Transatlantic Parallaxes: Toward Reciprocal Anthropology 9781782386643

Citation preview

Transatlantic Parallaxes

Transatlantic Parallaxes Toward Reciprocal Anthropology

Edited by

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com English-language edition © 2015 Berghahn Books French-language edition © 2012 CNRS Editions Parallaxes transatlantiques. Vers une anthropologie réciproque All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Transatlantic parallaxes : toward reciprocal anthropology / edited by Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-663-6 (hardback) —   ISBN 978-1-78238-664-3 (ebook)   1. Applied anthropology—United States. 2. Applied anthropology— France. 3. Comparative civilization. I. Raulin, Anne, editor of compilation, author. II. Rogers, Susan Carol, editor of compilation, author.   GN397.7.U6T73 2015   301—dc23 2014039943 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-78238-663-6 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-664-3 ebook

Contents

Preface Introduction Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

vii 1

Part I.  DISTINCTIONS: Class, Race, Culture   1. Homeless People (Paris, Los Angeles): The principle of equality seen from below Patrick Gaboriau, translated by Juliette Rogers

19

  2. The Moral Public Sphere: Integration and discrimination in a French New Town Beth Epstein

38

  3. Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana Sara Le Menestrel, translated by Juliette Rogers

60

  4. Claiming Culture, Defending Culture: Perspectives on culture in France and the United States David Beriss

84

Part II.  KEY WORDS: Community, Healing   5. Gay Activism and the Question of Community William Poulin-Deltour   6. Confronting “Community”: From rural France to the Vietnamese diaspora Deborah Reed-Danahay

109

125

vi

Contents

  7. Healing the Community: Ethics and ancestry in Orisha religious practices in the United States Stefania Capone, translated by Juliette Rogers

143

  8. Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers: Beyond the trauma of 9/11 Anne Raulin, translated by Juliette Rogers

162

Part III.  MYTHS: Endless Possibility, Countrysides   9. To Live in a World of Possibilities: A New Age version of the American Myth Christian Ghasarian, translated by Juliette Rogers

191

10. Faux Amis in the Countryside: Deciphering the familiar Susan Carol Rogers

208

Notes on Contributors

229

Index

232

Preface

This collection of essays, each grounded in original ethnographic research, brings together the work of five American anthropologists of France and five French anthropologists of the United States. It draws on some of the defining characteristics of twentieth-century anthropology, notably a comparative perspective that attributes special value to the insights of outside observers. But it combines these views with quite novel dialogic practice, one that may come to enrich twenty-first century versions of the discipline, namely the casting of reciprocal ethnographic gazes on each other’s home bases. The goal is to unsettle and enhance our understandings of ourselves and others by offering novel glimpses of two familiar societies. More importantly, this experiment with a French/American play of mirrors illustrates some of the twenty-first century challenges and potentials for the production of anthropological knowledge—and aims to inspire similar undertakings based in other places and on other dialogues. More than many other disciplines, anthropology has retained distinctive national traditions of scholarship both within its European and North American cradles and among the plethora of disciplinary variants that have emerged over the past several generations in those places where Western anthropologists have long sought their subjects. Within some of those national traditions (including French and American), the production of anthropological knowledge has rested on two kinds of radical distinction: sociocultural difference separating the outside expert anthropologist and his audiences from the indigenous subject, and the “I was there” experience that distinguishes the anthropologist from his audiences. The twenty-first century has seen increasing interest in reconsidering the relationships among the various “world anthropologies,” as well as a multitude of claims and counterclaims concerning legitimate or productive relationships amongst anthropologist, subjects, and audience. The reciprocal anthropology proposed here involves the direct engagement of two anthropological traditions, and it dramatically blurs the distinctions that have conventionally informed the production and dissemination of

viii

Preface

anthropological knowledge: the authors of the essays collected here are all simultaneously foreign experts and native subjects, knowledgeable audience and naïve colleagues with respect to each other. The essays emerging from these relationships offer concrete examples of the promise and pitfalls—both very real—for twenty-first century anthropology. The process of crafting this collection of essays has been a long one that has greatly benefitted from many forms of support on both sides of the Atlantic. A grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research was gratifyingly validating, and allowed us to launch this project with an initial workshop held in Paris in May 2007 in which the group first began discussing each other’s work. Each of our own institutions (the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Urbaine [IIAC/CNRS/EHESS] and New York University) generously provided financial support at various points along the way, but in fact nine of the ten institutions with which our contributors are affiliated stepped in at one time or another to help our collaboration along. We would especially like to thank New York University in Paris for hosting that first workshop as well as for help in covering the costs of the French version of our edited volume. We also owe a large debt to Middlebury College (especially the French Department and the Rohaytyn Center for Global Affairs) for hosting us and providing housing for our second workshop in February 2009. Language posed no problem for oral or written communication within our group: because all of us are fluent in both English and French, our meetings could be conducted bilingually and each of the pre-circulated essays could be written in its author’s own language. Publication was a different matter though. It seemed to us that the nature of our experiment required two versions of this collection of essays, one entirely in French and the other entirely in English. But most of us do not have the language skills necessary to write a publishable scholarly article in any language other than our own, so each version of the volume required the translation of half of our ten essays: no small feat as both a financial and a practical matter. We are grateful to the University of New Orleans Department of Anthropology, NYU Department of Anthropology, and the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Urbaine for funds permitting the English-to-French translations. The French-to-English translations were made possible by grants from the French Centre National du Livre and the NYU Humanities Initiative as well as contributions from the Centre d’Etudes NordAméricaines (CNRS/EHESS), Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (CNRS/EHESS), Laboratoire Architecture Ville Urbanisme Environnement (CNRS), Sophiapol—Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, and the Université de Neuchatel. At least as crucial was the patience as well as the careful and insightful work done by our

Preface

ix

team of translators: Frédéric Eugene Illouz, Frédéric Viguier, and Céline Ugolini for the American essays; and Juliette Rogers for the French ones. Finally, the double publication we envisioned as the ultimate product of our experiment required two publishers. We are indebted to Simon Robert and Martine Bertéa at CNRS Editions and to Marion Berghahn and Adam Capitanio at Berghahn Books for their patient guidance and support in moving this project from an interesting encounter among a small group of anthropologists to a real and public exercise in creating parallaxes. Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers Paris and New York April 2014

Introduction Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

Parallax: The apparent displacement of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object. Example: the small parallax caused by our having two eyes with different angles of vision allows us to see three-dimensional images.

In both France and the United States, anthropology emerged as an academic discipline in the twentieth century around a double aim: understanding the fundamental commonalities shared by all human societies and cultures while also grasping the full range of diversity among them. A key device for achieving this goal has been to conduct detailed study of societies that are radically different from our own. In both national traditions, the production of anthropological knowledge—about human society in general as well as about particular societies—was understood to require an encounter with a strikingly unfamiliar society by an outsider expert who took seriously the perspectives and experience of insider participants, but who retained a scientific distance from them. Further, anthropological analyses have generally been directed to audiences with no direct experience and little prior knowledge of the specific societies under consideration. In other words, twentieth-century production of anthropological knowledge conventionally rested on the shock of the unfamiliar: strongly marked alterity with respect to the anthropologist and her subjects in the first instance, and then her audience and those subjects.1 But such radical strangeness is seemingly harder to find in our twentyfirst-century world: people drink Coca-Cola and wear Chinese-made sneakers across increasingly large swaths of the planet, and anyone with access to the internet or a television set can visit almost anywhere. It is easy to conclude that everything has become more or less familiar, partly because of increased blurring of cross-cultural differences and partly because of growing ease of access—direct or mediated—to most corners of the world. What future can possibly lie in store for anthropological expertise if its production has rested on forms of alterity that are apparently disappearing?

2

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

This line of reasoning undoubtedly underlies many of the soul-searching debates within anthropology on both sides of the Atlantic over recent decades, debates ultimately pitting competing ideas about legitimate and productive relationships among the anthropologist, his subjects, and his audiences. What, for example, are the possibilities and pitfalls for anthropology-at-home, where much of the classical “otherness” in the anthropologist’s relationship to his subjects is absent? To what extent is it possible to overcome the challenges of noticing and analyzing the takenfor-granted foundations of a society when the anthropologist is a habitual member as well as a trained observer? Can “real” anthropology be done only through the study of societies that are truly exotic to the anthropologist, allowing him to bring the fresh and potentially unimplicated eye of the obvious outsider? But in that case, might the claim to privileged understanding of someone else’s society amount to morally (and perhaps scientifically) unacceptable hubris? If so, then what might be the promise of collaborative anthropology, where the anthropologist works in partnership with her subjects to define relevant questions and to develop data analysis, thus simultaneously blurring conventional lines both between anthropologist and subjects, and between subjects and audience? Or can truly significant research questions be articulated and reliable results generated only by exercising specialist expertise and maintaining some degree of scientific distance? Finally, it must be asked what specifically anthropological forms of knowledge can usefully contribute to the vast amounts of information—academic, but also journalistic, cinematic, literary, touristic—already available about most of the contemporary world, its faraway corners no less than nearby vistas? We aimed to explore such questions by using the well-established anthropological device of pushing such issues to their extreme limits: we organized a small workshop comprising an equal number of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists with research experience in the US, creating a group in which each half was simultaneously foreign anthropologist, native subject, and colleague to the other. Further, the research focus on France or the US means that we all study settings that are familiar to our potential audiences. Consequently, claims to expertise cannot easily rest on “having been there” as a unique experience: even when our audiences comprise non-specialist compatriots, they are likely to bring considerable prior experience to anything we might have to say. These circumstances, particularly marked for the members of our workshop group, will undoubtedly become increasingly characteristic of the general conditions under which anthropological knowledge is produced over the twenty-first century. At the same time, our French-American encounters allowed us to simplify our experiment by deliberate elimination of one variable that certainly shaped classical anthropological inquiry and

Introduction

3

may well persist—perhaps in diminishing forms—over the twenty-first century: the extreme differences of geo-political and social power that have typically colored the relationship of the anthropologist and her audiences to her subjects (colonial, post-colonial, or otherwise). France and the US arguably enjoy roughly equivalent world standing in a geopolitical sense; the two certainly stand on equal footing in terms of the considerable intellectual legitimacy reciprocally accorded the intelligentsia of each. Indeed, in each case, it is apt to be positively valorizing to cite scholarship produced in the other country. This circumstance allows us to explore the possibilities and challenges of practicing truly reciprocal crosscultural research, without the distortions of uneven political or intellectual standing.2 This enterprise has its roots in a long history of informal discussions between the two of us, based on our shared experience as somewhat unusually placed anthropologists of each other’s societies: Anne Raulin began her training in France, but earned her Ph.D. in the US in the 1980s with a dissertation based on research in New York; she has subsequently pursued her career in her native France, conducting urban research alternately in the two countries. Susan Carol Rogers was trained primarily in the US with some complementary coursework in France; since the 1970s, she has conducted fieldwork mainly in rural France with some short projects in the US, where she has pursued her career. From our conversations emerged the idea of bringing together a small group of colleagues who have similar experiences, to further explore the productivity of this kind of dialogue and its implications for defining research questions, as well as the methodological challenges and historic pertinence of anthropological practice under the conditions we had experienced. In fact, until the 1990s, only a handful of American anthropologists had conducted research in France and almost none of them pursued it as their main specialty. With the development of Europeanist anthropology in the US over the past twenty-five years, it has become considerably less unusual to choose France as an ethnographic focus, although this specialty remains a relatively small one within the domain of Europeanist anthropology, itself a rather minor—though now well-established—geographic specialty among anthropologists based in North America.3 Among French anthropologists, there has been a parallel development of interest in the study of contemporary Western societies since the 1980s, but the focus has remained primarily on France or elsewhere in Europe. Leaving aside native North America, no more than a handful of French anthropologists have to date conducted research in the US, nearly all of them as a complement to a career of research mainly focused elsewhere. In fact, the United States, relatively ignored by American anthropologists, is undoubtedly one of the societies in the world that has drawn the least

4

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

attention from foreign anthropologists. Following the logic of reciprocal anthropology developed here, we would hope that the twenty-first century would see a substantial increase in ethnographic research conducted in the US by anthropologists of French nationality, among others. In constituting our workshop, we were strongly committed to keeping the number of French and American participants strictly equal, even though this requirement posed challenges by forcing us to make extremely difficult choices on the American side and to make a considerable effort to identify appropriate participants on the French side.4 Our group met for the first time in May 2007 at New York University in Paris. Our bilingual discussions, organized around pre-circulated papers based on each participant’s fieldwork in France or the US, allowed us to begin developing a sense of collective purpose. In light of these exchanges, each participant reworked her or his paper for our second workshop session, held in February 2009 at Middlebury College. This set of essays, further reworked in the interim, form the basis of the present collection. Our work reflects a strong commitment to some of the defining characteristics of anthropology as it developed over the twentieth century in both France and the US. For example, each contributor deploys crosscultural comparison, at least implicitly, as a key device for achieving insight about the issue at hand. It should be emphasized that our collective purpose was never to systematically compare American and French societies; rather we all routinely use comparison as a valuable tool to sharpen the particular points each aims to develop. In some cases, such comparison is explicit: some authors make reference to field research they have conducted at home (e.g. Gaboriau, Beriss), while several draw comparisons with more exotic field sites (e.g. Capone). But insofar as each author is primarily concerned with a society that is foreign to him or her (even if not radically so), he or she inevitably notices and deciphers its characteristics from a comparative perspective. Secondly, each contribution is based on ethnographic fieldwork, using conventional participant-observation research methods to explore in detail specific case studies. Following well-established disciplinary practice, these cases are strategically selected, not as being representative of the larger society in any statistical manner, but rather because they shed particularly strong light—often because of their peculiarity—on one or another characteristic of the larger setting. Even though well-grounded in the legacies of twentieth century anthropology, this work also illustrates some twenty-first-century novelties in the conditions under which anthropological knowledge is increasingly likely to be produced. For example, while anthropologists classically wrote about settings that were largely unknown to their audiences, our work addresses readers who, if not necessarily members of the societies analyzed,

Introduction

5

are likely to at least be regular consumers of their products (scholarly, literary, cinematic, touristic, etc.). Far from controlling most of what our audiences know about our subjects, we are obliged to take account of the heavy baggage of prior experience and knowledge they bring. Indeed, it is not the rarity of information but rather its surfeit, readily accessible to the anthropologist and to her audiences alike, that is apt to shape the ethnographic enterprise today. Unlike our ancestors who were largely concerned with discovering and reporting the unknown, we find ourselves navigating the (putatively) well-known and amply documented. At least one further departure from earlier practice is clearly evident here: insofar as we live in a world similar to that of our subjects, the indigenous world views we wish to analyze largely overlap the conceptual frames we aim to refine or critique. Many of our workshop discussions turned on the ambiguities and confusions that inevitably result from the shifting meanings of terms or concepts as they move between vernacular and analytical uses. Further, our France–United States experiment highlights some of the additional challenges generated by the cross-national circulation of concepts. As in some other disciplines, the history of anthropology has followed largely parallel tracks in the US and France, with only occasional—and generally highly valorizing—transatlantic borrowing in both directions.5 Such imports, though, often acquire surprisingly new meanings, as they are absorbed into their adoptive intellectual context. These observations all suggest that the central twenty-first century challenge for those aiming to understand the diversities and commonalities defining the human condition is to recognize and correct faux amis,6 those misunderstandings that result from apparent similarity. Indeed, if twentieth century anthropology taught us that a common humanity was to be found behind easily observable difference, the task for anthropology in our century is to illuminate the human diversity underlying apparent similarity. To meet this challenge, we propose taking advantage of blurred distinctions among the anthropologist, his subjects, and his audiences. While classical anthropology rested on the notion that by studying “the other” we would arrive at a clearer understanding of ourselves, we suggest that it is through a reciprocal gaze—the juxtaposition of our observations of others with theirs of us—that we are most likely to be able to grasp the world in which we find ourselves today. The collection of essays that follows, then, illustrates an anthropological project that is as dialogical as it is comparative, focusing on specific events or contexts to illuminate the fundamental complexities, internal contradictions and dynamics of a given culture. The dialogical dimension of our undertaking refers partly to the workshop discussions out of which each essay developed; it is also reflected in the organization of this

6

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

volume, alternating the insights of French and American anthropologists with respect to each other’s society and the production of knowledge about it. More precisely, each section of this volume corresponds to one of the points of entry we identified to grasp the societies of interest here, approaches that are certainly not mutually exclusive, exhaustive, or specific to the cases at hand: • Analysis of categories of distinction: How do particular kinds of social difference (here, in terms of class, race, or culture) come to be defined, legitimized, protected, or erased? What forms of institutional action (or inaction), moral consensus, or judgments of value operate to reproduce, contest, or rearrange such understandings? • Analysis of key words: Here, the focus is on concepts that carry strikingly different meanings in the anthropologist’s own society and the one she studies (e.g. community/communité), or where a concept’s ubiquity in one national context contrasts to its more limited use in the other (healing/guérison). Careful analyses of such notions promise to illuminate more general characteristics of the larger society in which they are deployed. • Analysis of paths to the good life: Utopian visions of the good life and how to achieve it are also apt to take forms that are both surprising to the outside observer and revealing of broadly persistent cultural or social characteristics. These ideals are illustrated here by analysis of American notions of limitless possibility and French ideas about the countryside.

Categories of Distinction Class, Race, Culture All societies are structured around the meaningful categories with which people identify themselves and others. These are apt to be routinely manipulated in practice as well as in theory, and have long been at the center of social scientific thought. But what might be further elucidated through an approach that straddles national boundaries? Particularly within societies possessing a highly elaborated sense of the moral superiority of their own social orders, how do people come to terms with categorical arrangements that are obviously out of line with the social ideals they claim? Jean Baudrillard’s observations of the United States led him to pose just such a question:

Introduction

7

What has become of this American revolution that consisted in the dynamic resolution of a clearly understood individual interest and a well-tempered collective morality? A problem that was not resolved in Europe … In short, has the New World fulfilled its promise? Has it reaped the benefits of freedom to the full, or has it merely garnered all the unhappy consequences of equality? … We remain unconvinced by the moral vision Americans have of themselves, but in this we are wrong. (Baudrillard 1988:88–9, 91)

The two anthropologists opening this volume, one French and one American, each explore the way that such moral values, forcefully proclaimed within each national context, are experienced by those who are supposed to most need the protections they offer. No one would deny that there inevitably exists a discrepancy between legal equality and the inequities of daily life but how, asks Patrick Gaboriau, is this gap experienced by homeless persons? How do they account for their situation of extreme poverty, in apparent contradiction with some of the fundamental principles of French and American society alike? Are homeless persons in Los Angeles and Paris inclined to refer to the same causes, hold accountable similar institutions, or denounce the same kinds of miscarried justice? In fact, the differences are striking: in Paris very poor persons often see themselves as victims of a system that has evicted them, and understand their plight in terms of a logic in which state responsibility is considered paramount; whereas in Los Angeles homeless persons, though clearly articulating the appeal of an American Dream, are much more inclined than their French counterparts to abandon the idea that there is any discoverable reason for anything that happens to them. They thus understand their plight (as do those who achieve the Dream) as the product of a profoundly incoherent and arbitrary social non-order. Indeed, one theme that runs through many of these chapters concerns the way that social difference is defined, managed, and understood as a way to determine individual identities as well as collective belonging. For example, the relative pertinence of—and relationships among—cultural and racial difference are central to Beth Epstein’s study of a French New Town and Sara Le Menestrel’s on Franco-Louisianan music; these themes are also treated in David Beriss’s comparison of Antillean activism in France with post-Katrina restaurant culture in New Orleans, as well as in Stefania Capone’s analysis of Orisha religion in the US. Each author is especially concerned with deciphering the vernacular understandings of these kinds of difference in particular study settings, drawing varying degrees of distinction between these everyday understandings and the ways these concepts are used analytically. Not surprisingly, the salience of race in the US is most striking to French observers of the US, while its relative absence from discourse about France—together with the ubiquity of references to culture – invites comment from American observers of France.

