than to any particular set of historical conditions. Nonetheless, as conditions change over time, new ways are found to act upon inherent structural problems, with the effect that the loci of tension are shifted. For example, Ste Foyans have embraced a number of institutions which permit greater autonomy with respect to other community households. It is now considered far preferable to borrow from the Credit Agricole (bank) than from the neighboring gros. But this kind of "autonomy" requires the ability to maneuver within large impersonal bureaucracies, something supposed by Ste Foyans to demand good pistons. In extracting themselves from material dependence on a patron, lower-status Ste Foyans have heightened their need for more intangible services from a well-connected patron. Under these conditions, the exact nature of the patron-client dependency is not quite the same, nor are the attributes associated with an effective patron or a good client. This, together with changing circumstances which generated a redistribution of wealth and other accoutrements of high status, has generated considerable ambiguity about the appropriate rank order of social categories in Ste Foy. Inherently problematic as a basis for community organization, the ostal model has in effect been reapplied in a somewhat novel (and no less problematic) manner in postwar Ste Foy to legitimate a "new" and hotly contested order. Rules guiding behavior, whether the subject of a great deal of consensus and constructed as unchanging over time, or ambiguous sources of conflict and understood as contingent upon changing circumstances, orient behavior but do not determine how people actually behave. Having laid out some of Ste Foyans' ideas about what "should be," 1 will turn, in the next two chapters, to an examination of observable patterns of behavior, especially as these have changed over time as a function of these notions of the appropriate in interaction with a changing range of practical possibility. In the next chapter I shall return to the ostal unit, focusing on the unintentional and locally unacknowledged patterns of change in ostal organization resulting as Ste Foyans have continued to act upon clear and "timeless" ideas of the appropriate under shifting circumstances.

CHAPTER FIVE

Real Ostals in a Changing World and rigid ostal system provides a powerful and enduring guide to behavior in Ste Foy, but as a practical matter, it has generally been unworkable, even at the level of individual households. As I shall demonstrate in this chapter, most ostals were not in fact organized very consistently in close conformity to the ostal model in the context of the precarious subsistence economy characterizing much of Ste Foy's history. As material constraints began to relax during the interwar period and especially after World War II, measurable patterns of ostal organization evolved toward greater conformity to ostal rules. This would suggest that the ostal system is feasible in practice only under reasonably prosperous conditions, something not generally prevailing in Ste Foy until quite recently. Its potency as a model, however, does not appear to have been undermined by practical infeasibility, nor has it been abandoned under newly prosperous conditions permitting a wider range of choice. On the contrary: as material constraints loosened, Ste Foyans were freer to behave in culturally appropriate ways and were inclined to choose closer conformity to the ostal model. The ostal system then proved itself unworkable in other ways, as we shall see in the next chapter. In any event, this line of argument rests on the premise that there is always a discrepancy between models for behavior (ideal systems, or what people consider to be appropriate) and observable behavior (real patterns, or what people actually find it possible to do). Further, the degree and nature of such discrepancy is apt to vary over time for discernible reasons. The variable shape of this misfit is generated by the dynamic interplay of changing historical conditions and local structures of order and meaning, together defining the appropriate and the possible. Patterns of observable behavior, then, cannot be adequately understood without reference to both of these elements. As a blueprint for organizing household units, the ostal system is coherent and consistent enough, but like any blueprint, it does not provide clear guidelines for all contingencies and is hopelessly ill-suited to some circumstances. In Ste Foy as anywhere else, notions of the "appropriate," however clear in principle, sometimes become ambiguous or well-nigh inapplicable in real situations. We need only think, for example, of the general rule that it is clearly wrong to lie, cheat, or steal. But we have all been in situations in which such behavior might be acceptable, would be impossible or foolish to avoid, or might not "really" be construed as lying, cheating, or stealing at all. In real life, there is considerable room for maneuver and imaginative interpretation THE ELEGANT

128 • Chapter Five

as people invent interested ways to fit their sense of the appropriate with their experience of the possible. Ste Foyans are inclined to perceive, interpret, and act upon particular situations with reference to the terms of the ostal system, but rarely is there only one single and self-evident way to do so. The terms of the system provide some outer bounds of acceptable behavior, as well as means for legitimizing one's own claims or for coercing or undermining one's fellows. They are, though, highly manipulable because the real world, in fact, is more ambiguous than the ostal system and cannot be neatly fitted into its strictures. As a result, there is chronic noise, or misfit between clear ideals and real possibilities within which people maneuver in interested and often conflictual ways. Insofar as the range of real possibilities varies over time with changing historical circumstances, so does the location and width of this gap, as well as the ways people find to act upon it. This means that historical transformations involve not only shifting contingencies, but the reproduction in varying forms of sociocultural structures. In this chapter, i shall begin with a brief discussion of the manner in which chronic and inevitable misfit between the appropriate and the possible is handled in Ste Foy. 1 shall then examine in more detail some of the less deliberate processes by which patterns of observable behavior have shifted with historical changes that brought the possible more in line with the appropriate. TERMS OF ANALYSIS

Rules and Behavior Most Ste Foyans talk about ostal rules, as I have done in chapter 3, as if they were quite straightforward and rigid, including clauses to cover almost every eventuality. The many conflicts with which Ste Foyan life is riddled, however, suggests that there is a great deal of ambiguity about how to apply them to real situations. More often than not, grounds for dispute are circumscribed by the commonly accepted logic of the ostal system, but nearly all disputes have several plausible sides, each legitimized with reference to a competing interpretation or clause of ostal rules. Two of the vignettes presented in chapter 3 provide examples: Irma Milhac asserts her right to live on her paternal ostal on the grounds that she was there to nurse both her parents until their deaths; her brother claims she has no such right, on the grounds that she had moved away to spend most of her adult life elsewhere. It never occurred to anyone that Irma's housing problems might have been solved if she went to live with the married sister who defended her; under the rules of the ostal system, she clearly had no right at all to join her brother-in-law's household. If she had ever married, it would have been equally clear that she had no legitimate right to rejoin her brother's.

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Veronique Castelnau justifies abandoning her father's ostal with the claim that it would of course be inherited by her younger brother in the end, no matter what promises were made to her; her father insists that of course he meant to transfer it to her because his son was so young that the only alternative was for it to pass out of the family altogether. There was never any question that by moving away from the ostal Veronique was giving up all claims to inherit it: that was what she meant by her act, and that was how it was understood by everyone else. If her parents had had a son earlier in life, there would have been no grounds for ambiguity about who would inherit. Most Ste Foyans would agree on principle that ostal unity and continuity are of prime importance, but particular circumstances do arise, and various actors—mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers—have different interests in and different perspectives on the identity of the "right" thing to actually do. Ste Foyans, like many other people, are inclined to keep a sharp eye out for their own perceived interests and to actively protect them. In large measure, ostal rules color their perceptions of their own and competing interests, and provide the terms with which these can be credibly defended or asserted. But within the bounds of that playing field, there is considerable room to maneuver. The facts of real cases are selectively emphasized and the relevant rules given creative spins. It is perhaps in recognition of this frequently exercised potential, or perhaps out of mistrust of others' willingness to abide by any rules at all, that Ste Foyans turn frequently to legal authorities. I have indicated that in many respects Ste Foyan customary rules are quite different from those embodied in French law. Nonetheless, the habit of appealing to the coercive powers of official judicial apparatus appears to have deep historical roots in Ste Foy and its region: "In the old days, people around here were always suing each other; they'd drag each other to court at the drop of a hat (pour un oui ou un non), and some people didn't mind seeing every last penny go to the lawyers if that's what it took to keep their brother or neighbor from getting anything" (cf. Monteil 1802, 2:244, quoted in chapter 2). As striking as is local consensus about what is "right" on principle, there seems little expectation that others will voluntarily do right. The French legal and judicial systems are therefore used regularly to enforce "proper" behavior. Most commonly, now as in the past, agreements of many kinds are ratified by contract duly drawn by the appropriate officer of the law, thereby reinforcing moral obligations with a legal one. In the past, marriage contracts specifying ownership of property brought into the marriage were drawn up for most marriages involving a dowered ostal child. (Under current French law, the default arrangement regarding conjugal property is consistent with Ste Foyan notions of the appropriate and is legally enforceable without a contract, so marriage contracts have become

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• Chapter Five

quite rare.)1 Agreements for the care of elderly parents, wills, transfers of property ownership or usage rights, and other matters are regularly rendered binding by contract (e.g., Lamaison 1988, 141-42). Less routinely, when disputes erupt between Ste Foyans, one party may effectively draw public attention to his or her grievance—and generally further escalate the conflict—by calling in the gendarmes, as in the case of the tire-slashing on the Cunhac ostal (see chap. 4). In conflicts that last long enough or become serious enough, the greater coercive powers of the courts may be brought to bear. Threatening to bring suit seems to be a much more common device than actually doing so, but, as in the example of Paul Milhac and his sisters (chap. 3), it is a potent weapon nonetheless. Its potency derives largely from the known divergence between legal rules and local rules (such that a court decision is likely to be even less appealing than the most objectionable interpretation of ostal rules), and from the fact that it is by no means unimaginable that a hostile neighbor or relative might indeed follow through on such a threat. Ste Foyans' propensity to turn to outside authorities—notaries, lawyers, gendarmes, or the courts—provides part of the underpinning for the local patron-client system: a well-connected patron is expected to be able to provide advice and contacts needed to effectively use or defend oneself against the legal system. That Ste Foyans have long used the coercive mechanisms of the French legal system in their dealings with each other provides strong evidence that they themselves perceive local rules as ambiguous and manipulable in practice, and that they expect each other to twist or ignore them.2 It also further suggests that the persistent specificities of the Ste Foyan social order cannot be explained by simple reference to isolation from or resistance to the powers of French officialdom, or that such specificities must necessarily be undermined with the incursion of French institutions. On the contrary, Ste Foyans have made ample use of the judiciary in ways that make sense to them 1 Under current law, property brought by each spouse to the marriage remains his or her property, and only that acquired after the marriage is considered conjugal property. Previously, in the absence of other contractual arrangement, goods brought to the marriage (e.g., dowry) were considered conjugal property (communaute des blens). 2 Ste Foyans are neither exceptional nor typical of rural French in their use of the legal system. Some regions of France (including the Aveyron and parts of central France) have a long tradition of such behavior (e.g., Claverie and Lamaison 1982). In other regions (including parts of the northeast), there is an equally long tradition of keeping the official legal system at arm's length, and a much stronger preference for strictly local—often less visible—mechanisms of coercion and control (e.g., Karnoouh 1972). For example, in the Lorraine community where I previously conducted fieldwork, there was little evidence in local archival documents, stories told, or current events that much recourse was or ever had been made to any part of the French judicial or legal system. If, as happened extremely rarely, an appeal was made to outside authorities, this was taken as a sign of far more heightened conflict than a similar appeal would mean in Ste Foy. This does not imply that people there did, or were expected to, behave "properly" more than in Ste Foy; but rather that more subtle mechanisms of social control internal to the community were more fully elaborated or effective.

Real O.stals in a Changing World

• 131

and that effectively constitute part of the dynamic by which specifically local structures have been creatively reproduced. In Ste Foy, as among any group, there are of course limits to the aberrations that can be tolerated, and ways to expel from the group individuals who go beyond those limits. Life there is not strictly regimented, but it is not chaotic, either. For example, the young man whose "odd" behavior culminated in an apparently gratuitous, even if relatively harmless, attack on an ostal with which his family had no relationship went beyond acceptable bounds, resulting in a decision to have him committed to the psychiatric hospital. (By subsequently killing a man, he far overstepped not only local limits of tolerable aberrancy, but those of French society at large as well [see chap. 4].) Because Ste Foyans, like many other people, are inclined to designate as "crazy" any behavior they consider extremely odd, commitment to the psychiatric hospital is a relatively common means of removal. Stories about the "old days" suggest that before this explanation and recourse were available, intolerably odd individuals were said to be witches. There were no institutions to which they could be physically removed, but because it was considered dangerous to look at, be seen by, speak to, or have any other contact with a witch, such individuals were placed in extreme social isolation. Most stories about alleged witches (few Ste Foyans today would admit to believing that they "really" were witches) end with the witch's suicide, a kind of voluntary physical removal from the group. As in any society, very few Ste Foyans ever step so far out of bounds as to be sent away from the community by any route. But fewer still behave exactly or consistently as most of them agree "one ought to." The rules provide a guide, not an absolute prescription, and there is some room for divergence according to individual inclinations, needs, or circumstances. In Ste Foy as anywhere else, individual idiosyncracies and inventiveness always account in significant measure for discrepancies between rules defining what is "right" and observable behavior. This is not, however, the only source of such discrepancies. These necessarily occur in the context of particular historical conditions—for example, economic or demographic circumstances affecting all or most of the group at a given point in time—which make it more or less feasible for many people to actually do what they consider "right." Because historical conditions, by definition, change over time, so must the feasibility of closely following a given set of rules. To the extent that this factor is in play, the discrepancy between what people believe to be appropriate and what they actually do may be expected to widen or narrow over time as a function of specifiable changes in historical conditions. The Stability of the Ostal System It is a simple enough matter to trace changes over time in observable, measurable ostal-related behavior in Ste Foy. It is more difficult to assess possible

132 • Chapter Five

changes in ideas about the ostal system and the meaning given to it. I have been able to examine the version current in 1975, but there remain few direct traces of what Ste Foyans might have thought about it in earlier periods. My claim that behavioral changes in family organization can best be understood as a result of changing circumstances allowing closer conformity to a longheld set of rules rests partly on the assumption that the rules themselves did not change substantially. Bits of evidence suggest that this assumption is probably well founded. First, it seems reasonable to speculate that if Ste Foyan ideas about family and farm organization had undergone radical transformation, such change would have been in the direction of closer conformity to standard French notions. Indeed, it has frequently been argued elsewhere that the kind of sociocultural specificity observable in Ste Foy is apt to be ground away under cultural, legal, or economic pressures of dominant French society (e.g., Weber 1976; Mendras 1970; cf. Rogers 1987). To the extent that this kind of change has not occurred, the best explanation would seem to be that deeply rooted local systems of meaning have persisted over time. A somewhat weaker line of argument can be drawn from Ste Foyans' own perception of the ostal system as a set of age-old rules. Although they are certainly aware of changes over time in patterns of observable behavior, their frequent use of the ' 'old days" as a guide for the present might suggest that as a set of rules, the ostal system has indeed remained virtually unchanged. Certainly, if there had been a radical break, Ste Foyans would be aware of it and would be less inclined to define themselves and their expectations with reference to the past. On the other hand, there are as many ways of constructing the past as there are reasons for doing so. Ste Foyans are neither professional historians nor especially interested in historians' history; they are interested in their past as a guide to their present, and selectively remember and interpret what they know about it accordingly. There are certainly empirical bases to their version of the past, but empirical accuracy is not necessarily their main concern, and indeed cannot be if their history is to serve their purposes. For example, their claim that Ste Foyans have always produced ewe's milk under contract to Roquefort legitimizes an arrangement that would otherwise be at odds with their self-image as independent producers. The documentable fact that few Ste Foyans held Roquefort contracts before the interwar period and none at all did prior to the turn of the century is altogether beside the point. Similarly, when Ste Foyans claim that mother-in-law/daughter-in-law coresidence was more common in the past than it is in the present, they usually mean that such an arrangement is appropriate; they certainly do not mean to imply that anyone has or should actually calculate its incidence over time or that any "objective" documentation is necessary to validate their claim. The repertoire of stories with which Ste Foyans assert and illustrate continuity with

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 133

the past suggests that there may have been such continuity, but does not necessarily satisfy the rules of inference associated with the kind of history suited to my purposes for reconstructing a Ste Foyan past. Several kinds of documentation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide fragmentary evidence that the ostal system was constructed then much as it is today. Descriptions such as those in Francois Fabie's memoirs of his mid-nineteenth-century childhood on a modest ostal in the region resonate with contemporary notions. For example, he writes that, as a youth, he ordinarily would have been told: "It is expected: you are the eldest son of the family; you are going to stay here. . . . You will help your father with his work; you will marry and live here with your wife; later you will provide dowries for your sisters; and you will perpetuate the family line." 3 Of his mother he writes: "She loved me because I was her eldest son . . . [and] because I loved what she loved [especially] the house [an ostal in the same township] where she was born and for which she always remained nostalgic."4 Fabie of course had his own reasons for reconstructing his past, and these strongly color the images he draws. Heavily nostalgic, his memoir was written by an elderly Parisian looking back with some regret on a lost childhood, and on roots abandoned for all practical purposes, except their usefulness to his career as a regionalist poet. Nonetheless, although his lifetime did not extend into the postwar period, his descriptions of farm and family relationships as well as his use of the word house {maison; his audience was Parisian and he uses no Languedocian dialect in his memoir), are strikingly consistent with the principles of the ostal system as expressed by Ste Foyans in the 1970s.5 Other descriptions of the Aveyron, while generally less detailed or specific to Ste Foy's area, suggest that something very like the contemporary ostal system has been in place for at least a century or two (e.g., Monteil 1802; Affre 1903; Beteille 1973, 1984; Merlin and Beaujour 1978; Noel, cited in Collomp 1974, 784). Local archival documents offer fragments of another kind. Ste Foy, like most French communities, has extensive archives generated by the centralized 3 "C'est entendu. . . . [sic\ Tu es l'aine de la famille; tu vas rester ici. . . . Tu aideras ton pere dans ses travaux; tu te marieras a la maison; tu doteras tes soeurs plus tard, ot tu continueras la race" (Fabie 1925, 147). 4 "Elle m'aimait parce que j'etais son aine . . . [et] parce qu'enfin j'aimais ce qu'elle aimait: . . . la maison oil elle etait nee, et dont elle garda toujours la nostalgie" (Fabie 1925, 10). 5 All Ste Foyans know about Fabie (1846-1928) as one of the area's more illustrious native sons. Very few have read his works, however, and there is no reason to think that their ideas about themselves have in any way been influenced by what he wrote about the area. Apparently he considered it one of his great personal tragedies that during his productive years as a poet he had almost no real contact with the "good simple folk" of his homeland. Even today, many Ste Foyans refer to him as "le poete," an admirable personage who was somehow spawned in the area, but whose identity resides in his exceptional experience (as a poet) rather than his familiar roots (as someone bearing a local family name).

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• Chapter Five

French administrative bureaucracy. These include, among many other documents, frequent censuses, detailed property records, and birth/marriage/death registers. These documents yield a number of data series, each composed of similar kinds of information, recorded in a similar way and for similar purposes at regular intervals. Internal comparison over time is thus possible, and, because exact dates are generally provided for each entry or document, the various series can be linked together in time. This kind of data provides a picture of change in those bits of behavior that have been recorded. Each data series, tracing one measurable aspect of Ste Foyan life in isolation from the whole system that gives it meaning, is in itself quite trivial and offers little indication of what Ste Foyans of the past might have been thinking about what they did or did not do. It is possible, though, to construct some data series tracing elements central to the ostal system, namely, patterns of household composition and inheritance. Because these are key elements of the system, change along these dimensions may be assumed to reflect behavioral changes in the system as a whole. As I shall show below, the percentages of farm households organized in the stem family pattern and practicing male primogeniture inheritance have increased markedly since the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, throughout the period considered here—the mid-nineteenth century to 1975—the percentage of stem family households and father-to-son transfers have been much higher than would be expected by chance. That is, at least since the mid-nineteenth century, some households have been organized in a way consistent with contemporary ostal rules. Particularly because the most prosperous ostal families have most consistently done so, although others have as well, it would appear that something very like the ostal system as denned in 1975 has provided a model for behavior in Ste Foy for generations. The changing percentages of households successfully conforming to ostal rules suggests that the amount of "noise" in the system has varied over time, but, even at their lowest, these percentages have, for well over a century, been sufficiently large so as to suggest that the system itself has changed relatively little. Data Used The analysis below is drawn largely from census data covering the 1856 through 1975 period. French censuses were taken every five years during most of this period, and copies of the listes nominatives for most of them are on file in Ste Foy's archives.6 Further demographic data could be calculated from the 6 Through 1946, censuses were taken in all years ending in " 1 " or " 6 " except 1916 and 1941, when the country was at war. Beginning with the 1954 census, intercensus intervals are less regular (census years were 1954, 1962, 1968, 1975, 1982). Copies of all censuses from 1841 on are in Ste Foy's archives, except those for 1846, 1954, and 1968.

Real O.stals in a Changing World

• 135

township's etats civils, exhaustive records of all births, marriages, and deaths in the township since its creation as such. I chose 1856 as a starting date for several reasons. First, prior to 1840, Ste Foy was part of another township; its own archives begin at that date. The 1856 census is the earliest in the collection to systematically include information critical to this analysis (e.g., kin relationships among household members). Second, although my primary interest was postwar transformations of Ste Foy, substantial economic change was already under way during the interwar period and needed to be considered as well. Obviously, to make sense of change processes over the sixty years after World War I, it was necessary to examine a period of roughly equal length prior to World War I. Finally, because Ste Foy's population is a small one, a few idiosyncratic cases or years could introduce considerable distortion in the image emerging, so it is useful to examine patterns over a relatively long period of time. I chose six censuses to examine in some detail, using 1856 and 1975 as end points. The other four (1886, 1911, 1936, 1962) were selected to provide a look at approximately one-generation (25-30 year) intervals. Slightly different information has been collected in each census; the particular ones I chose included the most information of relevance to me. I also retrieved census summaries for all the other censuses on file. These include information on various characteristics of Ste Foy's population, as well as on the number of households and inhabitants at each named place. Unless otherwise noted, only those households located in the campagne (excluding Fouillac and Esplas) are considered in this analysis. As I have indicated, all campagne households are ostals, expected to conform to the rules of the ostal system. These isolated farms and small hamlets are easy to trace over time through the census because each is designated in the census by its place name. The few ostals located in the bourg and large hamlets are more difficult to identify with assured accuracy because they share their official place names with a large number of other households; there is less risk of distorting the analysis by leaving them out than by attempting to include them. The number of campagne households remained reasonably stable over the 1856-1975 period, fluctuating in nonlinear fashion between seventy (in 1856 and 1975) and eighty (in 1886). Place names have also been stable, with almost all of those in use by 1856 still being used in 1975.7 Changes observed in ostal organization, therefore, cannot be attributed to radical shifts in the number or location of farms. 7 A total of thirty-two place names designating isolated farms and small hamlets are listed in the 1856 census. Of these, four went out of use in the 1930s, whife the remaining twenty-eight were listed in all censuses through 1975. The forty place names listed in the 1975 census include, in addition to these twenty-eight, six that first appeared between 1881 and 1911, one in 1936, and five between 1954 and 1962. Four other place names appeared and disappeared again during the decades around the turn of this century.

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•

Chapter Five

PATTERNS OF CHANGE

Household Composition The most striking variation observable over this period is in patterns of household composition. As I have indicated, ostals are, in principle, organized around a stem family household comprising at its core three generations of men. It has been argued elsewhere (Gibbon and Curtin 1978) that in the context of nineteenth-century rural Europe, there are sufficient grounds to claim that the stem family was the preferred household form in a given population if as many as 10-15 percent of all households took this form. As indicated in figure 5.1, the number of three-generation households in nineteenth-century Ste Foy, all composed in stem family fashion, met though never surpassed this minimal criterion. The number jumped dramatically during the postwar period, reaching 45 percent by 1975. Two clarifications are needed to interpret this data. First, throughout the period under consideration, over half of all households include only two generations, usually taking a nuclear family form. It might seem more reasonable to assert that the nuclear family, rather than the stem family, has been the dominant model. However, stem family households typically have a domestic life cycle comprising two distinct phases, indicated in figure 5.2: a three-generation phase involving the coresidence of an older couple, their married son, and his children (Phase I); and a two-generation phase during the period after the older couple has died but before their grandson has had children (Phase II). In the aggregate, this means that even if all households were organized in strict conformity to ostal rules, they would never all comprise three genera706050 -

" \

^,, •

•

40 •

/

30 yV.-.

^0 10 - • 0 -

*

•

" "

^

3

D

/

——

1856

1886 A i-geiieraUon

1911 I ] 2-generation

1936

1962

1975

*#" 3-generation

Fig. 5.1. Ostal household composition. Percentage of all campagne ostal households over time. (Source; Local census)

Real Ostals in a Changing World • 137 Phase I

Phase II

Phase I

A O

0 .

„

male female deceased marriage parent- chile

Fig. 5.2. Phases of stem family domestic life cycle

tions at any one time. There would always be some number of households in the two-generation phase of the full cycle (Berkner 1972). Assuming that all three-generation households are organized in stem family form, as closer examination suggests they are, then the percentage of households following the full ostal cycle is actually higher than that of three-generation households. The second point is that the average length of each phase can be expected to vary over time with changes in life expectancy and the average age at which men father their first child. If ostal owners live longer or the age difference between owners and their heirs shrinks, then the average length of the threegeneration phase will increase, with a commensurate shortening of the twogeneration phase. In the aggregate, this would be expressed as an increase over time in the percentage of three-generation households found at any one moment and a decline in the percentage of those two-generation households that can be assumed to be in a phase of the full cycle. An increase in the percentage of three-generation households from one census to another, therefore, would not necessarily mean that ostal rules were being followed any more closely, although it would suggest that the "modern" nuclear family household model was not taking over. In fact, average life expectancy did increase through the entire period and, after 1960, men's age at fatherhood dropped slightly (see appendix 1). As a result, the ratio of three-generation to two-generation households that would be expected from strict application of ostal rules has changed substantially over time (table 5.1, column 1). When this is taken into account, the increase in three-generation households between the interwar and postwar periods is fully accounted for. In 1962, as in 1936, about two thirds of all campagne households appear to be organized in close accordance with the ostal system (column 4). By 1975, the percentage had dipped to about one half. This can be fully explained with reference to the "bachelor farmer" phenomenon of the 1960s and early 1970s. As I shall discuss in more detail below, this period saw substantial out-migration of young campagne women, leaving a number of ostal heirs with the choice of either remaining unmarried or leaving the farm

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• Chapter Five

TABLE 5.1

Households Following Full Ostal Domestic Cycle (1)

Projected Ratio 3-G.-2-G Phases (per 100)

(2)

Real % in 3-G Phase

(3)

Estimated % in 2-G Phase of Full Cycle

(4)

Estimated % Following Full Cycle

Prewar

45:55

10-15

12-18

22-23

Interwar

55:45

36

30

66

Postwar

66:33

45

23

68

85:15

45

8

Since mid-1960s

56"

1l

53 a

67"

Sources: Vital statistics (etat civil) (column I); local census (column 2). Column 3 was constructed on the assumption that the ratio in column 1 equals the ratio between column 2 and column 3. Column 4 equals column 2 plus column 3. (See appendix 1.) • Calculations counting 2-G households comprising an adult bachelor and his parent(s) as if they were in the 3-G phase.

themselves. A few left, but more chose bachelorhood (cf. Bourdieu 1962 for a description of a similar phenomenon initiated a decade or two earlier in the Beam region). If those two-generation campagne households comprising an older couple and a bachelor son past marriage age had been three-generation households which included the son's wife and children, then the two-thirds figure would have been sustained through 1975. Instead, there was a real decline between 1962 and 1975 in the number of "properly" organized ostals, although the number still remained significantly higher than that for the prewar period. Further, this new obstacle to ostai principles proved to be quite shortlived: by the mid-1970s, out-migration from Ste Foy had all but ceased and ostal heirs reaching marriage age no longer had any particular difficulty finding wives. If demographic factors can explain or smooth out variations observable since World War I, they only render more stark the contrast between the pattern emerging from the three prewar censuses analyzed and that evident from the three taken after World War I. Taking into account relevant demographic factors, only about one quarter to one third of all households appear to be organized according to ostal rules in the earlier period, while one half to two thirds are so organized in the later period. Even allowing for substantial error due to the small sample and inaccuracies in the data, a dramatic "before" and "after" jump is evident. A closer look at the composition of three-generation households offers further detail to the contrast. No campagne household in any of the six censuses is altogether out of step with the stem family model. For example, there are

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 139

no married uncles coresiding with married nephews, and no households with more than one in-marrying spouse per generation. Still, the three earlier censuses suggest rather looser application of the rules than the three more recent ones. Table 5.2 summarizes the composition of those households with coresiding parents-in-law and children-in-law.8 Several patterns emerge. First, throughout the period, there are generally more in-marrying daughters-in-law than sons-in-law, as would be expected from ostal rules. However, the difference is slight over the period prior to World War I, but substantial subsequently. That is, the increase in the numbers of coresiding parents- and children-in-law is attributable almost entirely to an increase in the number of in-marrying daughters-in-law. Further, until after the interwar period, at least half of all coresident children-in-law lived with a widowed in-law of the opposite sex (underlined figures in table 5.2). An in-marrying spouse was likely to be the only adult of his or her sex and may have been recruited not only for reproductive reasons but to take over responsibility for gender-specific productive work from the beginning of the marriage. This is somewhat speculative because the census data show household composition at the time of the census, not at the time of the marriage. Some in-marrying spouses with a deceased parent-in-law of the same sex may well have married and served an apprenticeship before the inTABLE5.2 Numbers of Ostals Practicing Cohabitation Households with In-marrying Daughter-in-law

Households with In-marrying Son-in-law

a

b

c

Total

a

b

c

1856

1

3

1

5

0

1

2

3

1886

3

4

1

8

7

3

1

11

1911

1

4

1

6

3

0

0

3

1936

7

11

5

24

5

1

3

9

1962

10

4

16

30

2

1

8

11

1975

6

7

10

23

3

2

7

12

Total

Source: Local census. Key: a = widowed mother-in-law; b = widowed father-in-law; c = both parcnts-in-law alive; underlined figures — opposite sex in-law only. 8

Note that this does not include all three-generation households; excluded are those few in which an unmarried aunt or uncle of the head of household or his wife is the only member still alive of the oldest generation. An "auntie'' or uncle is not considered a fully adult member of the household; by focusing on households with coresiding parents-in-law and children-in-law, 1 am limiting discussion to those including several generations of adults (i.e., ever-married individuals).

140

• Chapter Five

law died. On the other hand, nineteenth-century marriage records in Ste Foy show no significant difference between the proportions of mothers and of fathers of the bride or groom who were deceased at the time of marriage (about 35 to 45 percent).9 One might expect as a result that children-in-law would be as likely to coreside with a widowed in-law of the same sex as of the opposite sex. Alternatively, it might be argued that because average longevity was several years shorter for women, children-in-law would be more likely to coreside with a widowed father-in-law. In any case, there would be no reason to expect disproportionate numbers of both daughters-in-law and sons-in-law to be living with widowed parents-in-law of the opposite sex unless a significant number of them were recruited to replace a deceased parent in the household. During the interwar period, the number of daughters-in-law coresident with mothers-in-law increased markedly. After World War II, both the numbers and proportions of coresiding, same-sex in-laws jumped dramatically. Beginning with the postwar period, the large majority of three-generation households comprise a parent-in-law and child-in-law of the same sex, usually female. At any one time during the prewar period, less than one fourth of threegeneration households comprised a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, while during the postwar period, over half of the much more numerous three-generation households do. The opportunity for mothers-in-law to firmly control their daughters-in-law during a long apprenticeship, a pattern suggested by the ostal rules, appears to have been a statistical rarity in the past. Since World War I and particularly since World War II, on the other hand, the probability of ostal women finding themselves in this kind of relationship has greatly increased. Inheritance This evolution in household composition was accompanied by a similar evolution in inheritance patterns. Stem family households of the kind defined by ostal rules were relatively rare during the prewar period partly because male primogeniture inheritance was relatively rare. As 1 have indicated, ostals ought to be transferred from fathers to eldest sons (aines). Particularly because aines are defined such that they are not necessarily the firstborn, it is difficult to establish the frequency with which the heir to a farm was in fact the eldest. It is clear, however, that farms were transferred to sons a great deal more 9

These figures are based on calculations for all marriages performed in Ste Foy, generally all of those in which the bride was from Ste Foy. That is, the records cover many marriages not involving ostal heirs, and do not include those of ostal heirs marrying a bride not from Ste Foy. To the extent that heirs were firstborn sons, a smaller percentage of them may have had a deceased parent at the time of marriage than did the population at large. On the other hand, if the argument I have developed is correct, the opposite-sex parent of heirs and heiresses would be disproportionately likely to be deceased at the lime of the lattcr's marriage.

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 141

frequently after World War I than before; conversely, they were transferred altogether out of the family line much less frequently in the later period. Figure 5.3 gives a rough indication of inheritance practices in the fifty-fiveyear period ending in 1911, compared to the sixty-five subsequent years. Each ostal was transferred several times during each period. In the earlier period, only about one half of all ostals passed uniquely from father to child (column 1); of these, half were transferred at least once to a daughter and son-in-law. That is, only one quarter of all ostals remained in the same patriline between 1856 and 1911 (column 2). In contrast, three quarters of all ostals went from father to child throughout the 1911 through 1975 period (column 3) and only one third of these ever went to a daughter. About one half of all ostals stayed in the same patriline throughout the more recent sixty-five-year period (column 4). When farm transfers are analyzed over shorter periods of time (during which most ostals were transferred only once), the periods prior to 1911 stand in even sharper contrast to those after 1936, with the 1911-1936 period as a transition. The percentage of father-to-son transfers between 1911 and 1936 is markedly higher than that for the previous two periods and considerably lower than that for the subsequent two (table 5.3, row 1). Similarly, the percentage of farms passing altogether out of the family line between 1911 and 1936 falls midway between the high figures for the earlier two periods and low figures for the later two (row 2). The percentage of father-to-daughter transfers has remained roughly constant over the 125-year period (row 3). The preference for male heirs is clear enough throughout, although the increase in the number of father-to-son transfers has resulted in a decline in the number of heiresses relative to the number of heirs. These trends fit closely with those found in the evolution of patterns of household composition, suggesting that inheritance and residence patterns

H percent transferred only to sons or daughters CD percent transferred only to sons

1856-1911

1911-1975

Fig. 5.3. Multigenerational transfers o/ostals (Source: Local census [see appendix 2])

XI • Chapter Five TABLE 5.3

Transfers of Ostal Ownership 1856-1886 1886-1911 1911-1936 1936-1962 1962-1975 [64[ [401 [64] [56] [71V 1. % passed from father to son

38

41

50

68

70

2. % not passed to direct descendant

45

40

31

19

10

3. % passed from father to daughter

17

19

19

13

20

100

100

100

100

100

Total %

Source: Local census (see appendix 2). " Numbers in brackets refer to the number of campagne farm transfers during each period. Note that the 1962-1975 period is considerably shorter than the other. During the mid-1960s, the French government instituted various retirement and early retirement incentives for farmers, so more farms changed hands during this period than during others of comparable length.

have long been as closely associated as the logic of the contemporary ostal would suggest. Stem family households and male primogeniture inheritance are two facets of the imperative for ostal continuity and unity. A man brings his bride to live in his parents' household when he has inherited-—or expects to inherit—the paternal ostal. Otherwise, there is no reason to. It follows that during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when relatively few ostals were transferred from father to son, there were fewer daughters-in-law coresiding with parents-in-law. By the same token, as heirs became a great deal more common than heiresses, the number of three-generation households including an in-marrying daughter-in-law has become much greater than the number including an in-marrying son-in-law. In terms of both household composition and inheritance patterns, a considerably higher percentage of postwar ostals fit "traditional" patterns than was the case in the late nineteenth century, with the interwar period serving as a transition. It remains to be explained why an apparently archaic sort of household (stem family) and illegal kind of inheritance (male primogeniture) should become increasingly common in Ste Foy over precisely the same period that the community was becoming ever more tightly integrated into a larger society defining the one as archaic and the other as illegal. Some of the ramifications of this turn toward "tradition" within a "modern" context also remain to be examined.

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 143

Ostal Evolution and Economic Change Ste Foyans themselves have no ready explanation for the evolution emerging from their local records. On the contrary, their perception of their local history is quite the opposite. In their reconstruction of the past-as-model, stem family households and male primogeniture inheritance used to be a great deal more common than they are now. In the view of the conservative majority, this decline is an unfortunate consequence of modernization, while the modernist minority regards it as evidence of overdue progress. Both interpretations rest on a similar assumption about the direction of change. As my archival research began to suggest (to my surprise) that change had occurred in the opposite direction, I first asked Ste Foyans why that might be. Their response was generally that I must be mistaken; it could not be. When I began producing charts and graphs, they were as mystified by the picture emerging as I was. It was clear enough that Ste Foy had "modernized" rapidly, and it seemed an intuitively reasonable corollary to all of us that this process must have entailed the loss (for better or worse) of the old local family system. On the contrary, the empirical evidence suggests that with modernization Ste Foyans found themselves freer to organize their farms and families in culturally appropriate ways. Culturally appropriate in this setting means adherence to ostal rules. In nineteenth-century Ste Foy, most farms hovered close to the subsistence level. Bad weather during one season was sufficient to create the threat—and sometimes the reality—of famine. Most Ste Foyans barely had enough resources to meet their ordinary needs, and any unforeseen circumstances—illness among family or animals, fire, drought, hail, or lawsuit—could easily precipitate ruin and loss of the farm. Ostal owners may well have aspired to keep the farm and family line together over many generations, but the material facts of existence made that impossible for significant numbers of them. Even in the best of times, survival on most of Ste Foy's poor ostals depended on maintenance of a delicate land-to-labor ratio. On one hand, a minimal work unit, comprising an adult man, woman, and a child over age eight or nine, old enough to make a full labor contribution, was necessary to keep most farms in operation. On the other hand, most ostal households were unable to expand beyond very narrow limits or to easily support unproductive or redundant members. Analysis of nineteenth-century campagne households that included hired labor illustrates these two points. Prior to World War I, about one fourth to one third of all ostal households included hired hands. In about half of these, the ostal owner's family did not correspond to the minimal work unit, suggesting that extra labor was hired to compensate for a deficiency of family labor. Two such households censused in 1886 were composed as shown in the first two examples of figure 5.4.

144

Chapter Five 4.

o

A/ \ AT A

34

/\

30

/\

5

\— 0

4( h red labor:

A

/ \

3

) 7

15

hir ed labor:/\ 14 3.

/ \ 1

I/

o

A , VA 18

! '-" A

hit ed 1?ibor:

23

/ A\

| 20

\

24

z _ 1f VA 18

19

r

o

4

44

58

o

-~|—-

L

21

/

/\

\ 48

)

17

4

/

hired labor: / \ /A \ / 20

18

\ C )

12

2

\AJ

16

45

Fig. 5.4. Households with hired labor. Numbers indicate ages. A, family labor shortage; B, gros ostals. (Source: 1886 local census)

Only the largest and most prosperous ostals could absorb and support a much larger unit. Here, hired labor doubled or replaced the work contributions of family members. The second two examples shown in figure 5.4 (also from the 1886 census) clearly contrast with the others. It would seem that in these two households, one of the hired hands might easily be replaced by an inmarrying spouse, and that young children could be supported without special hardship. This kind of household, though, was found only on those ostals identified by Ste Foyans as gros, nearly all of which were indeed still in the same patriline by 1975 (cf. Berkner 1972, 413-16). The following scenario was probably more typical of nineteenth-century ostals in Ste Foy. When the eldest child reached marriage age, the paternal household was at a point in its domestic life cycle when no extra labor was needed and no extra mouths could be fed. The birthrate was high (about thirty per thousand inhabitants until the interwar period) and ostal wives were likely to bear children over a fifteen- or twenty-year period.10 When the eldest 10

Until the interwar period, it was quite common for women to die of complications during pregnancy or childbirth (about 25 percent of all adult female deaths during the latter half of the

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 145

reached adulthood, he was likely to have a number of younger brothers and sisters old enough to work on the farm but not yet ready to leave the household. Particularly if both parents were alive and active, the ostal's resources were stretched to the limit and no further labor could be absorbed. Under these circumstances, the eldest son—especially if he wished to marry—was obliged to leave the ostal and set up residence elsewhere. By doing so, he gave up his status as aine and his right to inherit the ostal, and was replaced in that position by a younger sibling. This process continued either until the ostal line was extinguished altogether or until the household had emptied sufficiently, through the departure of siblings or the death of parents, to absorb the spouse and, subsequently, the children of an heir. Because ostals toppled into ruin or died out with considerable frequency, farms in Ste Foy were available to those leaving the paternal ostal, allowing them to establish a new ostal line. A couple acquiring their own farm was under no obligation to house the parents or siblings of either partner, and almost never did so. All else equal, though, a couple acquiring their own farm was in a much more vulnerable economic position, subject to ruin in their turn, than one inheriting an established ostal. Those unable to keep a farm going long enough to pass it onto an heir were not likely to live out their days as patriarch and matriarch of a stem family household. This kind of shedding process on nineteenth-century ostals is consistent with the relatively small number of three-generation households, the rarity of coresiding parents- and children-in-law of the same sex, the large number of heiresses relative to the number of heirs, and the frequency of farm transfers out of the family line, all characteristic of the latter half of the nineteenth century as compared to the postwar period. It is also consistent with the constant average size of campagne households throughout the 1856 to 1975 period (about five persons). Without some intervening factor such as the kind of shedding I have described, ostal households in the nineteenth century would have been considerably larger on average than those of the postwar period, because the birthrate dropped precipitously between the two periods (from about thirty per thousand to about fifteen per thousand)" and because a significant number nineteenth century). Ostal owners left widowed in this way frequently remarried, several times, if necessary. That is, the long childbearing period of each ostal generation was more likely to be assured by a succession of wives than to be prematurely cut short by the death of one of them. It is possible that some second or third wives actively tried to drive their husband's elder children out of the household, allowing their own sons to succeed to the status of aine. " Again, the interwar period emerges as a transition, with a birthrate of about twenty-two per thousand. This drop, though, coincides with a reduction in infant mortality to insignificant levels. The interwar birthrate is virtually identical to the proportion of babies reaching their first birthday in the population of the late nineteenth cenlury. In a pattern similar to that found in many domains, Ste Foy's birthrate declined later than the national average and remains, now as in the past, higher than for France as a whole. Note that the evolution of Ste Foy's fertility rate (annual births per hundred women aged fifteen

146 • Chapter Five

of nineteenth-century ostal households included hired laborers, while almost none in the postwar period did. Actually, as with farm size, the constant average masks a changing pattern of distribution. In the nineteenth century, some ostal households (especially the wealthiest) were a great deal larger than average while many were somewhat smaller. During the postwar period, in contrast, most have been near the average. In general, the wealthiest ostals appear to have conformed quite consistently and closely to the rules of the ostal system, while these rules were respected rather more roughly or occasionally on other ostals.12 This suggests that the variable of economic well-being was indeed a critical one, but that ostal rules were not taken to be applicable only to a small Ste Foyan elite. Snapshots based on a few nineteenth-century censuses suggest that at any point in time, approximately a third of all ostals—considerably more than could be considered very prosperous—were organized in the ostal mode with respect to inheritance or residence patterns. Further, campagne households stand out from those in the bourg, where ostal rules generally were not applicable. Bourg households have consistently been smaller on average (3.5 members throughout the 1856 to 1975 period), as would be expected in a marginally poorer population based on a pieced-together household economy and having no particular aspiration to a stem family household structure. More significantly, bourg households, particularly in the nineteenth century, regrouped a wide range of collateral and affinal kin (e.g., nephews or nieces living with married aunts or uncles, coresident in-laws of both the head of household and his or her spouse). Campagne households, in contrast, while frequently not including a full stem family, nearly always comprised a fragment of the stem family type. My attempts to arrange bourg households in a neat typology proved hopelessly fruitless; in contrast, construction of such a typology for the campagne was quite a simple matter because the range of coresident kin ever found there was narrow indeed. This would suggest that the ostal model was never altogether disregarded in the campagne, even during the period when measurable conformity to it was lowest. In sum, Ste Foy's full-time farm households have, at least since the mid-nineteenth century, been organized in a manner approximating the ostal system as elicited in 1975. The precarious economic circumstances experienced by most ostals in the latter half of the nineteenth to forty-four) closely parallels the birthrate. This implies that, in contrast to some other areas of rural France, the declining birthrate is attributable primarily to a reduction in family size, rather than to any substantial change in population structure (especially out-migration of women of childbearing age). 12 This pattern is consistent with observations in other times and places which suggest that stem family systems require a certain level of prosperity to be feasible in practice. For example, in both the eighteenth-century Haute Provencal case analyzed by Collomp (1972) and the eighteenthcentury Austrian case studied by Berkner (1972), stem family households were most frequent in the wealthier strata of the community (cf. Flandrin 1979, 89).

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 147

century prevented them from conforming very closely or very consistently with this model. The model nevertheless remained untarnished. This line of reasoning derives its strongest support from the coincidence of Ste Foy's turn in economic fortunes and the increase in the measurable conformity to ostal rules. As the community began to move further from subsistence-level existence, profiting from increasing entrenchment in a market economy during the interwar period, father-to-son farm transfers and stem family households became significantly more common in practice. If such a trend were observable only during the depression era of the 1930s, it might reasonably be taken as an odd blip, a momentary retrenchment in a kind of traditionalism. That the trend emerging by then seems to have been reinforced and accelerated with the booming economy and hitherto unknown prosperity of the postwar period indicates that it was no mere ephemeral. Indeed, the postwar period offers the sharpest contrast with the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms of the statistical frequency of a "traditional" mode of ostal organization. During this period, virtually all Ste Foyan ostals have become engaged in highly lucrative production for market, seeing a heady increase in household revenues, a marked rise in standards of living, and an apparently definitive banishment of the wolf far from the door. As immediate problems of material survival receded, leaving Ste Foyans more choice about how to organize themselves, they were inclined to choose conformity to the rules of the ostal system. The dynamic can be seen on several registers. By 1975, the balance between family resources and household size had become considerably less delicate than in the past. On one hand, as a result of farm mechanization and specialization, most of the labor required to run the farm can be done by one man, so less help is needed from other members of the household. On the other hand, ostals are now prosperous enough to easily support marginally productive or nonproductive members. Households are able to expand to absorb an extra woman and small children at any point in the domestic life cycle. This means that eldest sons can marry when they are ready, without giving up residence on—and the right to inherit—the paternal ostal. Parents are no longer obliged to hand over the farm to whichever child is ready to marry at a feasible point in the domestic cycle, running a high risk of having no one left to carry on the ostal line. Rather, an heir can be chosen from birth, according to sex and birth order. Now, as apparently in the past, ostal owners prefer to oversee the arrival of a new bride on the ostal, assuring themselves during their lifetimes that the ostal will be maintained in good hands for years to come. The difference is that now most are in a position to actually do so. Prosperity has fostered the intergenerational continuity of postwar ostals in another way. Because they are substantially better protected from financial ruin, fewer farms are lost to their family line. As a result, fewer are available for the establishment of new ostal lines and individuals leaving the paternal

148

• Chapter Five

ostal are very unlikely to be able to found a new one. Further, with the growing lucrativeness of local agricultural production, land prices have skyrocketed. Bits of land are occasionally bought and sold among Ste Foyan farmers, but the purchase of an entire farm has gone virtually beyond the reach of any Ste Foyan. By 1975, the only practical way to either acquire or transfer a farm was by inheritance.13 Ostal Evolution and French Institutions Ste Foyans have not only become wealthier during the postwar period, they have also become more heavily engaged in a variety of French institutions. As I have indicated, the logic of the ostal system runs substantially counter to French cultural and legal imperatives in a number of ways. The ostal model, though, seems to have been no more tarnished by intimate contact with dominant French society than it was by the earlier material inability of most ostals to conform closely to it. On the contrary, a number of French institutions have been used in Ste Foy to reinforce the ostal system. I have described in chapter 3 some of the ways in which church and state law have been perennially bent to fit local notions of the appropriate. A number of more recently introduced or newly important institutions have also been absorbed in Ste Foy in ways that have not only failed to undermine the ostal system, but that have contributed to making closer conformity to it increasingly possible. The French education system is perhaps the most notable example. Ste Foy has had a public primary school and a Catholic primary school since at least 1856: all of the nineteenth-century censuses since that date list two public school masters and one Catholic teaching nun. Beginning in 1886, when universal free primary education was mandated by French law, two public school mistresses are listed as well, presumably coinciding with the opening of a public primary school for girls. By 1975, there were still five one-room primary schools in the township: a coeducational one in each of the two largest hamlets, and three in the bourg including a public school for boys, a public school for girls, and a Catholic school for girls. The use made of the education system, though, has changed a great deal over time. Prior to World War I, few Ste Foyan children attended school very 13

Note in table 5.3 the decline continuing into the 1962-1975 period in the percentages of farm transfers involving acquisition from other than a direct ascendant. Actually, it appears that the dwindling number of transfers of this sort involves some kind of inheritance rather than purchases. I know from case material that most of those in the 1962-1975 period were bequests among kin (e.g., uncle to nephew), while many in the earlier periods involved transactions between nonkm. My case data, however, are sketchier for earlier periods, and while census data permit systematic identification of father-to-child transfers, it is otherwise often difficult to distinguish between bequests and arms'-length transactions. Nevertheless, even allowing that distant kin and nonkin are disadvantaged under French inheritance tax law (e.g., sons pay a considerably lower rate of inheritance tax than do nephews, who pay less than nonkin), the costs of purchasing a farm have become prohibitively greater than those of inheriting one.

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 149

regularly or for very long. Most ostal children were needed to work at home from an early age, and many from the bourg were hired out to work. Virtually no one attended school except during the winter months, and then the long trek from outlying farms was often unfeasible. Further, the language of instruction, at least in public school, was French, a foreign language never used at home or anywhere else Ste Foyans were likely to spend much time. Some completed the full course of primary study, but many did not. Pursuing postprimary education involved going to Rodez or elsewhere as a boarder, and was unimaginable to all but a very small elite. Literacy rates did increase over the latter half of the nineteenth century, but do not appear to have approached 100 percent in any cohort before those reaching school age after World War I.14 During the interwar period, school attendance became much more regular. Most Ste Foyans of school age during that period acquired fluency in French (although it still was not spoken in most Ste Foyan homes) and many completed a full primary education. Continuing beyond primary school, though, remained beyond the reach or aspirations of most. Over the course of the postwar period, the local primary schools came to provide only the first stage in a lengthened educational cycle. Children must still be sent away as boarders to pursue a secondary education. But beginning in the 1950s, growing numbers of Ste Foyans, no longer needing child labor at home and eager to demonstrate newly comfortable means, adopted the old elite practice of providing daughters and younger sons with postprimary education. In the late 1960s, national legislation raised the legal minimum schoolleaving age from fourteen to sixteen, and redefined the primary cycle to end at age twelve instead of fourteen. Subsequently, all Ste Foyan children went away for at least a few years of school and many of them remained to complete a secondary (academic or vocational) cycle. In this matter as in many others, a sharp distinction has generally been drawn here between ostal heirs and other children. Ostal heirs are destined to continue the family farm; the best place to learn farming is considered to be on the farm, and formal education beyond the legal minimum is believed to be of no practical use for them. Sending other children through noncompulsory school became commonplace, as it effectively enhances family prestige by displaying the means to provide handsomely for nonheirs, but ostal heirs 14 Marriage records provide a rough proxy for literacy because brides, grooms, and their parents are required to sign the marriage register or make formal declaration of their inability to do so. These records have the advantage of showing differences by gender and across successive generations. The percentage of those unable to write even their names is obviously a gross underestimation of those effectively illiterate; it is safe to assume that until some time after the percentage of the population unable to sign their name dropped to zero, the percentage of functional illiterates was substantially higher (cf. Furet and Ozouf 1982). In the middle of the nineteenth century, about 20 percent of all grooms and fathers, 70 percent of brides, and 80 percent of mothers were unable to sign the register. These percentages had dropped to zero by the turn of the century for grooms and by the interwar period for brides.