8

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

It is interesting to note that while the notion of culture has generally not provided a very important analytical tool for twentieth-century French anthropology, the culture concept was a cornerstone of the American version of the discipline as elaborated by Franz Boas and his followers. Seeking an alternative to racial explanations for observable differences in behavior, Boasians, by most accounts, drew a sharp distinction between those characteristics determined by race (biologically transmitted and extremely slow to change) and those attributable to culture (transmitted by teaching/learning and relatively malleable), radically constraining the kinds of traits that they considered legitimately explainable in racial terms. One could argue that the Boasian legacy persists in the US today, in the form of ubiquitous reference to—indeed celebrations of—cultural difference within routine American practice. However, as the chapters by Le Menestrel, Beriss, and Capone illustrate, “culture” in contemporary American usage is frequently inextricably tangled with “race”: they show cultural categories of musical style, cuisine, or religious practice all to be fundamentally grounded in racial distinctions, assumed to be immutable. Each of these cases refers to the simple black/white binary that most obviously constitutes race as it is understood in the US. But the habit of interweaving racial and cultural distinctions undoubtedly does not stop there. It could be argued more broadly that the notion of ethnicity is most frequently used by Americans to mean a race/culture mix. Further, as something transmitted from ancestors, understood to be relatively immutable over time and naturally inalienable, ethnicity is more similar in some important ways to Boas’ notion of “race” than to his “culture.” As outsiders to American society, Le Menestrel and Capone are both inclined to notice and effectively articulate—rather than simply take for granted—some examples of American entanglements of race and culture. Insofar as Americans are inclined to internalize and naturalize this connection, American observers of France are apt to be suspicious of French claims to conceptualize cultural differences independent of race. Beriss takes note of such attitudes in his own reaction to Antillean activists in Paris, as well as in his compatriots’ response to his work among them. Epstein’s analysis addresses such suspicions head-on, using the example of a suburban French New Town’s sizeable immigrant population to decipher routine ways of thinking about belonging that are not necessarily grounded in primordial racial/cultural differences. Shaped as much by the preconceptions of her American interlocutors as by her observations in France, her analysis (like Beriss’) offers striking insights into French ways of thinking about difference that simultaneously cast light on contrasting American habits of thought. Epstein’s suggestion that social distinctions have been considered more pertinent in her French case find an interesting echo in Le Menestrel’s comments about the relative insignificance of social

Introduction

9

criteria in her example from Louisiana. Although a shared class position once provided the basis for asserting a fundamental commonality across the diversity of Franco-Louisianan musical genres, she argues, this claim has been largely displaced—in scholarly and vernacular contexts alike—by assertions of a primordial culture/race-based distinction between Creole (zydeco) and Cajun styles. The contrast between the state’s absence from Le Menestrel’s account and its pertinence as an actor in Epstein’s analysis, which addresses the principles and practices underpinning French notions of legitimate categorical differences and collective interests, is consistent with Gaboriau’s observation about its roles in the explanations for their plight offered by homeless persons in the two countries. Despite such clear consistencies, these articles as a set do not offer a seamless or entirely consistent picture of either French or American society. Beriss’ treatment of culture and race among Antilleans in France and in post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, complements—but also departs in some provocative ways from—those of Epstein and Le Menestrel. In any case, these juxtapositions shed stimulating light on a number of definitive characteristics of the two societies.

Key Words Community, Healing In the context of cross-cultural comparison—whether implicit or explicit—certain words may take on particular importance, seeming to summarize key characteristics of each case and the divergence between them. The term “community” offers one example with respect to France and the United States. Highly charged in political or media discourse as well as in sociological analysis in both settings, this word almost always carries positive or neutral (rarely negative) value in American usage but, consistent with the logic of French Republican integration discussed by Epstein, is usually negative or neutral (rarely positive) in French. The two American authors in this section, William Poulin-Detour and Deborah Reed-Danahy, are drawn by their French encounters to reexamine takenfor-granted uses, meanings, and contrasts in the two countries. The two French authors, Stefania Capone and Anne Raulin, focus on “healing,” a term that strikes them for the contrast between its ubiquity in the American setting—in public, private, vernacular, analytic, literal and metaphorical contexts—and the limited medical or religious meanings associated with its French counterpart ( guérison). Poulin-Deltour uses the example of gay activism to explore how the familiar binary of American good community/French bad community may be reversed by dissident groups as a way to critique dominant national val-

10

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

ues. His primary focus is on the mobilization of French gays in the 1990s, particularly on their use of an American model of “gay community” (as they understood it) to make claims about the legitimacy of a distinctive identity based on sexual orientation. He contrasts these with contemporaneous claims about the “romance of community” from American queer activists, many inspired by their reading of French theory to critique the essentialist and exclusionary implications of claims to community among gays in the US. This case of two-way contestatory borrowing leads Poulin-Deltour to caution against both overstating simple cross-national contrasts and underestimating the culture-specific adaptations of such imports. But his material also offers an intriguing example of the potential political expediency of such misunderstandings. In her consideration of the community concept, Reed-Danahay is concerned with the potential for misunderstandings that result more from importing vernacular meanings into analytical tools than from cross-national exchange. Drawing on her work in a French farm community, as well as among Vietnamese ethnic communities in the US and France, she argues that the considerable baggage associated with American common-sense uses of “community” undermine its usefulness for ethnographic analysis. Instead, she proposes that a better choice would be “social space” (espace social), a strictly analytical term first developed by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre and then further elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu. In this move to replace the baggage of an everyday term with the precision of specialized scientific vocabulary—all the more legitimized by its Gallic origins—Reed-Danahay addresses a perennial challenge of the social sciences. To resolve it, she follows the precedent of a number of influential predecessors on both sides of the Atlantic, including most notably perhaps the work of several mid-century French scholars of rural France who sought to escape the preconceptions implied by such everyday terms as village, paroisse, commune or pays by borrowing from Anglo-American “community studies” the notion of communauté rurale or communauté paysanne (e.g. Lefebvre 1963, Bernot 1975) as more analytical terms that further benefited from the luster of overseas origins. In the context of rural France, the term communauté in this technical sense has since been absorbed into administrative language (e.g. communauté de communes)7 but not into ordinary vernacular usage, nor has it acquired the negative associations with communitarianism connoted in France by groupings based on either religion or foreign ancestry. The example of communauté/community is an especially telling one, but a number of the other authors in this volume also note such shifting meanings across space, time, or social context. Vernacular terms may circulate far from their points of origin, acquiring new connotations—or the authority of scientific abstraction—along the way. Terms that begin

Introduction

11

as analytical concepts (Boasian culture, for example) may work their way into common usage, picking up diverse baggage on the trip. Clearly, in the course of moving between common sense and scholarly usage, between one national context and another, between one political stance and its opposite, words acquire new meanings that can themselves illuminate the conceptual stakes and local circumstances producing them. It is the relative richness of the term “healing” as it is widely used in American society that draws the attention of the two French observers whose papers close this section. Capone focuses her attention on North American versions of Orisha religious practices, imported to the US by immigrants from Cuba and Haiti and embraced there by small groups of African-Americans. Capone argues that a key specificity of mainland versions of this religious practice is its emphasis on efforts to reconnect with African ancestors, largely absent from versions elsewhere in the Americas. Indeed, her analysis adds a useful strand to those of Le Menestrel and Beriss, with respect to the management of (black/white) racial identity as an important preoccupation in the US. Here, African ancestors are seen by Orisha practioners as a crucial source of moral guidance; re-establishment of ties with them is considered the best way for their American descendents to achieve both spiritual healing and moral reawakening. But the notion of healing at the center of this religious practice is broader yet: affirmation of an ancestral black identity is understood to have potent healing powers, not only for Orisha practitioners but for the broader African-American community, bringing social and cultural as well as political and spiritual redemption to the whole collectivity. If the Orisha religion is a relatively marginal one, even among the racial minority from which it draws its practitioners, the Episcopal Church is clearly a mainstream religion that has long been associated with American elites. It is undoubtedly significant then, that the notion of healing is no less important in this context, and here too is not only liturgically meaningful but is also central to private, individual acts of conscience. In her essay, Raulin captures the conceptions of healing that shaped post-9/11 activities in the Episcopal parish located next to the Twin Towers site. She shows healing and reparation to be connected to the immediate need to bear witness and minister to the trauma experienced in the aftermath of the attacks, but also that healing is extended to include a sense of forgiveness that can transform the enemy-other. In this case, the power of healing is invoked, not so much to reinforce a sense of collective belonging (as in the Orisha example) but to dissolve hostile boundaries through a broad transnational movement for reconciliation that has drawn in the Episcopalian Church. In this context, healing again includes a political agenda aiming to repair the wounds caused by social, ethnic, religious, or national conflict, but here this goal is extended to the human race and aims for a

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

12

kind of universal solidarity: nothing short of the reconciliation of all of humanity with itself. This shared use of a language of healing in the American versions of two very different religious traditions suggests that the significance of the religious idiom in US society resides largely in its potency as a frame for interpreting political/social realities or individual understandings of self, independently of rates of church attendance or declarations of orthodox belief. Moreover, the similarities between these two examples illuminate other characteristics of American society, such as a widely-shared threeway conception of the person (comprising body/mind/spirit) that contrasts with habitual French conceptions as well as with particular kinds of linkages between science—psychological, clinical, but also natural and physical—and religious belief of many kinds.

Utopias Endless possibility, Country living The notion of healing in much the same sense reappears centrally within the New Age milieu of San Francisco analyzed by Christian Ghasarian, even though this context obviously occupies a very different position in American society than do either the Orisha practitioners described by Capone or the New York Episcopalians studied by Raulin. Nonetheless, Ghasarian too encounters a concept of healing that posits an inextricable linking of body, mind, and spirit; concerns both individual and collective (even global) well-being; and draws on wide-ranging forms of knowledge, including ancient and modern science as well as diverse forms of spirituality. Again, the appearance of this concept in such sharply contrasting contexts exposes a ubiquity that makes it largely invisible to natives, but by the same token makes it a promising locus of widely shared ideas that help define the particularities of everyday life in the United States. As in the other examples, healing is understood here as a key process for overcoming obstacles on the way to the “good life.” In Ghasarian’s view, the New Age version of that good life, as well as ideas about what is required to achieve it, rest on a kind of fundamental optimism best summarized by the ubiquitous phrase “anything is possible.” The quest for the good life—bringing together personal accomplishment, physical and spiritual health, and planetary improvement—is believed to demand considerable effort but also to foster the full realization of individual and collective potential. Indeed this “world of possibilities” can be seen as a contemporary version of the American Dream. Ghasarian’s analysis shows this utopian vision to remain remarkably powerful, though neither static nor monolithic: continually reworked over time and social context, it

Introduction

13

persists as a potent guide to individual and collective behavior in contemporary American society. If the theme of endless possibility expresses the forward-looking optimism characteristic of the American Dream, whether functioning as a positive inspiration or (as Gaboriau’s work among the homeless of Los Angeles suggests) as a mirage, French attraction to the countryside suggests instead an inclination to define the “good life” with reference to the past. Susan Carol Rogers is struck by the powerful and deeply ambivalent connotations of countryside in France to symbolize both a world happily left behind and one tragically lost: the good life can require leaving the countryside, just as well as it can imply returning to it. This double valence stands in sharp contrast with the positive simplicity of American conceptions of “endless” possibility that exclude negative options: social mobility is never imagined as downward, nor is the American Dream ever expected to turn into a nightmare. Like the American Dream of endless possibility analyzed by Ghasarian, French images of the countryside do not necessarily describe any observable reality. Indeed, Rogers suggests that by many empirical measures rural life in France and the US has evolved in broadly convergent ways over the past century without blurring the sharp contrasts in the two national imaginaries. Nonetheless, as in Ghasarian’s American example, French ideas about the countryside function as a highly consequential— and therefore illuminating—framework for articulating and acting upon widely shared aspirations. If neither author offers explanation for why recipes for the “good life” draw on such different elements in each national setting, both suggest that the force and persistence of such utopic visions reside in their association with an adaptable repertoire of meanings. In its late twentieth century New Age version, the American dream, for example, remains recognizable as such, even if it is not identical to the version that drove nineteenth century pioneers across the continent. Rogers focuses more squarely on this kind of flexibility, exploring some of the variations across time and social context in the meanings attributed to rural space in France to illustrate the dynamics—simultaneously persistent and malleable—that shape such repertoires. *  *  * This set of essays illustrates how a well-grounded reciprocal anthropology can render explicit the myths, ideologies, conceptual reflexes, and habitual practices that implicitly shape our everyday experience. This style of anthropology deploys carefully chosen cases that, while not necessarily statistically representative, draw attention to contextual variability and stretch our imaginations with their consideration of paradox: acceptable terms for articulating a moral social order—and one’s position in it—vary

14

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

considerably from one context to the other; and borrowed ideas or things may be pressed into service to reaffirm well-established identities or to promote novel ones sometimes only to be rejected in the name of those very constructions. The term “parallax” (from the Greek parallaxis, alteration), meaning the difference in the apparent position of an object when it is viewed along two different lines of sight,8 seems especially useful for our purposes. In effect, it identifies the results of a reciprocal anthropology, one in which novel insights about a given society result from the juxtaposition of outsider and insider perspectives. If one of our aims is to invite a play of mirrors held up in a way that allows us to see the image of ourselves perceived by the other, it is with the full awareness that this exercise is a risky one, likely to be unsettling to those seeing themselves from this unaccustomed angle. In this regard, Claude Levi-Strauss’s view of the anthropologist as an “astronomer of human constellations” takes on a double meaning, referring both to the transitivity necessarily characterizing a reciprocal production of knowledge and to the kind of non-hierarchical epistemological order that would be required to legitimize future anthropologies of this kind. The realities of contemporary globalization concern anthropology as much as any other domain. Emergent recognition of world-class intellectual centers in countries such as Brazil, India, or China may signal a “provincialization of Europe,” the continent that until the end of the twentieth century considered itself the brains of the planet, with North America presumptively positioned to carry on its legacy. The reciprocal anthropology proposed here is both motivated by and dependent upon the potential for upending such old center/periphery models. We have focused here on a play of mirrors between France and the US as an early experiment with what we have in mind. But the ultimate interest of this approach lies in its general application among a wide array of societies, western or not. Our example only begins to lay out the methodological and theoretical challenges and potentials of such an undertaking. It should be noted that the tone taken here is neither judgmental nor ironic; our aim is not to celebrate or to mock the national characteristics we encounter (or those we routinely live with). Particularly within western literary traditions, there is certainly an honorable and much-loved genre of cross-national commentary that has just such purposes, including many notable examples of French or American chroniclers whose assessments of each other’s country are often used to judge their own (e.g., Alexis de Toqueville, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Georges Duhamel, MFK Fisher, Jean Baudrillard, etc.). Our goal here is rather to cast thought-provoking light on revelatory characteristics that otherwise seem banal or counterintuitive to the inside observer, no less than to identify and decipher those whose interest lies in their pervasiveness, internal contradiction, or appar-

Introduction

15

ent elusiveness. Casting aside the license among equals to use a language of value judgment or comedy, we have aimed instead for a kind of critical distance—in the strictly analytical sense of the term—as the best way to capture the places and cultures that we reciprocally care about, admire, and respect. Ultimately our undertaking is one that rests on the legacy of classical anthropology, a body of knowledge and methods that we are grateful to have inherited and are eager to bequeath.

Notes   1. This observation arguably applies to all four fields conventionally comprising American anthropology. In this volume, however, our focus is on sociocultural anthropology.   2. In some important ways, our undertaking overlaps and complements those of such groups as the World Anthropologies Network Collective (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, WAN 2005), the Lausanne Collective (Saillant et al 2011), and the Workshop on Anthropologists and Indigenous Scholars (Hendry and Fitznor 2012). Rather than focusing on the power relationships among various national and regional anthropologies or scholars, however, we have devised an experimental situation allowing us to explore the possibilities for a dialogical production of knowledge in the absence of such inequalities.   3. Today, there are about thirty American anthropologists whose primary research focus is in France, many more than was the case a generation ago. Nonetheless, the number remains small compared to the roughly 500 members of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE) or the 10,000 members of its parent organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Europeanist anthropologists in the US, it would appear, generally continue to follow wellestablished disciplinary preferences for relatively unfamiliar societies, such as those in Southern or (since 2000s) Eastern Europe (Rogers 1991).   4. This dearth of French anthropologists of the US (and absence of a substantial network among them) is reminiscent of the situation of American anthropologists of France a generation ago: when Jacqueline Lindenfeld and Susan Carol Rogers organized a session on the anthropology of France for the 1985 AAA meetings, they were hard-pressed to fill out a panel of eight (including themselves).   5. This relationship can usefully be compared with that of Anglo-American anthropology. Somewhat distinct, at least over most of the twentieth century, the British and American traditions nonetheless developed in explicit reference to each other, underpinned by regular transatlantic exchanges of students and faculty. In contrast, French anthropology is grounded in quite a different intellectual history, intersecting only sporadically with its Anglo-American counterpart. Like some other anthropologies (e.g. Dutch), British, American and French all lay claim to a universal purview. One might therefore expect national differences to have faded away over the twentieth century, much as has arguably happened in the cases of such other universalizing disciplines as physics, biology, or economics. Rather, anthropology seems in this respect to have followed the model of those disciplines

Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers

16

generally focused on the study of the particularities of one national setting, usually the scholar’s own (e.g. literature, history, sociology). In those cases, dominant styles of scholarship are apt to vary cross-nationally.   6. Literally, “false friends”: this term refers to a technical error of translation in which words that resemble each other in two different languages are mistakenly supposed to share a common meaning.   7. Communauté de communes is an official administrative unit, created by a 1992 law and involving the federation of several contiguous townships (communes), usually in rural areas.   8. In its literal meaning, parallax is measured by the angle of inclination between those two sight lines; because nearby objects have a larger parallax than those farther away, the principle of parallax can be used to determine distance (e.g. in astronomy).