150 • Chapter Five

normally quit at the minimum school-leaving age. This pattern has made ostals somewhat less resilient. Because someone who has remained in school through adolescence is considered to be unfit and likely unwilling to take over the farm, chances are slight that a replacement will be available should the designated heir die prematurely or refuse for some reason to take over the ostal (see, for example, the cases of the Castelnau and Fabre ostals, faced with the decampment of the designated heiress, chap. 3). On the other hand, this use of the education system has had the effect of trapping the designated heir on the farm, reinforcing the pattern of male primogeniture. In the context of postwar France, a young man with only a few years of education beyond primary school and no diplomas, faced with the choice of taking over a prosperous farm or entering the labor market, has little choice at all. His options are further constrained by the fact that he, the aine, raised as the superordinate child of the family, would be at a disadvantage on the open labor market compared to his better-credentialed sisters and younger brothers. A "traditional" and archaic inheritance system has thus, in effect, been given renewed life, thanks to the meaning of a formal education in contemporary France and the use made of it by Ste Foyans. '5 Other kinds of institutions made available to Ste Foyans, as French citizens and as farmers in a highly modern and protected agricultural economy, have further bolstered the ostal system. Most obviously, ruin is kept at bay not only by greater on-farm prosperity but by a variety of state-sponsored forms of insurance. Health, property, crop, and livestock insurance have rendered bankruptcy unlikely. Generous government credits, bonuses, tax breaks, and supervision and guarantees of farm loans all help keep ostal finances afloat. The probabilities of a farm slipping away from the family who has worked it have, as a result, greatly diminished.lf) The goal of ostal continuity over many generations has come to be well within the reach of nearly all families. 15 By the end of the 1980s, this pattern had changed, but only in detail. A variety of French agricultural policy measures have made it virtually mandatory for young farmers to acquire some formal secondary-level vocational training in agriculture by making such training a condition of eligibility for many farm and farm transfer subsidies. Most ostal heirs, therefore, now stay in school beyond the minimum age, but they follow, usually through middle school and sometimes through secondary school, agricultural tracks including substantial "internships" on the farm. A designated heir's training continues to equip him for little other than taking over the farm, while the nonagricultural tracks pursued by his sisters and younger brothers reinforce their undesirability as ostal heirs. 16 During 1985, when farms in the American Midwest were being foreclosed in record number, I had the opportunity to talk with farmers and farm lenders in a number of French agricultural regions (including Ste Foy). Almost all of them were cognizant of their American colleagues' plights, and were shocked and mystified that a national government could permit such a turn of events. There was ample evidence that the financial status of French agriculture in many regions was no better (though that of Ste Foyan specialty farming generally was), but for a variety of political, social, and economic reasons, it was unthinkable that the French government would allow farms to go bankrupt.

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 151

Other farm programs have been used more creatively to reinforce the ostal system. For example, various subsidies have been made available for separate housing for young farm couples. These are based quite explicitly on the premise held by French agricultural policymakers that the modernization of agriculture depends on replacing an older generation's hold on the land with that of a younger group, more inclined to borrow, invest, try new technologies, and situate themselves firmly in the modern world (Groger 1982). In Ste Foy, few families have taken advantage of such subsidies. Most of those who have done so have used the money available to create an apartment in the ostal house, initially for the use of the heir and his bride, and subsequently for the retired older couple. Although in the census (and my calculations) such households are counted as independent, they are only barely so. Typically, farm management, the main meals of the day, major appliances, child care, and all comings and goings are shared between the two "separate" households. In effect, the separate apartment financed by the state hardly amounts to much change from the more habitual separate bedroom. It offers a faint appeasing rose to an heir—or more likely his prospective wife—insisting on independent quarters, while in fact preserving the unity of the ostal household. The image that emerges from all of this is a kind of resurgence of "traditional" ideas in the "modern" era. A region-specific model exerts powerful influence, but under the material circumstances prevalent prior to the postwar period, the model remained a generally unobtainable aspiration most of the time for most people. With postwar prosperity in a fully market-saturated economy, the model becomes consistently feasible in practice, not only to a small elite, but to virtually all of the full-time farmers to whom it is considered applicable. As a result, these farm families begin acting in a way that is certainly consistent with "modern" models, but only on certain terms. No one in Ste Foy appears especially "old-fashioned" or would describe himself that way, but in large measure, Ste Foyans turn newly accessible possibilities to the service of old models. Further, many of the opportunities, programs, or incentives that they have embraced (e.g., public education, farm modernization, and insurance programs) are meant—and often assumed—to have a uniform effect throughout France, promoting or reflecting a single "French" set of attitudes or behaviors. These have been absorbed in Ste Foy, however, in ways undoubtedly unimagined by their framers, to fit a distinctly local view of how the world should work. CONCLUSIONS

There is no doubt that life in Ste Foy has undergone massive and consequential transformations over the last several generations. While change is undoubtedly ongoing there, as anywhere, its pace clearly quickened beginning in the interwar period and further accelerated during the decades following World

152 • Chapter Five

War II. In some ways, Ste Foy has followed an altogether conventional trajectory, measurable in terms of higher income levels and improved standards of living, higher education levels, more even distribution of resources, and deeper entrenchment in national and international markets and in various kinds of national institutions. There is nothing inherent in any of this that would necessarily be expected to generate or foster a structure like the ostal system. Obviously, ostals did not suddenly appear in those many regions of France that experienced a roughly similar kind of economic development but had always been structured along different premises of social order and cultural meaning. Ste Foyans, like others, have ordered and used their changing environment substantially on their own terms, making of this shifting range of possibility an environment as compatible with their sense of the appropriate as they can. As it happens, the nature of structure and of postwar change in Ste Foy have been such that the fit between the appropriate and the possible could be made measurably closer than in earlier periods. In some rather obvious ways, Ste Foyans have little control over the forces that shape the world they live in and the way it changes. Their lives are consequentially influenced by the decisions of powerful persons to whom they have little or no access. National and international agricultural policy, for example, clearly impinges upon them, but it is made in Paris or Brussels by processes they consider altogether beyond their capacity to understand or influence. The national education system is organized as a highly centralized bureaucracy, and understood as an institution properly run by unknown "higher-ups." The Roquefort firms' decision to extend the ewe's milk production area into the eastern Segala certainly had a profound effect on Ste Foyans, but it was not Ste Foyans' decision to make. Furthermore, particular configurations of change are, to a large extent, beyond anyone's control; sometimes things just happen to come together in consequential ways. For example, Ste Foy's recent economic history was largely shaped by the facts that technological innovations permitting land clearance and reclamation finally became readily available in Ste Foy just as the reorganization of the Roquefort industry made ewe's milk production a lucrative undertaking, and that both of these developments occurred before many Ste Foyans had joined the great streams of migration out of the Aveyron. The powers of distant decision-makers, dominant groups, or chance, however, are not limitless. wSte Foyans, like other people, do have control over their environment insofar as they make particular kinds of sense and use out of it. More or less consciously, they act in familiar, "timeless" terms upon what is offered or imposed, shaping its consequences in important ways. As a result, decisions made in Paris, for example, do not necessarily yield the intended, nationally uniform results, nor are the effects of "chance" allowed to be altogether random. Ste Foyans understand and order the universe in a way significantly molded by the premises of the ostal system. They appear to have done so even under material conditions generally incompatible with acting in

Real Ostals in a Changing World

• 153

very close conformity to this model and have continued to do so as they become increasingly implicated in a larger world defining many of its clauses as archaic, unsavory, or illegal. The ostal system is not, it would seem, inconsistent either with preindustrial misery or with postindustrial modernity. On the contrary, it has continued to be reproduced under quite radically different conditions, operating as a filter by which these are managed and ordered. Particularly under material circumstances allowing enhanced choice of action, it yields specific trajectories of change. There is very little intentionality in the patterns of change I have described so far. Change has certainly occurred, but it seems to have been generated by a kind of systemic logic rather than the conscious intentions of anyone in particular. This image partly reflects the views generally expressed by Ste Foyans. They think and talk a great deal about the dramatic transformations in their community, but these are generally not considered controllable—at least locally—or indeed to have very clear causes at all: televisions, tractors, modern individuality and selfishness, youth's disrespect for the old, and all the rest just arrived "with the times." Some patterns of change which were most obviously generated locally, namely, shifts in ostal organization, are not recognized to have occurred at all. Clearly, the increasing incidence of male primogeniture inheritance and stem family households was intentional in that it resulted from people's purposeful acts, rather than chance or mistakes. On the other hand, this kind of change was unintentional in the sense that no one ever consciously thought, "Finally! Conditions are right, so now let's more of us organize our ostals properly." Rather, people went on doing what they had always done: attempting to organize their ostals as appropriately as possible. It just happened that new conditions rendered the appropriate increasingly possible. At one level, then, there was no change at all, while at another level change has gone essentially unnoticed. The evolution I have described here created no equilibrium. On the contrary, this development, in the context of shifting repertoires of possibilities and sensibilities, inspired various kinds of quite intentional and highly visible challenge from those ill-served by the ostal system. In the next chapter I shall examine several of these, as examples of the ongoing dynamic disequilibrium in Ste Foy. I shall illustrate how this generates and is generated by shifting loci of tension and strain within the local structure as it is interwoven with changing historical contexts and the acts of interested players who manipulate and come to terms (or not) with these and with each other.

C H A P T E R SIX

New Crises: Structures and Change in Ste Foy

As THE ECONOMIC constraints on the ostal system relaxed, other pressures emerged within it. Ste Foy's ostal system, like any other social system, favors some categories of people at the expense of others. The specific costs to disfavored categories were muted as long as the ostal model remained a largely unobtainable goal; they were amplified as it became applicable in practice. If the ostal model itself seems to have remained quite constant, the changes generated by the shifting circumstances affecting its feasibility were real enough, and set in motion new dynamics which were shaped by the nature of the model in interaction with the specifically postwar French context in which it was now operating. The clearest examples of these are found in the response of two social categories most adversely touched by newly widespread conformity to the ostal system: women and younger sons. Because these two groups are situated differently within the ostal system, the kinds and consequences of response available to each were quite different. I will focus first on that of women and then turn to Ste Foy's great upheaval of 1975, related to a number of changes but best interpreted, at least metaphorically, as a revolt of younger sons. THE BRIDE SHORTAGE, 1960-1975

In general, the ostal system is defined in such a way that women are systematically excluded, at least in theory, from many of the rights, domains, and activities most highly valued in Ste Foy: land ownership and ostal stewardship; patronage within the community and linkage to high-powered patrons outside of it; and the high sociability of cafe life and of market exchange. Of course, not all women are equally excluded: for example, older women, as mothers and mothers-in-law, are expected to carry a great deal more weight on the ostal than are daughters, daughters-in-law, or aunts; the daughters, like the sons, of high-status families are more privileged in contacts, comforts, and opportunities than are their counterparts from low-status families; some women have decidedly more formidable personalities than some men. Nonetheless, although gender is certainly not the only determinant of status, the ostal system is organized such that women are structurally inferior to men of otherwise equivalent rank (especially husbands or brothers). Further, a central element of the ostal system and of the place defined for women within it—the cores-

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idence of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law (cohabitation)—is generally assumed by Ste Foyans to be as unpleasant for women as it is crucial to the ostal. It is difficult to argue that in actual practice, women's experience was a great deal more difficult than that of their male counterparts as long as prevalent circumstances were such that almost everyone lived under harsh subsistence conditions, hardly anyone engaged in much market exchange, relatively few families managed to maintain an ostal over many generations, the chances of inheriting a farm were not much less for women than for men, and few adults actually coresided with parents or in-laws. Only as the ostal system became increasingly practicable were the specific structural disadvantages to women encoded within it brought substantially to bear on women's experience of life in Ste Foy. The response of women was quite simple: they left. More specifically, the group of women who were especially crucial to the perpetuation of ostals, those of an age and social status to marry ostal heirs, instead migrated to urban France in record number during the 1960s and early 1970s, leaving in their wake a cohort of bachelor ostal owners. Figure 6.1, showing sex ratios by age cohort in 1975, graphically illustrates this phenomenon. In the township, there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in each age cohort except that aged 30-39 (i.e., born in 1936-1945, reaching marriage age in 1961-1970), in which there is a marked shortage of women. Half of the men in this age cohort are bachelors, while none of the women are unmarried. Further, this unbalanced sex ratio is specific to the campagne:' there are equal numbers of 200 175 Men Per 100 Vomen

150 [56]

125

i

100 • 75 -

50 J

[64]

[24]

[91]

[37]

[53] [40]

[117] [75]

age 0-19 b. 1956-75 Campagne

age 20-29 b. 1946-65

age 30-39 b. 1936-45

age 40-49 b. 1926-35

age 50-59 b. 1916-25

60 and over b. pre-1916

Bourg

Fig. 6 . 1 . Sex ratios in Ste Foy, 1975. Numbers in brackets indicate the total number of bourg or campagne resident in each age cohort. (Source: 1975 local census) 1

In this calculation, unlike those based on time series data, the large hamlets of Fouillac and Esplas are included as part of the campagne. By 1975, these two hamlets were composed nearly exclusively of ostals and could reasonably be classified this way. Campagne sex ratios are virtually identical, whether or not data from the two hamlets are included. Including them provides a picture of the whole township.

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• Chapter Six

men and women in this age group in the bourg population, whereas in the campagne there are nearly twice as many men as women aged 30-39, as well as some gender imbalance in the two adjacent age cohorts. Ste Foyans are very aware of this development. They see it as a significant disruption of local life, and explain it with the claim that ostal mothers, profoundly unhappy with their own lots, actively discouraged their daughters from marrying onto an ostal and tried to equip them to do otherwise. In particular, runs the conventional reasoning, women resented the heavy farm work they had to do, and found life with a mother-in-law almost unbearable. While local opinion attributes a certain kind of sympathetic rationale to the putative perpetrators of Ste Foy's postwar demographic problem, the ultimate judgment usually faults them with selfish and shortsighted disregard for the common good. Even ostal mothers, pleased to see their own daughters established far away from any farm, deplore as loudly—and undoubtedly at least as sincerely—the self-serving actions of others which condemn their sons to bachelorhood. The local explanation, while certainly not implausible, cannot be taken altogether at face value. First, the most common explanation in Ste Foy for any perceived disruption to proper personal, domestic, or collective order is some kind of female machination. The cherchez lafemme impulse is an altogether Ste Foyan one. While Ste Foyan women certainly can be consequentially disruptive, the propensity—of men and women alike—to attribute to them responsibility for virtually all disruptions is a bit too automatic to be believable. Secondly, there is a major logical flaw in the local argument. Heavy farm work and coresidence with mothers-in-law are said to be the source of ostal women's discontent, leading them to push their daughters toward a different life. But it is also claimed locally that two of the most important consequences of postwar modernization in Ste Foy have been a marked reduction in the amount of farm labor required of ostal women and disarray in the ostal system, most notably a decline in the incidence of cohabitation (of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law). Why would women suddenly be inspired to leave just when their main reasons for doing so were on the decline? The answer to that question is apt to be a mumble, change of subject, or "well, that's just how it is." In fact, this line of argument can be rendered quite coherent in light of the analysis in the previous chapter. Postwar prosperity does appear to have had the effect of relieving ostal women of some of the drudgery of farm work, thanks to mechanization, increased specialization of farm production, and the shift away from (partly feminine) subsistence production toward (masculine) production for market. By the same token, though, women have become increasingly marginalized with respect to ostal activities as market-oriented production and marketing of farm produce, always prestigious, have become predominant.

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In sharper contrast to local perceptions, many aspects of the ostal system, including mother-in-law/daughter-in-law coresidence, have, as I have demonstrated, become more common overtime. Indeed, the generation of women who married during the interwar period was the first to experience in substantial number ostal organization as it "ought" to be. It was their daughters who formed the great wave of migration out of Ste Foy: the period of female outmigration corresponds exactly to the period when a second generation of ostal women reached marriage age and faced the possibility of following in their mothers' footsteps by marrying onto "proper" ostals. No less respectful of ostal rules than anyone else, they perceived no option of redefining ostal organization. Their only alternative to becoming ostal daughters-in-law was to refuse to participate in the system at all, by leaving altogether. It appears that changing circumstances had rendered the ostal system more feasible in practice, but that this new feasibility in turn generated the seeds of its destruction. It was difficult to reproduce ostals in practice under highly constrained economic conditions, but once those constraints were relaxed— and because of the consequences of their relaxation—it became difficult to recruit the women without whom the reproduction of ostals is literally impossible. There were, of course, other factors shaping patterns of postwar migration in Ste Foy. Most obviously, conditions in all of France, including Ste Foy, during the 1960s and early 1970s generated exceptionally strong "push" and ' 'pull'' forces. That a wave of Ste Foyans joined the so-called rural exodus of this period and moved to urban areas is altogether banal and easy to explain. At the same time, neither migration nor high rates of bachelorhood were new or unusual in Ste Foy. People have been moving into and out of the community throughout the 125-year period examined here, and there have always been substantial numbers of Ste Foyans who have remained unmarried. What does require explanation is why it was potential ostal brides in particular who suddenly started migrating out of the region during this period, and why it was ostal heirs who ended up as bachelors. It is these more specific questions which cannot be answered without reference to the nature of the ostal system and its evolution in practice. Urban Migration During the 1960s and early 1970s, the French economy was experiencing especially rapid growth, manifested in part by a rapid increase in urban, servicesector jobs. Ste Foyan migrants were part of a massive population movement in France during this period from rural to urban areas and from primary- to tertiary-sector employment. Further, the Ste Foyan cohort reaching adulthood in the 1960s was the first to have acquired postprimary education in substantial

158 • Chapter Six

number, to be perfectly at ease with the French language, and to have had considerable contact (however indirect) with the world beyond the village. More opportunities existed for them outside of Ste Foy than had ever been the case for their elders, and they were better equipped to seize them. Finally, at least at the beginning of this period, there persisted a substantial discrepancy in real or imputed standards of living possible in Ste Foy (like the rest of relatively backward rural France) and Paris or other major French cities. The aspirations of the children of newly prosperous Ste Foy were higher than local possibilities, and the glitter of the city was irresistible to many. This scenario was history by 1975. By then, French economic growth had given way to stagnation, plentiful jobs to chronically high urban unemployment. Meanwhile, rural standards of living (especially in places like Ste Foy) had met or surpassed by most measures those in urban France. Stories about the urban rat race, crime, overcrowding, the difficulties of finding a job and even then of making ends meet, of finding and paying for housing, drowned out the golden images of life in the city. Ste Foyans coming of age in the late 1970s, no less well equipped than the previous cohort—indeed, many were a great deal better traveled and more experienced in the ways of the world— were much more likely to stay put. "This is just a nicer place to live. And there's always some kind of work around here. At worst, if you're going to be unemployed anyway, better to be someplace where you can count on a roof over your head and be able to at least grow a garden and raise some chickens.'' That unprecedented urban migration from Ste Foy began in the early 1960s and ended by the mid-1970s is explainable in very general terms, equally applicable to hundreds of other communities throughout rural France. What was more specific to Ste Foy and is best explainable in terms of the ostal system and its evolution is that it was especially young women from the campagne (or otherwise likely to move there) who left. There were no particular external factors favoring female migration. The jobs drawing young Ste Foyans away, primarily low-level civil service positions filled by examination, were as accessible to men as to women. Indeed, among the bourg population, men were slightly more likely to leave than women, the sex ratio of the bourg being maintained by the migration of campagne women into the bourg as well as out of the community altogether. Young ostal women were able to leave Ste Foy in the numbers they did partly because of postwar French conditions largely independent of an ostal system, but they chose in disproportionate number to do so specifically because of the manner in which ostal life had evolved. In becoming more ostal-like, ostals had become repulsive to potential brides. This point is sharpened by the long history of migration out of Ste Foy. At least since the mid-nineteenth century, Ste Foy has experienced considerable migration, with more individuals moving out than in. The net effect has generally been the maintenance of stable population size: as shown in figure 6.2, Ste Foy's natural population growth has been consistently positive (more

Structures and Change in Ste Foy

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15 T

10-

-5 -10 } -15 1856

TO]

1876 - change in censused population

1896

1916

1936

1956

1976

— natural population growth

Fig. 6.2. Net migration from Ste Foy. Top line shows average annual natural population growth (births minus deaths) between selected census years; bottom line shows average annual change in censused population over the same periods; net number of migrants is shown by the shaded area (number of years times the difference between natural growth and population change). Because natural population growth is consistently greater than censused population change, the net has always been out-migrants. (Sources: Local census; local vital statistics [etat civil]) births than deaths annually), while growth in the censused population has usually hovered closer to zero. 2 Young ostal women have been involved in this migration, but as part of a more or less balanced exchange (generally of the matrimonial sort) among rural communities in the area. Until the 1960s, most of those who left married into farms or villages similar to Ste Foy's and were replaced by individuals from the same places. Almost all Ste Foyan residents not born in Ste Foy are from the rural vicinity; the same handful of nearby communities appear as the birthplaces of non-natives of Ste Foy in all of the censuses in which this information is recorded, as well as in local marriage and death registers. As shown in table 6 . 1 , there is an almost perfect match between the number of migrants moving to rural communities and the number coming from them among the cohorts born between 1930 and 1949 3 (generally migrating in the 1950s and 1960s). 2 See Collomp's analysis of the stem family system in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Haute Provence (1983) for a similar example of migration operating as a population stabilizer. 3 Note that it is difficult to compile similar statistics for those born later because beginning in the 1950s, increasing numbers of women in Ste Foy and elsewhere in the area delivered their babies in a maternity clinic in Rodez instead of at home. By the 1960s, virtually all babies in the area were bom there. This means that in census and other records, Rodez is listed as the birthplace of almost everyone in these younger cohorts and identifying which community they actually come from is a much more painstaking affair.

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• Chapter Six

TABLE 6.1

Exchange Migration Between Ste Foy and Other Rural Townships Date of Birth 1920-1929

1930-1939

1940-1949

No. of Ste Foyan migrants to rural townships

88

55

39

No. of Ste Foy residents born in other rural townships

65

53

36

Sources: Bages 1972, 12, 17, 58; 1975 local census.

The excess of emigrants to rural communities in the 1920-1929 cohort can be accounted for by another kind of migration: a sloughing-off of surplus population, involving primarily those for whom there was no room in Ste Foy: younger sons, families whose farms had failed, but especially the children of Ste Foy's poorest, landless households. Calculations, based on pre-1975 censuses, of sex ratios of those remaining in Ste Foy suggest no particular genderspecific pattern in this type of migration. Looking for work or a fresh start, some migrants of this sort went to rural communities or towns in the area, while others moved farther away to southern cities (especially Toulouse and Montpellier) or Paris. Among the cohort born between 1920 and 1929, about half of these unreplaced migrants moved to urban centers (Bages 1972, 58). During the postwar period, local exchange migration continued, but unidirectional migration became substantially more important proportionately, and shifted more exclusively toward urban areas. This shift, illustrated by the comparison shown in table 6.2 between the destinations of migrants born during the 1920s (generally migrating during the 1940s and early 1950s) to those born during the 1940s (generally migrating in the 1960s and early 1970s), is explainable by reference to the redistribution of opportunities available in postwar France. These "new" migrants might have been drawn from the same social categories that have long fed Ste Foy's stream of unreplaced out-migration: young men and women who could not be integrated within the ostal system. Instead, they were most apt to be young women pivotal to it. The total number of individuals leaving the community between 1960 and 1975 was not necessarily higher than had left in previous periods (although the proportion of some age cohorts was, as was net out-migration), but during that fifteenyear period, out-migration was not primarily a matter of sloughing off excess population or of exchanging residence within the region. Rather, it took a form that seriously threatened the future of the community. In particular, it emerged as an internally generated sabotage of the prospects for the ostal families on whom Ste Foy's new prosperity largely rested and who seemed to be profiting the most from newly comfortable local circumstances.

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TABLE 6.2

Destinations of Migrants from Ste Foy Date of Birth 1920-1929 [144]"

1940-1949 [1011*

Rural township Balanced by rural in-migration In excess of in-migration

45 15

36 2

Towns (Aveyron or Tarn)

13

12

Urban centers

27

50

100

100

Destination

Total percentage of migrants

Source: Bages 1972, 58. a Numbers in brackets indicate the total number of Ste Foyan migrants in each age cohort. Note that the total number of individuals born in Ste Foy during the 1940s is much smaller than the number born during the 1920s. This is due to the large number of births immediately following World War 1, the small number during World War II, and the long-term trend toward lower birthrates beginning in the 1930s. As a result, although the absolute number of migrants in the 1920-1929 cohort was larger than in the 1940-1949 cohort, a considerably smaller percentage of the former cohort migrated (about 55%, as compared to 75% of the 1940-1949 cohort).

Bachelorhood This sabotage was manifested in the substantial number of bachelor ostal heirs who ought to have married during the 1960s and early 1970s. As in the case of migration, relatively high rates of bachelorhood were not new to Ste Foy, but had long served as an effective mechanism for controlling population growth despite high fertility rates: in the context of strong social pressures against illegitimate children, a part of the population was prevented from reproducing itself. The ostal system favors this mechanism by providing that daughters and younger sons may remain in the paternal household as long as they do not marry; indeed, prior to the postwar period, most never-married adults in Ste Foy were noninheriting children of ostal families. As indicated in figure 6.3, celibacy rates in Ste Foy between 1851 and 1975 form a shallow U-shaped curve. Most obvious from the graph is the changing sexual distribution of bachelorhood: celibacy rates were slightly higher for women until the turn of the century, about the same for men and women through the interwar period, and much higher for men after World War II. The declining celibacy rate in the latter half of the nineteenth century is not accompanied by any rise in marriage rates. This suggests that there was no real decline in the numbers of individuals remaining unmarried, but that they were increasingly likely to choose migration over life in Ste Foy during this period. During the interwar

162 • Chapter Six

1870

JB90

~^ unmarried men over 30

1910

1930

1950

1970

U unmarried women over 30 • total unmarried

Fig. 6.3. Celibacy rates in Sle Foy. Percentage of all persons older than 30, over time. (Source: Local census)

period, on the other hand, as resource constraints began to relax and the fertility rate dropped, a further decline in celibacy rates is balanced by a higher marriage rate, suggesting that celibacy had functioned in part to manage population pressures on scarce resources.4 After World War II the decline might have continued had not new forces come into play to push celibacy rates back up toward nineteenth-century levels again. As for migration, postwar celibacy rates were no higher than they had been in some earlier periods, but, coming to implicate actors pivotal to the ostal system rather than marginal to it, celibacy threatened to undermine that system (cf. Bourdieu 1962). During the postwar period, then, it was disproportionately ostal daughters who chose to migrate while ostal heirs preferred to stay, even at the cost of bachelorhood, wheareas both migration and bachelorhood had hitherto been more characteristic of other, less privileged, social categories. The best explanation for this shift lies in the gender-asymmetric distribution of costs and benefits within the ostal system, now impinging more directly on more people's lives than had been the case in the past. If daughters were apt to be repelled by their mothers' experiences, now that more ostals were organized more "properly" than ever before, heirs were, by the same token, apt to be especially attracted to the prospect of succeeding their fathers and staying on 4 Lowered male celibacy rates during the interwar period can also be partly attributed to the effects of World War I. Of all men aged fifteen to thirty-eight in Ste Foy's 1911 census, fully one third were killed in the war. This might have resulted in a high rate of female celibacy, as it did generally in France. In the context of Ste Foy's family system, however, the effects of substantial war losses on the marriage market could be fully absorbed. Women were at least as likely to marry as ever, and those men surviving the war, considerably more so.

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the lucrative land. Further, as I have indicated, those groomed as heirs not only had more to stay for, but were likely to be less equipped to leave than their sisters: in general, they had less of the formal education required for the jobs pulling Ste Foyans away. On most accounts, their prospects were a great deal better in Ste Foy than elsewhere. Matrimonial Strategies The disarray generated by the new feasibility of the ostal system in the context of postwar France appears to have been even more complicated. In particular, the rules governing matrimonial strategy in Ste Foy are quite straightforward and have a fairly obvious and commonplace function: marriages are contracted between families of equivalent social status and serve to define and integrate each specific social stratum. To the extent that ostal daughters left instead of marrying onto ostals, and ostal heirs remained bachelors instead of leaving, the rules were respected, even if their integrative function atrophied. Many of the women who migrated, though, married first, but, insofar as the men they "ought" to have married were unwilling to leave, they tended to "marry down," preferring men with more to gain by going elsewhere. Similarly, almost half of the ostal men in the affected cohort did marry, but many of them also married down, preferring lower-status women less equipped or inspired to leave, over bachelorhood at the hands of more appropriate but thwarted matches. Ste Foyans perceive chaos in contemporary matrimonial strategy: "Anybody can marry anybody these days, and some people who ought to, never marry at all," they say. "There just aren't any rules left." The large number of stories in circulation about the dire consequences of inappropriate marriages is probably directly related to this perception and the dismay it provokes . Ostal families have responded to this perceived problem by making adjustments quite explicitly directed at rendering ostal life more attractive to appropriate brides. Most noticeably, beginning in the late 1960s, many began investing in home modernization and renovation. Previously, farm profits had generally been reinvested in the farm operation, while investments in the home or in raising standards of living were considered a great deal less important. When a modern house with enough conveniences to compete with urban life came to be considered critical to drawing a bride, and thus assuring the ostal's future, ostal profits were redirected toward this new priority. In a few cases, accommodations were made in ostal work organization to allow a potential bride to continue her off-farm career (e.g., as a primary school teacher in the area) or to take charge of an on-farm activity (e.g., a pig-raising operation). Here, a coresident mother-in-law available for child care and housekeeping responsibilities was redefined as an asset to the younger woman's aspirations. Partly for these reasons, but also because opportunities in urban France shrank

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with the economic crisis beginning in the mid-1970s, the ostal bride shortage had ended by the late 1970s and young Ste Foyan women were again at least as inclined to marry onto ostals as to migrate away. France's economic bust of the 1970s was as much a boon to the orderly reproduction of ostal lines as the boom of the 1960s had been an assault on it. Colette and Sylvie were both teenagers in 1975, still in school but firmly decided not only to leave Ste Foy, but to live and work abroad. Colette wanted to be a secretary in the French foreign service, and Sylvie thought she would like to join the air force. No one in either of their families had ever traveled as far as Paris. Colette's family had a small ostal, inherited by her mother, whose only brother had died as an unmarried young man. Colette's older brother had already migrated to Montpelher, and her parents were resigned to seeing the ostal die out with them. Sylvie's parents had a tiny farm near the bourg and several modest sources of income: her mother ran a small cafe and restaurant and her father raised a few cattle and worked as a substitute mailman. There was not a great deal to pass on to any of the children, and there was no particular expectation that any of them would stay. Sylvie and Colette grew up in two different parts of the township and knew each other only vaguely. Colette successfully completed secondary school and went on to complete, just as successfully, a training course as a trilingual secretary. As part of her program, she took a six-month internship in Spain and worked for a year in England, where she enjoyed herself immensely. Sylvie left school before completing the secondary cycle and went on her own to England, where she worked as a store clerk, babysitter, and at various similar jobs. She eventually decided that she wanted to work in the London office of Air France, and applied for a position there. Meanwhile, on her visits home, Colette had resumed her acquaintance with Jean, a younger son of an ostal near her parents'. Jean had always wanted to farm, but his older brother had inherited his parents' ostal. In the end, Colette and Jean were married and moved to Colette's parents' farm, which they planned to take over when her parents retired. By 1985, Jean was running a confinement lamb operation, and Colette was commuting to Rodez, where she worked for a multinational agribusiness company, while her mother cared for their baby. Colette was not sure her job was worth the commute and was considering quitting to work on the farm with Jean once her parents retired. Her mother's response was that she would be foolish to do so: "If you think it's tiresome to work in an office all day, wait until you see what it's like being tied to the farm. . . ." By 1989, her parents had retired and she had quit her job, was helping on the farm, and was active in a number of community and farm union organizations.

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As for Sylvie, she had just been called for an interview at Air France when she received word that her younger brother, still in Ste Foy, had been killed in an accident. She came back home, planning to spend a few months with her parents before returning to London. While she was there, she met Didier, a young plumber from a neighboring community. They, too, married, and moved to Sylvie's parents' farm. By 1985, Sylvie had taken over her mother's cafe/restaurant with considerable gusto, while Didier helped her father on the farm as his plumbing business allowed. By 1989, her parents had retired, and she and her husband had substantially expanded the cafe/restaurant, creating a successful business that draws customers from well beyond Ste Foy. Both young women chose to marry men who had never had any desire to leave Ste Foy and are firmly committed to staying there. Both women are leading lives apparently similar to those of their mothers before them. The difference, of course, is that both have chosen to do so out of a new range of options. Sylvie and Colette grew up at a time when joining the foreign service or the air force and living abroad were imaginable and within reach (if not altogether conventional) as possibilities for young Ste Foyan women. They both shifted their original goals somewhat, but were able to organize the kind of escape from Ste Foy they had hoped for, and apparently had promising prospects for a future far away from there. But, having tried the alternatives, they decided to move back home. Both of them enjoy talking about their adventures abroad and sometimes complain that they seldom have the chance to do so because their experience is too alien to that of most other Ste Foyans (including their husbands). This does not appear to be a pressing enough problem or a strong enough source of identity for either of them to have created a link between them. They still live in two different parts of the township and still know only vaguely of each other. Both appear to have settled quite happily back into the routines of Ste Foyan life—much more happily, no doubt, than if they had been thwarted in their plans to leave, but with no regrets to be back and no aspirations to leave again. Patterns of migration out of Ste Foy can be explained in terms of the dynamic interplay of a variety of factors, so intertwined as to be hardly distinguishable as "internal" or "external" to the community. These include the evolution of ostal organization, itself closely connected to a larger economic environment; expansion of educational opportunities and the use made of them in Ste Foy, related to general trends in France at the time as well as to Ste Foy's new prosperity and old social order; patterns of economic development in France generating urban tertiary-sector employment for which some Ste Foyans (especially daughters and younger sons) were now well prepared. All of these together resulted for a time in circumstances under which many daughters of Ste Foy understood migration as their best option. This created

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new kinds of tensions for ostal organization, prompting further shifts in response. These, set in the context of changing conditions general to France, resulted in further redefinition of the options available, and different patterns of preference for acting upon them. The picture is a dynamic one, never quite coming to rest. The women who chose to leave in the 1960s, like their mothers who encouraged them to do so, and the fathers who tried to make their ostals more enticing to a potential bride, all acted on individual interests as they saw them: their own, those of their daughters, or those of their ostals. The women meant to engineer individual escape from the ostal system, not to undermine it, although the collective effect of their action might, if it had continued longer, finally have destroyed it. The men (like their wives) were concerned to preserve the continuity of their own ostals, not to shore up the system as a whole: investments were made both to equip one's own daughter to leave and to entice someone else's to stay. This strategy was too contradictory in the aggregate to have had much likelihood of success in terms of ostal continuity, had the larger context not changed in time.5 In any event, the deliberate actions of individuals in this regard did have a number of largely unintended consequences for the evolution of ostal organization and life in Ste Foy. Another group of individuals, situated differently within Ste Foy, made a different assessment of developments there and of the possibilities for acting upon them. A group of ambitious and resourceful bourg men, excluded from local power in the established social order, played on another set of emergent ambiguities in a more deliberate attempt to undermine and replace that order. The consequences of their actions, too, though not exactly those intended, shifted points of tension and ambiguity in a dynamic fueled by inextricably intertwined external and internal factors, as perceived and interpreted by various interested actors. THE MUNICIPAL CRISIS OF 1975

If changing ostal life prompted young women to respond in a relatively straightforward way that had clear-cut consequences for individual ostals, the reaction of other groups now finding themselves at a disadvantage is more difficult to sort out. Some younger sons and others with no expectation of integration into an existing ostal line did, like ostal women, leave the community. Except insofar as they left with women who "ought" to have stayed, 5

Elsewhere, something like the process I have described was set in motion earlier, and so had affected a much larger cohort by the time rural-to-urban migration in France was stemmed in the mid-1970s (e.g., Bourdieu 1962). It is very likely that in such places so many farm owners had been consigned to bachelorhood that the system's ability to reproduce itself was damaged beyond repair.

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this was neither new nor especially disruptive. On the contrary, the well-being of individual ostals and of the community was served, as it always had been, by the departure of a number of such persons. That they were now generally unable or unwilling to acquire an ostal on their own or to find work as farm laborers, and chose instead to move to urban areas, was of no negative local consequence. They were no longer needed in the local farm economy. Because of the opportunities available in urban France during the postwar period and the favorable circumstances of many individuals leaving Ste Foy during this time, it became quite common for urban migrants to achieve a measure of prosperity or success at least apparently equal to or surpassing that of elder brothers and compatriots remaining on ostals. This has generated some ambivalence, if not resentment, in Ste Foy. The success of a migrant simultaneously enhances the status of his family back home and offends the proper order of things. Proud references to relatives who have made it in Paris, Toulouse, or elsewhere are as frequent as sniping comments about migrants who give themselves airs, trying to give the folks back home (no fools) the impression of having achieved a great deal more than they really have. On the whole, however, those shed from ostal lines (or never part of one) who leave the community are largely—if not entirely—out of the picture, and have relatively little impact on social relations in Ste Foy. The situation of those who have not left, in contrast, is a great deal more complicated and consequential. Settled in the bourg, always home to those with no place in ostals, and precluded from enjoying the high status of ostal owners, they have nonetheless benefited from ostal prosperity. Some had been provided with specialized skills or more education than their elder brothers before being sent off the ostal, and have had more opportunity to acquire experience and contacts off the farm. Many have become at least as prosperous as most ostal owners, earning a comfortable livelihood from servicing the local farm economy. Able to acquire some of the status markers associated with large ostal owners—wealth and connections—they are nonetheless structurally defined as "rejects" within the ostal system, meant to either disappear or serve and bow to the will of their betters in the campagne. In response, they have attempted to redefine the local order, playing on some of the terms of the established system to resituate the bourg (non-ostal households, younger sons) with respect to the campagne (ostal households, eldest sons). Their revolt, unlike that of the women, was not observable in measurable trends having the unintentional consequence of undermining the organization of individual ostals. Rather, it was a messy attempt to reshuffle the community deck, played out in a series of more or less well orchestrated events. In its way, it generated as many reverberations as did the wave of female migration, but was a rather different kind of willful change. First, the migration pattern I have described was a trend which was circum-

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scribed in time with respect to a reasonably clear beginning and an equally definable end about fifteen years later. The municipal crisis, in contrast, can be situated at once more and less precisely in time. On one hand, it was composed of a series of well-defined and unusual events occurring at precise dates. On the other hand, it had been gradually building over a considerable but illdefined period prior to that paroxysm, and does not appear to have reached any discernible resolution since then. This would suggest, paradoxically, that events of courte duree can have a longer half-life than trends of moyenne duree. Second, it seems fair enough to analyze postwar migration patterns in strictly systemic terms and to suppose that, given the historical and structural circumstances prevailing in Ste Foy during the postwar decades, these patterns would have emerged regardless of the particular individuals living there at the time. Indeed, the relatively clear beginning and end of this trend coincide with those of the configuration of circumstances generating it. In contrast, individual personalities take on much greater causal weight in the case of the municipal crisis, its preparation, and its fallout. To be sure, this crisis, like the migration of potential ostal brides, grew out of an array of historical, structural, internal, external, contingent, and logical factors so intertwined as to be hardly distinguishable. But these were understood and acted upon in ways specific to some particular individuals who sought quite explicitly to intervene in the social order so as to resituate their place within it and to reorient its evolution. The methods and directions chosen by these persons are only partly explainable as a function of the circumstances prevalent in Ste Foy; they also emerged from the particular imaginations, styles, perceived interests, and inventive strategies of those specific individuals. Change in Ste Foy as shaped and generated by the municipal crisis might well have proceeded along a somewhat different trajectory had different persons been living there. In this sense, individuals can be understood as playing a stronger determinant role in the kind of change illustrated by the municipal crisis, as compared to that expressed in postwar migration patterns. In another sense, the municipal crisis can be understood as a great deal less individualistic. The migration patterns I have described resulted from decisions made by individuals seeking to change their own status and prospects. Although a number of persons made the same decision for apparently similar reasons during this period, there is no indication that it was a self-consciously collective action intended to have consequences for the collectivity. At least some of the events associated with the municipal crisis, on the other hand, were purposely orchestrated by groups of individuals, aimed at directed change in the community, and meant to mobilize or persuade community members. In all of these ways, it was organized as a collective effort intended to have an impact on the collectivity as well as on the recognized status of the individuals involved.

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The Events In retrospect, it apears that the sequence of events immediately leading to the 1975 crisis began with the regularly scheduled local elections of 1971. The incumbent mayor, Marc Beaujot a Salvetat, owner of the second-largest ostal in Ste Foy, was returned to a third six-year term of office. Eight other candidates from the thirteen-member slate he headed also won seats. These included two young men running for the first time: the owner of Ste Foy's largest ostal and the heir to one of the largest bourg ostals. To no one's surprise, the mayor appointed these two men, like himself descended from many generations of Ste Foy mayors and councilors, as his deputies (maires adjoints). Paul Clement, the owner of a successful bourg enterprise and one of the cofounders of the community's spate of new voluntary associations, had organized an opposition slate. Clement himself had run unsuccessfully for office in the previous elections (1965) and did not try again this time, but four candidates from his slate were elected. These included two bourg artisans active in the voluntary associations, as well as two owners of medium-sized ostals. A third bourg artisan was one of the successful candidates from Beaujot's slate. With three of the thirteen council seats, two of them held by active bourg partisans, bourg nonagriculturalists had never been so well represented on the town council. Furthermore, the town clerkship, a nonelective but potentially influential post, continued to be held by Joseph Catala, the bourg's recently retired public school teacher who had served in this position for years. He had long been an ally of Beaujot (and his father before him), but was becoming increasingly involved in the bourg associations. Nevertheless, the town council continued to be dominated by ostal owners and appeared to remain firmly in control of gros ostal families in the persons of Mayor Beaujot and his two deputies. Two events then occurred which served to test the mettle of this old guard and found it wanting. First, in 1973 Beaujot fired his clerk and replaced him with a man who, although Catala's son-in-law and successor as bourg public school teacher, carefully holds himself apart from all groups in the township, including the bourg associations and their leaders. Next, the mayor decided to change Ste Foy's cantonal affiliation, embarking on a maneuver that became the official explanation for the municipal crisis. On the face of it, the attempted cantonal change had no potential as an explosive issue. It took on particular significance only when it was transformed, to the surprise of the mayor, into a test of his status and power, a vehicle for publicly undermining his patron-client networks. Ste Foy has always been part of the canton of Viane, but borders on the canton of Briols. As one of the more prosperous townships in the area, Ste Foy is an attractive asset to its canton. Two leaders of Briols, a doctor and a veterinarian, hoped to entice it away from Viane, a move requiring only a majority vote by Ste Foy's town council, subject to approval by the prefect of

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the Aveyron. Mayor Beaujot, a client of these two, promised to deliver the needed votes. He had no reason to expect trouble. On the contrary, he assumed he could count on well-disciplined support from a majority of his councilors. No one in Ste Foy has especially strong cantonal allegiances, and if necessary, a number of perfectly plausible economic and ecological arguments could be mustered to justify the change in affiliation. Nonetheless, Beaujot found himself caught in increasingly serious challenges to his leadership. When he initially presented his proposal to the council, the four councilors from the 1971 opposition slate voted against it, not unexpectedly. But four others abstained, and Beaujot was unable to mobilize more than four yea votes. The motion carried only by Beaujot's tie-breaking vote, and without the clear majority he had expected. Next, someone (allegedly the group of town councilors opposed to him) organized a petition drive and persuaded a majority of Ste Foyans to sign against the cantonal change. Nominally about cantonal affiliation, this petition was understood as a referendum on Beaujot. Most Ste Foyans who signed it say that they were actually indifferent to or in favor of the cantonal change but wanted to register disapproval of Beaujot. In fact, the cantonal issue was not constitutionally subject to popular vote and the petition had no legal standing, it was nonetheless sent to the prefect with a plea to veto the change in cantonal affiliation. In effect, it was a public demonstration that Beaujot no longer had the loyalty of his erstwhile clients within Ste Foy and was therefore of little use as a client to powerful persons beyond the community. Beaujot having been destroyed as an effective intermediary, the town councilors from the cantonal seat of Briols visited each councilor from Ste Foy to mobilize support for the move to join Briols, while the councilors from the cantonal seat of Viane threatened to resign en masse if Ste Foy withdrew from their canton. Undoubtedly, a number of more private offers and counteroffers were made as well. Subsequently, the issue was put to a second vote in the Ste Foy town council, although it was not altogether clear if this vote could constitutionally supersede the first. This time, only the two deputies voted for the cantonal change and all ten of the other councilors voted against it—or against the mayor. If Beaujot's inability to deliver on his promise to Briols had been ambiguous before, it was now clearly established. The final blow to Beaujot's political life was delivered by the council's treatment of its next order of business at this point, by now early 1975: the township's annual budget, which is proposed by the mayor and must be approved by majority vote of the council. Again, only the two deputies voted for it, and all the others rejected it and the mayor. In the spring of 1975, after the third successive council meeting at which the same ten councilors voted down the mayor's budget, the council was, in accordance with the French constitution, declared inactive. From there, events followed their official course: that

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summer, the French Minister of the Interior definitively relieved the mayor of his functions and dissolved the council, calling special elections for the fall. The public explanation (printed in the regional newspapers) for this sequence of events was Ste Foyans' distress about the prospect of change in cantonal affiliation. Although empirically unfounded, this was a plausible and presentable explanation, one pinning the blame squarely on Beaujot and further undermining his standing as an effective patron and client. Privately, most Ste Foyans offered another explanation, related to the retirement of Catala in 1973. Those unsympathetic to Beaujot claimed that the mayor had been elected for his contacts and high status as a gros ostal owner, not for his administrative skills or political astuteness; it had always been Catala who had supplied those assets. Beaujot's downfall began when he started to chafe at his clerk's position of real power, first by limiting Catala's involvement in official community affairs and then by pushing him to retire. Some say that Beaujot's ambitious and vindictive wife was behind the deposal of Catala. As long as Beaujot's mother was alive, she had been able to counterbalance the wife and make her son see reason. But after her death (soon after the 1971 elections), the wife had prevailed, with the result that Beaujot lost his head and the township. In any case, Beaujot was unable to carry out even the most routine administrative matter without his clerk, and in the end destroyed himself by his ineptitude in handling the canton affair. Those more sympathetic to Beaujot saw a somewhat different dynamic. According to them, Catala had become increasingly overbearing and too old to properly carry out his functions as clerk. The mayor was obliged to ask him to step down and Catala legally had to do so. He was furious, though, and promised revenge. In this version, it was Catala who orchestrated Beaujot's downfall, managing to transform an altogether feasible operation into a debacle. There is no doubt that the clerk was a skilled politician and that the mayor was not, nor is there any question that Mayor Beaujot but not Clerk Catala had the requisite social status to hold the mayoral position. There is equally little doubt that a great deal of animosity was generated between the two when their alliance was, for whatever reasons, ruptured. The effectiveness with which public opinion was mobilized, as well as the organization and outcome of the special election of 1975, however, suggest that a great deal more was at stake and that several other personalities were intimately involved. Beaujot's inabilities or Catala's revenge, like the issue of cantonal affiliation, were no more than precipitating causes, apparently seized and manipulated in the service of something else. Two slates of council candidates emerged out of the much-observed, -discussed, and -imagined maneuvers during Ste Foy's summer of 1975. Generally referred to as "the mayor's slate" and "the slate of the ten," respectively, these were identified in a way that implied that the conflict was internal to the

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town council, pitting Beaujot against the ten councilors who had turned against him. In fact, not only did Ste Foy no longer legally have a mayor by the time the slates were announced, but Beaujot and his two loyal deputies all refrained from running at all, and Beaujot denied any association with the putative "mayor's slate," going so far as to place an announcement to that effect in the regional newspaper. Few Ste Foyans believed this disavowal and most took it as further evidence of his dishonesty and deviousness. It was duly noted that the organizer of' 'the mayor's slate'' was a neighbor and loyal client of Beaujot's. It may also have been significant that this slate included several young men who, although rather young to yet accede to the council, were heirs to gros ostals and had the same kind of hereditary claim to council seats as the deposed mayor and his deputies. Meanwhile, the thirteen slots on "the slate of the ten" were filled out by three men who had not previously run for office. One of these was Jacques Magrinet, founder of one of the bourg's largest and most successful nonagricultural enterprises, co-organizer (with Paul Clement, the organizer of the 1971 opposition slate) of the bourg's new voluntary associations, and one of the most active bourg promoters. Magrinet had, through his associational activities, become closely allied with Joseph Catala, erstwhile town clerk. The "head" of this slate (i.e., its selection as mayor in the event of winning a majority of council seats) was not publicly disclosed, but virtually everyone assumed that it was Magrinet. He kept a rather low profile during the summer, but when "the slate of the ten" swept the fall elections, the newly seated (or reseated) councilors did indeed choose Magrinet as the new mayor. Thus ' 'the slate of the ten" appears to have been at least as much a misnomer as was "the mayor's slate." A man who was not one of "the ten" at all ultimately emerged as their formally designated leader, probably played no small part in mobilizing them against Beaujot, and undoubtedly was a key player in consolidating public support behind "their" cause. I was never able to discover exactly when and how Magrinet became involved in the municipal crisis; until he was elected mayor, he chose to present himself as a concerned bystander, flattered and a bit surprised to be asked to join "the slate of the ten." My understanding of him and his prior activities, together with the virtually unanimous certainty with which Ste Foyans supposed him to be "the ten's" mayoral candidate, lead me to believe that his role was a great deal more active from the beginning than he judged politic to openly proclaim. In any event, the entire "mayor's slate" was soundly defeated. For the first time in at least fifty years, all council seats were won by a single slate and no runoff election was necessary. (Under French electoral law, candidates obtaining an absolute majority of votes win in the first round; the remaining seats are filled by those winning the most votes in a subsequent runoff.) Magrinet, Marius Barthes a Grimal (another newcomer to the council, an ostal son-in-law/ owner closely allied to Magrinet and active in bourg associations), and a bourg