References Baudrillard, Jean. 1989. America, trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso. Bernot, Lucien. 1975. “Les plein-vent,” Ethnos 40: 75–90. Hendry, Joy and Laara Fitznor, eds. 2012. Anthropologists, Indigenous Scholars and the Research Endeavor: Seeking bridges towards mutual respect. New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1963. La vallée de Campan: Etude de sociologie rurale. Paris: PUF. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2006. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary transformations within systems of power. Oxford: Berg. Rogers, Susan Carol. 1998. “Strangers in a crowded field: American anthropology in France.” In Europe in the Anthropological Imagination, ed. Susan Parman. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Saillant, Francine, Mondher Kilani and Florence Graezer Bideau, eds. 2011. The Lausanne Manifesto: For a Non-Hegemonic Anthropology. Montreal: Liber. Wan Collective. 2005. “Establishing dialogue among international anthropological communities,” Anthropology Newsletter 46(8): 8–9.

Part

I

Distinctions Class, Race, Culture

1 Homeless People (Paris, Los Angeles) The principle of equality seen from below Patrick Gaboriau How my experience began This is how my experience began: Seventh Street, Los Angeles, the summer of 2006. It was a typical Tuesday downtown. The Mexican markets were teeming with people, it was lively with music booming from speakers. I had just arrived at the main station and walked through the streets in the city center. I soon found myself on Seventh Street. The atmosphere suddenly changed. No vendors, no customers, no music; warehouses closed, shops shuttered. A street corner marked the contrast. I passed only homeless people walking around. Only black people, almost exclusively men. Dressed in dirty pants or rags. To the left, heading toward East L.A., I felt like I had changed cities and gone into a Third World neighborhood. That’s where I was: I went past about fifty black people, some walking, tugging a shopping cart, a suitcase, or bags; others seated or lying on the sidewalk watching people go by, like tired travelers. All were poorly shaven, in worn-out clothes. In front of me a man walked with a limp. Farther on six people were scuffling, knocking over trashcans and making a din of rattling steel. I went around them. Nearby there were tents set up on the sidewalk. A couple of heads poked out. A guy greeted me; I replied, “Hi!” Then twenty yards further three guys were yelling at each other, so I crossed the street. I returned in the other direction. A few more tents, then I came across a group of sixty or so people spread out on the sidewalk, backs against the wall, ground down by drugs. Most looked at the pavement. Some, presumably lost in their imaginings, burst out laughing; others were lying down, inert, inanimate. The sidewalks were different from the street, where another world flowed: that of the passing cars of white people, doors locked.

20

Patrick Gaboriau

In the Santa Monica neighborhood of western Los Angeles, a black man living in the streets had told me, “Over there, downtown, it’s a hard life. Yeah, man, don’t go over there! I’ll never go live over there!” Another said, “It’s crazy, downtown, crazy. Downtown’s bad people. It’s more dangerous, more dangerous down there.” What is more pleasant or less dangerous in this neighborhood, in the western part of L.A. and half a mile from the ocean? The fresh sea air, perhaps? More palm trees? The possibility of going to the beach and swimming? The overall sense of luxury that contrasts with downtown’s warehouses, its crushing heat, and the skyscrapers of the business district? From the street where I stood, in the doorway of a soup kitchen adjacent to Interstate 10, there was certainly nothing very welcoming. A black-and-white police car went by every half hour, making its neighborhood rounds to keep an eye on guys like me who loiter in the street. Police officers scanned the sidewalk where I have settled in for the day. “You shouldn’t sit,” a man living on the street told me. Why? “It’s forbidden! You can get a ticket for that!” I quickly understood that the ordinary behavior of the poor in the street may be legally sanctioned: it is illegal to drink alcohol on the sidewalk, or to sit down, form a group, or have a grocery cart there. I have known California since 1985. I had lived there for several years. But these were the first two days of my fieldwork in Los Angeles, and others would follow. I had to learn the rules of how the poor live in a state otherwise marked by ease. Are they different than the rules for the Paris street people I knew (Gaboriau 1993, 1997, 2008)? Concerning the United States, I should emphasize that the expensive cars, the practical luxury of home interiors, and the beauty of the modern architecture all indicate a widespread wellbeing that would continue to strike me after living several weeks in California.

Egalitarian principles and unequal practices? “The gradual development of the equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. “[Equality] has the essential characteristics of one: it is universal, durable, and daily proves itself to be beyond the reach of man’s powers. Not a single event, not a single individual, fails to contribute to its development” (2004: 6). Speaking of his experiences on a ten-month trip around the United States between 9 May 1831 and 20 February 1832, he remarked that “(a)mongst the new things that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcefully than the equality of conditions” (2004: 3).

Homeless People

21

What equality was Tocqueville referring to? How does it account for, explain, America? James T. Schleifer thinks this was what interested Tocqueville (1980: 35–84). Upon their return to France, his travelling companion Gustave de Beaumont turned his attention to another theme, publishing a book in 1840 on slavery in the United States that would not know the same renown as Democracy in America. “The reader,” he wrote, “is aware that there are still slaves in the United States; their number has grown to more than two million” (Beaumont 1999: 4). Two travelers took off together, companions and friends (Pierson 1938). How is it that (without total contradiction) one of them should be struck by democracy and the equality of conditions, and the other by slavery? How did Tocqueville conceive of democracy? And why did Beaumont, in nearly identical circumstances, see slavery? Tocqueville was interested in a principle. He was in the world of ideas, beliefs, arts, tastes, social organization—what he called “the spirit of the people” (2004: 241). Democracy is first and foremost an egalitarian principle. It is the collective belief in a rule that governs social relations. As Nicolas Berdiaev wrote, in democracy, “the people themselves are enough” (Berdiaev 2008: 133). There is no higher principle, no greater authority. One citizen is equal to another, and in elections the majority imposes its rule with the sovereignty of the people. It is this democracy—both the institutional organization that perpetuates it and what we could call a collective belief in equality at work—that struck Tocqueville. His sensibilities were shaped by the crumbling of his aristocratic world, which had been defeated by the French Revolution.1 As a result, the democratic aim, this great movement underway, was for him a formal one a vessel whose contents remained to be defined. What does equality mean? How will it be expressed—according to facts or principles? Is it an idea, a great widespread abstract movement? Will the foundational implementation of these principles affect how social classes and milieus are sorted and organized? Nicolas Berdiaev, among other writers and thinkers of different cultures regarding and interpreting each other, pursues the issue. He wonders, “Why should a manifestation, unrestrained and unlimited by human nature in its non-transfigured state, by the means of democracy and popular government, lead to good and procure social justice? That remains incomprehensible” (2008: 136). And if it were incomprehensible, would there not be some elements that would allow a particular social problem to be raised, connected with this very incomprehension? Why would Tocqueville’s presumed general egalitarian principle necessarily lead to egalitarian practices; in economic or cultural spheres, for example, why would we expect differences of fortune, inequalities of networks, and opportunities to flatten out under the weight this formal egalitarian

Patrick Gaboriau

22

principle? Might not equality remain a mere formality, failing to generate much consistent practice?

A French perspective? So here is the question: how is the egalitarian principle noted by Toqueville conceived by the homeless of Los Angeles, who experience radically disadvantaged life conditions? Might they be in a privileged position to offer insights allowing me to formulate an understanding of the relationship between ideal and practice? It is probable that as a French ethnologist from a poor working class background, I have a preconceived view formed by European representations of class. So I have been drawn to consider the perspectives of people “from below.” Can their view enrich American questions about inequality or let them to be raised on novel terms, updated, or put into new perspectives? The goal here is not to generalize about how American social milieus or classes are arranged but to capture the perspective that certain “poor” people have of their social universe. I try to use the perspective of the “streetpeople” I met, “beaten” in a way by the neoliberal economy (see also Burt 1993; Davis 1986; Jencks 1994; O’Flaherty 1996; Rossi 1989), to formulate a wider analysis of equality that considers opportunities, rights, facts, and goods. What do people living in misery in America think about it? Is equality understood in terms of a political struggle to be fought? Or is it internalized by inward-turning guilt about the missed opportunities one failed to seize? In sum, do people in the streets think of themselves as beaten. incapable, or neither, for that matter? Only after addressing that issue can we pose a second, question: does this formal principle of equality mean anything to the people I met who live in the street? What were their concerns and their broader views on social organization?

Wandering I: Describing fieldwork returns us to life itself The ethnographic field site is characterized by a constant reminder of life itself. This is not an abstract thought on ideals and principles, such as equality, but a question of situated participation in moments of existence with the other. We know that the principles organizing American society are beautiful and generous, but what about everyday life itself? Rico, Charles, Deedee, Guy, and Max all live on the street. They seem to live in a world apart, far from democratic principles, where the discourse of citizen equality seems only a turn of speech. But what do they,

Homeless People

23

all with black skin, have to say about it? What do they think of this proclaimed equality? What do they have to say about this beautiful democratic ideal? Is it important to them? What are their words, expressed in a “field” removed from the general environment of the passing cars, devoid of the ease of the so-called “middle-classes,” and regulated by the public rules that police only the poor and miserable? Seen from the street, how do people suffering society’s agonies conceive of this society? Do they try to avoid an intolerable contradiction by somehow reconciling the impossible: the lives they lead and the collective ideal? How do they reconcile collective values with their lives? Rico, a black American man of about 30, was sleeping on the street. He came to eat lunch and dinner at the soup kitchen near where we met. Well-dressed and sober, he was hoping to find work soon. In fact, within two weeks of our meeting, a restaurant hired him to wash dishes. He was still sleeping in the street during the first month of his job, unable to pay rent. One day, we were together on the sidewalk, and a car went by. That’s police—the car, right there. See the shot gun, sticking up? The black and white, the blue and white, that’s someone to worry about. You just stand up [we were sitting on a shopping cart, which is not allowed]. They don’t arrest you, they may gave you a ticket for a hundred dollars. One hundred dollars. Yeah. It’s illegal to walk with these [shopping carts] in the city; you can get a ticket. Unless you got one like mine—you gotta cut it off, just the bottom. [He indicates where he had cut the basket off the cart, leaving only a base with wheels]. Just this part, take all this off. And they won’t give you ticket. … The shelter feeds you, they feed you lunch and dinner. In this center, they take anybody, they don’t care. You get food inside—they serve the food, and you can eat inside or outside. They give you a voucher for clothes, a voucher for food, and for identification. To get your ID, they give you [a] voucher. You go and buy your ID at the DMV, [Department of Motor Vehicles]. I went Wednesday—I got a fine; instead of $4, I got to pay $24. Yeah. Three times I lose my ID, three times, so now they charge me. I got a fine.

I met up with Rico several times. After a month and a half working, he showed up one day with nice sunglasses. PG: You have nice sunglasses! Rico: Yeah, I got them for $80. Now I have to find a place to live. I’m still sleeping rough in the street. I’ve got to wait to see if I’ve got enough money to rent an apartment. I don’t earn enough! I’m going to have to sleep in the rough for the next few months.

I never noticed him making any spontaneous remarks on general social issues or on how society works overall. The world seems to play out at his level: get a job, fear the police, buy sunglasses, try to find a place to live.

Patrick Gaboriau

24

One evening I was walking with Charles and DeeDee, a couple who had been living together on the street for three weeks. Charles, born in 1950, explained: Yeah, before, I had a job and someplace to live, but unfortunately lost it. My job was like under the table, in security. But I am what, five-nine, right? I was too small. They wanted me to watch the club. It was security work in a nightclub. They like big guys, six-two, weighting three-fifty, right? They said I was too small.

And both elaborated: Charles: You see, we walk around, and look at night after the sun goes down, and see what safe place is available. There’s competition for it. DeeDee: During the day you can sit down, but at night you got to be on the move. They gave me a ticket. I didn’t pay it. It was a $250 fine for sitting down there. They give you a ticket. Then it goes to court , and when you don’t pay it, then you go to jail for not paying your ticket. You go to court you go to jail for three days. I sit in my cell in jail for three days, yeah. Charles: My stepfather was in the service, my mom was a homemaker. I have two brothers and one younger sister. My sister is locked up. My brother sells and talks. My baby sister, she has been going on and off to, how do you say, institutions. She started going to jail in elementary [school]. DeeDee: Out there, everybody takes care of everybody. We take care of each other out here, we’ve got to. What we get for lunch, you have to split in half, for dinner. We go to the market some days, and get food there. Most of the time we eat right across the street from the shelter. In the morning we eat at the shelter. They give sack lunches about nine, ten o’clock, so we sit in this area from six thirty in the morning till, what? Eight thirty, nine o’clock at night, because we can’t move, because of the police. We sleep in front of a print-shop. Charles: My parents are dead, her parents are gone. Her mom sang, she was able to survive half-way. … She’s retired. The salary isn’t enough to get a place. You gotta make room for yuppies, you know, close to the beach—middle class, rich white folks.

Some points to consider DeeDee spoke of the world of the street as one united in solidarity. And yet this ideal world conflicts with the world they experience. Just before this conversation, Charles had been telling me that there was a fight to get the “best places” to sleep (the quietest and least dangerous). In practice, we are far from the frequently proclaimed solidarity. In France as in California the world of the poor does not stand in sharp contrast with wider society where the values of being attentive to or in solidarity with others are concerned. In each case, it is certainly possible to find examples of people coming to understandings, collaborating, helping one another,

Homeless People

25

and forming friendships, of course, but as elsewhere, they also fight, treat others with indifference, and express hatred and jealousy. For the poor, the social universe seems to be governed by obscure powers—money, the middle classes, the rich—that toy with them. In daily life, it is the police who control and regulate space, the forbidden and allowed places, right up to bodily positions. The word “police”—conjuring supreme authority and ability to detain and imprison—sums up this direct interface with social surveillance. In this setting such reprimands are most often meted out for repeated misdemeanors whose censure has the sole purpose of repressing homeless people, since certain acts were designated as offenses specifically to regulate them. Charles thought that blacks form a group with unique qualities that should be acknowledged. His claim, if it can be put that way, comes from a perspective of minority rights recognition. He lacks the sociological tools that would allow him to think of his domination—one specifically exerted on blacks, not exclusively due to their skin color but because of their class (which in the United States is often coded as skin color)—in wider terms. He can only reason using the framework available to him: that of the claims of minorities, which are legitimated and accepted in California, where every “minority”—Hispanic, black, Asian, gay, lesbian, and so on—can claim the right to exist and be “themselves.” How to talk about forms of social domination? In California, I often had the feeling that each person told his unique story to relate how the social reproduction of poverty played out for him. But the poor that I knew, who were unable to imagine or coordinate the potential social force of homeless people as an organized group, were able to express social domination in a form audible in Californian society: the “minority claim,” or sometimes even a claim from “the homeless” demanding the right to be where they were (on the street). The minority claim was used on numerous occasions to emphasize that black populations’ specificity is “in the genes,” in this way affirming a bio-sociology (“it’s naturally that way, because we are black”) because they are not equipped to express a classbased power relationship. I should emphasize the fact that in the United States, “race” is a way of expressing and hiding “class,” and also a way of observing it (by statistical means) without saying so explicitly. Thus one reads statistics saying that in 2009 the average annual household income was $32,584 in black households and $51,861 for non-Hispanic white households (Denavas-Walt et al. 2010: 6).

Wandering II Guy, around 40, had just arrived from Miami. A plumber, he was experiencing his first nights outside on the street.

26

Patrick Gaboriau

I went downtown to a homeless center, and they told me to come here. I came early this morning, but they told me they don’t have any beds. I thought it was a shelter. They don’t have beds. I slept outside last night. From downtown I took the 20 bus … I came from Miami. Went to Hollywood, then downtown, then here. I made a friend in Miami, and she told me to come here. We just had a relationship, but it didn’t work out, so I have to find a job. I am trying to go back to Miami. I have my family in Miami. My parents are senior citizens. I have two brothers and one sister … I don’t have any money to go back … I flew here, it took me eight hours. I didn’t sleep anywhere. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know nobody. I have to find a place to sleep, and then find a job. I need to rest first. Yeah. I was a master plumber—I have a resume out there, I worked about eight years as a plumber. I don’t know what I am going to do. I’d like to go back—don’t wanna stay here, I wanna to go back to Miami. I don’t like it here. If I had a job, it would be different. It’s going to take two or three weeks before I can go back. Yeah.

And he stopped there, marveling, as if he had just discovered the world and its trials. Perhaps he expected a Californian paradise? He discovered a much harder universe, without kindness, where no one took much account of his own drama. No one cared that he could not buy an airplane ticket. He was now part of the homeless; he was on the street. He did not seem to know where he was any more. Perhaps he would go back to Miami …? How to talk to him about equality and inequality? Everything seemed abstract for him. He wanted a ticket to go back home, and now the world seemed strange to him. I had the feeling that he wanted to stop the world to explain himself; he still believed in a logic of kindness, he asked to be heard, simply to get back home, but no one was listening to him because he was like everyone around him: on the street. Another homeless man, Max, felt like a foreigner in California. Being a stranger for him meant being rejected, buffeted from place to place. He was the same age as Charles: I was born in 1950, November 29. I stay human but I also stay cold. I am the second oldest out there. The problem is just access … to be able to get food and help. A safe place. Basically, my safe place has always been Santa Monica, it’s safer than anywhere in Los Angeles. Back in the day I slept on the beach. It’s not forbidden now. Nah, nah. You can get a ticket, but it’s not forbidden. They used to want you on the beach. Now, they give you a ticket. But Venice Beach, you sleep on the beach near the water, and they don’t bother you. They wake you up at five thirty in the morning. You know you have to go. From eight o’clock to five thirty in the morning you can sleep. The police, they don’t bother you. … In jail, it was mostly gang members and drug addicts. For me, it was real bad. I am like you, man. You’re a foreigner from a different country, I am a foreigner from the Mid-West. This is the West coast.

Ethnographic observation—of survival, police surveillance, the criminalization of destitution, daily movements—highlights how hard life on

Homeless People

27

the streets is. A lifestyle that requires an apprenticeship (learning to break down shopping carts to avoid fines, knowing where to go to eat, or dividing your meals in half to eat noon and night), but that remains difficult even for the practiced: “I stay human, but I also stay cold.” The feeling of being a stranger in his own country—in France we doubtlessly jump too quickly to the conclusion that a territorial unit, “a country,” and feelings of identity are much the same, but Max from the Midwest felt “someplace else” in California. And equality in all this? A dream? A hope? The goals seemed to be elsewhere: getting someplace, leaving, rejoining friends or family, improving everyday life, wanting something, making friends, hoping to fall in love—everything in this seemingly uncomprehending and repressive world. How many times did I hear street people say, “I don’t understand”? I never heard that in Paris. What could this “I don’t understand” mean?

What is equality? For Toqueville, the notion of democracy has multiple uses and meanings. Sometimes it indicates a political regime; other times the condition of a society distinctive for its egalitarianism or its movement in that direction. According to Jean-Claude Lamberti, “the concept of democracy in Tocqueville is ambivalent: it can refer to realities as politically different as the United States or France and it can signify the opposite of revolution or be identified with it” (1983: 14). James T. Schleifer expressed the same idea: “Perhaps the most disconcerting feature in Tocqueville’s thought has always been his failure to precisely identify the meaning of democracy” (1980: 264). Raymond Aron warned, “Tocqueville’s vocabulary is not without some wavering” (1960: 511). This inability to specify and limit the notion of democracy may be connected with the concept itself. Democratic principles are difficult to identify for one simple reason. Declaring a core set of democratic characteristics is polemic and contestable, and above all supposes from the outset a distinction between the world of ideals and the world where they are put into practice—which Tocqueville does not do. Thus, the ideal of political pluralism is perhaps not fully achieved in a two-party situation where the parties take turns governing. People may act considerably less routinely as citizens (only occasionally voting, for example), than they do every day as producers and consumers; Free speech as a principle is apt to be limited in practice by real possibilities for expression. The independence of the media is surely restricted by the dictates of the financial powers to which they are subjected. What, then, is democracy, if its values are constantly contradicted by actions? What are some of its traits? It is first of all a historical trend: the

28

Patrick Gaboriau

disintegration of the Medieval feudal three-estate system (church, nobility, peasantry) left people unsure of their roles in society, and the human principle of democracy came to replace the divine principle of theocracy; the notion of democracy highlights this historical progression. Secondly, democracy is the opinion of the majority and the collective will declared by a sum of people giving legitimacy to state power (the “tyranny of the majority,” wrote Tocqueville; see Horwitz 1966); democracy is the universal vote. And yet—and there is a contradiction here—while democracy appears to be an irresistible movement toward greater equality, the presence of misery seems unchanged, or even expanded. The homeless, people without regular immigration papers, workers in wretched conditions, the serfs of modern times are multiplying. Might the poverty of street people, homeless people, amount to a kind of residual or unthinking inequality? The legal framework of democracy seems to include an ever-growing number of domains (more or less so from one Western country to another, with a well-known effect on misery in the streets—in Denmark, a country with wide-ranging social protection policies, there are fewer homeless people than in the United States, which offers fewer social protections to the poorest). These domains include health coverage, insurance, benefits, rights to social services, and assistance of all kinds (for the disabled, widows, the ill, people in need). These legal formulations suppose an array of procedures, rationales, bureaucracies, and rules, with the illusion of order, regularity, and planning. The general order gives citizens the feeling of a logical whole. Overall, social service operations seem to have been developed to ensure more equality. But it is not just that society is full of contradictions, and I cannot stress this point enough. In French society too, it is easy enough to identify contradictions between declared values and reality. What is more striking in California is the sense that among street people there is a feeling of incoherence that is more forceful than any impression of contradiction. Under seeming order, is everything actually disordered? Behind the visible bureaucracy and its orderliness there are sacrificed spaces of life, as if they are disconnected from the rest—in short, unconsidered and incoherent with the logical whole. Homeless people seem to not understand what has happened to them. They are lost in a universe whose logic they no longer understand. It seems to me that, unlike in France where homeless people felt defeated, those in California felt lost. It is quite different: they are lost in rules they cannot figure out, lost in obligations that do not make any sense. In line with Kundera’s writings (1986, 1995, see also Nemcova Banerjee 1990), I now wonder, what has come of democracy, if it does not necessarily imply in practice any particular kinds of relationship between social groups or in the life course itself? How does the ideal of democracy

Homeless People

29

connect (if it connects) to these incoherencies that are perceived and experienced by the California homeless I knew?

Fight or flight? In France, the centralization of the state creates a readily visible, if sometimes illusory, adversary. Power relations are negotiated with state institutions, and political power seems to be exposed from the outset, even if it is sometimes decentralized and takes a web-like form. For instance, Augustin Legrand, the leader of Enfants de Don Quichotte, an organization that provided tents for homeless people along the Saint Martin canal in Paris in December 2006, appealed to the state (several relevant ministries) and was invited to several ministerial fora, though without any concrete results. The leaders of movements for homeless people carry the words of the poor “upward”, addressing the state in terms of clearly recognized power relationships. The state and its agents, for their part, clearly position themselves as interlocutors. In the United States, the situation is quite different. For one thing, political power is more diffused in the federal system, rather than being centralized in the hands of a few clearly placed people in charge. The American president seems very far away. For another thing, neo-liberalism is generally not considered, as it is in France, one option among others (i.e. a political choice), but rather as a self-evident orientation that is hardly up for debate, except by a few university leftists who are left in peace with their discourse in a media universe that barely acknowledges their existence. Many Americans still confuse “freedom of enterprise” with simple “freedom,” leaving the impression I frequently had in California of “free foxes loose in a free range henhouse,” to borrow an expression attributed to the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès. Given all that, the elements for thinking about one’s domination are very different in France and the United States. Unable to locate political power (city-level? state-level? national-level?), street people blame immediate power, that of the police, much more regularly than in France. Everything is interpreted as if the police had a legislative function or as if particular policemen were “loose cannons” on the force. The impossibility of thinking in broader terms of social forces means that social relations are individualized, leading to a feeling of being tossed around by random forces beyond comprehension. A person thus thinks of himself as subjected to arbitrary punishments that make little sense. And so it is that people find themselves in jail for having committed the error of sitting on the sidewalk, as if it were a crime. By comparison, in France the centralization and politicization of state power, indeed of the entire administrative system, invites the poorest to

30

Patrick Gaboriau

either place themselves in a broader political fight or to surrender the battle. The state, which they can never manage to reach, seems like a sort of general system that would be the cause of their unhappiness. Since 1994, begging and vagrancy are no longer legal offenses in France, so a person living in the streets may go where he wishes and sit or lie down “without disrupting public order.”2 And yet everything seems to be “the system’s” fault, caused by this abstract and centralized bureaucratic assemblage that exercises power over them and constrains them. To sum up, in France the statements “They’re after us!” or “They don’t like us!” refer to the state, the encompassing state of Paul Ricoeur3; in the United States the same expressions are said of the local police department, and people in the street do not understand why they are subject to suppression. They feel like they do not understand both because they cannot identify a head of some kind of hierarchy (the State) to accuse and because the individualist values of neo-liberalism are widely recognized and seem to go without saying. In these two contexts, the potential powers are not the same. In France, the homeless person represents a risk of possible revolt, as members of the government are reminded by leaders of homeless movements. Abbé Pierre, long-time activist in support of the homeless,4 was for many years ranked in French person-of the-year polls as the most popular French figure. There is nothing like this in California. The person in the street does expect government action (even if, for the more lucid of them, all forms of public policy are not considered equal). Rather, the homeless person turns at best to associations or local authorities as temporary interlocutors. In California, it is rare for poor people to embrace an overarching political discourse; most often they evoke the absurdity of their situation and hopes of managing as best as possible. Charles spoke of the Californian dream as an unattainable ideal that has nothing to do with him. He does not deny it. The spacious houses, the blond American women, the sun, pools, and palm trees, are part of a California that is not his. He explained it in his personal story without situating it in a wider class context, or relating it to his skin color: “Blacks want something else,” once again genes provide the ultimate explanation. If it is “in the body” and not “in society,” what more can be said, other than pointing it out and at best claiming the right to express these “genetic” attributes as other minorities do? I do not mean simply to highlight how difficult—or even impossible— it was for the homeless people I met to analyze their way of thinking sociologically. It is hardly surprising that they use other forms of reasoning, particularizing their notion of race and focusing on relationships between individuals (especially police officers or agency personnel) in order to make sense of their social universe.

Homeless People

31

Shifting my approach, I would now like to work on developing a broader anthropological conception coming from these street people’s talk. It seems to me that the notion of paradox, which I present next, is useful in pursuing this point.

The notion of the social paradox As I have already mentioned, it is not uncommon to find contradictions between the values of a given society and how it actually functions. French society loudly proclaims its idealized values of liberty, equality, and fraternity; American society likewise highly ranks democracy, free enterprise, and freedom of movement as so many shared values. These values are frequently contradicted by observable actions. In France the basic rights of foreigners “without papers” (illegal immigration status) are flouted, despite the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, which states: “All men are born and remain free and equal under the law.” Similarly, the American government recently authorized the torture, killing, and imprisonment of its enemies without prior declaration of war. But rather than draw attention to obvious contradictions, I aim to stress the social paradox of values that goes beyond simple contradiction or mundane public rhetoric, and could be said to characterize a current trend in the United States It seems to me that this notion of paradox touches on an aspect of current North American culture that may be original, can be observed in California, and which is certainly emphasized by people living in the streets. This notion brings us to a wider anthropology, indeed more hypothetical and less empirical, but one nevertheless revealed by firsthand observations of street people’s feeling that the social world is absurd and tempestuous. The notion of paradox came to me while reading Milan Kundera. This author stresses what he calls the “terminal paradox.” He writes that many modern novelists—Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch—have wondered about contemporary values and “saw, felt, grasped” some of the paradoxes of modern times. “[U]nder the conditions of the ‘terminal paradoxes,’ all existential categories suddenly change their meaning” (Kundera 2003: 12). He goes on to give the following examples: What is adventure if a K.’s freedom of action is completely illusory? What is future if the intellectuals of The Man Without Qualities have not the slightest inkling of the war that will sweep their lives away the next day? What is crime if Broch’s Huguenau not only does not regret but actually forgets the murder he has committed? And if the only great comic novel of the period, Hasek’s Schweik, uses war as its setting, then what has happened to the comic? Where is the difference between public and private if K., even in bed with a woman, is never without the two emissaries of

32

Patrick Gaboriau

the Castle? And in that case, what is solitude? A burden, a misery, a curse, as some would have us believe, or on the contrary, a supremely precious value in the process of being crushed by the ubiquitous collectivity? (2003: 12–13)

Thinking about my experiences working in various field sites on the theme of homeless people, recalling once again some of the moments spent on the street, considering these ways of living made of misery and pain (although not exclusively, I must add), I found this thought-provoking. The question is not, “upon what lie is our society built?” That would require thinking in terms of truth and error, experimental or positivist knowledge, or, where poverty is concerned, in terms of justice and injustice—in moral terms. It is clear that the existence of poverty may be seen as a contradiction in the social functioning of a rich society founded on egalitarian principles, and that there is also a paradox there, in the mundane sense of the word.5 But this is not how we are using this notion. Rather, combining a consideration of the abstract values that govern collective representations with more specific elements from ethnographic observation reveals the social brutality that leads the people I met to find themselves not only diminished and dispossessed, but unable to comprehend their situation; they seem to have no idea what is happening to them, or why. Thinking in terms of simple contradictions would be asking oneself the following questions: Where is the democratic agenda if the values behind it are endlessly contradicted by actions? What are democracy and human rights if they are flaunted by actions contrary to their principles, such as the reproduction of flagrant inequalities, the nameless poverty of some, and the priceless wealth of others? Who benefits from all this? How is it perpetuated? In Los Angeles, values can be approached from the angle of social domination: one can seek their foundations and highlight the consequences of their reflections, as Mike Davis does in his book City of Quartz (1990). More broadly, thinking in terms of contradiction would be to confront values and practice, plans and reality, and ultimately lead to asking this general question: Where do our collective projects stand if they are not expected to be reconciled with actual life? To build a line of thought that works within a broader anthropology, I propose starting with the Kunderan notion of paradox. It seems to me that issues present themselves differently when approached this way: If equality is no longer a plan and a goal, but a delusion, a useful illusion, and a fake, then what accommodations are we prepared to make to live in such a world? It seemed to me that street people were on just such a quest, precisely because they did not understand what was happening to them. They saw no logic behind their arrest by the police; they could make little sense of the sanctions to which their conduct was subjected; they were

Homeless People

33

living in a world that seemed arbitrary. I emphasize, then, the paradox is not a simple contradiction, but pervasive inconsistency. The world of homeless people seemed to be marked by a lack of consistency . There was nothing left but to submit without even trying to understand. And I could formulate the wider question they asked themselves this way: Which illusion should we preserve just in order to keep living? What are the effects of these illusions? When all is said and done, what has come of equality if it can only be expressed in the form of a mirage that gives dominated people the feeling of insubstantiality? What happens to discourse and public debate if no one believes it, if it seems to be evaded, seems to not exist? If it serves only to trick, but it does not even trick anymore, since it seems to be absent? What then of the status of private discourse? If we do not understand anymore, what has happened to the logic that once governed our values? Other questions follow: which inconsistency is the basis for our “living together”? Should we live an illusion and maintain such a discourse? Does our ability to speak, despite helping us to reason, also mislead us? Are words such as “equality” or “democracy” only illusory? Are we discursive beings whose language, instead of instructing us in life, distances us from living? These seem to me to be the anthropological questions raised by the encounter with homeless people in California. So what exactly is this inconsistency that forms the basis of society for its most impoverished members?

Wandering III: Soup-time! We were in a courtyard at a soup kitchen that served meals to homeless people in Santa Monica. Someone wanted to take a chair to sit down, but there were not enough to go around. About thirty men stood while fifteen sat. Someone said an unoccupied chair was taken. The guy who had been sitting in it returned. He grabbed his chair and prepared to defend his right to sit down. The other, tall and sturdy, wanted to take it from him. The two men started to exchange blows, the chair flew through the air at head-level less than a yard from me. A little later, Charles explained to me the ultimate source of black cultural identity. He insisted, “It’s in the genes!” Rather than rejecting racist conceptions that stress the hierarchy of supposed races, he adopted this model. For him, hierarchy amounts to difference and is attributable to the genetic and biological factors that define the particular characteristics of blacks. The world of street people I knew in California was not shaped exclusively by feelings of incomprehension and inconsistency; these alternated

Patrick Gaboriau

34

with other views. The poor also spoke of “the American dream,” the hope they had of becoming rich someday—if circumstances worked in their favor and if they could figure out how to grasp the opportunity when it arose. I would say they believed in Santa Claus. Santa Claus appears to be a reality to them, or at least a possibility, which is not without effect on their own lives, where hopes of becoming rich alternated with disappointment in failing to. Charles explained why he liked California: “I love the American dream, the nice weather, the palm trees. Ah, the people!” He may not have entirely believed it, but he repeated it often. His girlfriend DeeDee barely spoke (he was one of the only men in a relationship). She sucked her thumb beside him. Some friends had given her a little teddy bear that she carried around on her cart. Her life had been hard. “My mother had a lot of children, from several men.” DeeDee could not have known many moments of tenderness. She seemed to be catching up for lost time. Her gravelly, drawling voice was testimony to her misery, beyond her words, which were limited to a few laughing interjections to punctuate Charles’ or my speech or to agree: “Oh yeah!”—“Very, very!,”—“Yeah, man!”

The concept of inconsistency At this point the work of Louis Dumont could be useful. We can take up the project he presents in Essays on Individualism: “It needs to be shown here that a study of the set of ideas and values characteristic of modern times can be justified and even commended from a social-anthropological viewpoint” (1992: 1; see also Dumont 1980). It seems to me that a consideration of street people in California raises a more general issue related to the values of contemporary North American society. In California, this is what I see happening: there, the paradox is not the class relationship as it is in class-based societies, with injustices and antagonisms. Of course, blacks in a certain way do constitute a class. The conditions of their domination are reproduced from one generation to the next. But that does not seem to me to be the most characteristic fact. More characteristic, it seems to me, is this great reigning generalized indifference, this great discursive ability to justify the unjustifiable, and this great incomprehension felt by the poor. This is without a doubt the effect of class position, but they articulate this fact in another way, without specifying any opponents. We know the classic schema of neo-liberalism: everyone can find his place, it is just a question of rolling up your sleeves, applying yourself, not waiting for external miracles (from the state or elsewhere) but getting a

Homeless People

35

grip on yourself; explained in individual terms, case by case, by laziness or effort. A morality of will, a psychological morality that bars the contribution of the sociology of domination, that is unaware of it. According to this view, a society is composed of a sum of subjectivities; we must not forget that simply considering “social facts” seems leftist in the United States (Sombart 1906). So what is this inconsistency I feel? How does it express itself among the street people with whom I spoke and spent time? These are obviously questions to be answered. In France the street people I knew felt like “losers,” “defeated” in a social world made up of struggles and powers to which they could no longer add their voice. It was the world of the dominated, more or less aware (according to phases) of its domination. The homeless person believed himself to be the loser in a “system”—a whole world rooted in the state, collective organizations, and “back-room deals.” There was nothing like that in California. The street person referred to an inconsistent world where he was buffeted from here to there according to rules whose rationale he does not even understand. It is an arbitrary world, not without values, not valueless, but outside of any recognizable system of value. Where absurd rules govern life—not, as in France, because “they’re after the poor” (which supposes a “will” to devastate, a state that acts), but because “we don’t know why,” “we don’t understand,” expressions that return time and time again in the speech of the homeless people I knew in Los Angeles. Fines or jail terms are threatened without anyone knowing why, other than as part of an arbitrary stream of punishment without logic; “We were there at the wrong time.” It is a matter of luck. You are not allowed to sit down and you do not know why, or to set up a tent and you do not understand. In relation to poverty, this Kafkaesque universe seemed to me to be California’s modern future. Frantic people who no longer knew the reason behind what has made them suffer tumbled about without understanding why. A world that seemed to have lost any sense—that was the existential experience of the street people I knew in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles I left the soup kitchen and went back home via the bridge that spanned Interstate 10. Cars passed at full speed on saturated roads; I wondered if that is the Los Angeles of the middle classes? These people going from one place to another, as fast as possible, passing feet away from shopping carts pushed by famished people who do not understand. A city shaken by spasms, a city that needs to be illuminated in some other way in order to understand it? Arlette Farge and Jean-François Laé explain: “It is no longer a matter of tracking events for what they say, but to read in them a reversed image of our society that is evasive, makes itself infinitely distant, setting scenes and screens to avoid the facts, push them

Patrick Gaboriau

36

off into pathology or impotence. But how to slow down this life shaken by spasms?” (2000: 133).