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artisan first elected from the 1971 opposition slate each received considerably more votes than any of the more conventional candidates. Magrinet named Barthes and a medium-sized ostal owner originally elected from the 1971 opposition slate as his deputies. The new council was still numerically dominated by ostal owners, but its leadership had been shifted away from gros ostal owners and into the hands of men sympathetic to specifically bourg interests. Most notably, the new mayor was, unlike all his predecessors, both a nonfarmer and an assertive bourg partisan. These results were confirmed and consolidated in the next two regularly scheduled local elections. Two opposition slates were organized in 1977, but eleven of the twelve candidates running with Magrinet were elected and the mayor himself was overwhelmingly returned to office. In 1983, the mayor's slate faced no organized opposition at all. All councils elected since 1975 have included four or five nonfarmers from the bourg closely associated with bourg interests. Furthermore, Mayor Magrinet clearly demonstrated himself to be well in control of the electorate, even after the excitement of 1975 had passed. The cataclysm of 1975, then, was not merely a matter of throwing Mayor Beaujot out of office. It amounted instead to an occasion astutely used—and perhaps carefully engineered—by Magrinet and his allies to challenge the credibility of Beaujot and other gros ostal owners as the community's most powerful patrons and to place themselves in that position instead. This maneuver seems to have been accomplished by a coalition forged between the new bourg leaders and prosperous owners of middling ostals. Neither group was strong enough to succeed alone in such an endeavor. Owners of mid-sized to large ostals were generally seen as legitimate patrons and community leaders, and, under conditions coming to fruition over the postwar period, could afford to defy hitherto more powerful gros ostal owners. These men did not, however, form an especially unified or coherent group, nor did they include anyone able or willing to initiate the ouster of the gros. On the other hand, the bourg leaders (especially Magrinet) had taken full advantage of the bourg's evolution to become well organized, to hone their leadership skills, and to cultivate a loyal and well-disciplined constituency. Although their articulation of specifically bourg interests gave them a well-defined power base, it led many Ste Foyans either to find them threatening or to fail to take them very seriously. The combination of the ostal owners' legitimacy and the bourg leaders' canniness was a powerful mix, sufficient to displace the gros ostal families. This displacement reflected and further oriented particular kinds of change and conflict in Ste Foy. The mayor and his councilors, understood as Ste Foy's local patrons, are constrained to display and use their own powers and those of their well-placed contacts in ways construable as beneficial to their clients. Magrinet's vantage point and vision of Ste Foy were rather different from those of previous mayors. His election as mayor implies that many Ste Foyans

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were persuaded that his priorities and abilities were more legitimate and desirable than those of his predecessor. Having acceded to the position of mayor, he was able to promote these even more vigorously than before. As Beaujot learned to his detriment, however, the local powers of the mayor are not absolute; other members of the council demand reckoning. Pre-1975 councils, dominated by ostal owners and led by the gros among them, generally acted in accordance with campagne interests and in disregard of the bourg. Post1975 councils, on the other hand, still dominated by ostal owners but led by an outspoken bourg partisan (and including a significant minority of his fellows), embody the newly articulated conflicting interests of bourg and campagne. Ironically enough, Magrinet, having become mayor via a conflict fomented between the previous mayor and his councilors, is himself chronically vulnerable to such conflict. Prior to 1975, Ste Foy had been run quite unambiguously for the benefit of ostal owners. Few of Ste Foy's resources had ever been invested in bourg improvements, for example, whereas it was the only township in the area that had provided paved roads to every outlying farm and hamlet in its territory. Similarly, someone had invested considerable political skill and pull to have Ste Foy classified as a "mountainous zone" community, making its farmers eligible for an array of special state subsidies and programs, even though Ste Foy is mountainous only by a substantial stretch of a highly legalistic imagination. In contrast, the community would have been a logical site for the regional dairy, market, or middle school all planned for the area by various authorities in the late 1960s. Very little effort was expended on these bids, which would have particularly benefited the bourg, with the result that they were lost to other communities. Beginning in 1975, a specifically bourg agenda did emerge in the official arena, and was for the first time given some attention. Insofar as this agenda is understood to diverge from that of the campagne, however, it is kept closely in check by the still-dominant ostal interests. The alliance between middling ostal owners and bourg leaders is an uneasy one. As illustrated in the examples below, Magrinet has been able to move Ste Foy in the new directions he prefers only insofar as they are acceptable to his wary ostal allies. One of the voluntary associations which Magrinet had helped to found in the 1960s was the Syndicat d'lnitiative, a group working to develop a tourist industry in Ste Foy. This organization had laid all of the groundwork for obtaining state subsidies to set up a campground in the township. The final stages of this project required the approval of the town council, but, under the Beaujot administration, the project had never found its way onto the council agenda. As soon as Magrinet became mayor, he moved quickly to bring this project to fruition, and thus Ste Foy soon had its campground.

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Some bourg residents hoped that this would bring new business to bourg shops, while most campagne residents were neither strongly for nor against it. In fact, Ste Foy is too inaccessible and the campground too small for it to have had much impact, although the community can now boast of this "modern" amenity. Ste Foy is one of the few communities in the area with its own water supply and distribution system. This has allowed the town council to set water prices and to do so in a way that favors large consumers (i.e., ostal owners). The local reservoir was adjacent to and downhill from a pasture, so that every time it rained, animal waste was washed into it. Whenever the water inspector visited after a rainy spell, the water was found impotable. Most Ste Foyans were not especially bothered: "We've been drinking it all this time and it never hurt us, so why should we stop now, just because of what some guy from Rodez says?" The town council, charged with ameliorating the situation, did little more than hope it would not rain the few days before the water inspector's next visit. When Magrinet took office, he decided to take the matter in hand, and proposed to the town council that Ste Foy abandon its own water system and join the regional water network instead. He argued that a frequently impotable water supply was a bad idea in general, was particularly bad for the incipient tourist trade, and that it was foolish for such a small community to try to supply so many of its own services. Presumably, he was also less interested in protecting preferential water rates for local ostal owners than in consolidating his own power by linking Ste Foy to the larger network, with himself as intermediary. His proposal created an uproar, and he came close to resigning over the issue. In the end, the council voted to keep an independent water system but to build a new reservoir elsewhere in the township, creating a reliably potable water supply which could continue to be controlled by and sold at rates favoring ostal owners. As part of the drive to beautify and modernize the bourg to which Magrinet and several of the voluntary associations he had founded were strongly committed, the mayor proposed planting a stand of trees on the bourg's barren couderc. Councilors from the campagne balked. The couderc is the site of the monthly sheep auction, and there is no room there for sheep, merchants' trucks, and trees. Trees might be more attractive than an empty space to bourg residents and to tourists, but ostal owners need the empty space once a month. A compromise was reached and the trees were ultimately planted near the couderc on a patch of land where gypsies periodically camped. This solution was generally satisfactory: it left the couderc as usefully unbeautiful as before, but it might also serve to discourage the gypsies from returning to Ste Foy (or so bourg residents hoped).

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The string of events beginning with the 1971 elections, culminating in the 1975 crisis and continuing in the form of periodic battles within the town council since that time, can all be understood as reflecting and propelling the shifting meaning and order associated with the various social categories constituting Ste Foy. The successive states of disequilibrium implied by the emergence of a viable bourg-specific agenda in competition with identifiably campagne interests, the replacement of Mayor Beaujot with Mayor Magrinet, and the implantation of bourg/campagne conflict within the local governing body have all arisen out of changing conditions generated by historically situated local structures (or locally structured historical circumstances) as manipulated and expressed by particular persons. It has entailed an ongoing process simultaneously defined by the imagination of the actors and their perceptions of the limits of the historically possible and the structurally appropriate. Local Conditions Several elements of the evolution I have described in Ste Foy provided necessary, albeit insufficient, conditions for the particular turn of events played out there. First, I have suggested that the redistribution of wealth among Ste Foyans and their access to a variety of institutions available in postwar France has meant that the content of patron-client relationships within and beyond the community has shifted. The patron-client mode of relationship clearly remains important.6 The successful strategy for unseating Beaujot, after all, involved discrediting him as an effective patron within the community and client beyond it. The change in content, however, made it feasible for someone like Magrinet to emerge as a serious rival. As a nonfarmer, he could not legitimize his status with respect to acres of land or head of sheep owned, nor could he build ties of obligation and dependence on the basis of exchanges of specifically agricultural goods and services. He could and did play up other forms of wealth and power in his possession, and found ways to display and valorize his savvy and contacts, available to facilitate dealings with the bureaucratic institutions within which all Ste Foyans have become entrenched. By now, a Ste Foyan farmer whose hay barn has burned does not so much need donations of hay (most likely to be forthcoming from a gros), but help in managing insurance claims (conceivably most available from an obliging businessman like Magrinet). The possibility of bourg entrepreneurs challenging gros ostal owners was probably enhanced by a weakening of ties among ostal owners within the campagne. The web of patron-client networks tying together ostals of unequal status certainly has not disappeared, but comfortable material circumstances 6 Note that a highly elaborated patron-client mode of conduct historically has been specific to some regions of France (especially the Aveyron and elsewhere in the south) but has been virtually absent elsewhere (for example, in much of the northeast).

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and a preference for ostal autonomy seem to have undermined them, making it difficult for gros ostal owners to command the kind of loyalty and discipline they once could from client ostals. (Compare, for example, the consequences of the Fabies' electoral disloyalty toward " M . " in 1863 with that of the Cassagnes toward the Noels in 1975, as described in chap. 4.) At the same time, disarray in the matrimonial market during the 1960s and early 1970s may have loosened the ties once binding ostals of equivalent status. Among gros ostal owners, the loss of exclusive access to wealth, substantial market activity, relative comfort, and consistent organization as "proper" ostals may have further eroded their sense of connection to each other. That some bonds remain among them is suggested by the fact that, to no one's surprise, Beaujot's two deputies, both from gros ostal families, remained loyal to him throughout his travails of 1975 and that several other gros ostal families provided candidates for "his" slate that year. They were not, however, able to provide a front powerful or unified enough to preserve their own position of primacy. Nor were there any other groups of ostal owners sufficiently powerful, well organized, or motivated to replace them. Enough chinks had developed to allow bourg leaders to slide in. This could happen, however, only insofar as potential bourg leaders were able to acquire and convincingly display sufficient signs of legitimate status and power. Indeed, under postwar conditions, a number of bourg entrepreneurs (including Magrinet, Clement, and most of the bourg residents on post1975 town councils) were able to acquire many of the status markers associated with gros ostal owners. As I have indicated, they have chosen to organize their families and businesses substantially along ostal lines, adopting those legitimizing accoutrements available to them. At the same time, they have astutely reframed their exclusion from real ostals, presenting this as an asset in the form of superior experience with the "modern" commercial and urban world (as opposed to entrenchment in an "old-fashioned" agricultural and rural one). It is unlikely that either of these two facets of the identity they have created for themselves would have much credibility as a basis for status and power within Ste Foy in the absence of the other. If the apex of Ste Foy's patron-client networks is no longer squarely situated in the campagne, it is because some bourg entrepreneurs can plausibly lay claim both to quasi-gros ostal owner status and to favored access to the "modern" world of which Ste Foy is a part. If the distinction between bourg and campagne has blurred in terms of the proper location of legitimate power, it has sharpened along other dimensions, so that acute rivalry between the two becomes more likely. Most obviously, with the disappearance of subsistence agriculture from Ste Foy, campagne ostals have turned to market-oriented agriculture while bourg households have become more exclusively involved in nonagricultural or agricultural service activities. Few bourg households are engaged in farming any more, and none

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any longer provide farm labor to outlying ostals. A former (more or less mythical) solidarity based on shared activity has been replaced by a somewhat edgy solidarity grounded in a clear division of labor but undermined by diverging interests. Campagne households depend for an array of goods and services on the bourg, which depends on the campagne for its business. Beginning in the 1950s, however, roads in the region were improved and increasing numbers of Ste Foyans acquired cars. As a result, dependence on the bourg has diminished considerably as many Ste Foyans find it at least as convenient to frequent shops, workshops, and offices in larger towns in the area, where prices are lower, selection wider, and more services available. Many bourg residents complain about unfair competition and a shameful lack of loyalty, but some of them have found ways to escape dependence on local business: setting up regular delivery routes in the area (bakers), selling at the big weekly market in Rodez (pork butcher), making the circuit of monthly fairs in the region (shoe salesman), developing a regional clientele for a specialized product (tailor/work pants, cabinetmaker/staircases). The attempt by bourg leaders to develop tourism in Ste Foy, though only modestly successful at best, is clearly meant to push the bourg further toward independence from the campagne. Much as the bourg and campagne seem to have moved apart as distinct entities developing different and not altogether compatible interests, the viability of each remains intimately dependent on that of the other. Ste Foy's bourg is, as small rural French villages go, an unusually lively and diversified center, thanks primarily to the good fortunes of local agriculture. The schools, church, cheese dairy, monthly fair, post office, cafes, and shops which form the core of bourg activity depend to a great extent on the relatively large and prosperous campagne population. Even the nascent tourist industry, conceived as a boost for the bourg, depends on the campagne's pretty farms and placid sheep herds as a draw; no one expects the bourg's shoe store, pants manufacture, or staircase-maker to be a tourist attraction. At the same time, if Ste Foy appears in no danger of declining, as have some neighboring communities with the same potential for lucrative agriculture, it is largely thanks to the amenities and activities provided in the bourg. Ste Foy, in fact, is known in the area as an especially dynamic and attractive community, and as rather unusual for having been able to hold young owners or heirs committed to carrying on virtually all of its farms. Much of the credit for this attribute is conventionally given to the dynamism of the bourg. Ste Foyans are fully aware of the ultimate interdependence between the bourg and the campagne, even as they are conscious of the differences between narrower interests specific to bourg or campagne. This interdependence means that all share a stake in the priorities and effectiveness of whichever group they mandate to run the community. Bourg and campagne can no more go their separate ways than they can melt into a single whole. The picture that emerges is shot through with ambiguities. Although dis-

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tinctions among well-established social categories appear to have remained intact, confusion and conflict have emerged around how they should be ordered. Comments about the 1975 crisis, for example, reflect consensus around the old terms but discord about how to situate them: "Those gros out on their farms were just getting too autocratic," "Times have changed and we petits can't be led around like sheep anymore," "It's high time someone paid attention to the bourg for a change," "The campagne and farming aren't the only things around here," "The rejects are trying to take over," "Everything's going to ruin when even a little artisan can be mayor." This kind of confusion, generated by the evolution I have described, may have created the tensions that made a realignment of bourg and campagne, ostal and non-ostal households conceivable, but it certainly was not sufficient to generate such a shift spontaneously. Rather, a particular group of men, situated in such a way that they found their position constraining and believed themselves capable of orchestrating change, embarked on a long and rather careful process to use and reorder well-established local categories. Even then, they were unsuccessful in their attempt to capture power through altogether normal channels. They failed to take over the town council during the regularly scheduled 1971 elections, despite having spent at least a decade laying the groundwork to do so. Only through the extraordinary and disruptive events of 1975—whether they fomented or simply used these—were they able to unsettle the old order, if not clearly establish an altogether new one. Actors The four or five men who spearheaded the move to resituate themselves as bourg and community leaders are all clearly distanced from the ostal system yet highly respectable in some of its terms and in a position to reproduce the kind of social position held by highest-status ostal owners. All of them are bourg residents from ostal families, either younger sons themselves eliminated from the paternal ostal (e.g., Mayor Magrinet) or descendants of a younger son eliminated, a now-forgotten number of generations ago, from a well-established local ostal line (e.g., Paul Clement, the organizer of the 1971 opposition slate). All of them, like gros ostal owners, run very successful family businesses, serving a market extending well beyond Ste Foy. They were joined in their organizational efforts by a few high-status bourg professionals who had hitherto been inclined to attach themselves to gros ostal owners, but now chose to switch allegiance (e.g., Joseph Catala, the ex-town clerk/retired schoolteacher). Several middling ostal owners emerged as a kind of adjunct leadership in bourg activities, presumably providing for themselves an assertion of independence from other ostal owners (e.g., Mayor Magrinet's two deputy mayors). They also lent the bourg leadership an air of legitimacy as well as grounds for claiming to act for all enlightened Ste Foyans, not just

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narrow (low-status) bourg interests; almost all discussions about bourg associations by their leaders or activists include prominent reference to the few ostal owners who participate. Rank and file support for bourg leaders came primarily from lower-status bourg families. Individuals having no kin connection to prominent Ste Foyan ostal families, less wealth, and less access to high-powered contacts fell in place behind bourg leaders. Attaching themselves as clients to the new bourg patrons, they could demand the kinds of favors expected of local patrons (e.g., help with employment, legal problems, and so on through well-placed connections) in return for support of bourg activities. In effect, a specifically bourg patron-client network, similar to those capped by gros ostal owners, was established. Bourg ostal owners conspicuously avoided any involvement with bourg activity or leaders. One might imagine that they would have played a linchpin role in any realignment of bourg and campagne. Instead, they have remained assertively associated with the campagne. Process As I have indicated, seats on Ste Foy's town council provide a formal validation of patronage positions within the community. They also supply an institutional framework within which to deliver, formally or informally, on promises to both clients and patrons, thus further developing and consolidating one's clientele and ties to patrons. Although prospective bourg leaders all came from "good" families (albeit the wrong branches), could display personal wealth and well-run businesses, and made claims about their appropriateness as mediators between Ste Foy and the new postwar world, their ability to display or develop local power had been severely restricted by their ineligibility for council seats. Beginning in 1961, therefore, they set out on a novel route, providing themselves with an alternative institution: their voluntary associations. Ste Foy already had several voluntary associations, including a hunting society, a veterans organization, and a local chapter of the farmers' union, the Federation Nationale des Syndicats d'Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA). These were dominated by ostal owners, were notably inactive, and were only very loosely tied, if at all, to any larger organization. Local activity of most of these organizations was limited to an annual fund-raising bingo game or dance and an annual banquet for members. The new associations, in contrast, were aimed at civic activism, built quite explicitly on an urban model, and, in some cases, founded as local chapters closely integrated into larger associations, with their founders as connecting links. Aiming to demonstrate a new set of community potentials and their own prowess, the same small group of men established a series of associations in

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quick succession. Their Comite des Fetes transformed the modest village patron saint festival into a multi-day extravaganza attracting, within a few years, thousands of participants. Their Syndicat d'Initiative set about organizing amenities meant to attract the tourist trade: a motorcycle race course, soccer field, and playground complex was set up on bourg fringes; the groundwork was laid to establish a campground; and funds were collected (mainly through various Aveyronnais dignitaries and Parisian Amicales) to create a local museum. Their Association Familiale organized an annual banquet for senior citizens, two annual trips (one for several days and one for a single day), a ' 'family helper" available to provide occasional help to families (e.g., child care in case of a mother's illness), and a summer day camp for Ste Foyan children. Their Union Sportive organized and sponsored several community soccer teams. This associational activity most certainly made a mark, although the results have been met with some ambivalence. The new festival, as I have indicated, is quantitatively successful in terms of receipts and participants, but it seems to leave most Ste Foyans indifferent or alienated. The Syndicat d'Initiative's museum, soccer field, and—eventually—campground (followed later by a tennis court) are all there, but draw few tourists and, with the exception of the soccer field, are ignored by most Ste Foyans. Many young men do use the soccer field and quite a few bourg residents have become loyal fans of the local teams. The soccer field, though, created rancor still alive twenty years later: some Ste Foyans—-especially campagne residents—considered it scandalous to appropriate good farmland for such a frivolous purpose, and are loathe to forgive either the farmer who sold it or the association which bought it. As for the Association Familiale, considerable conflict emerged around the family helper until she finally quit on the grounds of being used inappropriately as hired farm labor (e.g., to help butcher the family hog). Most of the other activities of this association have been reasonably well received, although some seem less appropriate to Ste Foy than to the more urban localities from which they were borrowed. Many older Ste Foyans, for example, attend the annual senior citizens banquet and enjoy it, but they do not generally suffer from the kind of isolation, loneliness, or marginality such activity is usually intended to counterbalance. The explicit accomplishments of these various organizations, while not altogether insignificant, have been considerably less important than their effectiveness as vehicles for demonstrating their founders' abilities to conceive and execute projects and to mobilize high-level support. For example, no one in Ste Foy much cares whether or not the community has its tiny attic-like museum (which, in any case, is almost never open). Most were impressed, however, by the array of regional and Parisian dignitaries recruited to support its founding. Similarly, the campground makes very little difference to Ste Foy,

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but bourg leaders' ability to identify and establish eligibility for substantial state subsidies to create it was duly noted with admiration. Bourg leaders made an initial assault on the town council in the 1965 local elections with Paul Clement's unsuccessful run for office. Six years later, after ten years of associational activity, he put together an opposition slate including several association activists and another one of the leaders. Although four of his candidates were elected, he had expected better results. Partly out of discouragement, Clement withdrew from his associational activity, and was replaced by his eldest son, who was also taking over the thriving Clement shoe business. Four years later, Clement's coactivist, Magrinet, did succeed in taking over the mairie, the associations finally having served their purpose. Magrinet and his associates have generally abandoned their voluntary associations once they were elected to the town council. Many of their clients have quit as well: they are now expected to vote for their patron, not join his clubs. Some of the original associations have all but disappeared, others have been taken over by new leaders, and some new ones have been founded by challengers to Magrinet. Indeed, it would seem that founding voluntary associations has come to be understood as a means by which out-groups can try to achieve a position from which to mount a challenge to established power. For example, one of the new groups, the public school parents' association, was founded in the late 1970s by Claude Dumont, a successful bourg entrepreneur opposed to Magrinet. Playing not so much on the bourg/campagne split as on a split within the bourg, this organization was established about the time that the old peaceful coexistence between the public and Catholic primary schools broke down, and was meant as a challenge to Magrinet, who was closely associated with the church, priest, and Catholic school.7 For years, there had been three one-room primary schools in the bourg serving much of the township: a public school for boys and both a public and a Catholic school for girls. Most Ste Foyans sent their daughters to the Catholic school and their sons to the public school. The girls' public school served only the daughters of the public school teachers and a few other families. The nuns running the Catholic school provided a lunchroom for children enrolled in any of the schools unable to go home for lunch (especially those from the campagne). In the late 1970s, it happened that among the families strongly supporting public schools, there were only two daughters of primary school age. Because this was below the threshold defined by state regulation allowing the school to remain open, the public school was obliged to become coeducational, divided into two classes by age. However, once the public school went coed, the Catholic school would be allowed to follow suit, and then the public 7 Magrinel's close relationship with Ste Foy's priest probably contributed to his electoral success, but was also used against him by some of his opponents. "We might just as well have gone ahead and elected the priest as mayor!" said several after his first election.

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school risked losing many of its male students as well as virtually all of its potential female students. Ste Foyan families would lose the comfortable mechanism for dividing their business between the two institutions. It was generally expected that most would opt for the church, if forced to choose between the two. There was no real alternative, though, and the public school announced plans for coeducation, followed closely by the Catholic school's announcement of similar plans. A battle erupted. The teaching nuns announced that henceforth, only children enrolled in their school would be allowed to use their lunchroom. They allegedly undertook a door-to-door campaign in the township to persuade parents to send their children to the Catholic school, on pain of various dire consequences. In the midst of this turmoil, Claude Dumont, joining forces with another bourg entrepreneur who had once been allied with Magrinet, organized a public school parents' association. This group completed the polarization of the community over the issue, first undercutting the nuns by announcing plans to open and run a lunchroom only for public school children, and then offering their own counterpropaganda to promote the public school, taking the occasion to criticize the mayor for his (at least tacit) support of the Catholic school, unbecoming of a public official.8 At the opening of the first school year of coeducation, only about one quarter of all primary school age children were enrolled in the public school while the others (including the mayor's young son) went to the Catholic school. Over the following years, the proportions shifted until, by 1984—1985, there were over sixty children in the public school and only twenty in the Catholic. Enrollment in the Catholic school continued to decline, and the school was permanently closed in 1988. Most Ste Foyans deny the influence of Claude Dumont and his organization, explaining this development in terms of the retirement of the teaching nuns and their replacement by "civilian" teachers, who were "just salaried employees and didn't pay as much attention to the kids as the nuns used to." Dumont, meanwhile, something of a gadfly, has succeeded neither in unseating Magrinet nor in vaulting himself onto the town council. He and the followers he has mobilized are nonetheless a force with which Magrinet has had to contend, pressuring him on one flank almost as much as the ostal owners on his council pressure him on another. The semiweekly lamb auction Magrinet succeeded in establishing in the bourg in the 8 1 was originally inclined to interpret this episode as another example of Ste Foyans' use of their own somewhat original terms in playing out local factional battles. Although competition between Catholic and public schools once provided a highly charged pretext for disputes of many kinds in France, I thought that this arena had long since lost its emotional appeal in most of the country. However, in 1984—six years after Ste Foy's school-centered battle erupted—record numbers of Parisians took to the streets to protest a law proposed by the Mitterand administration and aimed at increasing state control over Catholic schools, a public outpouring which, according to most observers, had more to do with broader objections to Mitterand's leadership than with support for Catholic schools per se. The use of this line of dispute by Ste Foyans, it appears, was not so locally specific after all.

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early 1980s, for example, was pushed and pulled into shape both by the demands of its ostal-owner users and by Dumont's vision of the bourg's needs (crystallizing around a confusing battle about public toilets). Ten years after Magrinet, representing the new bourg, took over the mayor's slot from the deposed Beaujot, he was still trying to manage his uneasy alliance with his council's farming majority, which has jealously protected the perceived interests of the campagne and its ostals; was under pressure by a bourg opposition for failing to adequately advance bourg interests; was criticized by the town clerk (himself reproached as overbearing by many Ste Foyans) for being an irresponsible administrator unwilling to listen to the clerk's advice; and was under attack as too autocratic by some of his constituents. (One of them painted "No to Franco!" [non a Franco] on the street in front of his house on the eve of his 1977 reelection, something most Ste Foyans found in despicable taste, whether or not they agreed with the sentiment.) In a sense, little had changed. As a visibly wealthy man from a good family, running a successful business and taking care of those who are loyal to him, Magrinet seemed likely to be returned to office, as have most mayors of Ste Foy, for as many terms as he cared to run. This seemed particularly the case insofar as Magrinet understood, as his predecessor Beaujot did not, that he is operating in a context compelling him to remain responsive to both the middling patrons of the campagne (on which his ascendancy depended) and the mobilized opposition of the bourg (which he once spearheaded). By the 1989 local elections, Magrinet's public image was slipping along all of these lines. Complaints about his autocratic leadership style had become more audible, and it was widely alleged that in township affairs he rarely consulted or informed any town councilors except a few cronies. His credibility was eroded by observations and rumors about his business and family affairs. It seemed that he had not after all succeeded in establishing a long-lived and prosperous family business or in settling his family honorably: he no longer employed any workers, all of his children had moved away, and his business was generally assumed to be failing; one of his daughters had divorced, the other was rumored to be on the brink of divorcing, and his wife, never very popular, was said to be making more trouble than ever with her indiscretions and intrusions regarding township business. Magrinet was reelected to a fourth term in 1989, but there were clear signs that he was losing control as he faced his first serious electoral challenge and the apparent reemergence of gros ostal forces. The 1989 opposition slate was organized by a bourg activist and several middling ostal owners who turned back to the gros ostals as the most credible challenge to Magrinet. They claimed that they had no intention of unseating the mayor, but wanted to remind him that he is not invincible. They therefore refrained from drawing up a complete slate, making it unlikely that they would win the majority of council seats required to choose a new mayor. All ten of

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their candidates were from ostal households, and included one of ex-mayor Beaujot's loyal deputies (owner of Ste Foy's largest ostal), as well as Beaujot's daughter-in-law, the wife of the ex-mayor's heir.9 Beaujot's other deputy was invited to join this slate but preferred not to run. The ex-deputy, in his first candidacy since 1971, emerged as one of the highest vote-getters, and Mme Beaujot a Salvetat was only narrowly defeated. Two young owners of bourg ostals, each descended from a long line of Ste Foyan town councilors, were elected from the opposition slate, as were three middling ostal owners from elsewhere in the township. With six successful opposition candidates on his new council, Magrinet faced his first opposition bloc, a larger one than that greeting Beaujot's aborted term of office. Meanwhile, two of Magrinet's staunchest allies, including a prominent bourg activist and longtime council member, were soundly defeated. Although the 1989 elections did not involve the same level of uproar as those in 1975, they did generate a great deal more electoral conflict and intrigue than usual: accusatory tracts and countertracts were distributed, secret nighttime meetings were held, bitter disputes broke out around the local priest's involvement, rumors flew, and many families stopped speaking to neighbors or kin. The community deck, it would appear, was lightly reshuffled again with considerable rancor, public opinion effectively remobilized around the old guard, and Magrinet and his allies put on notice that they could well be replaced should their opponents choose the path of restoration. If Magrinet were a less astute man, if Beaujot had been more clever, or if some other leader had emerged more powerfully, Ste Foyan social order might have evolved somewhat differently. As it happened, Ste Foy had been transformed by the end of the postwar decades in such a way that the playing field of local politics had been rearranged. Gros ostal owners could be shoved aside, at least for awhile, even if it took the cataclysm of 1975 to do so. Bourg or non-ostal interests could find and make heard a distinctive voice, even if not, ultimately, a univocal one. Nevertheless, neither the terms of the play nor its rules had much changed. Magrinet and his associates aimed for the same prize that Beaujot and his peers had long held, and took it by outplaying them at the old game. They captured power by setting themselves up as more effective and better-connected patrons than the old ones could (allegedly) any longer be. The world viewed from Ste Foy is, for example, no more egalitarian than it has ever been, and no more committed to participatory democracy. The 9 Several women have been elected to Ste Foy's town council since 1983, all of them activists in one or another association, and most of them daughters or daughters-in-law of former council members. Young Mme Beaujot would have been the first woman to be elected strictly on the basis of her family ties, in the absence of any prior experience in civic activities (i.e., on the same terms do most councilors, rather than by the route now associated with out-groups aspiring to get in). Her husband was briefly considered as a candidate, but for reasons of personality-related voter appeal, she was selected (with his blessing) as the more promising of the two.

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personnel has changed a little, and the pressure points have moved to different places again. Postwar transformations in Ste Foy had set in motion a new dynamic, leading prospective ostal brides to move to Paris and an emerging bourg leadership to challenge the old guard. By the end of this period, the brides were marrying onto ostals again, Magrinet was mayor, and another dynamic was in motion. CONCLUSIONS

The postwar decades were a period of exceptionally rapid change in Ste Foy. In making sense of this change and acting upon it, Ste Foyans have simultaneously reproduced and transformed the structures shaping local life. By the end of this period, Ste Foy was significantly different from what it had been earlier, yet its trajectory had been molded in substantially local terms, terms no less salient now than before. The two examples of change discussed in this chapter, like that treated in the previous chapter, illustrate this point, showing the deep interpenetration of various kinds of internal, external, contingent, and logical factors generating moving loci of amibiguity in successive states of disequilibrium. These two examples are also meant to illustrate the variable forms of human agency in such processes. In each of these cases, people self-consciously acted differently than they had before, in response to changes both in the range of perceived possibilities and in felt discomfort or tensions in the social order. Both generated further consequential change, although in neither case did the consequences altogether match the intentions of the actors. The migration of potential ostal brides was a more impersonal movement, in the sense that it occurred relatively independently of the particular personalities implicated. It involved decisions by individuals to deal with a situation judged unsatisfactory by removing themselves from it, rather than by trying to reorder it. The events surrounding the municipal crisis, in contrast, depended relatively more heavily on the individual personalities who orchestrated or manipulated them. In this case, persons dissatisfied with their situation tried to change it by quite explicitly playing upon historically specific structural ambiguities in an attempt to engineer a social reordering. As it happened, women's migration in fact posed a more serious menace to the local ostal system, threatening for a time to undermine quite literally its capacity to reproduce itself. The municipal crisis, on the other hand, because it was necessarily played out around the historically situated and locally meaningful terms of the ostal system, was, in effect, a vehicle for the reproduction of that system, albeit in somewhat modified form. It cannot be concluded that one sort of change process is necessarily more consequential than the other. A more satisfactory conclusion is that, while change is an ongoing generator and result of human action, the degree and

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kind of intentionality in such action is widely variable, as is the misfit between intent and consequence. Furthermore, the intentions of actors and consequences of actions, however disconnected, are inevitably bounded, both historically and structurally. People are unlikely to be altogether unconscious or passive receptors of the circumstances under which they live, but they are not entirely in control or necessarily conscious of them either. People invent— more or less purposively—novel ways to manage their lives out of the stuff they perceive to be available to them, and then make what they can from the results as they understand them. Ste Foy is as it is today partly because it is a contemporary French agricultural community, partly because it is an Aveyronnais community located within the Roquefort radius, and partly because it is the home of Joseph Catala, Mayors Magrinet and Beaujot, and the rest. It has changed a great deal over time and undoubtedly will continue to do so, but just as certainly will continue along a trajectory enough of its own making to remain discernibly different from that traced elsewhere.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conclusions CLOSING SCENES

my first trip to Ste Foy in 1975 and my most recent in 1989, there has been no obvious driving force of accelerated change comparable to the economic transformation of the previous decades. Nevertheless, neither the group of people living there nor the relationships among them have stayed quite the same. The Ste Foyans I knew have, in the interim, grown up, aged, died, moved away, come back, or stayed pretty much the same as they were when I first met them. Some families which had been bitter enemies had become close allies and vice versa. In 1975, it seemed that many ostals would die out for want of an ongoing male line, but by 1989, virtually all of them included a young man who had succeeded or expected to succeed his father as owner of the farm and transmitter of the line. By 1989, there was a new priest, several new schoolteachers, and a new discotheque. A second doctor had settled in the bourg and left again within months, and it was rumored that a veterinarian was planning to come set up a practice. Both of the cheese dairies in the township had been closed, and there was much talk about the milk production quotas instituted by the Roquefort firms. No one milked ewes by hand anymore, and almost all ostals were enrolled in the genetic selection program for ewe herds offered (for a fee) by the departemental extension service. The local tourist trade still had not materialized. In the summer of 1989, the recent elections for the European parliament elicited as little interest in Ste Foy as anywhere else in France, and television coverage of the quashing of Chinese student demonstrations as much. The upcoming bicentennial of the French Revolution was a matter of resounding indifference. The annual motorcycle race, Association Familiale trips, and monthly fairs continued, by all accounts, much as I had seen them. I had been struck, on a return trip in 1985, by the introduction of Bastille Day celebrations in Ste Foy. This seemed interpretable as a new development in the community's relationship with the rest of France, partly because it involved participation in a patriotic national holiday which had previously gone unmarked, and partly because it took the form of a "return to the roots" of urbanized, folklorized versions of local tradition. Organized as a fund-raising event by the soccer team, the celebration in 1985 included a community "country meal" (repas campagnard) composed of traditional Rouergat dishes. Under some conditions, such food undoubtedly has enough nostalgic appeal to compensate for its inferior quality when mass produced, but most Ste Foyans, who are after all country people (campagnards), still routinely BETWEEN

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Fig. 7.1. Fair day in Ste Foy, 1990: Monthly sheep auction in the new covered market. A merchant {right, in black smock) and a producer negotiate a deal. (R. Bru)

eat it at home. Following the meal was a performance by an urban folklore company of Rouergat dances and stories in patois, familiar to most of the audience but made exotic by the "folk" costumes, unknown specialist performers, and spectacle mode. I was sorry to have missed the previous year's celebration, which had had an Alsatian theme. I was a bit chagrined that many Ste Foyans clearly found such pleasure in what struck me as a woefully distorted rendition of their own culinary and oral traditions, but was intrigued that they judged even this to be radically different from and decidedly superior to the pure exoticism of Alsatian food and folk performance. Neither Bastille Day nor this type of performance took root in Ste Foy, however, and apparently no one there had given it the significance I had. Abandoned by the time I returned in 1989, those festivities had been all but forgotten until I asked about them, and then were dismissed with "Oh yes, now I remember; well, that only lasted a few years." Subsequently, another form of public "folk" performance was introduced by a former teaching nun who had returned to her native Ste Foy to retire. In the winter of 1989, she recruited several groups of older Ste Foyans—mainly from old ostal families—to prepare a spring weekend of theatrical evenings in Ste Foy's town hall with a program of skits and one-act plays in the patois as well as several folk-dance numbers. The months of rehearsal coincided with the period around the 1989 local elections, so a few of the acts had to be recast

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to accommodate election-related conflicts. Then several elderly cast members suffered physical breakdowns after the intensity of final rehearsals and the excitement of performance. Nonetheless, the experiment was unanimously judged a success, meriting institution as an annual event. The performers said that despite the hard work involved, they enjoyed getting together regularly with each other and having something to do all winter; many of their families were no less appreciative of having parents and in-laws occupied off the farm; and the show itself was enthusiastically received at each of its sold-out performances. I would hesitate to guess whether the novelty of Ste Foyan elders dressing up in elaborate costumes and performing patois skits to audiences of their neighbors, children, and grandchildren will be as enduring as the inclusion of motorcycle races in the patron saint festival or as short-lived as the folkloric Bastille Day celebrations. Much of the talk in Ste Foy during the summer of 1989 turned around the latest local elections, held a few months earlier. Like the elections I had been able to observe fourteen years before, these involved many appealingly scandalous stories and a wide array of conflicting interpretations and justifications of what had and had not happened. Most people agreed that the mayor had grown too complacent after a succession of uneventful elections and that the embroilments around those of 1989 had enlivened the winter months, but that it was unfortunate for so much bitter animosity to have resurfaced within the community. The 1975 elections were a frequent point of reference in those discussions, although many people had since forgotten the details of what had happened then and were surprised that I remembered so clearly. Others had been too young at the time to have paid much attention; some of the younger candidates, for example, were astonished to learn in the course of the 1989 campaign just how serious and divisive the 1975 crise had been. For me, the 1989 election was much more readily understandable than had been the events of 1975. This was partly because it was less cataclysmic, but mainly because I was more familiar with the developments over the preceding years and had already deciphered the terms, rules, and stakes at play. The 1989 elections were by no means either a repetition of or an inevitable sequel to those of 1975, but the sense I had made out of one was quite readily adjustable to the other. I have understood and remembered structure, change, and people in Ste Foy for different reasons and in different ways than have the actors themselves. But what has become of Ste Foy since the year I lived there reinforces my certainty that Ste Foyans—like all of us—are indeed engaged in an ongoing process of reproduction and transformation, bounded by the kinds of structural and historical constraints I have described, but ultimately rendered unpredictable by the human capacity to creatively invent or manipulate novelty in old terms and continuity in new circumstances. These pictures provide a reminder that change is ongoing, although its pace and the clarity with which we perceive it are variable. Individual and collec-

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Fig. 7.2. Bourg of Ste Foy, 1990. In the foreground is one of the new houses built on the outskirts. Note the plaster rooster in the yard. (R. Bru)

tive circumstances shift relentlessly in ways that are rarely either entirely controllable or altogether unmanageable by the various actors involved. The sense that people—myself, any Ste Foyan, or anyone else—make out of the inherently unstable world in which they find themselves allows them to act in and upon it, simultaneously reproducing and transforming it. Ste Foy continues to follow its particular trajectory, shaped at once by widely shared forces of change, the specific terms by which Ste Foyans understand and act upon these, and the resultant movement of perceived possibilities and loci of tension. A subtheme of these fragments is the variation with which events past and present may be remembered and given meaning. Our memory is interpretive, operating as a function and reproductive mechanism of how we understand both the world and the kinds of knowledge needed to act within it. Although I have tried to understand the terms by which Ste Foyans order their world, and did so well enough to be able to participate in it for a time, I am an American anthropologist who studies rural France, not a Ste Foyan. I think in quite different ways from them, find order on different terms, and have ultimately used my knowledge of Ste Foy to be able to act in my world, not theirs. As a result, my memory and interpretation of events in Ste Foy only partly overlap theirs. The sense I have made out of the municipal crisis, for example, seems consistent on the whole with the conscious knowledge and subsequent actions of most Ste Foyans. But they continue to participate in the ongoing saga of local

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politics—as I do not—without necessarily remembering the same details of the events of 1975 as I do, and certainly without drawing quite the same lessons from these. Some have forgotten what they once knew and others have had to learn bits, now considered relevant, of a sequence of events to which they paid little attention at the time. I, like all Ste Foyans, have interested reasons for understanding Ste Foy, but insofar as our reasons and our frames of reference are different, so too is how we remember, interpret, and use the same events. A particularly stark example is the Bastille Day celebration, which seemed from my perspective quite significant, memorable, and consistent both with standard ideas about contemporary rural France and some of my ideas about Ste Foy. In that case, however, subsequent events led me to conclude that my initial interpretation, however plausible it seemed, was probably unfounded. Quickly abandoned and forgotten by Ste Foyans, Bastille Day in Ste Foy remains quite fresh in my memory as an example of the limits of my acquired understanding of that place, the manner in which we all use retrospection to shape our constructions of "reality" past and present, and the pitfalls of drawing sweeping generalizations from one scene of an ongoing play. The same kind of warning certainly applies to the impulse to draw broad generalizations from small and out-of-the-way places. Nonetheless, my purpose in examining Ste Foy in some detail has not been simply to provide a description of a rural French community. Rather, I have meant to use the case of Ste Foy to gain insights into contemporary France, family history, processes of social change, and the significance of culture in modem societies. In the pages that remain, I shall draw together some of the ramifications for these larger domains implied by the analysis developed in the preceding chapters. ON FRANCE

This inquiry began with my perplexity about how two modem French agricultural communities could remain so different from each other with respect to social structure and systems of cultural meaning. My observation of diversity is perplexing only if one assumes that modernization necessarily involves sociocultural homogenization, at least within such a highly centralized nationstate as France. I have resolved the initial dilemma by suggesting that the kinds of historical transformations experienced in France (as elsewhere) involve the reproduction rather than the obliteration of sociocultural specificities. The course of change, therefore, proceeds along an array of trajectories only partly defined by widely shared forces. It logically follows that a thoroughly modem community in the Aveyron should remain quite different from an equally modern one in the Lorraine, and that France continues to be as socioculturally diverse as it ever was. But then the question of how to think about France as a coherent whole becomes salient. What does it mean to say,

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as one most certainly can, that Ste Foy and Ste Foyans are French, or to talk about France as an identifiable entity, distinguishable from, say, Germany or Japan? The argument I have developed undermines two conventional strategies for doing so. First, it can be concluded that postwar Ste Foy, like any other single group, time, or place, represents no more than one particular variant among many others and cannot legitimately be taken as France writ small. My line of argument leads inexorably to the position that one cannot purport to have described "France" (or even rural France) by, for example, finding a "typical" French village to describe, for the simple reason that no such beast can exist. Indeed, my justification for focusing on the example of Ste Foy was not based on any claim of representativeness. On the contrary, it is a strategic case for my purposes because its configuration of particularities could be expected to render especially visible the processes I meant to explore. Second, it follows just as surely that one cannot expect to adequately grasp "France" directly from a reading of those many formal institutional arrangements, administrative decrees, or proclamations of powerful decision-makers which emanate from the center and are intended to have a nationally uniform effect. An important conclusion of my argument is that these cannot in fact yield uniform results because they are apt to be creatively understood and used in a variety of socioculturally specific ways. The strictures of French inheritance law or the official goals of the national education system, for example, tell us very little about actual inheritance patterns or the variety of meanings attached to formal education. In this domain as in any other, intent cannot be mistaken for consequence: that the various creations of the centralized state are meant to define a single France does not mean that they literally do or can. These reservations apply, however, only in terms of simple description. At higher levels of abstraction, Ste Foy can be taken as exemplary and France can be said to be held together as a coherent entity by its centralized formal institutions. Although the particular trajectory of change I have described is specifically Ste Foyan, there is no reason to believe that the general dynamic by which it is traced is different from that anywhere else. The locally specific ostal system, for instance, provides a convenient example but not a causal explanation of the intermeshing of historical conditions with sociocultural structures and the inventiveness with which people operate within and upon these. That is, it can reasonably be expected that the kind of process I have identified would be found among groups not having an ostal system, or, for that matter, Roquefort cheese, Mayor Magrinet, or any of the other elements and persons defining Ste Foy's specificity. By the same token, a similar general dynamic should be discernible at scales of analysis other than individual communities. Although I have argued that sociocultural specificities are reproduced over time, I have also argued that ongoing trajectories of change are not defined

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solely by such specificities. Shifting patterns of migration in Ste Foy, for example, have been shaped by the evolution of ostal household organization in conjunction with changing opportunities in urban France. Widely shared forces of change are not necessarily stronger determinants than more specific impulses, but neither are they apt to be inconsequential. The environment within and upon which people act comprises both intertwined. Among those forces that may be considered "widely shared" from the perspective of individual French communities are some which are shared by all of them and are specific to France. These include most obviously those myriad national institutions, centralized administrations, mandates for uniformity within the French hexagon, and indeed the long-entrenched habit of participating in a highly centralized and bureaucratic nation-state. Various groups within France make what they will of the national education system, for example, rendering its effects far less uniform than intended, but all of them must necessarily make something out of the same formally constituted system. Although its official parameters do not directly determine how it is understood and used, they do partly define the range of possibilities. I have shown, for example, that the rules defining the ostal system help to shape a moving range of variation and configuration of tensions in Ste Foyan family organization different from those observable where other family structures prevail. Similarly, the national education system as instituted in France partly defines a range of variation and tension over time and place, different from that found in the context of other systems of education and therefore identifiable as specifically French. That is, it is as meaningful to talk about French patterns of education as to talk about Ste Foyan patterns of family organization, even though neither can be adequately summarized by a simple recitation of the rules and regulations defining its formal structure or by reference only to its observable manifestations at any one time or constituent place (e.g., farm in Ste Foy or community in France). In France, the ubiquitous national apparatus also operates in a more powerful and paradoxical manner to define a sense of coherent French identity. Although it can be demonstrated quite easily that national institutions are understood and used in a variety of ways with a range of consequences, this diversity is not generally perceived. Rather, it is more readily supposed that one is French partly by virtue of participating in the same multitude of national institutions on substantially the same terms as all other French; shared (French) forma! rules, regulations, and structures are understood to necessarily generate shared (French) practices and impacts. For example, from his study of the geography of contemporary French inheritance practices based on a questionnaire administered to notaires charged with drawing up legal wills, Pierre Lamaison made two apparently contradictory observations. First, there persist sharply marked regional variations in inheritance patterns, clearly evident in notarial practices as reported by notaires themselves. However, most

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notaires are persuaded that they are simply applying the national law exactly as do notaires throughout France (Lamaison 1988, 120-21). That is, notaires (and presumably their clients) are engaged in region-specific practices but do not recognize them as such, instead supposing them to be generally French, defined uniquely by the strictures of national law. Similarly, I have provided a number of examples indicating that Ste Foyans make something identifiably Ste Foyan from many of the "national" institutions in which they are involved. In general, however, no Ste Foyan would describe such behavior as anything but generically French. The national education system, judicial apparatus, body of agricultural policy, local political structure, and the rest are all understood as being defined elsewhere and used in Ste Foy much as they are everywhere in France. This does not always involve claims that one is simply following the letter of national law (as in the case of notaires drawing up wills). Rather, systeme Dl may sometimes be brought into play. This well-known national sport, the art of getting around any kind of obstacle, is as ubiquitous in France as the bureaucratic structures it renders manageable. Some individuals may be recognized and admired as especially adroit players, but the game is not understood as having local or regional variants. When Ste Foyans, for example, deliberately ignore or twist some national mandate in a way I would identify as specifically Ste Foyan, they frequently perceive such behavior as a response common to any reasonably alert and clever French person, as nationally uniform as the mandate inspiring it. Another response, also understood as universally French in content as well as form, is to complain about state-sponsored actions. "Les francais sont des raleurs" (the French are complainers) is a formula frequently invoked in Ste Foy (as elsewhere), sometimes as one of a series of complaints and sometimes as a kind of nationalist justification provided at the end of such a series. The implication is that by complaining about France or the French state one is simply expressing a generically French identity. By way of contrast, many French, in Ste Foy as elsewhere, find it difficult to understand how the United States can function with its wide variation by state and municipality in statutes and public institutions. The fact that Americans, although perhaps as theoretically equal before the law as the French, actually stand before different laws and have access to different institutions depending upon where in the United States they happen to live generally strikes French sensibilities as bafflingly chaotic and unjust. No less mystifying is the relative paucity of services provided or mandated by the American federal government, as compared to those assured by the French centralized state. For example, one discussion which Ste Foyans initiated frequently enough with me for it to become almost a ritual incantation consisted of my reciting, 1 The ' ' D ' ' stands for debrouille (polite version) or demerde (vulgar version), both meaning to straighten out or manage.