Notes Translated from the French by Juliette Rogers. I sincerely thank Susan Carol Rogers and Anne Raulin for their attentive readings and the lines of thought they helped me to clarify. I also thank Juliette Rogers for her careful translation.   1. Speaking of Tocqueville in his introduction to an edition of Democracy in America, François Furet wrote: “His entire oeuvre can be seen as an interminable contemplation of the nobility” (1981: 9–10).   2. In some cities (most notably Marseilles), recent anti-vagrancy ordinances have limited the right to beg and solicit.   3. Paul Ricoeur wrote: “[T]he state continues to encompass all the spheres of belonging with respect to which we pay allegiance” (1998: 103).   4. The Abbé Pierre founded the charity organization Emmaus in 1949 to combat poverty and homelessness. Both he and his organization were highly visible in France for the rest of his life, and since his death in 2007.   5. Many authors emphasize the “paradox” of the persistence of poverty in a society of abundance; see Peterson (1991: 2–27).

References Aron, Raymond. 1960. “Idées politiques et vision historique de Tocqueville.” Revue Française de Science Politique 10(3): 509–526. Beaumont, Gustave de. 1999 (1840). Marie, or, Slavery in the United States, trans. Barbara Chapman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Berdiaev, Nicolas. 2008 (1923). De l’inégalité, trans. Anne and Constantin Andronikof. Paris: L’Âge d’Homme. Burt, Martha A. 1993. Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1986. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class. London, New York: Verso. Denavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, US Census Bureau. 2010. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Dumont, Louis. 1980 (1966). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992 (1983). Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Homeless People

37

Farge, Arlette, and Jean-François Laé. 2000. La fracture sociale. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Furet, François. 1981. “Le système conceptuel de la ‘démocratie en Amérique’.” Preface to Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Gaboriau, Patrick. 1993. Clochard, L’univers d’un groupe de sans-abri parisiens. Paris: Julliard. ———. 1997. SDF à la Belle Epoque. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. ———. 2008. Le chercheur et la politique. Paris: Aux Lieux d’Etre. Horwitz, Morton J. 1966. “Tocqueville and the tyranny of the majority.” The Review of Politics 28: 293–307. Jencks, Christopher. 1994. The Homeless. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Jencks, Christopher, and Paul E. Peterson, eds. 1991. The Urban Underclass. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Kundera, Milan. 2003 (1986). The Art of the Novel. Translated by Linda Asher. New York: Perennial Classics (HarperCollins Publishers). ———. 1995 (1993). Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Translated by Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins. Lamberti, Jean-Claude. 1983. Tocqueville et les deux démocraties. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Nemcova Banerjee, Maria. 1990. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. O’Flaherty, Brendan. 1996. Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Peterson, Paul E. 1991. “The urban underclass and the poverty paradox.” In The Urban Underclass, edited by Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Pierson, George Wilson. 1938. Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1998 (1995). Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. New York: Columbia University Press. Rossi, Peter H. 1989. Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schleifer, James T. 1980. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sombart, Werner. 1906. Warum gist es in den Vereinigten Staaten keine Sozialismus? Tübingen: Mohr. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2004 (1835). Democracy in America. Translated by Arthur Gold­hammer. New York: Library of America.

2 The Moral Public Sphere Integration and discrimination in a French New Town Beth Epstein For the past several decades, the French banlieue, the largely poor and heavily immigrant-populated districts on the outskirts of Paris and other major cities in France, have become known as sites of chronic urban and social decay. These suburban districts are associated with a spectrum of social and economic problems that run from high and prolonged rates of unemployment to racial discrimination, police harassment, youth disaffection, and a more general apprehension that old structures are breaking down. Populated in disproportionate numbers by people of immigrant background, the banlieue have in particular become the focus of broader anxieties relating to matters of immigration and national identity and are looked on with considerable disquiet as places where the ideals of the French republican project have somehow run aground. These peri-urban districts were not, however, always regarded with such alarm. At the time of their construction, the post-war French suburbs were, rather, vaunted as signs of progressive social change. Erected with considerable speed during the prosperous years after World War II, they were envisioned as a bold response to an acute housing crisis, as “socially mixed” cities that would provide people of middle, low, and moderate means access to decent living conditions and the city services they would need to build up new centers of civic life. As it became apparent in the 1960s that immigrant laborers recruited to work in the country’s post-war boom were not returning home as anticipated but were instead settling in France, it was imagined that they too would become a part of this mix. Their distinctive ethno-national origins notwithstanding, they and their children especially were to improve their prospects as surely as any other members of the working classes during a period of economic expansion

The Moral Public Sphere

39

that was to lift all boats. The advantages of the “mixed” suburbs were vaunted precisely because they would provide families of immigrant origin access to the loci of daily life that would allow them, over time, to “become French.”1 Anything short of this was considered, then as now, to be potentially hazardous to the larger national health overall. In this chapter, I work through the prism of this history and the social order it was meant to sustain to reflect on the broader problem of cultural pluralism and its effects in contemporary France. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the city of Cergy, a state-planned New Town, or ville nouvelle, located on the outer reaches of the Parisian megalopolis, I consider what the social organization of these districts and the underlying suppositions they reflect can bring to the debate on diversity more broadly. While France is, to be sure, rarely held up as a model of multicultural success, I hold that the official “race-blindness” of the French republican project can provide a promising framework for reexamination of these issues, precisely because—and as the development of the post-war suburbs shows—it frames “difference” as a salient and essential organizing principle. Rather, cultural, putative racial, and ethnic differences are cast as secondary to the ongoing elaboration of public life, consequently generating a social landscape that, while far from immune to the problems of discrimination, can allow us to see beyond race, or beyond culture, to locate the broader social context in which such notions of diversity are made to matter, and open the way to a critical reconsideration of these terms. Contemporary debates around these issues both in and out of France tend most to converge around the question of the integrationist—many would argue assimilationist—trope of the French republican project, a tendency that the development of the post-war suburbs would seem to confirm. Discouraged from living together in vaguely menacing “ethnic enclaves,” post-war immigrants to France and their families were and are regularly solicited to break with such “communautariste” ties and to “integrate,” at least residentially, into French life, the better that they might adapt to and make “French culture” their own. For numerous critics, this is seen as evidence of the extent to which French political culture is built on—indeed demands—abeyance to a more or less strict form of cultural homogeneity that necessarily discriminates against other cultural traditions and habits of mind. The troubles in the suburbs, they argue, provide evidence of the insidious consequences of these policies that have effectively consigned immigrants and their descendants to second-class status. For others, however, the integrationist ideal that “becoming French” speaks to, stands on the side of a more just social order. The particularly “Anglo-Saxon” tendency to focus on the ethno-cultural bases of identity, these proponents claim, leads necessarily to a racially or culturally deter-

40

Beth Epstein

minist view of social life. Aiming to steer clear of such communautariste dangers, proponents of this view uphold the French integration ideal on the grounds that it sustains a view of a body politic made up of individuals capable of reasoning in and for the broader collective good, thus protecting people from consignation to racialized groups to which they might only tangentially belong. Indeed, if there is one central problem underlying the contemporary crisis of the banlieue, they argue, it is precisely that these cities and towns are not integrated enough, that the social solidarity they were supposed to foster has given way instead to forces of social dissolution, creating fertile ground for the escalation of racialized claims. If these polemics have become particularly charged in recent years it is in part because the ethno-cultural claims of “identity politics” that, traditionally in republican France, have been subsumed to a more distinctly “social,” or class-based view of society,2 are increasingly rising to the fore. Still among the most significant forces shaping this social terrain is the French concept of integration, which has long stood as the means by which proponents of the republican ideal have sought to craft a sense of the common good to which all members of the polity can adhere. The “crisis” of the past 30 years has also seen the rise of the extremist views of the far Right, long associated with a nationalist politics, and of more recent appeals for a post-colonial re-reading of French immigration history. Many, if not all, of these ideological struggles take place in, across, and in reference to the symbolic terrain of the troubled banlieue, which in the public imaginary have come to stand as the material expression of republicanism gone wrong. I argue here that to understand these dynamics it is necessary first to see integration and communautarisme not as opposed ends of an ideological spectrum but as rhetorics and practices that regularly cut across one another and collide. Integration policies have created material results, among them the mixed communities, neighborhoods, and housing projects of the French suburbs, where people of multiple different backgrounds—French people included—live together in close proximity, and where they are obliged to work through, on a regular basis, the meanings and consequences of their various trajectories and points of view. At the same time, the realization of the integrationist ideal as a form of spatial organization has required distinguishing between those to be integrated and the others in whose neighborhoods they then reside. Integration policies thus discriminate: they differentiate, they mark acceptable practices, and in the process construct a moral framework within which people of different backgrounds come together to negotiate the terms of their collective lives. To speak of distinct racial or cultural groups in this context, then, is indeed problematic, as the tensions that exist in French cities and towns do not fall easily between discretely defined social groups: “mixing,” after all,

The Moral Public Sphere

41

has not been without consequence. And yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that the problems tearing at the French banlieue have nothing to do with race or culture. More to the point then is to reflect on how these various discourses function—the boundaries they mark, the interests they serve, and their modifications over time. A consideration of the history of the modern suburbs since their construction following World War II reveals a shift away from a more deliberately social, or class-based, framework to one, more recently, that engages with notions of cultural diversity. Rather than take these diversity claims at face value (and indeed, it is precisely the merit of the French republican project that it discourages such suppositions), I seek to understand the conditions of their production.3 Through a consideration of the repercussions of state-initiated efforts to build ethnic and class “mixing” into its post-war suburban plans—an initiative that reached its apogee with the launching, in the mid-1960s, of the villes nouvelles—I reflect on how integration, as an ideal, a set of practices and, perhaps most importantly, as a moral force, has shaped and transformed, in contemporary France, what is “difference” and what is “French.”

Social mixing Erected hastily in the boom years after World War II, the suburbs that are now such cause for concern were not, contrary to what many now suppose, built specifically with immigrants in mind. Construction of both the grands ensembles—the tracts of bars and towers that dominate the suburban skylines—and the New Towns that followed, was intended rather to help resolve an acute housing shortage and regulate the haphazard spread of suburban sprawl. By the early 1950s, the Paris region alone was growing by roughly 180,000 people per year, half of whom migrated from the provinces or overseas; some four to five hundred thousand people lived in poor and substandard conditions (Fourcaut 2004: 202–203). Over the roughly twenty-year period during which construction of the grands ensembles reached its peak, some 6 million apartments were erected across the country. State-of-the-art units with flush toilets and modern appliances, the new projects were to solve the country’s housing crisis and rationalize and “rejuvenate” the disparate development that had defined peri-urban growth in France since it first started to accelerate during the industrializing nineteenth century. (Administration: Revue d’Etude et d’Information 1988; Bastié 1967).4 Concomitant to these developments, the challenge of where and how to house the many thousands of immigrant workers recruited to buttress the nation’s post-war development was reaching crisis proportions. Private enterprise had fallen short of its mandate to provide decent lodgings

42

Beth Epstein

for its employees; state-constructed dormitories, while an improvement, were raising the prospect of a “ghettoized” non-French workforce; and hundreds of shantytowns, or bidonvilles, which spread across the Paris region among others and which were inhabited, for the most part, by immigrant workers, were proving quickly to be a hazard and a menace, especially during the tense years of the Algeria crisis, when it was feared they would serve as a fertile recruiting grounds for the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale).5 The shantytowns were a profound testament of the extent to which it was imagined that a majority of immigrant laborers would one day return “home” (to southern Europe and the Maghreb, for the most part), thus obviating the need to provide adequate and permanent housing for them in the new suburban tracts that they themselves, as workers in the building trades, were helping to construct. When France officially closed its doors to immigration with the economic slump of the early 1970s (yet also allowing for family reunification for those—far more than anticipated—who were choosing to stay), policy concerns turned toward the question of how best to settle these populations without reinforcing their residential segregation. Two key initiatives undertaken to this end—the cités de transit, hastily-erected transitional homes, and the concept of the seuil de tolérance, or threshold of tolerance— reveal how immigrants were perceived in both class and ethnic terms as potentially problematic populations needing regulation. More, these initiatives reflect the overarching goal of having these populations reinforce the larger ambition of mixité sociale. One of the central objectives of post-war (sub)urban policy, this notion reflects the specific concern that residential communities be mixed with respect to social class, on the assumption that areas in which there are high concentrations of people of low socio-economic status are more vulnerable to various forms of social distress. Far from wanting to isolate immigrant populations, therefore, as has often been charged, policy makers at the time were, to the contrary, intent on fitting them in to the larger “mix,” in an effort to forestall future strife. Erected in the early 1970s, the cités de transit were conceived as waystations for people dislocated from the shantytowns and the numerous slums tagged for demolition as urban designers continued to plan for more “rational” suburban growth. In the cités these workers—and, increasingly, their families—were to await more permanent housing, into which, it was imagined, they would move within a period of two years. The cités served both “French” and immigrant families. More explicitly, they were intended for people of “precarious” means, regardless of place of origin, and were literally places of transition, designed to ease the passage from broken-down slum-dweller to resident of a modern abode.6 The cités had

The Moral Public Sphere

43

both an overt moral purpose as well as a preventative one: they would offer “socio-educational” assistance for people needing “to get used to living in normal hygienic conditions with basic comforts” (Bulletin Municipal, St. Denis 1968, in Lallaoui 1993: 47), and thus assure that they would not be “rejected by the habitual populations of social housing”7 (Laé & Murard 1985: 198; see also Tricart 1977). In some cases, and in flagrant contradiction of the cités’ original intent, some families wound up living there for up to twenty years.8 The notion of the seuil de tolérance, more explicitly directed at nonFrench immigrant groups, was similarly conceived with prevention in mind. The seuil was built on the assumption that immigrants navigating their way through French society require assistance that could drain resources from other populations. The notion of the “threshold of tolerance” was thus conceived as a way to disperse foreign populations in and among residential areas such that the regular functioning of society and its institutions would continue uninterrupted. Accorded scientific status, the seuil was determined according to empirical measurements,9 and warned of the dysfunction that could follow should an excessive concentration of foreigners gather in any one locale or institutional arena. Most important, it was to serve as a pre-emptive strike to future racial or intercultural tensions by providing the means for immigrants to “become French” (MacMaster 1991, Silverman 1992). Indeed, both the cités de transit and the seuil de tolérance were to serve this function, as they sought to control the settlement of immigrant populations in French cities and towns so that they could learn and adapt to the lifeways of which they were becoming a part, without in the process—or at least this was the idea—generating too much disruption. Post-war suburban construction then was most specifically intended to respond to pressing shortages in housing; subsequent measures were later taken up to assist immigrant workers and their families settle into French life, in the explicit hope that they would melt into French society and contribute to its growth. The paradoxical and restrictive nature of these measures, which broke up ethnic communities, defining their members as problematic the better to have them fit in, has given grist to the view of French society as particularly hostile to racial or cultural difference (MacMaster 1991, Schain 1985, Silverman 1992).10 Much less remarked, however, are the values of “social mixing” that these measures sought to foster. Built with a utopian faith in the possibilities of social progress, the suburban projects, through the realization of such notions as “mixing” and “balance,” were to give rise to a viable new civic culture, committed to a renewal of the republican public sphere. As I discuss below, these are the objectives that, in very large measure, have shaped distinctions

44

Beth Epstein

between “French” and “other” and conditioned the tensions in a period of on-going economic duress, that the banlieue has come to signify. It is difficult to know what the suburbs might have become were it not for the sustained economic downturn that began in the early 1970s and that subsequently hit these districts particularly hard. The economic transformations of the past forty years have created a class of dispossessed in the suburbs that the post-war language of social mobility—implicit to the suburbs’ construction—can no longer contain (Wacquant 2008). Even prior to the slump, however, concerns were being raised that something in the suburbs was amiss: the new projects, for all that they were intended to provide access to modern amenities, were falling far short of the progressive vision their promoters had proclaimed. Mounting disapproval pointed to how the grands ensembles had not made sufficient provisions for city services, for businesses, or for recreation. They were said to be “rabbit hutches” in which residents were “warehoused” with little to no sense of community; the social fabric there was thought to be disconcertingly thin.11 By the 1980s, their association with social dysfunction, economic stress, and an emergent youth rebellion, closely allied with young people identifying themselves as “second-generation immigrant,” was all but assured. In an effort to staunch this decline, the state launched, in the mid1960s, yet another project of suburban reform to provide a corrective to everything the grands ensembles had gotten wrong. The villes nouvelles, or New Towns, like the banlieue that preceded them, were to be “mixed” with respect to age, occupation, and social class. In counterpoint to the earlier suburbs, special care was taken to ensure that the new cities be more than dull commuter districts short on infrastructure. Connected to Paris via new highway construction and the RER12—the RER was an integral part of the New Towns plan—the New Towns were to be cities in their own right, attractive places to live and work with parks and offices and community centers and shopping malls. The residents would be shopkeepers as well as business executives, bus drivers as well as doctors. The New Towns stand as the apogee of post-war efforts to modernize, rationalize, and with a little luck solve the problems of suburban growth that had plagued the region of Ile de France from the end of the 19th century. There people from all walks of life would contribute to a renewed sense of collective life, investing their habitat with meaning, and reinvigorating local social life with an engaged and participatory politics. The New Towns were to give heft to the republican project, to realize in material form the promise of an engaged and diverse citizenry. And as deliberately “mixed” cities, they would provide a template of what an integrated France should become, a society where people of immigrant origin would join the “daily plebiscite” of the republic and make it thrive.