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to their chorus of astonished exclamations, a variety of state-sponsored services which are not federally mandated in the United States but which they can take for granted as French citizens (e.g., national health insurance, paid maternity leave, annual one-month paid vacations). The exercise undoubtedly had the effect of reconfirming both their specifically French identity and their sense of good fortune for possessing it. These observations would suggest that Ste Foyans, like most other French, find it appropriate that the state should actively intervene in many aspects of everyday life, and that it should do so without much explicit regard to the specific sensibilities or desires of any particular spatially or socioculturally defined group. It also follows that the essence of Frenchness is understood to derive in important measure from participation on substantially identical French terms in a single French formal apparatus, participation taken to include the right (or duty) to complain and to cleverly subvert, but not the power to define. I have argued that people notice, remember, and order information in ways that make sense and are useful to them. What Ste Foyans know to be true of the evolution of family organization in their community, for example, runs directly counter to the empirical evidence I have drawn from their census records. The history they construct effectively provides legitimization of the ostal model in the "what used to be" and also supports an image of the community as one that is thoroughly modern and French. My construction, on the other hand, is more in keeping with certain rules of scholarly inference and the appeal of the interestingly counterintuitive, of more relevance to me and my interests. Each vision is reasonably consistent with one set of perspectives and ends, and quite undermining of the other; there is no reason to expect Ste Foyans to abandon their version in favor of mine, nor vice versa. In a parallel manner, what the French believe to be true about the homogenizing powers of the center and the weight of their formally uniform national institutions runs directly counter to considerable empirical evidence which could be mustered to the contrary. It might be argued that the shared belief in the uniform effects of participation in national institutions—the will and ability to overlook patterned diversity of implementation and consequence—is crucial to the construction and maintenance of a coherent France and French identity. That is, the various creations of the centralized state do, in a sense, define a single France. They do so, however, not by any "real" homogenizing effect but as a "real" consequence of providing a basis for belief in the existence of such a France. The "cracked mirror" to which Agulhon has referred in describing the sociocultural diversity of nineteenth-century France remains cracked, but it does not shatter because the cracks are effectively masked. This sleight of hand does generate a variety of tensions and contradictions, suggested, for example, by the regionalist movements that have emerged periodically throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century French history. These have taken a variety of forms and political colors over time and place, but

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have generally been premised both on the "French'' notion that the centralized state and the dominant "civilization" it promotes are overwhelming, and on the oppositional position that these ill-serve or threaten to destroy region-specific identities and interests that are themselves real and legitimate. Such movements, however, have rarely generated much broad-based support or survived for long. French realities have recurrently provided the stuff from which to construct regionalist discourses emphasizing regional specificities cast in opposition to the nation-state, but have also prevented such discourse from being very widely compelling. For example, my fieldwork in Ste Foy was conducted at the height of one period of regionalist activism in France (1970s) and squarely within the territory of one of the more visible regionalisms (Occitanie). However, I saw little evidence in Ste Foy, elsewhere in the Aveyron, or among the established Aveyronnais community in Paris that the regionalist discourse, developed largely in intellectual circles in Toulouse, prompted other than indifference slightly colored by ridicule or hostility. Occitane regionalism was considered a matter of concern to "powerful people" in the regional center of Toulouse, a matter not implicating "ordinary people" any more than do the machinations of powerful persons in the national capital of Paris. At the same time, although Aveyronnais (like many other French) do maintain a strong sense of regional identity, this is generally understood as a private matter, in no way opposed to an equally strong French identity. They complain a great deal about the French state, but understand their discontent as part of the French condition, rather than as particular to their southern, Aveyronnais, or Ste Foyan status. Those distinguishing traits that are consciously displayed are apt to be labeled as "Rouergat": cuisine, stories, sayings, and so on which are pleasurable and colorful, but ultimately either intimate or folkloric and trivial remnants of a bygone era. As I have indicated, in most important areas of life and certainly in all public or civic arenas, Ste Foyans and others are inclined to believe themselves to be treated and to respond as French persons, virtually like any others; the notion that this might not or should not be so is apt to be understood as nonsensical or offensive. This way of thinking underlies the discomfort and unrest currently evident in France in response to assertions by so-called immigrant populations (especially those of North African origin) of their legitimate right to maintain and publicly display specific cultural identities. Many of these "immigrants" are in fact children of immigrants, who were born and raised in France and have legal French citizenship. Although they are, strictly speaking, French nationals who never immigrated anywhere, they are apt to be understood as foreigners living on French soil insofar as, by virtue of a foreign ancestry, they insist upon—or are perceived as—introducing "foreign" institutions and participating in French institutions on other than "French" terms. See, for example, Dominique Schnapper's definition and proposed solution to the problem of

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cultural pluralism in France: "foreign" populations, she argues, can and should retain their "cultural particularisms," because these can well be expressed in private and need not interfere with the adoption of "Frenchness" (i.e., abandonment of "particularisms") in public and civic arenas (Schnapper 1987; cf. Beriss 1990). That is, cultural pluralism is understood as directly opposed to French national identity, but it poses no real threat if the opposition is constructed as a private/public one, preserving the latter by keeping the former substantially out of sight.2 This line of argument suggests a solution to the dilemma of the "two Frances." Insofar as transformative change involves the reproduction of sociocultural specificities, the France composed of a strikingly diverse array of socioculturally distinct regions and localities persists. This France does not stand in an evolutionary relationship to the France that is a strikingly centralized nation-state; the former has not given way over time to the latter. Neither do the two stand in any relation of mutually exclusive opposition; at least during the historical period of interest here, the one exists as surely as the other. Rather, they may be understood as dialectically related, fulfilling and preserving each other. Sociocultural specificities are reproduced in part via the local processing of national institutions and mandates which themselves operate to provide a sense of coherent Frenchness by masking those specificities. "France" is, in fact, a massive contradiction, a construct which, like the ostal, cannot work, but nonetheless persists. Also suggested by this view is the existence of a system of cultural meanings and social structure identifiable as specifically French, including among many other threads certain ideas about the appropriate role and weight of the state. The French entity is obviously a great deal more complex than any one of its component parts (e.g., Ste Foy). It comprises a much wider range of groups and individuals distinguishable along many dimensions, including their situation with respect to the whole and their access to power of various sorts. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to think about France in terms of sociocultural structures which are as coherent, internally ambiguous and contradictory, resilient, and mam'pulable as those I have described in Ste Foy. One can also think about French trajectories of change in the same terms that I have used to talk about change in Ste Foy. That is, French sociocultural specificities are 2

In many ways, French discomfort with overt displays and claims to legitimacy of salient cultural difference, and the offense this represents to national identity, are comparable to American responses to the assertion of difference based on social class. Most Americans claim to belong to the middle class, rejecting as offensively un-American evidence of real or legitimate class distinction, although they readily accept the legitimacy of ethnic distinctions among Americans. In a parallel fashion, ethnicity is problematic in France but social class is not. Most French consider themselves of unconditionally French cultural extraction and have difficulty conceiving an alternative, although class distinctions within this unity are understood as both legitimate and palatable.

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reproduced in the course of widely shared historical transformations, as both are acted upon with varying degrees of intentionality by interested actors. This conceptualization is consistent, for example, with recent revisionist interpretations of French nineteenth-century economic history. A classic problem in this domain has been to explain the retardation of French industrialization; standard solutions refer to particular policy decisions or cultural, social, or material factors understood to have impeded a "normal" pace of industrialization (e.g., Landes 1949; Cameron 1958; Clough 1972; Kemp 1971; cf. Kindleberger 1964). In a revisionist view, the problem is recast as a false one: France was retarded only if one takes a particular interpretation of English industrialization as a universal standard. Instead, it may be argued that France changed in the same general direction as other industrializing powers of the time, influenced by many of the same large-scale forces, but that, understandably enough, it followed a specifically French course rather than a specifically English one. From this perspective, the decisions of individual French policymakers and other actors, as well as the social, cultural, and natural environments within and upon which they acted, are better understood as having helped to shape what did happen, rather than as preventing what did not (e.g., Roehl 1976; O'Brien and Keyder 1978; Asselain 1984; cf. Marczewski 1963). Just as sociocultural specificities within France have neither braked nor withered away under the transformational effects of national integration, so the sociocultural specificities of France neither impeded nor succumbed to industrialization. The processes at work are dialectical, mutually secreting, not oppositional. This perspective also undermines some of the more excessive predictions about the homogenizing impact of the European Economic Community reforms scheduled to take effect in 1992. These reforms amount to a series of formally instituted agreements and arrangements designed to promote further uniformity and integration among the member nations. Like those French institutions meant to have a uniform and integrative impact within the nation, these will undoubtedly carry consequential change but will just as certainly fail to produce the intended (or feared) effect of European homogeneity. Just as French institutions are creatively used in a variety of socioculturally specific ways, so EEC institutions are likely to be understood and used in ways specific to each of the member nations, preventing uniformity of effect. Paradoxically, such international institutions may well operate as one of the mechanisms by which those national specificities are reproduced. Indeed, this has been the case over the thirty years since the European Community was formally established, as illustrated, for example, in the analyses compiled by Meny (1985) of striking national variations in the implementation of a variety of EEC decisions and regulations. At this scale of analysis as at any other, neither widely shared institutional or historical forces nor the intentions of decision-makers, however powerful, are sufficiently strong to fully determine the course of

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change. As the European nations continue to change, each is bound to proceed along its own trajectory, defined in part by its specificities in interaction with the formal institutions in which they all participate as these are perceived and acted upon by various interested players. There is no more reason to expect that France will ever become indistinguishable from England or Germany than to expect the Aveyron to become just like the Lorraine or Brittany. It may well be that French fears of losing national identity in a European soup are as great as both France's fabled recalcitrance in asserting its national interests in community affairs and the French belief that France's own internal diversity has been substantially dissolved by centralized institutions and official mandates. In fact, because there is little evidence, for the moment at least, that Europeans share a belief in or desire for ' 'Europeanness" comparable to that which I have noted with respect to "Frenchness," it appears unlikely that the reproduction of national specificities within the EEC can be as effectively masked as that of regional specificities within France. It is rather a long way from postwar Ste Foy to reinterpretations of French economic history, much less speculation about post-1992 Europe, even if each is implicated in various large and small ways with the others. Clearly, no plausible prediction of what could happen in the EEC can be read directly from what Ste Foyans might think about it, nor can Ste Foy's circumstances be much understood from proclamations made in Brussels or Strasbourg. However, a close look at the dynamics of change in one manageably small and relatively simple case like Ste Foy can offer insights that illuminate processes at work in larger-scale, more complex, and therefore less readily accessible contexts like France or the EEC. Indeed, although the analysis I have developed has been generated by the example of Ste Foy, the most relevant test of its power and usefulness is not so much its ability to account for what I have observed in Ste Foy, a place and group that is, after all, of no particular inherent importance to any but a small handful of us. Rather, the lessons learned in Ste Foy are credible and valuable insofar as they help to make sense of what we can observe in other places and times and at other scales. 1 have suggested some of the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn about an entity like France from an examination of one like Ste Foy. It remains to be seen where these might lead. ON FAMILY HISTORY

If insights based on observations in Ste Foy can, with some care, be applied to larger-scale units of analysis, they may also be applied to more general phenomena. Ste Foy is not France, but my analysis of Ste Foy reveals a dynamic of change that suggests potentially useful ways to understand France. Similarly, Ste Foy's ostal system is but one variant of a kind of family system found in many areas of southern Europe. This kind of family system is itself

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one of many in Europe, and one that has undoubtedly drawn a degree of attention from scholars of the family far disproportionate to its importance by most other measures. The Ste Foyan ostal system cannot be considered representative of European families or even necessarily of southern European stem family systems. It does, however, provide a strategic case insofar as its peculiarities and the manner in which they have been recorded within the French context render the dynamics of change especially visible. Here too, at a level of abstraction beyond simple description, the ostal system may be taken as exemplary, offering insights into general questions about the ways in which family organization is reproduced and transformed. The history of the family as manifested in Ste Foy initially appeared to have taken a curiously contrary turn, with an "archaic" form of family organization becoming increasingly evident as the community became more "modern." This evolution, however, seems backward only if we begin with the assumption that family history is one of convergence toward a single kind of nuclear family model which we label "modern" and which must necessarily displace all others (logically labeled "archaic"). If, on the contrary, we assume that family systems, like other kinds of sociocultural specificities, are reproduced in the course of historical transformation, then the failure of one kind of structure to wither away under the putatively more compelling weight of another is not surprising at all. The apparent contradiction of an archaic family system in a modern community can be resolved by relabeling that "archaic" form, considering it instead to be as "modern" as any. This implies a re framing of the project. If there is no convergence, then family history does not move in any particular (universal) direction. Rather than asking how family systems evolve over time along a homogenizing course of change, we should ask how diversity of family organization is reproduced in the course of change. The most easily retrievable picture of a given family system is apt to be based on written or oral evidence of patterns of family organization, one kind of behavioral trace of a continually unfolding dynamic. This dynamic, I have argued, is defined by the structured notions of "what ought to be" that shape people's perceptions of the possible and the desirable, by the manner in which they act upon these under continually shifting individual and collective circumstances, and by the structural and contextual ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions that emerge or disappear as they do so. Observable patterns of family organization necessarily change over time because the conditions within and upon which people act necessarily change. Family structures— rules for behavior and notions of the appropriate—are simultaneously reproduced as people use them to order and manage those shifting circumstances, thereby permitting action. Specific trajectories of reproduction and transformation, then, are generated by the interpenetration of sociocultural structure, historically located circumstance, and inventive human action upon both. The case of Ste Foy provides a particularly convenient example of how such

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a dynamic works. The ostal model, as defined by contemporary Ste Foyans, is an elegant and clearly articulated structure, providing the terms by which they distinguish, order, and give meaning to social categories and conduct. Two important characteristics of this structure (stem family households and male primogeniture inheritance) are obviously distinctive features in the French context and are expressed in behavior reliably recorded over considerable time in frequent censuses. In the context of Ste Foy, census data provide especially revealing and easily retrievable information about changing patterns of family organization because the ostal system revolves around the succession of households associated with a family permanently fixed in a named location. This means, first, that the household as defined in the census is no less significant to Ste Foyans than to census-takers and, second, that families can easily be traced through time with reference to the households found at a given location in successive censuses. Census data would be less usable or useful for my purposes in the context of a family structure not having such a convenient mechanism for linking censused households through time (e.g., where families are expected to be mobile or to disperse over time) or of one in which coresidence is less significant (e.g., where family ties among households are as important as those within them). That is, the nature of family structure, the kinds of data recorded in French censuses, and my interests all happen to coincide in such a way that it was an easy matter to construct data series permitting measurable change in patterns of family organization to be traced over time. These could then be analyzed in terms of other changes occurring simultaneously in Ste Foy, Ste Foyan perceptions of local family history, and the ostal model itself. A number of general conclusions may be drawn about the dynamic relationships among these various dimensions comprising the family system. First, socioculturally specific family structures clearly help to shape trajectories of change in observable family organization. It would, for example, be impossible to explain why patterns of Ste Foyan household composition evolved as they did without reference to the ostal model. As it happens, this case is a particularly self-evident one because, in the context of contemporary France, there is no other readily apparent explanation for increasing rates of stem family households or male primogeniture inheritance. There is no reason to believe, however, that family structures are any less consequential when they are less distinctive and therefore do not carry such immediately obvious weight. At the same time, it is clear enough—and hardly surprising—that observable patterns of family organization do not perfectly coincide with the rules defining family structure, even where the latter appear to be quite clear-cut and the subject of considerable consensus in principle. No structure can be so fully and unambiguously elaborated as to account for all real eventualities, nor do people always find it possible to take the course of action they consider

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most desirable, even when there is no ambiguity about what that might be. A more interesting observation forthcoming from the Ste Foyan data is that the degree of fit between formal structure and observable behavior may vary considerably over time. This is readily explainable with reference to changing circumstances which make the desirable more or less possible. The Ste Foyan ostal model, for example, is not very practical under severely constrained economic circumstances; as economic constraints relaxed in Ste Foy, observable patterns of behavior came to conform more closely to the model. Similarly, in middle-class American families, adult children are expected to establish themselves independently at standards of living meeting or surpassing those of their parents. Under conditions prevailing in the 1950s, many were able to do so, while during the 1980s, this pattern has become less feasible, generating the perceived problem of "boomerang children."3 These two examples together suggest that there is no inevitable direction of change in the degree of discrepancy between the appropriate and the possible. Defined by the intersection of structure and circumstance, the gap between the two may narrow over time (as in the ostal example) or widen (as in the boomerang example); in the long ran, it undoubtedly does not change in linear fashion. The distinction 1 have drawn between relatively stable family structures and more changeable patterns of family organization is not necessarily acknowledged by the actors themselves. They may be inclined to blur the two, overlooking or perceiving as problematic differential rates of change along these two dimensions. For example, people may suppose that behavior has been, is, or should be as timeless as the rules guiding it, leading them to underestimate past behavioral or structural change, or to overestimate the width, abnormality, and deleterious effects of acknowledged gaps between rules and behavior in the present. Ste Foyans, for instance, often express ideas about what "ought to be" in terms of what "people used to do." They overlooked the increase in numbers of stem family households in their community over the last few generations, and interpreted acknowledged change in marriage patterns during the 1970s as a sign of structural disarray and decay: "No one follows the rules anymore." Similarly, recurrent "death of the family" commentaries in the United States could be taken as evidence that Americans are just as inclined 3 Note that the boomerang phenomenon aiso provides an example of the distinction to be drawn between relatively stable structures and more changeable patterns of behavior, as well as the manner in which structures help to define perceived problems, possibilities, and tensions. If the coresidence of adult children and their parents is perceived as a problem in middle-class America, it is because this residence pattern and intergenerational downward social mobility both continue to be considered inappropriate, even if practical circumstances have evolved in a way making it difficult to avoid one or the other. In the context of a different family structure, such as the Ste Foyan ostal model, neither the coresidence of some adult children with their parents nor the downward social mobility of the others would be considered a problem at all. In Ste Foy, the inappropriateness of a boomerang effect, at least for some categories of children, would derive from the sending away, not from the coming back.

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to think of "the family" in terms of rules and notions of the appropriate assumed to be timeless and absolute, to underestimate or overlook evidence of ongoing change, and to interpret acknowledged behavioral change, structural contradiction, or desirable/possible discrepancies at present as signifying the destruction of the structure itself. By the same token, those who see behavioral change and the dismantling of existing structures in a more positive light are inclined to overestimate structural mutability. The return of American women to the workplace over the last several decades, for example, though certainly not inconsequential in terms of family organization, has failed to generate the kind of revolution in family structure that many of us expected. These examples suggest that actors' perceptions of pathologically rapid or retarded change are best taken seriously as potentially consequential sources of tension and action propelling further change in the system, rather than as literal descriptions of the dynamics of change. Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the Ste Foyan case is that the power of a formal structure as a guide to behavior and its likelihood of being reproduced over time do not necessarily derive directly from its feasibility in practice. On the contrary, the ostal model was apparently kept alive over those generations prior to World War I when most families were unable to adhere very closely to it in reality. Over the century and a half considered here, the only period in which the ostal structure seemed in imminent danger of collapse was during the 1960s and early 1970s, when more families than ever before were able to organize themselves in accordance with it. It was the tensions and conflicts generated by people's ability to do as they consider appropriate, not their frustrations at aspiring to an unobtainable goal, that threatened to undermine (in a literal sense) the reproductive capacity of the ostal system.4 As it happened, this system was shored up by local responses to the crisis, combined with subsequent changes in the larger French context. The ostal system appears as alive today as ever, resilient to a wide range of practical adversity. This case does not after all provide evidence that such structures necessarily cave in under the weight of widespread practical realization, but it does suggest that a narrowing of the inevitable discrepancy between the possible and the desirable can be more rather than less likely to undermine the capacity for continued structural reproduction. This argument would imply that family structures have a kind of essential arbitrariness with respect to simple materialist or functionalist considerations. Socioculturally specific structure is reproduced in the course of historical transformation, operating as a powerful code and filter under changing circumstances and highly variable possibilities for practical realization. By the 4 This point suggests a rather pessimistic observation about the human condition in general: the luster of one's aspirations is sometimes easier to keep alive when they go unfulfilled than when one has to confront the disappointments and difficulties engendered by satisfied desires.

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same token, widely shared forces of historical change generate not one but an array of trajectories, each defined in part by socioculturally specific structures. In this view, the possibility of explaining the origins or persistence of a given family structure directly in terms of its practical adaptation is obviated. The ostal model, for example, can be construed as one logical way to manage the continuity and integrity of individual farms, but it is certainly not the only way to do so. Nor is there any self-evident prior cause for Ste Foyans, unlike people in some other regions of rural France, to possess a family structure built upon this priority rather than one constructed around, say, provision for all family members or protection of community integrity. Furthermore, over the history I have examined here, the ostal model has proved to be strikingly maladapted to a succession of practical constraints marking Ste Foyan life. It has, for example, been ill-suited in many ways both to the severe economic hardship characterizing much of Ste Foy's history and to the larger institutional context in which the community has become increasingly implicated; it has created considerable psychological difficulties for various categories of its adherents over time, and provides an extraordinarily poor vehicle for community harmony or integration. There is no reason to suppose that the Ste Foyan ostal model is inherently any more arbitrary, maladaptive, or generative of tension or conflict than any other, although its particular configurations of difficulty may be specific to this structure and the historical contexts in which it has been activated. For example, the family system I observed in the Lorraine, like those in many of the "open field" regions of France, is based on a model constructed largely around the priority of maintaining the integrity of the community, and is characterized by partible inheritance, nuclear family households, and a profoundly egalitarian worldview. This system appears to have clear practical advantages over the ostal structure under some economic, demographic, or political circumstances, but to be considerably more maladaptive under others. It breeds somewhat different kinds of tensions and contradictions within families and the community, but on the whole, seems to work no better or worse—or any less persistently—than the ostal model (Rogers 1975, 1979, 1985; see also Flandrin 1979). Such structures continue to be reproduced, not because they effectively create lasting order or permanent psychological and material comfort (as anyone who has ever lived in a family—or, for that matter, in a community or a nation-state—knows), but because they provide people with serviceable terms by which to make sense out of and act upon persistently emergent disorder. In this way, a given family structure cannot be said to have been produced by any particular set of practical circumstances, but it is reproduced out of shifting circumstance. The process is a dynamic and multidirectional one. People perceive and act upon reality with reference to specific structural terms, thereby reproducing that structure. But they also rework it insofar as the man-

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ner in which structural rules are interpreted and applied shifts with the circumstances under which people individually and collectively find themselves. Furthermore, salient structural ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions come to the fore or disappear with changing circumstances, generated by and propelling new actions and redefinitions. The phenomenon of reluctant brides in Ste Foy, for example, potentially poses a chronic threat to the ostal structure. It emerged as a real problem, however, only under a particular set of conditions as understood and acted upon by people in this context, and then disappeared again as a result of new circumstances, including those created by responses to the problem. Similarly, Ginsburg (1989) discusses the emergence of certain structural ambiguities and contradictions surrounding American notions of motherhood as the legal status of abortion has changed over time. In a slightly different realm, recent innovation in reproduction technology has brought to the surface an array of inherent inconsistencies within American family structure about the meanings of parenthood and property, nature and nurture (e.g., Rapp 1990). In all of these examples, it is the intersection of a particular family structure and a particular set of circumstances as acted upon by interested players that determines the perceived existence of a problem, the terms of debate or conflict around it, and resultant courses of further change. Change driven by such intersections does not necessarily generate conflict and indeed may go unnoticed by the actors involved. The increasing numbers of stem family households in Ste Foy, for example, best explained by Ste Foyans' application of ostal rules under conditions increasingly amenable to these, remained unacknowledged in itself, although it created circumstances under which some of the inherent tensions in the ostal structure could be felt. Just as the relative weight of structural principles on observable patterns of family organization changes with shifting configurations of circumstance over time and place, so too does the impact and relative significance of various kinds of practical circumstance. For example, demographic shifts provide the most powerful immediate explanation for measurable change in Ste Foyan household composition during one period I have considered (1936-1975), but can account for virtually none of the change observed along this indicator during another (1856-1936). The rural exodus associated with France's postwar economic boom had considerable impact on family organization virtually everywhere in France, but went largely unfelt in Ste Foy until the 1960s and then had an impact only partly explainable in terms of national trends. Such examples suggest that there is considerable folly in doctrinal debates about whether it is cultural, economic, demographic, political, or some other kind of factor at local, regional, national, or international levels that ultimately drives family history. Because the relative weight of each factor and locus is apt to vary by time, place, and type of change under consideration, it is as easy to find a case in which one or another kind of explanation can be construed as determinant as to find another in which it clearly cannot be. None of

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the elements shaping the context in which families are embedded is irrelevant; the driving force is the complex but discoverable interplay among them and the ways people find to act upon the shifting range of possibilities and problems so generated. In the end, trajectories of family history are traced by the actions of human players, simultaneously constrained and moved to action by the interplay of historically located circumstance and socioculturally specific structure. In this domain as in others, people inventively manage the situations in which they find themselves, although they fully control neither these nor the consequences of their management. With varying degrees of intentionality, people act upon the ambiguities and contradictions inevitably thrown up by circumstance and the terms in which they understand these. Reshaping square conditions to fit round ideas (and vice versa), we are all engaged in the construction of meaningful and perceptibly ordered realities, generating in the process new uncertainties and contradictions. In Ste Foy, an "eldest son" is not necessarily the firstborn; an heiress who marries beneath her must have been pregnant before marriage; and a person displaying gros ostal-like qualities may or may not have sufficient grounds to make legitimate political claims. In the United States, we have restored proper order by finding ways for infertile couples to conceive a child, but then are unsure if the "real" mother is the "surrogate" who bore it or the wife of the sperm donor who contracted it. Such a problem is less likely to emerge in a family system placing less emphasis on blood ties as the basis of kinship, a society less wedded to contract law, or a historical period bereft of sophisticated reproduction technology. The intricate and dynamic intersections of the wide array of historical, structural, and creative forces that generate and shape change in family systems are nothing if not complex. These are discoverable, at least to a revealing extent. But because such systems are essentially dynamic, their manifestations at one moment in time cannot be meaningfully deciphered without reference to change over time. By the same token, because their dynamism is defined by the interplay of so many temporally, spatially, and individually variable elements, the course of change is difficult to predict with any certainty and extraordinarily unlikely to converge into any single universal trajectory. ON SOCIAL CHANGE AND CULTURE IN THE MODERN WORLD

While my argument may be applicable to contemporary France or to family history, it does not end there. My analysis of Ste Foy's socioculturally specific trajectory of change and of the persistence of an "archaic" family system in this thoroughly modern setting rests on a conceptualization of the role of culture in historical transformations that has much broader implications. I have aimed to explain how it is that, although Ste Foy was profoundly affected by the rapid postwar economic change characterizing much of France (and indeed