The Moral Public Sphere

45

The collective core What, then, does “social mixing” look like? In what is it considered a more just alternative to the “communitarist” ethnic enclave? Most important for my purposes here, how have ambitions to build more “balanced” cities shaped relations among the considerably diverse populations that now consider these districts home? The city of Cergy, regularly cited as one of the most successful of the five New Towns in Ile de France, was not intended to be a city with a particularly significant number of immigrant residents. As the first inhabitants started to settle there in the mid-1970s, however, it was designated as one of several cities capable of receiving (“absorbing” is the word frequently used) populations then being displaced by the dismantling of the bidonvilles. The first group of ex-shanty-town residents who moved into Cergy—most of them of Algerian origin—were housed in a project of 462 units located near one of the municipal centers, in one of the first neighborhoods of lowincome housing to be built in the city (Hirsch 1990, La Croix 26 February 1976). Since then, and as the city has grown, residents of a wide array of backgrounds have moved in, making Cergy, like many of the banlieue in the Paris region, markedly plural in its racial and ethnic constitution.13 The city was planned with “mixing” very much in mind. Efforts to diversify the urban social fabric are evident not only across the city as a whole, but within individual neighborhoods. Quiet suburban streets of single family homes are built adjacent to blocks of four- or five-story apartment buildings. Rental and private properties are intermixed. Public housing for low-income families is interspersed within neighborhoods where families own their homes. “Difference” was thus incorporated into the New Town plans. The city’s planners envisioned that residents of different occupational and class backgrounds would join together, excited to be a part of this new adventure, to build up their neighborhoods in a spirit of cooperation and commitment to the city’s future. Distinctions based on age, education, and social class would contribute to the making of a “healthy” or “balanced” collective life; as complementary and mutually enhancing forms of difference, they would engender a Durkheimian form of “organic solidarity” wherein individuals would come together to build a community that could reproduce itself over time. Residents of foreign background would be easily fitted into this mix, and indeed residential spaces that, for various reasons, have now given way to a more singular ethnic make-up—a street full of Asians, an apartment building of only black people—are looked on as decidedly “not normal,” as areas where the goals of “mixing” have broken down. Bound to one another through their attachment to the community and their shared interest in regulating the city’s social problems, foreign-born residents were expected to join in

46

Beth Epstein

like any others, emancipating themselves of their private attachments and in their place creating new ties, new interests, and shared culture. In this, then, the New Towns were to give sustenance to the French republican ideal. The New Town residents, all of them newcomers, all of them with an equal stake in seeing their city thrive, would locate together “the clearly expressed desire to live a common life,”14 a new and shared collective sensibility (Association du corps préfectorale et des hauts fonctionnaires du ministère de l’intérieur 1988; Hirsch 1990; Lelévrier 2001). Now, however, certain districts, most especially the neighborhood where I focused my research, are said to have failed and are blighted— especially since the economic downturn that has held this neighborhood and others like it in its grip since the mid-1980s—by too much unemployment, too many troubled youth, and too many broken homes. Unemployment rates hover around 20% (compared to 12% for the city overall), with another 17% in “precarious” (short-term or temporary) employment.15 Constructed in the early 1980s, the neighborhood was meant to be the centerpiece of the New Town. It has since, however, been classified as a ZUS (zone urbaine sensible), indicating the concentration of economic and social hardship to be found there. In this neighborhood, as in so many other suburban districts judged to be “in difficulty,” social mixing, it is argued, has come up short. Ethnically, however, the neighborhood is decidedly plural. The district is known for its considerable immigrant presence: while a majority of the residents are French, others hail from the Caribbean, northern, western and central Africa, southeastern Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and central and southern Europe. Roughly 25% of the district’s 9,900 inhabitants are of non-French nationality,16 a figure that does not include those who are foreign-born who have since taken French citizenship, or the descendants of immigrants who, while technically French, may be considered, or may consider themselves, in other terms. From an ethno-racial perspective, then, the neighborhood is considerably mixed, allowing an opportunity to see how, within the larger integration frame, people of multiple backgrounds are managing their differences in the everyday. As they come together seeking to keep their streets safe or their walkways litter-free and to regulate the problems that arise in their housing projects, their public parks, their shopping centers, and their children’s schools, the neighborhood’s residents wrestle with the significance of the differences that the city’s mixing has given them occasion to observe. “Diversity talk”—discussion about the extent to which race or culture matters in the working out of local affairs—is plentiful, while public discourse is strongly oriented to reinforce the republican ideal. The way to a more lasting peace, many concur, is to put identity-based claims aside, the better to work toward the realization of a higher-order common ground.

The Moral Public Sphere

47

In this, then, local dynamics reflect an on-going engagement with the broader goals of integration politics. While the integrationist orientation does not go uncontested,17 local residents generally expect that whatever their particular practices or habits of mind, they can all be held to the same collective terms: respecting the social contract in its most elemental forms, maintaining order and civil discourse in the public sphere. Cultural practices, religious beliefs, and “difference” in its numerous manifestations are tolerated to the extent that they do not impinge on others’ interests; most of the time, however, they are deemed to be irrelevant for the working out of day-to-day concerns. “You mustn’t use cultural differences as a scapegoat,” the mayor of Cergy once told a group of parents—French, North and West African—who had met to discuss problems in childrearing at a local event. Some of the parents present had maintained that, as immigrants, they had particular obstacles to face: their children—“caught between two cultures” as they said—made their job particularly hard. The mayor, however, would not concur. “These are problems that are as old as the world,” she stated, “that you find with everybody. I mean, I’m telling you this because I also have children, and we don’t have a problem of cultural differences, but I’ve also got problems with my kids.” The mayor’s comments were well appreciated—people in the assembly laughed and applauded—and brought them back to a sense of common purpose. Cultural difference, in a word, is to be considered secondary—fluid and non-essential—and not to get in the way of the more central enterprise of finding the collective core. This, then, I argue, is what is meant by “becoming French.” Contrary to what many critics suppose, integration as it is practiced in France does not, I contend, necessarily mean the casting off of one way of being in order to adapt to another.18 To the contrary, cultural differences of various sorts are often appropriated to shore up the idea of a unified nation made up of interlocking parts, if they are not otherwise seen as private matters best protected when transcended in the public sphere. “Becoming French” rather demands that particular practices be conceded to abstract principles to which, because of their universality, it is supposed all can and should adhere. These principles concern, most significantly, acceptable civic practice, which is why, among other reasons, the trouble in the suburbs causes such despair—because it is read as a failure, on the part of the state, of urban planners, and (depending on one’s politics) of the people who live there, to locate the balance of factors that will nurture an appropriate sense of commitment to the collective core.19 Belonging, then, is not seen as a function of race or culture but of a commitment to abide by and engage in the deliberation of a higher-order set of social codes.20 Of all the points of conflict that could potentially arise between local residents in Cergy, it is the division made between those who are deemed

Beth Epstein

48

to participate “responsibly” in the collective sphere and those who do not that is the most acute. The distinctions that matter most do not fall, as one might suppose, along ethnic lines but have to do rather with the abstract principles that shape and define civic life, such as responsibility, fairness, and participation. As culturally constituted notions of value, these matters may and at times undoubtedly do cut along normative cultural and racial lines, but there is nothing either necessary or predictable about this. Behaving “responsibly,” in other words, is a subjective notion that does not fall under the exclusive purview of any given group, even as, no doubt, certain people in certain contexts are more able to wield power over the terms of the debate. But that is just the point: it is precisely through discussion of these matters—about what constitutes “responsible” civic action, about what is most “fair,” or about how best to show one’s commitment to the requisites of civic engagement—that local actors, whatever their background, negotiate the terms of their social legitimacy. And it is in relation to the management of these matters, then, that the knotty questions of discrimination tend to fall.

Moral claims Recent years have witnessed a not insignificant shift in discussion of these issues as a growing number of voices are being raised to argue that it is time for France to recognize and ferret out the discrimination functioning in its midst. Many continue to hold to the value of the “race-blind” tradition of thinking in relatively undifferentiated racial or cultural terms, while new scholarship and activism, drawing on various strains of poststructuralist, post-colonial studies developed largely in the United States and Britain, argue in favor of a more American-style focus on identity, taking the French model to task for its stubborn attachment to an unvarying form of universality that conceals social inequalities. Elsewhere, the strides made in the United States since the 1960s to overcome racial segregation and discrimination through the use and documentation of racial and ethnic criteria have been submitted as exemplary models to follow, taken up most explicitly in recent debates on the potential uses and abuses of ethnic statistics as a means of measuring French society and its discontents (Blanchard 2001, Fassin & Fassin 2006, Ndiaye 2008, Simon 2008).21 These critiques are, perhaps, an endorsement of a more explicit ethnoracial reading of social life, and in that regard they may be considered to signal a shift of considerable consequence in French public discourse away from a more singular focus on the social. This move may in turn reflect a larger-scale de-legitimization of categories of social class as a means of thinking through social problems. At the same time, these critiques point

The Moral Public Sphere

49

to particularities of the French republican project that merit a closer look. By turning the focus to problems of discrimination (as opposed to, let’s say, making an argument for cultural or minority rights), these arguments signal a key but perhaps under-remarked aspect of French integration policies, which is, precisely, their authority to act in discriminating terms. As the matters I have discussed here reveal, in France, integration, or rather its agents, select and choose; they make decisions about who or what should go into the collective pot, and in what doses. These actions are done with the “greater good” in mind, and are legimitzed by appealing to the abstract values declared necessary for the maintenance of a presumably shared, presumably universal, social sphere. Integration policies traffic in the particular as they seek to realize the universal, to produce, I would argue, not a narrowly culturalist regime but a moral one, that grants particular authority to causes defended in the name of the larger interest overall. Of critical concern then is how the collective interest is defined. The objectives pursued in the interest of social mixing can render this process particularly complex as actors must negotiate among not always easily (if at all) reconcilable claims. When the multiple and not always compatible practices of neighbors living together in “mixed” apartment complexes spill out into the public sphere, what is to be done? Whose demands are to be given precedence, and what weight accorded to cultural claims? A socialist member of Cergy’s municipal council who worked on housing issues explained it to me this way: It’s not simply an idea, like that, not to want to house a black person. … It’s that if I house a black I have to assume all the shit that that’s going to bring. Because it brings de la merde. It’s very, very, very difficult … I had a woman at the Croix Petit [a neighborhood of Cergy]. I refused to provide her housing because I knew her family. She was living at her sister’s. She was one of two wives of a Malian man; they had children. She lived with her daughter. And I knew that in Mali she had two grown adolescent boys. Her husband was in Mali. He also had another wife, younger. So the woman wanted an apartment. She said that at her sister’s they didn’t have enough room. So I said wait, does she want an apartment because the husband is going to come back? Maybe it’s racist, but I refused to grant her the apartment. Finally she managed to have an apartment, just across from the neighborhood of Ponceau. And unfortunately I was right. That is, two months after [she moved] her two sons came from Mali. And her husband returned not with one wife, but two wives, two other wives.

The logic of integration justified this city councilor’s actions on the grounds that they protected the collective social interest. Too great a concentration of African, polygamous families in one small housing development would throw off the desired “balance.” The landlord would find more people in his apartment than he bargained for; the children, having little room to play, would spill into the courtyards and stairwells, making

50

Beth Epstein

noise that disturbs the neighbors; the percentage of children of immigrant origins going to the neighborhood school would increase; their special needs (additional language instruction and so on) would place greater demand on teachers, leaving them less time to devote to other children. Resources would be needed to re-establish the equilibrium that was lost. None of this is fair. In order to create integrated spaces, therefore, it is necessary first to decide who needs integrating and in whose neighborhoods those people should then reside. In order to have balance it is necessary first to determine what constitutes a social problem the better to insert it into, and have it be absorbed by, the surrounding norm. People’s behaviors and identities are passed through the prism of the principles that make up the collective ideal. These are heavily freighted with value. They are imagined as absolutes to which everyone can, and should, adhere. Certainly these absolutes may, as in the example above, stand in an antagonistic relation to particular cultural practices, beliefs, or habits of mind; but to argue that this is all they do is to insist on an ethno-racial reading that ignores the work that integration has done—the making of “mixed” cities and neighborhoods that resist a fixed culturalist frame and moreover oblige people to confront and, in some form or another, contend with the many and multiple things that they are. As people meet and interact at their children’s schools, in local civic organizations, and in the hallways and stairwells of the apartments that they share, they also form opinions about how they and their neighbors comport themselves in the public sphere; they make utterances about what they consider to be good and right and fair, and no doubt often feel they have found consensus for their views. And yet not everyone comes to these discussions on equal terms. In the quotidian contest to define the common ground, some people have more influence than others; and, indeed, the moral underpinnings of this scheme can seem at times to allow little room for voices that are perhaps less imposing or grand. As an example I cite here a discussion I had with two dedicated teachers in a public elementary school, Florence Guérin and Catherine Norbert, who somewhat breathlessly recounted how early one morning they rescued Justin, a Haitian boy, when his aunt had failed to get him ready to leave with his classmates for a two-week trip to the mountains. The story served as an example, for them, of just how far they were willing to go, in the name of fairness, to protect the interests of a child in their care, while it again revealed the daily indignities that the “collective good” and its enactment can impose. As the other children and their parents waited at the school for the bus that would take them to the Pyrenees, Florence and Catherine ventured into Justin’s home to get him ready for the trip:

The Moral Public Sphere

51

Florence Guérin [FG]: I went upstairs. I entered the bedroom of the mother, who was in bed [laughs], in her nice nightshirt. It was clean, it was, ah, the house all neat and all that, but … Besides, there were the kids in junior high school, and they were going to arrive late, in my opinion. … Everyone in bed in this house, and I assure you, there were a lot of them. The boy wasn’t, he got out of bed. Catherine Norbert [CN]: He was up? FG: Yes, well but, I mean, he was naked, or no, he was in his underwear, I mean … CN: Pyjama bottoms. FG: Pyjama bottoms, right. In any case, his torso was bare. … So I saw Mme A. and I said, “But Mme A. it’s not possible. Justin has to go. You’ve already paid.” Because in addition to everything else she’d paid already [for the trip], at City Hall … FG: She is often sick, she’s old, so I can imagine that she has a hard time. She has her ten children, she must have a hard time raising her ten children. I don’t know how long she’s been single, but at any rate since we’ve been at the school she’s always been alone. But, if you like, her real children have had at least a little affection, because I think she loves her daughters. But this little one there, he’s the little écorché [the one who’s been burned]. I found that too unfair that it was him who wasn’t going to be able to go to the Pyrenees, you see? Frankly I found that … No matter who, I mean if that had been, it wouldn’t have been fair for no matter who to see all of his classmates leaving, but this one in particular, really. So I said to one of the older sisters, “Find me a suitcase etc. Where is Justin’s closet, his things and all,” and I went through his closet. I went, ok, where is his underwear, but I couldn’t find his underwear … So I looked in the dresser. Fine. We found what we needed, but he didn’t have any pyjamas. So I took the pyjamas that were in the next closet, [the closet of one of the girls]. Right away [the aunt] tried to snatch it away from me; it was one of her real daughter’s. So I said, “Listen, you work it out among yourselves. Your daughter, she can sleep in a T-shirt for two weeks, but Justin, he needs pyjamas to leave on the classe de neige.” [Laughs]. So we put everything in the suitcase, and then we led our Justin to Catherine’s car, and vroom, we left. CN: As if we were in an American police car. [We all laughed.] FG: It was like the best chase scene, you see? CN: And then the applause of the parents. FG: That’s right. The applause of the parents when we arrived.

This incident reflects what anthropologists Deborah Reed-Danahay and Katherine Anderson-Levitt (1991) argue has long been considered a part of French teachers’ purview, namely the authority to instill “rational” middle-class values among the families in their care. One nonetheless has to wonder what Justin and his aunt and cousins thought about having his two schoolteachers rummage through their affairs, no matter how

Beth Epstein

52

justified the latter may have felt in ensuring that he not be denied the opportunity to leave on a school trip with his classmates. Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt’s work provides an important corrective to the idea, expressed frequently among the immigrant families I got to know, that they in particular were accorded only a chilly welcome at their children’s schools. But one can also imagine how such an event could enflame feelings on the part of these families that they are subject to a problematic, if not outright xenophobic, regard.

Conclusion A woman from Cameroon who had lived in France for over ten years when I met her once told me that she thought the French were “hypocrites” for refusing to look their race problems in the eye. Her brother lived in Chicago, and while she had heard that there was not much mixing of blacks and whites in the United States, she maintained that “it is better in America for blacks”: at least there, she said, the discrimination is clear. Indeed, common charges against the French integration project— often, but not exclusively, coming from across the Atlantic—hold that it is simply a less direct way to talk about racial and cultural difference. The race-blindness of French republicanism and its integration practices simply serve, critics charge, to keep underlying racial and cultural hierarchies, that are none the less devastating, out of sight. How else to explain the discrimination that would seem to be at large in French society, the longsimmering problems of the troubled banlieue, and the disproportionate numbers of people of immigrant origin who live there in relatively poor social and economic conditions? Is this not evidence that the claims of the integration project—to create cities and neighborhoods in which everyone, French and immigrant alike, has equal access to the opportunities of the polity—have broken precisely along these ethnic lines of fracture? But what does it mean, as per the conversation cited above, for discrimination to be “clear”? Does it require, as this woman suggested, a clear separation of black and white, French and immigrant, self and other? Are such distinctions conceivable, not to mention desirable, in these days of hybridity, globalization, and métissage? Processes of integration, I argue, muddy these ethno-cultural lines, in France as well as in the United States. In France, however, social life and thought are not always laid down along racial lines. While for some this form of social organization might look or feel like “hypocrisy,” it nonetheless allows a discursive opening to see how people living in culturally plural spaces are making something of their differences—a perspective that in the United States, disclaimers about race

The Moral Public Sphere

53

being a constructed category aside, is all too often obscured by racialized concerns.22 In consideration of these issues it is important that we not simply exchange one model for another—the universal for the particular, the assimilationist for the culturally laissez-faire. Contemporary French integration policies are neither and both; they traffic in the particular—in the representation and definition of difference—in an on-going process to locate the universal—the common good, the collective core—that is regularly contested and reformed. This is a process that cuts across multiple categories—ethno-racial, national, religious, linguistic, social, etc.—and carries them along, mixing them, re-defining them, suppressing some, asserting others in its wake. It is a process that shifts the nature of the terrain, disrupting the notion of the “ethnic community” and creating something new—a collectivity of many “ethnics” who transform and are transformed by the new social entity of which they are a part. The discomfort and sense of discrimination that this process can induce has to do, I hold, with the moral certitude, and presumed disinterestedness, of the values defended in the name of the common interest—fairness, participation, and responsibility, to name a few. These notions are often so taken for granted that few think to question how they are defined or whose interests they serve most to protect. While some might argue that it is most often immigrants, people of color, or the non-French who suffer under this regime, the reality on the ground is rarely, if ever, so cut and dried. Conceptions of “culture” and “difference” have indeed become critical loci for political and social struggle in France, but the tensions they signify do not fall easily along demarcated fault lines between distinctly drawn cultural groups. To the contrary, the very mixité that integration policies have sought to foster has rendered these interactions more opaque—and of greater sociological interest—as they occur among people whose cultural identifications are so much more complex. These matters are potentially in the process of shifting as people in France wrestle more deliberately with the country’s history and practice of integration. Still to be seen are how these shifts might constitute a response to global economic transformations that have touched the banlieue particularly hard and whether efforts to call attention to these inequalities might not in the process reduce them to a constellation of more essentialized terms.

Notes   1. Quite literally, devenir français.   2. Recent scholarship on the means adopted by the French republic to extend its universalist principles overseas in the colonies provides helpful insight on how

54

  3.

  4.   5.

  6.

  7.

  8.   9.

10.