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elsewhere), these effects did not include loss of Ste Foy's sociocultural distinctiveness. In the view I have developed here, sociocultural specificities are normally reproduced rather than worn away in the course of such transformations as those we conventionally gloss as modernization, national integration, or capitalist penetration. The dialectical interaction between widely shared forces of change and more specific structures generates an array of consequentially distinctive trajectories rather than a single convergent one. The conclusion is obvious: there is, after all, no reason to expect the postindustrial world of modern nation-states to be any more homogeneous than was the world of subsistence agriculturalists peopled by our ancestors. All societies change, but we are not all becoming more alike as a result, because change does not necessarily imply the erasure of sociocultural distinctions. Conversely, the preservation of such specificity does not imply lack of change. Social structures and cultural systems of meaning are not static, but their weight does not diminish over time (as we move closer to the present) or over space (as we move closer to centers of Western power). Salient in the past and in "exotic" societies least like ours, they remain consequential in defining and distinguishing contemporary Western societies, and in helping to shape their further change. This large point is drawn from the small example of Ste Foy, but I have suggested that the dynamic observed there may be extended to France on the whole and to family systems in general. These too are meant only as examples, although it could be argued that they are particularly compelling ones because each is, in its own way, an extreme case. France is unambiguously a thoroughly modern, integrated, capitalist nation-state. Furthermore, it possesses a well-entrenched and unusually elaborated ideological and institutional apparatus aimed explicitly at consolidating, preserving, and asserting a nationally uniform cultural identity. If consequential sociocultural diversity continues to be reproduced even within this context, then such reproduction must indeed be a powerful dimension of change, as significant in the contemporary West as anywhere. As for families, they are universally a fundamental seat of socialization and social reproduction. If family history is, after all, a plural one rather than a story of convergence over time, then the sociocultural contexts in which family systems are embedded must also move along an array of trajectories rather than toward a single homogeneous pattern. This conclusion seems to fly in the face of some of the most self-evident common knowledge. For example, in the "global village" defined by multinational corporations, international telecommunications, and universally distributed products, we are easily led to focus on commonalities, many of them associated with the West or assumed to be culture-neutral (or culture-destroying) . The commonalities of the contemporary world are certainly real and significant, but not necessarily more so than were those of a world where most people shared the experience of extracting a subsistence from the soil. Insofar

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as sociocultural diversity is consequential, widely shared stimuli are likely to have substantially variable effects, and diversity thus continues to be reproduced now as in the past. The spread of potato cultivation from the New World to Europe and Africa, for instance, undoubtedly had significant effects on the lives of the eventually legion subsistence fanners adopting this dietary staple. But exactly what its effects were, and what people found to make of their potatoes, varied considerably over time and place. Similarly, it certainly matters that television sets have spread around the globe and that many people use them to watch "Dallas" or Chinese student demonstrations. But this does not mean that we all see the same story, nor are we likely to draw the same conclusions and inspirations from what we are shown. The characters on "Dallas" appeal to Ste Foyans, but not for the same reasons they appeal to people in the Lorraine or the American Midwest, and certainly not, as in Cairo, because some of them exhibit good Islamic behavior (Abu-Lughod 1989). Change may be initiated or propelled—the outer limits of possible behavior shifted—by generalized goods or forces like potatoes, televisions, or international capital. It is driven, however, by human actions, and these are shaped in significant measure by the form and meaning people give to what is at hand. Raw potatoes and telephones may be indistinguishable and culturally neutral, but the manner in which people use them is not.5 Pentecostal Christianity and "Dallas" may be products of a specific culture, but they do not recreate that culture wherever they are taken. Instead, they are interpreted and used in a multitude of culturally specific ways. Clearly, some people, goods, or forces are more powerful than others. Mayor Magrinet carries considerably more weight than most other Ste Foyans and has made a particularly strong mark on his community; the French national education system as formally constituted in Paris has infinitely stronger influence overall in France than do any specifically Ste Foyan institutions; Roquefort firms' corporate decision-making is undoubtedly shaped more by the exigencies of international finance than by the preferences of milk producers. Virtually no person, thing, or force, however, can be so powerful as to fully determine people's actions. Power can be measured by the ability to shape constraints on actions, framing or reframing the range of possibility. Only under rare and extreme conditions is it so strong as to narrow absolutely the range of all possibility, and even then the range is almost never reduced to zero.6 New imperatives or relocated limits inevitably generate new ambigui3 See, e.g., Mayntz and Hughes (1988) for a fascinating comparison of the ways railroad and telephone systems have been developed, managed, and used in the United States, Germany, and France. 5 The powers exercised by extremely repressive political regimes spring immediately to mind. But one thinks just as immediately of the various and inventive ways that people living under such conditions find to justify, resist, circumvent, or undermine narrowed possibility.

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ties and contradictions, and consequences rarely match even the clearest of intentions of the most powerful agents. As the constraints upon their actions shift, people find room to maneuver inventively and do so in terms that make sense to them. Mayor Magrinet was eventually able to impose his vision of Ste Foy onto the local political landscape, but only because he could present it in terms that were plausible to his fellows, and even then he has been unable to obtain quite the results he bargained for. The national education system has been worked into the fabric of Ste Foyan life, with far-reaching consequences. But because it has been used in part to reproduce local specificities there as elsewhere, the goal of nationally uniform results remains an elusive one, despite countless legislated reforms of the system and endless high-level debate. There is no doubt that in the absence of the Roquefort firms and a thriving international market for their cheese, Ste Foy would be quite a different place. But there is nothing about the cheese itself, the corporate requirements of its production and distribution, or the restrictions implied by working under contract to agribusiness firms that would inevitably generate more stem family households or male primogeniture inheritance. In this sense, social structure and systems of cultural meaning can be understood as operating with other kinds of forces—historical, economic, or political, for example—which, in some intertwined and dialectical way, have the power to shape who we are and how we change. If we have not been inclined to see culture in this way, it is because our own sociocultural specificities are so deeply internalized as to be barely noticeable to us. We are in the habit of thinking about "social structure" and especially "culture" mainly as constraints that operate upon people different from us and that account for their failure to behave or think as we do.7 As we move through time (down to the present) or space (away from the exotic) onto more familiar ground, difference from " u s " diminishes and the power of culture seems to fade. It fades all the faster if we suppose that apparent similarities (eating potatoes, watching "Dallas") necessarily imply substantial congruence. The thrust of my argument, however, suggests that "culture" is not a weakening force which distinguishes "others" from "us," but something that continues to distinguish all of us from each other over the changes of time and place. Sociocultural specificities and their reproduction are only more readily noticeable—not more significant—among those most different from " u s . " Admiring a "Dallas" character for exhibiting good Islamic behavior is obviously a response shaped in part by culture-specific priorities and beliefs, but so is eliminating candidates from presidential races (as in the United States) 7 While this inclination might be particularly pronounced in the dominant societies of the postindustrial West, it is certainly not specific to them. The indigenous names of peoples all over the world translate as normatives like "The People" (Navajo), and the habit of understanding and treating other groups in terms of their perceived difference from a definitive " u s " is by no means either a modern or a Western invention.

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or ministers from office (as in Great Britain) because of sexual misconduct, and so is public indifference to the sexual habits of political figures (as in France). We in the modern West are as bound and moved to action by our social structures and cultural systems of meaning as anyone else, and no less than we are bound and moved by our histories, economies, or politics. At least three practical lessons can be drawn from this line of argument. First, we assume to our peril that as peoples around the world "modernize," significant differences among us diminish and in essence we are or will become increasingly alike. The possibilities for serious misunderstanding and blunder are legion when we fail to recognize (at least) or understand (at best) the sociocultural specificities that continue to distinguish us in consequential ways. The displacement of the Shah's Iran by the Ayatollah's, for example, was undoubtedly unpredictable, but might not have been so astounding to Western observers had we been less inclined to suppose that signs of modernization mark a single, ineluctable, and familiar path. Similarly, if we were to assume that as many different styles of behavior and systems of belief are compatible with "modernity" as we are accustomed to associate with "the traditional," then we might be less confounded by the persistence with which the Japanese, for all their economic and technological sophistication, fail to behave more like "us." A somewhat more modest, but essentially similar, cautionary note might be struck with respect to the manner in which we habitually think and talk about "the West." I have argued that an entity like France has been and undoubtedly will remain a great deal more socioculturally heterogeneous than we are inclined to suppose. Therefore, while there are some senses in which it is perfectly legitimate and meaningful to refer to French society and culture in general, most frequently, doing so only creates the illusion of a homogeneity for which there is little empirical foundation, an illusion that has its functions but that can be misleading. It follows that "the West" remains heterogeneous indeed. If people in the Aveyron and the Lorraine remain clearly distinguishable from each other, sharing something rather limited that is identifiably French, and if this Frenchness contrasts in turn with whatever is identifiably American about life in New York and Fargo, then all of these, though all part of the contemporary West, must have relatively little in common. As is the case for ' 'French'' with respect to American or German, there are undoubtedly some outer bounds to variation which are identifiably "Western" as opposed to, say, Asian or African. "Western society and culture" is not an entirely misleading or illusory construct. It is frequently used, however, in a way that suggests considerably more commonality than can in fact be found. One might, for example, legitimately refer to "the Western family" but only as a rather large (albeit finite) array of family systems, not, as is often done, as one single model. The latter usage has consequences far beyond the offense of inaccuracy; it operates, for instance, to reinforce the notion that sociocultural

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diversity and its reproduction can and will be overwhelmed by the historical, economic, or political forces that putatively evacuated it in "the West." All of this leads to my final, and perhaps most self-interested, point. If sociocultural reproduction is dialectically related to historical transformation, remaining as significant in the contemporary West as in other times and places, then anthropologists, as students of social structure and cultural meaning, have as much to say about the here and now as about the there and then. In the conventional disciplinary division of labor, anthropologists have specialized in prehistoric or exotic societies, maximally distant from " u s " in time or space, while the study of Western societies has been allocated to such disciplines as history, economics, and political science. This division was premised on the notion that "they" are primarily defined by sociocultural specificities which for " u s " have given way to other forces, better understood by historians, economists, political scientists, and the rest. Over the past several decades, this division has begun to break down, as we have come to believe that "they" too have histories, economies, and politics, and " w e " too have culture. As I have repeatedly emphasized, however, entrenched habits of thought may shift, but they rarely simply wither away. Neither Africanist historians nor Europeanist anthropologists, for example, have quite the legitimacy enjoyed by their colleagues specializing in European history or African anthropology.8 The old division of labor is further reproduced insofar as Africanist historians have been inclined to stay as close to " u s " as possible by disproportionately focusing on centers of power during the colonial era, while Europeanist anthropologists retain maximum distance by favoring the study of peasants or migrants at the most exotic and powerless fringes of Europe. Such a pattern has methodological as well as conceptual underpinnings. Historians usually need archives to work with, and are apt to be drawn to those places and problems where the written record is most abundant. The structures and systems of cultural meaning studied by anthropologists are most readily discernible when they are least familiar. The structural and cultural dimensions of Ste Foy's ostal system, for example, were easier for me to see and credibly communicate than would be those of a family system more similar to my own or to those of my intended audiences because we have not internalized the ostal as part of our own familiar taken-for-granted world. But just as a paucity of archival records does not necessarily mean the absence of a retrievable history, so the difficulties of perceiving our own sociocultural specificities does not mean that they are nonexistent or unimportant. Cultural analysis 8 See the case made by Beidelman (1974) for the development of an anthropology of (European) missionaries in Africa, as one example of an attempt to break down the division I have noted here. Many of the reactions prompted by his work along these lines can be interpreted as resistance to violations of the old idea that anthropology is properly the study of the "exotic" and not the study of " u s , " whether as we are among the "exotic" or as we are at home (Beidelman, personal communication).

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of our own societies involves studying the elusively ambient, not the absent or trivial. The obstacles at hand are certainly real and can be legitimately eschewed, but they are ultimately only practical ones which, with some imagination, can be effectively surmounted. It is not impossible to find ways to step sufficiently far back from the structures and meanings shaping us to be able to see them as they operate to mold, not the only way to be, but our socioculturally specific identities and trajectories (e.g., Ginsburg 1989; Le Wita 1988; Schneider 1980). In arguing that the cultures of the postindustrial West require as much attention as others, I mean to imply neither that anthropologists should abandon the study of more radically different cultures nor that anthropology should displace other approaches to the study of "us." On the contrary, on both counts. First, one effective way—perhaps the only effective way—to bring into focus any particular social structure and system of cultural meaning is by at least implicit contrast with others. We can discern the sociocultural specificities of exotic societies because they are radically different from ours. By the same token, we are unlikely to be able to perceive our own except by a similar juxtaposition. There is no reason for anthropologists to study only cultures maximally different from ours, because culture is not uniquely significant in such contexts. But unless we know something about what we are not, there is little possibility of being able to recognize ourselves. Like fish and their water, our ambient fluid has little meaning except with reference to others. The argument can be made to circle back around: insofar as we grasp the specificities of "others" with reference to ourselves, our understanding of "them" is limited by what we know of "us." Without a clear sense of how processes of modernization have been played out in the West, for example, the suppositions on which we base our interpretations of their impacts elsewhere are apt to be misguided. "Culture" is a powerful force of human diversity, most readily understood in the context of the wide range of variation it generates. The anthropology of the "exotic" and the anthropology of the "familiar" are thus strongly interdependent. If culture operates as a powerful force in all times and places, nowhere is it a fully determinant one. In the example of Ste Foy, I have shown sociocultural reproduction to be one consequential strand in the course of historical change, but Ste Foy's trajectory has also been shaped by, for example, powerful and widely shared economic forces as well as the actions of particular individuals operating in the local political arena. Ste Foy—like France, the West, or anywhere else—would be as impossible to understand by focusing exclusively on its sociocultural specificities as by neglecting to consider them at all. As an anthropologist, I am best equipped to decipher its social and cultural dimensions, and have brought these more to the fore of my picture of Ste Foy than might someone more interested in historical, economic, or political analysis. The living subject is too complex to grasp or coherently draw without empha-

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sizing some of its dimensions and relegating others to the background. Unless we are willing to settle for caricature, however, its multidimensionality must be taken into account. I have shown that social structure and cultural meaning are reproduced through interaction with other kinds offerees and constraints. This means that it can be satisfactorily understood only with reference to other perspectives on identity and change, just as those other perspectives must accommodate the ongoing reproductive forces of culture. In the end, this study is only partly about a small and obscure French farming community. At risk of entering a hall of mirrors, I might fairly claim that it is about the power Ste Foy has exercised upon me to rework my notions of culture, change, and modernity as these define " u s " in the postindustrial world. It is a tale worth telling insofar as it has the power to effect change upon others as well.

Appendices

APPENDIX 1

Estimations of Ostal Domestic Life Cycles Local birth, death, and marriage registers (etats civils) for 1856 through 1976 were used to calculate average longevity for ever-married adults, age at first marriage, and interval between marriage and birth of first child. These statistics form the basis for estimating the duration of two- and three-generation phases of the "model" Ste Foyan ostal. The following charts, showing ages of household members at the beginning of each phase thus constructed, illustrate the four patterns discernible as life expectancy and marriage age changed over time.

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Postwar (to mid

60

o

16

16 years

C.

Phase I

Pr ase II

Phase 1

25

Phase I

Phase II

/ \

45

0

30

20

10 years

20 years

25 /__ A 0

20 years

Phase I : Phase II = 20 : 10years

66 : 33%

D. Since mid-1960s

/K = 0

z56\ -~ O 1 53 28

j

k 0

Phase I

Phase II

Phase I

A

25

/52\ | 0 k

24

49

A •- O 56

A- o i

53

28 1

0

24 years

4 years

24 years

Phase 1 : Phase II = 24 : 4 years = 85 : 15%

25

APPENDIX 2

Succession of Households on a Ste Foyan Hamlet To calculate patterns of household composition and ostal transfers, census data were used to construct a chart like the one facing for each named place in the campagne. The numbers in the left-hand column indicate the years in which the households indicated were censused. The numbers within the chart indicate birth dates, and have been changed slightly in this example to protect the anonymity of the (pseudonymous) individuals represented.

Girard 1856 in —law

1886

1911

1936

1962

1975

1967 1969 1971

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Index

agricultural development: of Aveyron, 52-54; of France, 108, 151; of Segala, 59-60 agricultural markets, 12-16, 61, 62, 65, 66, 156 agricultural production: in Aveyron, 53-54; in Ste Foy, 62-66, 105, 108-9 aine, 69, 78-79, 133, 140-41, 145, 150 Amicale movement, 54, 55-57, 181 anthropology, 34, 41-45; of the contemporary West, 212-14; of the family, 36-37, 41, 201-7; fieldwork in, 20, 22, 26-30, 31, 118; functionalist explanation in, 43, 204— 5; uses of history in, 29, 35, 40-41, 41-45, 213-14 archival sources, 23, 29-30, 37, 133-35, 216-17, 218-19. See also census Aveyron: Catholic church in, 50-51; economy of, 15, 23-24, 46, 51-54, 57-58; in French state, 50-51; language of (patois), 48-49; location of, 2, 6-7, 47—48; migration from, 53, 54-58; stereotypes of, 17, 54-55. See also Rouergue behavior, aberrant, 107-8, 131; as desirable and possible, 99-100, 102, 126, 127-28, 131, 152, 202-3, 204 bourg: appearance of, 4, 8—9, 13, 14, 117, 122, 189, 191; as distinguished from campagne, 115-18, 167, 174, 177-78;economy of, 12-16, 116-17, 120-22, 123, 177-78; social organization of, 118-19, 120-21, 146 cafes, Aveyronnais, 14, 28; in bourg, 122; in Paris, 54-55, 56, 86 campagne: appearance of, 9, 10, 76; as distinguished from bourg, 115, 124-25, 146, 155,177-78 Catholic church, 50-51, 82-83, 93-94, 97, 110; and local schools, 148, 182-83 celibacy: of heirs, 137-38, 155, 161-63; of nonheirs, 80-81; rates of, 161-62 census, 38, 116, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 159, 202, 218-19. See also archival sources

cohabitation, 69, 87-88, 94-95, 121, 13940, 142, 154-57 community relations, 101, 124—26; in bourg, 118-19 conflict, 206; familial, 83, 86-87, 88, 91, 95, 119, 121, 128-29; local, 31-32, 72, 106, 122, 123-26, 170-72, 174-76, 182-83, 185 culture, 34; in historical analysis, 32-36, 40, 43; local and regional, 33-35; and modernization, 33-36, 73,210-14 Decazeville, 7, 51 economic change: in Aveyron, 51—54; and family organization, 31, 37-38, 39-40, 143, 147-48, 203; in France, 23, 157-58, 163-64, 199; in Ste Foy, 15-16, 23-24, 71, 115-16, 177-78. See also agricultural development; modernization education,-82, 91-92, 148-50, 157-58, 194; and migration, 163, 164. See also schools, local elections: 1863 cantonal, 113; 1975 local, 113-14, 171-73; 1989 local, 184-85, 190; politics of, 111-14. See also politics, local; municipal crisis elite, local, 22, 27,70-71, 81-82, 116, 117, 123-26, 169-72, 176-80, 184-86. See also pages European Economic Community, 30, 188, 199-200 exchange relations: in bourg, 119; among ostals, 102, 105-9 fair (monthly), 12-16, 189 family farms. See ostals family history, 31, 36-41, 201; explanation in, 38-40, 201, 202, 204-5, 206-7 family organization: determinants of structure of, 38, 39-40, 204-5; and modernization, 31, 37-38,39-40, 147-48, 201 family relations, 3-4, 121; between in-laws, 84-88, 90-91, 93-94, 140; between parents and children, 79-82, 83, 86, 88, 89-

230

Index

family relations (cont.) 92, 97-98, 166; between siblings, 80-83, 91-94,121,150 France: cultural pluralism of, 197-98; economic change in, 23, 54, 56, 57, 61, 72, 157-58, 163-64, 199; history of, 32-34, 36, 42, 199; language in, 48-49, 149; national identity of, 32-33, 36, 57-58, 97, 194—96; sociocultural diversity in, 32-36, 39, 193-98. See also rural France French institutions, 32-33, 36, 37, 39, 48, 49, 68-69, 95-97, 98, 108-9, 111, 13334, 151, 152, 170, 193-97, 199-200, 208, 209-10; educational, 148-50, 152; judicial, 50, 83, 96, 129-30 gender, 19, 20, 23, 28, 155; and celibacy, 161—62; and ostal system, 162—63. See also women (in ostal system) grosostals, 103, 169, 179, 184-85. See also pages history: in anthropological analysis, 40-41, 41-45, 132-34, 213-14; of France, 32-33, 36, 42, 199; indigenous representations of, 11-12, 15, 30, 31,42, 69, 74-75, 132. 143, 153, 156, 171, 191-92, 196, 203-4 history, family. See family history household composition, 37-39, 68-69, 79, 89-90, 120-21, 128, 136-40, 142, 14347, 151, 202, 203, 216-17, 218-19. See also cohabitation human agency, 26, 32, 44-45, 70, 71, 123, 128-29,152-53, 166-68, 185-87,191-92, 207, 209-10 identity: individual, 75-79, 86, 90, 101, 177; local, 57-58, 97, 195; national, 32-33, 36, 57-58,97, 194-96, 197-98, 199-200; regional, 23, 48, 49, 55, 188, 197 inheritance, 129, 147-48, 194-95, 218-19; of bourg businesses, 120, 122, 123; and education, 91-92, 150; in French law, 95-96, 148; in ostal system, 78-80, 83, 88-93, 95-96; of ostals, 140-42, 148, 188 judicial system, use of, 50, 83, 96, 129-30 language. See Langue d'Oc; patois Langue d'Oc, 2, 22, 48. Sec also patois leisure activities, 3-6, 8, 10-11, 12, 30, 181, 188-90

Lorraine, 20-21,28, 205 marriage: of heiresses, 89-92, 164-65; of heirs, 84-87, 92-94, 163; levirate, 93-94; of nonheirs, 80-81, 82, 163; recruitment for, 85, 139-40; and social stratification, 85-86, 104, 163 migration, 6, 16-17, 59, 157-61, 168, 186; from Avcyron, 54—58; of nonheirs, 91—92, 167; rural, 159-61; urban, 160-61; of women, 83, 137-38, 155, 157, 158, 159, 164-66 modernization, 16, 24, 33, 34, 35, 152; and family organization, 31, 37-38, 39-40, 6869, 143, 147-48, 201; local assessments of, 11-12, 143, 153, 156; and redistribution of wealth, 52, 66-67, 71, 103-4, 17677; and social order, 70-71; and sociocultural diversity, 19, 20, 24, 33-35, 192-93, 207-9, 210-11 municipal crisis, 31-32, 123-24, 190; actors in, 179-80; events of, 169-76; local conditions influencing, 176—79; process of, 180— 86. See also elections; politics, local Occitanc, 49, 57, 197 ostal system, 22, 67-69, 98-99, 128, 153, 166, 202; compared to other stem family systems, 77-78, 81; coresiding women in, 87-88; exchange relations in, 102, 105-6; family relations in, 79-98; household composition in, 68-69, 79, 89-90; inheritance in, 78-80, 83, 88-93, 95-96; marriage in, 79, 80-81, 82, 84-87, 89-92, 104; as model in bourg, 119-21; social identity in, 75-77, 90, 100; stability over time of, 13234 ostals, 10, 31, 75-77, 127; appearance of, 9, 10, 76; autonomy of, 101, 102, 106, 108, 126; demographic constraints of, 137—38, 145, 166, 186, 206, 216-17; household composition of, 136-40, 142, 143-48, 151, 216-17,218-19; inheritance of, 140-42, 149-50, 162-63, 188, 218-19; ranking among, 103-4 pages, 52, 59, 67, 103. See also elite, local Paris. Aveyronnais migrants in, 54—58, 86, 96-97, 133 patois, 11, 12, 14,48, 105, 189-90. See also Langue d' Oc

Index patron-client ties, 55, 56, 70, 102, 110-14, 117-18, 123-24, 126, 130, 169-71, 17374, 176-77,180, 181-82 pistonnage, 110. See also patron-client ties politics, local, 31-32, 111-14, 123-25, 16975, 190. See also elections; municipal crisis regionalist movements, 49, 57, 196-97 Rodez, 6-7, 50, 51-52 Roquefort cheese: industry of, 60-64; production of, 22, 61-64,65, 71 Rouergue, 2, 23, 47, 189, 197 rural France; sociocultural diversity in, 19, 20-22, 23, 30-31, 32-36, 192-93, 205; transformations of, 33-35, 72 schools, local, 115, 116, 148-50, 182-83. See also education Segala, 7, 59-60,61, 63 sociability, 3-4, 14, 27, 28, 188-90 social stratification, 16, 17, 59, 67, 85-86, 90, 102-4, 111-14, 123-25, 163, 176-77, 179 sociocultural diversity, in Western societies, 208,210-12 sociocultural reproduction, 44, 130-31, 15153, 186-87, 198-200, 201, 204-5, 208, 209-11 standards of living, 17, 158, 163 Ste Foy, 22-24, 72-73, 188; change in, 1516, 185-86, 188; as a community, 28, 100;

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economy of, 10, 46, 58, 63-64, 71; location of, 2, 7-8; migration from, 59, 15861; place names in, 9,75-76,77, 115, 135; politics in, 31-32, 111-14; social stratification in, 16-17, 67,70-71 stem family, 22, 23, 31, 37-38, 41, 68-69; demographic constraints of, 137-38, 206; domestic life cycles of, 38-39, 136-38, 216-17; economic constraints of, 143-48; variations in structure of, 77-78, 81. See also ostal system technological innovation, 12, 52, 53, 60, 156, 208-9 tourism, 4, 10-12, 174-75, 178, 181 urbanization; of Aveyron, 51-52; of France, 51, 157-58 voluntary associations, 10, 123-24, 169, 172, 180-82; Amicales in Paris, 55-57, 181; Association Familiale, 10, 28; la classe, 4; festival committee, 5, 181; public school parents' association, 182-83; Syndicat d'Initiative, 5, 27, 174-75 women (in ostal system), 154—57; as brides, 84-88, 95, 156, 157, 163-64; as heiresses, 89-92, 141-42; as mothers, 85, 87-88, 93, 97-98; as mothers-in-law, 87-88, 97-98, 140; as sisters, 80, 81-83; as widows, 92-93