Beth Epstein

difference has been exploited and contained within the French republican project. See Conklin (1998), Saada (2007), Shepard (2006), Wilder (2005). While it is beyond the scope of the present discussion, this problematic begs the question of why now? Wacquant (2008) argues that the crisis of the French banlieue must be viewed in light of global transformations that have relegated the suburbs to the world of the dispossessed. Ferguson (2002) similarly explores these concerns in his consideration of what he calls the “abjection” and “disconnection” of workers in the Zambian Copperbelt, that he theorizes as a function of global economic change. This perspective urges a reconsideration of issues relating to diversity and the banlieue to reflect more precisely on why, within the context of a sustained economic crisis, these claims of cultural diversity are coming to the fore (see also Bauman 2007). On early twentieth-century French suburban growth, see Stovall (1989, 1990) and Fourcaut (1990). For a sensitive and compelling view of life in the bidonvilles, see Bourlem Guerdjou’s 1998 film Vivre au Paradis, which shows also the tensions experienced by bidonvilles residents as they struggled to navigate between their desire to live and work in France, state repression, and their sympathies for the Algerian struggle. See also MacMaster (1996). Residents would be divided into two types: those judged capable of “evolving” quickly enough to move into definitive housing within two years, and those whose “social characteristics” made any such calculation difficult to define (Circulaire article 2.1.3 in Laé & Murard 1985:199). From the government circular defining the protocols for the cités de transit, dated April 10, 1972: Article 2.1. “Les cités de transit peuvent être définies comme des ensembles d’habitations affectées au logement provisoire des familles, occupantes à titre précaire, dont l’accès en habitat définitif ne peut être envisagé sans une action socio-éducative destinée à favoriser leur insertion sociale et leur promotion. Bien évidemment, les cités de transit sont susceptibles de recevoir aussi bien des familles étrangères que des familles d’origines françaises.” Article 2.1.1 “[La cité de transit] est destinée aux seules familles pour lesquelles se présentent des difficultés d’insertion sociale et qui, dès lors, risqueraient d’être ‘rejetées’ par les populations résidant habituellement en logement social.” The last of the cités in Nanterre, a close suburb of Paris, that continued to house a total of 253 families, did not come down until 1997 (Le Monde 16 July 1997). Michel Massenet, Director in 1970 of the Fonds d’Actions Sociales, described the tolerance threshold as follows: “In a primary school class, the presence of more than 20 percent of foreign children slows down the progress of all the pupils. In a hospital, problems of coexistence arise when foreigners represent more than 30 percent of the number of patients. In a block of flats, it is not wise to go beyond the proportion of 10 to 15 percent of families of foreign origin when these families are not accustomed to life in a modern environment” (Silverman 1992, 75). Silverman (1992) discusses these initiatives in relation to what he calls the “double bind of assimilation,” wherein others are told they must lose their specificity while being reminded how very other they really are. This argument supposes, however, a clear and marked distinction between “French” and “other” that is subverted by the very integration practices Silverman sets out to study. As I seek to argue here and elsewhere, a more productive means for coming to terms with

The Moral Public Sphere

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

55

these sorts of inequalities, in France and beyond, is to lift them out of an ethnocultural frame the better to see how understandings of these categories are made. For an alternative reading, see Manuel Castells (1977). The underlying problem of the social thinness of the grands ensembles, he argues, is not, as the dominant discourse would have it, a problem of poor urban planning, but a distrust of the grassroots that has not been allowed to thrive. Construction of the grands ensembles was officially put to an end by a government circular of 21 March 1973. For more on the grands ensembles, see Lallaoui (1993), Merlin (1989), Fourcaut (2004), Fourcaut and Pacquot (2002), and Pétonnet (1979). Réseau Express Régionale, or suburban rapid transit. This original neighborhood, which in the years since had become known as a dangerous part of town, was recently razed. In its place, and in a continuation of the on-going effort to build a better neighborhood and to find the form that will foster better urban function, a “safer” neighborhood is in the process of being built. The sinuous pathways that in the 1970s were designed to create a smalltown feel are now giving way to buildings designed in straight rows, with better lighting. From Ernest Renan’s speech What is a Nation? (1896: 81). In this speech, Renan stressed the importance of such enlightenment ideals as “moral reason” and “common will” for the construction of a common sense of belonging, as opposed to the shared characteristics of “blood,” “race,” or territory. INSEE 2009. SIRS poll cited in Parizot et al. (2004). For more on how residents work these matters out in a number of arenas in the New Town, see my book Collective Terms (Epstein 2011). Consider, for example, this statement by Joan Scott: “French universalism insists that sameness is the basis for equality. To be sure, sameness is an abstraction, a philosophical notion meant to achieve the formal equality of individuals before the law. But historically it has been applied literally: assimilation means the eradication of difference” (2007:12). The sluggish economy, which has moved thousands into the ranks of the longterm unemployed, is all too frequently forgotten in accounts of the “causes” of the banlieue’s failings—a silent admission, perhaps, of the dearth of resources available to fight the banlieue’s decline, especially in this era of global competition. These ideals are of course subject to on-going debate and have constituted the stuff of French politics since the republic’s founding. The rise of the National Front since the 1980s has made these issues particularly hot to touch, as the Front has successfully used a defense of cultural difference as a justification for its nationalist, anti-immigrant program. Recent appeals to recognize the particularities of the immigrant or minority experience in France and specifically those of immigrants coming from the former colonies are similarly calling the ideals and aspirations of French republicanism into question, or at least seeking to expose its contradictions (cf. fn 17). On republicanism and the National Front see, among others, Gaspard (1995), Holmes (2000), Jennings (2000), Taguieff (1988). The CRAN (Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires) was created in 2005 to serve as a national umbrella organization bringing together numerous groups working on and around minority issues in France. Its aim is to draw attention to discriminatory practices against minority populations and introduce minor-

Beth Epstein

56

ity concerns into the national debate. Members of the CRAN cite aspects of the American civil rights movement as a source of inspiration. Efforts to introduce affirmative-action-based policies—called discrimination positive in France—have mostly been limited to elite institutions of higher learning (Institut d’Etudes Politiques, ESSEC), where initiatives have altered admissions requirements for young people from “education priority zones” or ZEPs (zone d’éducation prioritaire), many if not most of which are located in the suburbs. Significantly these initiatives are not identity-based but target rather geographic areas assessed to be “in difficulty”. Recent proposals to allow ethnic criteria as a legitimate variable in the collection of statistical data and as a legitimate target of enlarged affirmative action programs have been struck down. See Fassin & Fassin (2006), Ndiaye (2008), Peer & Sabbagh (2008), and Sabbagh (2002). 22. See Sara Le Menestral’s contribution, this volume; in the US, even within efforts to move the dialogue along—affirmative action, whiteness and creole studies, ‘post-racial’ politics—all too often race remains.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Writing in the Present, edited by R. G. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Association du corps préfectorale et des hauts fonctionnaires du ministère de l’intérieur. 1988. “Table Ronde: Les Villes Nouvelles.” Administration: Revue d’Etude et d’Information 141: 11–26. Bastié, Jean. 1967. “Les problèmes d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de l’agglomération Parisienne. Où va Paris?” Les Grands Enquêtes (18–21): 211–224. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. “Identity in the globalising world.” Social Anthropology 9(2): 121–229. ———. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality & Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blanchard, Pascal. 2001. La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage coloniale. Paris: La Découverte. Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47. Castells, Manuel. 1977. The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. A. Sheridan, trans. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Conklin, Alice. 1998. “Colonialism and Human Rights: A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914.” The American Historical Review 103 (2): 419–442. Dominguez, Virginia R. 1994. “A Taste for ‘the Other:’ Intellectual Complicity and Racializing Practices.” Current Anthropology 35(4): 333–348. Epstein, Beth S. 2011. Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a StatePlanned City in France. New York: Berghahn Books. Fassin, Didier & Eric Fassin, eds. 2006. De la question sociale à la question raciale? Répresenter la société française. Paris: Editions la Découverte.

The Moral Public Sphere

57

Ferguson, James. 2002. “Global Disconnect: Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism.” In The Anthropology of Globalization, A Reader. J. X. Inda and R. Rosaldo, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Fourcaut, Annie. 1990. “Débats et réalisations de l’entre-deux-guerres ou le lotissement comme anti-modèle.” In Les Origines des Villes Nouvelles de la Région Parisienne. D. Voldman, ed. Paris: Institut d’Histoire du Temps Present. ———. 2004. “Les premiers grands ensembles en région parisienne: Ne pas refaire la banlieue?” French Historical Studies 27(1): 195–218. Fourcaut, Annie, and Thierry Pacquot, eds. 2002. Le grand ensemble, entre histoire et avenir. Urbanisme 322: 35–80. Gaspard, Françoise. 1995. A Small City in France: A Socialist Mayor Confronts Neofascism. A. Goldhammer, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2002. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA/ Harvard University Press. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference”. Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6–23. Hage, Ghassan. 1995. “The Limits of ‘Anti-Racist Sociology.’” The UTS Review 1(1):59–82. Harrison, Faye V. 1995. “The Persistent Power of “Race” in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 47–74. Hartigan, John Jr. 2005. “Culture against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial Analysis.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 104(3): 543–560. Hirsch, Bernard. 1990. Oublier Cergy, L’invention d’une ville nouvelle. Paris: Presses de l’école nationale des ponts et chaussées. Holmes, Douglas. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. INSEE. 2009. Fiche Profil—Quartiers de la Politique de la Ville, données des recensem ents de la population de 1990 et 1999. http://www.insee.fr/fr/ppp/bases-de-don nees/donnees-detaillees/duicq/zus.asp?reg=11&uu=95851&zus=1100460 Jennings, Jeremy. 2000. “Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France.” British Journal of Political Science 30(4): 575–597. La Croix. 1976. “Cergy-Pontoise: Contrat en préparation Etat-Ville nouvelle pour les immigrés.” February 26. Laé, Jean-François and Numa Murard. 1985. L’argent des pauvres: la vie quotidienne en cité de transit. Paris: Seuil. Lallaoui, Mehdi. 1993. Du bidonville aux HLM. Paris: Syros. Lelévrier, Christine. 2004. Politique de la ville ou comment lutter contre “l’exclusion” et la “ségregation” dans la ville. Note de synthèse, Ministère des affaires sociales. Le Monde. 1997. “L’adieu au Marguerites, dernière cité de transit de Nanterre.” July 16. MacMaster, Neil. 1991. “The ‘seuil de tolérance’: The Uses of a Scientific Racist Concept.” In Race, Discourse & Power in France. M. Silverman, ed. pp. 14–28. Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing Co. ———. 1996. Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Merlin, Pierre. 1989. “Origines et devenir des villes nouvelles.” In 25 Ans de Villes Nouvelles en France. J.-E. Roullier, ed. Paris: Economica.

58

Beth Epstein

Ndiaye, Pap. 2008. La condition noire: essai sur une minorité française. Paris : CalmannLévy. Parizot, Isabelle, Fabienne Bazin, Emilie Renahy, Pierre Chauvin. 2004. Santé, inégalités et ruptures sociales: Enquêtes sur la santé et le recours aux soins dans 7 quartiers défavorisés d’Ile-de-France. INSERM, rapport pour la Délégation Interministérielle de la Ville. Peer, Shanny & Daniel Sabbagh, eds. 2008. Special issue: French Color-Blindness in Perspective: The Controversy over Statistiques Ethniques. French Politics, Culture & Society 26(1). Pétonnet, Colette. 1979. On est tous dans le brouillard. Paris: Editions Galilée. Reed-Danahay, Deborah, and Kathryn Anderson-Levitt. 1991. “Backward Countryside, Troubled City: French Teachers’ Images of Rural and Working-Class Families.” American Ethnologist 18(3): 546–564. Renan, Ernest. 1896. “What is a Nation?” In Essays of Ernest Renan. London: Walter Scott, Ltd. Saada, Emmanuelle. 2007. Les enfants de la colonie; les métis de l’ Empire francais entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: Editions de la Découverte. Sabbagh, Daniel. 2002. “Affirmative Action at Sciences Po.” In Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference. H. Chapman & L. Frader, eds. New York, Berghahn Books. Schain, Martin. 1985. “Immigrants and Politics in France.” In The French Socialist Experiment. J. Ambler, ed. Philadelphia: ISHI. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2007. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Silverman, Maxim, ed. 1991. Race, Discourse & Power in France. Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing Co. Silverman, Maxim. 1992. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism & Citizenship in Modern France. London: Routledge. Simon, Patrick. 2008. “The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France.” French Politics, Culture & Society 26(1): 7–31. Skrentny, John D. 2001. “Counting on the Census? Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics.” Society 38(3): 86–90. ———. 2002. “Inventing Race.” The Public Interest 146: 97–113. Stolcke, Verene. 1995. “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe.” Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24. Stovall, Tyler. 1989. “French Communism and Suburban Development: The Rise of the Paris Red Belt.” Journal of Contemporary History 24(3): 437–460. ———. 1990. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Taguieff, Pierre-André. 1988. “Les métamorphoses du racisme.” Hommes & Migrations 1114: 114–129. Tricart, Jean-Paul. 1977. “Genèse d’un dispositif d’assistance: les “cités de transit.” Revue française de sociologie 18: 601–624. UNESCO. 2005. Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001429/142919e .pdf

The Moral Public Sphere

59

Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2009. “Talking/Not Talking about Race: The Enregistrements of Culture in Higher Education Discourses.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(1): 21–39. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3 Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana Sara Le Menestrel Creolization was established as a cultural process by a literary and political creoleness1 movement in the 1980s. Today it is used as an analytical concept by anthropologists and historians and as the basis for claims to identity in societies considering themselves Creole. Consequently, the term is as ideological as it is descriptive. For many North American and European scholars of creolization, the concept, like all metaphors connected with cultural mixing (such as hybridity and métissage), includes the myths of origins and “racial” purity and cannot avoid strategies of exclusion.2 Charles Stewart emphasizes this racist heritage, which he believes too many researchers pass over too quickly. He reminds us that the term Creole is rooted in an imperial history associating birth in the New World with “deculturation” (1999: 44). For his part, John Tomlinson invites anthropologists to adapt themselves to the ambiguities and aporias of such concepts by ceaselessly questioning them and using them as everprovisional tools for dialogue (2005: 572). By focusing on ethnographic fieldwork and everyday practices, as Aisha Khan prompts us to do, we can distance ourselves from these concepts and reveal the many issues at stake in situations of cultural mixing and attendant processes of hierarchization (2005: 569). The creolization question is especially visible in the category of world music. Since the 1990s the rhetoric of world music has raised the status of the concept of hybridity in the field of music studies, while too often overlooking the racial imaginary in its formulations. “The transnational mix has not erased race from music, but rather it has recontextualized it,” assert Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, who decry what they consider to be a denial of the racial dimension in music studies and plead for an approach aiming to take its measure (2000: 37). According to Simon Frith (2000), researchers of “popular music” have tended to define the notion

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

61

of hybridity as a new form of authenticity, a form of creativity characteristic of the transnationalization of contemporary musical styles and their syncretic natures. In holding that “the aesthetics of modern popular music is the aesthetics of the hybrid, the aesthetics of the crossover, the aesthetics of the diaspora, the aesthetics of creolization” (1997: 39), Stuart Hall correlates the concepts of hybridity and creolization by associating them with the diversity and heterogeneity from which concerned musical styles have emerged. Simon Frith calls for a localized approach aiming to update our understanding of the networks of interactions between musicians, producers, promoters, and researchers, who are all players in the construction of world music. Addressing creolization in the field of Louisiana music, this chapter aims to show how the concept of creolization feeds off the racial imagination. Consequently, the concept’s social uses and paradoxes, in Louisiana society and the musical domain in particular, are at the heart of my analysis, although I avoid using it as an analytical concept myself. Instead of being limited to a metaphor of mixing, the concept of creolization as it is used here also includes a logic of differentiation. My work on categories, practices and musical judgments in the construction of the Louisiana French repertoire analyzes the negotiation of difference among Acadians and Creoles, two categories of identification based on distinct ancestries. Musical categories play a fundamental role in the reproduction of social stereotypes, which in turn shape the tastes and strategies of publics and musicians. These processes are accompanied by the constant interplay between these ancestral categories and musical discourse, which according to circumstance may erase or reiterate differences based on “racial” and class prejudices. Careful consideration of this dynamic promises to reveal symbolic, social, and economic issues manifest through access to a music market. Louisiana’s case is above all illustrated in the interactions and interstices between often-contradictory rationales.

“The Creole State” Contemporary academic and touristic literature frequently refers to Louisiana as a “Creole state.” Louisiana’s claim to creoleness thus sets it apart from the rest of North America, highlighting its unique identity attributed to its French and Spanish colonial heritages, its many waves of forced or voluntary migration, and its substantial historical population of free people of color. Claims to a specifically Louisianan creoleness refer to a culture fashioned by this cultural blending. The image of New Orleans as a non-American city, held as much by its residents as by outsiders, has for better or worse given it an appeal that has not waned since the mid-

62

Sara Le Menestrel

nineteenth century.3 Frederick Starr describes New Orleans from every angle, including aspects that also apply to all of southern Louisiana, beyond town-and-country variations: “The composite vision of fading grandeur, cultural hybridization, noble simplicity, eroticism, authenticity of expression (and a hint of danger) provides the underpinnings for scores of books and films on New Orleans and for the programs of more than a few local cultural and educational institutions” (2001: xxiv). If the adjective “Creole” is broadly used to designate Louisiana’s cultural uniqueness, it is applied in a more specific way to cuisine, architecture, language, music, and individuals, with strikingly diverse meanings. The polysemy of the term “Creole” results from a complex history and successive reappropriations. Its use, said to come from Portuguese (crioulo), goes back to the sixteenth century when it was first applied to American-born slaves. It would next come to designate any person or thing of local origin, born in the Americas. But its meanings were still quite variable according to historical and geographical context. Although the use of the term “Creole” in Louisiana under the French regime (1699–1763) was devoid of a racial dimension, French historian Cécile Vidal (2008) draws our attention to a distinction between external usage and internal usage. Those remaining in Europe attributed creoleness to colonists as a marker of difference, while within the colony the term was little used to designate colonists. Some sources suggest that slaves, to whom the term was applied locally, succeeded in appropriating it in the context of the conflicted relationship between colony-born “Creole” slaves and those born in Africa. It is only after France’s sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803 that the label “Creole” would be extended to all Louisiana-born inhabitants, whatever their origins. Henceforth a distinction was established between “the Creoles”—in the plural, to designate “the old population” established during French and Spanish colonial periods—and new Frenchspeaking residents coming from Santo Domingo (arriving 1809–10) or from continental France, who were designated as “Foreign French.” A massive in-migration of “Americans” and the control that they took over the territory would put claims to Creole identity in a relationship of domination. In the build-up to the Civil War, French-speakers became increasingly marginalized. White Creoles, displaced by the Anglo-Americans who took over economic and social power and suspected them of sharing blood with Creoles of color, felt threatened by being confused with them. They would consequently transform their anxiety into a Creole mythology imposing a strictly white definition of Creoles, applying a logic of blood purity. After the Civil War, the emancipation of slaves and new segregationist legislation eradicated the legal distinction between free people of color

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

63

and newly liberated blacks. The official change from a three-tier society in Louisiana (slaves, free people of color, whites) to a binary one incited historically free people of color to identify themselves as Creoles of color in order to set themselves apart from emancipated slaves. In 1900, the census removed the category “Mulatto” and counted all persons of black descent, whatever the degree, under the category “Black.” This merging of statuses would awaken class-consciousness among some historically free people of color, prompting strategies of distinction through endogamous marriage. This historical context is visible in the concurrent perceptions of Creole identities in contemporary Louisiana.4 In southern Louisiana, Creole identification may refer to black or white populations according to the region and speaker. Those who claim to be white Creoles cite their Spanish and/or French ancestry, which gives them an elevated social status. In southwestern Louisiana, this form of identification has become marginal, and “Creole” is above all associated with the French-speaking black population, descendants of either free people of color or slaves. Creole identification is not inconsistent with a strong feeling of being African American, save for some families descended from former rural Creole slaves.5 “Blackness” and francophone heritage are claimed simultaneously. Many Creoles emphasize the discrimination they have suffered as blacks, whatever the shade of their skin, and are quick to point out that during segregation, light or dark, “you knew your place.” In contrast, in New Orleans and the Cane River region south of Natchitoches (in the center of the state) as well as in the Creole diaspora (in California in particular), there is often a persistent feeling of belonging to a specific culture, emanating from a unique mixture of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans, and connected with a refusal to be identified as either black or white. This perception, which Creoles identifying as African American find elitist, goes along with the desire to take a political leadership role, as seen among Creoles during the Reconstruction.6 The preoccupation with magnifying Creole accomplishments and giving them credit for significant contributions to education, emancipation, and the defense of black civil rights in Louisiana conforms with a celebratory official history, which contrasts with a conflicted and tormented individual and collective memory (Thompson 2001). According to the context of interaction, the social issues, and the region in question, a Creole might thus identify him- or herself as both African American and Creole, or as exclusively Creole. Ancestry in servitude is not emphasized (and may even be obfuscated) in favor of highlighting a mixed ancestry, perceived as superior to each of its components (European, African, Native American).7

Sara Le Menestrel

64

Cajun Country Along with southern Louisiana creoleness, the twentieth century saw the parallel development of another regional identity, Cajun (spelled Cadien in Louisiana French, pronounced “kadžε”). Today it has become a generic term and a highly prized label for qualifying anything associated with socalled French or francophone Louisiana from the southwestern part of the state (population, products, businesses …). This promotion of Cajun identity, which has long given a monolithic image of what is known as Louisiana French culture (the result of many waves of francophone immigrants from the colony’s founding to the twentieth century8), contrasts with the black legend that preceded it. The distinction between “Cajuns” and “Acadians” reflects the social stratification of Acadian society that was established in eighteenth-century Louisiana following the British expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. Over the nineteenth century the Acadians would split into two groups: an educated and influential minority and a large class of sharecroppers who would gradually find themselves further set apart through a variety of labels (Henry and Lindhal 2002). Adopted at the turn of the twentieth century, the ethnonym “Cajun” would be applied to many francophone populations of diverse origins (poor Acadians, white Creoles descended from colonists, “Foreign French”) who shared a low social status and were stigmatized as “white trash.” These class distinctions influenced the various ways of classifying identity that are found today. Forbidden in schools by Louisiana law since 1921, the French language long continued to lose prestige. In the 1950s, some perceived calling a white person a “Cajun” as an insult akin to calling a black person a “nigger.” This image would continue until the 1970s, when a political and intellectual elite spearheaded a revival of interest in French, leading to the creation of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), a public agency for the teaching and promotion of French, and transforming “Cajun” from an insult into a proudly claimed identity. The francophone renaissance gradually took on a new dimension by becoming an object of touristic promotion. The petroleum crisis that crushed the region prompted the economic diversification of Louisiana, which turned to other revenue sources. A series of official designations honored Cajun identity by focusing on its Acadian heritage, by the same token effectively obscuring Creoles in the Louisiana French landscape. In 1971, “Acadiana” became an official regional denomination for a triangle of 22 parishes in southern Louisiana, providing a new name for the region commonly known as French Louisiana; the touristic label Cajun Country was added to the names for this area during the same period. And so the

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

65

university in Lafayette would be nicknamed “l’Université des Acadiens” and its stadium christened the Cajundome. Louisiana French culture became one of the privileged themes of the state’s tourist office in the mid-1980s. Food and music held dominant positions in this promotional initiative. In 1984, the Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans gave Cajun and Creole cultural displays prime locations, exposing them to a wide public. The Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme went to San Francisco and New York in this period, and his blackened redfish was so successful that it brought international renown to Cajun cuisine. Moreover, the commercial promotion of Cajun culture expanded beyond southwestern Louisiana—to be exploited by New Orleans and occasionally even the northern part of the state. Louisiana French music benefited greatly from these touristic policies, which involved academic and cultural institutions through the engagement of regionally- and nationally-known folklorists. This validation and diffusion of Louisiana French music inspired festivals, concerts, workshops, and dance clubs across the region. From an old fashioned, discordant music once stuck with the demeaning descriptor of “chanky-chank,” Louisiana French music reached the status of “folk music” deserving to be preserved, and was officially recognized with prizes from the best-known artistic institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 and various Grammy Awards from 2008 to 2011.

Current musical nomenclature Until the 1960s, French Louisiana music was categorized as “French music” or “musique française,” which grouped together a variety of styles without associating them with any particular identity. In comparison, current musical categories distinguish between Cajun music, Creole music, and zydeco. Louisiana musicians, folklorists, experts, fans, touristic publications, and academic literatures tend to agree on these categories. Music dubbed “Cajun” thus designates that of the Cajuns, understood as whites of francophone culture, while Creole and zydeco are associated with Creoles, understood as black francophones. Music identified as Creole is presented as the “traditional” repertoire of Creoles and an ancestor of zydeco. Going back to the first half of the twentieth century, people also used the descriptor “lala” or “French lala.” The coexistence of two distinct categories at the beginning of the last century—French and lala—is put forward as the historical basis for justifying today’s labels. So instead of saying “French music” to refer to the pioneering musical style, today the

66

Sara Le Menestrel

terms “old-time Cajun music” and “old-time Creole music” are preferred, according to the ancestry of the musicians concerned. Experts trace the genealogy of Creole music back to jurés, a type of gospel music featuring a capella singing and bodily percussion performed by Catholics during Lent and also by a minority of Creole protestants to celebrate a good harvest. Jurés are presented as the incontestable survival of African polyrhythms, a perception legitimated by the most eminent folklorists, especially Alan Lomax, who began recording this music with his father in the late 1930s. In the booklet accompanying the compilation Cajun & Creole Music 1934/1937: The Alan Lomax Collection, produced in 1987, he insists on the parallels—with many examples—between Creole jurés and zydeco and the “West African and Caribbean musical style” on the basis of a putatively shared tradition of polyrhythm. For example, he recalled seeing a trio of young Creoles near a Baptist church whose body percussion “sounded as though there were an African drum ensemble in the church,” and he described the playful voice, the repetitive and unintelligible lyrics, and the syncopated rhythm of standard “prison blues” as a “style which lies back of the blues, [and] is the only black American type that I know of that can be precisely matched in West Africa” (Lomax 1987). This conception of musical genealogy based on African ancestry, contested by many ethnomusicologists today, would legitimate the existence of a unique “Creole sound” distinctive from Cajun music and defined in particular by a syncopated rhythm.9 Zydeco was popularized by Clifton Chenier with the 1964 release of his record with Arhoolie Records. This musical genre is most often defined as being based on Afro-Caribbean rhythms, blues, and Cajun music by journalists and music experts, who commonly refer to it as a “cousin” of Cajun. The way in which these categories are defined reveals a persistent paradox from the outset: Creole and zydeco styles are both positioned in relation to another, “white” style, by highlighting the similarities among all three, frequently through use of the biological language of kinship. At the same time, the differences between Cajun and the other two are sharply underscored by stressing the African origin of Creole and zydeco musical styles. Current musical nomenclature thus betrays an immediately perceptible tension between creolization and racial imaginaries.

“Creolization” as a regional founding myth Cultural blending is emphasized relentlessly in Louisiana, usually through the culinary metaphor of gumbo, a regional dish whose various ingredients illustrate the European, African, and Native American origins of this “unique culture.” In southwestern Louisiana, since the francophone

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

67

revival movement of the 1970s, local researchers depict the concept of “creolization” as a Louisiana French idiosyncrasy. Statewide media and touristic literature, sometimes picking up academic terminology, vaunt the specificity of local culture due to its cultural mix. Interactions between academic, activist, musician, institutional, and tourism industry discourses are multiple, and individuals circulate among these fields, borrowing concepts and formulations and/or adapting them to suit the situation.10 In the southwestern region, the value accorded to cultural mixing correlates with the efforts of Creoles determined to be present in the French Louisiana touristic landscape, which had been long limited to Cajuns. Tourism and local authorities’ gradual implementation of policies acknowledging Creoles led to the modification of some touristic slogans, the publication of specifically African American travel guides, and the founding of museums honoring Creole heritage. From the 1930s onwards, the concept of creolization has been part of a clear tendency among folklorists of celebrating processes of adaptation. Periodically, as Benjamin Filene shows, an insistence on folkloric purity dominated folklore studies, before giving way by the late 1930s to a fascination with capacities for adaptation: “New Deal folklorists, starting with Alan Lomax, began conceiving of their work as the study of the ‘living lore,’ characterized by its simultaneous reinterpretation of the old and incorporation of the new” (2000: 139). This fluid and harmonious vision of the creolization process is ubiquitous in historiographical and musicological writings on French Louisiana. Significantly, adaptation is presented more as a choice than a survival strategy, for indigenous populations as much as for colonists, thus obscuring the physical violence and power relations often inherent in the encounters of such populations. The creolization concept has been advanced for some time to define the Cajuns’ ethnogenesis. A sociocultural amalgam did indeed take place after the Civil War via exogamous marriages, not only between poor francophones but also with other migrants of German or Scottish origins settled in the region (Brasseaux 1992). Louisiana researchers’ insistence on Cajuns’ capacity to “assimilate” combines with their tendency to extol Cajuns’ capacity to adapt (to the environment, historical circumstances, modernity) and innovate, in an effort to rehabilitate them and to prove recurrent predictions of their immanent disappearance wrong. This inclination to attribute to Cajuns particular qualities of adaptation would come to be extended to all French-Americans: R. Creagh (1988) credits all French-Americans with an unequalled capacity for adapting to the frontier. More recently, Louisiana historian Ryan Brasseaux presents this openness to change as a “French North American survival scheme” (2009: ix). Attributing the process of creolization to Cajuns thus appears to be an effective late-twentieth century strategy for countering their marginaliza-

68

Sara Le Menestrel

tion insofar as it rests on claims that they were full-fledged participants in the construction of an American national identity, while also retaining their own uniqueness. By focusing on its creative dimension and the various cultural elements contributing to the process, local use of the concept of creolization is stripped of all social divisions. In particular, divisions between Cajuns and Creoles are often relegated to academic histories of Louisiana, as if one can only verbalize them with the protection of temporal distance. Mechanisms of exclusion are often acknowledged and may be critiqued, but without leading to deeper analyses.11 Besides that, the creolization concept is used only to describe cultural processes, scrupulously avoiding any issues of biological mixing. If references to reciprocal cultural borrowing are an incessant refrain, the mixture is never presented in terms of “racial mixing” or “crossing.”12 Additionally, intellectual and artistic elites tend to homogenize representations of Cajun identity to the detriment of other forms of identification that might expose conflicting perceptions. The concept of the Acadian diaspora has assumed increasing importance in the definition of Cajun identity over the past twenty years. This sense of belonging is based on several factors: a common collective memory built around the experience of the Great Upheaval (le Grand Dérangement, the British expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755); the theme of survival expressed in their tenacity and independence to this day; a “blood” relationship with the Acadians of the Canadian maritime provinces; a mythical territory illustrated by the many established terminological variations on Acadie/Acadiana, such as “Northern/ Southern Acadia.” World Acadian congresses, organized since 1994, and the proliferation of museums, monuments, expositions, and cultural events honoring the Acadian diaspora illustrate the salience of this dimension. This feeling of belonging is echoed in the musical world, not only through songs, but also in exchanges between young Louisianans and Acadians from Maritime Canada interested in learning the French language and exploring the “traditional” repertoire. Francophone activism is considerably more visible and well-known than is another form of identity, founded on a rural, white identity at the bottom of the social scale and proclaimed under the ethnonym “Coonass” (Walton 2001).13 This label is widely rejected by the Cajun elite, which considers it degrading and insulting and aims to banish it from the public sphere (denying its recognition as a legitimate identity) with the support of the Louisiana Legislature.14 Those who claim to be Coonass are primarily concerned to set themselves apart from the Cajun designation and its touristic dimension—or at least not be limited by it. The Coonass label also opposes the association of Cajuns with middle-class norms. In

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

69

addition, Coonass aligns with a racializing approach to local social relationships, product of a stigma inversion akin to that of “nigger.” Thus, S. Walton proposes seeing it as a “category of southern whiteness” (2001: 47), defined through a process of differentiation where race and class outweigh claims to an Acadian and French-speaking identity. Those who combine the label Coonass with their Cajun identity in this way are in a process of racializing Frenchness, whereas those who refute it favor an ethnicized notion of Frenchness that stresses the importance of language and cultural roots. For the latter group, the racial dimension is expressed in the breach, through suggestions of a musical kinship between Cajuns and black Creoles.

Setting the boundaries of “creolization” Since the early 1990s the artistic elite of southwestern Louisiana has emphasized the shared musical heritage of Cajuns and Creoles, just as local researchers have likewise applied the creolization concept to the musical field to highlight its multiple influences.15 The example that has become emblematic of this shared heritage is the twenty-year collaboration between the Creole accordionist Amédée Ardoin and the Cajun fiddler Denis McGee, who immortalized their partnership by making one of the first recordings of Louisiana French music in 1929. Both worked as sharecroppers for the same landowner in Eunice, north of Lafayette. In post-abolition southwestern Louisiana most Creoles as well as Cajuns were sharecroppers, and their shared economic situation was grounds for attributing common characteristics to the various musical styles of the Louisiana French repertoire, by musicians and the public alike. The model for Louisiana French music insists on the rural origins and modest social position of the repertoire’s pioneers, and its fans and interpreters alike define it as simple (“plain”) and informal (“low down for real”), prizing emotion over sophistication—and sociability, conviviality, and sharing over musical technique and competitiveness. “It’s not about performing, it’s about socializing,” one musician summed it up. The Ardoin-McGee duo thus came to symbolize a shared musical heritage, a common conception of the music, and the same social position, with class appearing as the element uniting Cajuns and Creoles. Consequently, claims of social proximity and their prominence in the contemporary Louisiana French music imaginary were able to survive the stormy political climate of much of the twentieth century (segregation, tensions related to the civil rights movement, and the mobilization of white Cajuns against integration and school desegregation). Pioneering publications by the British scholar John Broven (1992), the anthropolo-

70

Sara Le Menestrel

gist Rocky Sexton (2000), and the Louisiana historian Shane Bernard (2003) have unhesitantly explored the tense relationships dominating the realm of music in the 1960s, but they stand as exceptions. The segregationist protest songs of Leroy “Happy Fats” Leblanc and Clifford “Pee Wee” Trahan reflect a violent nation-wide backlash among white populations in reaction to the black population’s progress in civil rights. LeBlanc’s most popular song, “Dear Mr. President,” referring to the 1968 candidacy of segregationist George Wallace, celebrates a Cajun farmer who uses animal metaphors to challenge integration (2003: 63). Researchers have most often described the many interactions between the Louisiana French repertoire and popular American music as a process of “Cajunization,” extending the discourse on Cajuns’ capacity for assimilation by applying it to the musical domain. This neologism identifies the repertoire through its heritage rather than as the product of a regional creative process incorporating exogenous influences. Moreover, not all of these influences are thought to be desirable. The translation of blues, country, and hillbilly songs into regional French is generally viewed positively, while the predominance of Western swing in the 1930s or rockn-roll in the 1950s tends to be perceived as a deterioration threatening French heritage. The musical “creolization” that researchers refer to thus seems circumscribed by a French heritage whose exact contours remain fuzzy at best; does it refer to a language, to instruments, to song structure, to rhythm, to melody? Creolization was long distinguished from Americanization in defining an authentic repertoire whose uniqueness was something to be celebrated. However, over the past several years there has been a shift in how younger researchers of Louisiana present the historiography of Louisiana French music. They see processes of “Americanization” as a legitimate object of analysis—and no longer as a form of a assimilation with harmful and ineluctable consequences: Their work approaches “Americanization” as an integral part of the construction of the Louisiana French repertoire that does not undermine its integrity (Bernard 1996, 2003; Brasseaux 2009). Indeed, it legitimates contested styles like swamp pop and influences from country or rock musics that are the product of reinterpretations and adaptations of popular American music, mainstream culture, and mass consumption. By tracing the career of the song “Jole Blon” (Jolie Blonde), Ryan Brasseaux illustrates its commercial success and range unequaled in the history of this musical tradition: recorded by Harry Choates in 1946, it was catapulted to the top of the Billboard Charts and was re-interpreted by the big names of American popular music (from country star Roy Accuff to Bruce Springsteen), assuring its place in the canon and moving it beyond local and regional boundaries.

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

71

Though Brasseaux frees himself from the concept of creolization, preferring that of adaptation and including “Americanization” in it, he still depicts this capacity for adaptation as a trait specific to Cajuns, thus presenting Cajun specificity (on this point, at least) in the same terms as did his predecessors. What he defines as “a Cajun musical ethos” thus appears as a typically Cajun adaptive mechanism rooted in improvisation, the author playing on a double (cultural and musical) register (2009: ix). Eclipsed by the cultural representation of creolization, tensions over racial mixing are visible in the musical domain, taking the form of accusations of eroticism. As spaces of seduction and promiscuity, dance halls are consequently also privileged places of sanction, some ingrained in Louisiana French collective memory. Amédée Ardoin is a prime example, violently beaten after playing in a dance hall for having accepted a handkerchief offered by a white girl so he could wipe the sweat from his face. The musician never recovered from his injuries and died in a psychiatric institution in 1941. As noted above, Ardoin was a symbol of musical creolization for his long and successful collaboration with Denis McGee, but he also incarnates the rigidity of the color line and the risk of such collaboration, as a victim of consequences he was unable to escape. Other, earlier accounts of discrimination often remain all but forgotten, such as the story of the leader of the swamp pop group Cookie and the Cupcakes, who was forced to leave the region to avoid being lynched after being accused of having seduced a white woman. Dancing frequently crystalized segregationists’ phobias, because they saw it as encouragement to “racial amalgamation” and “miscegenation” (Le Menestrel 2004). More recently, a similar phenomenon was behind criticism of the white musician Horace Trahan. This talented Cajun accordionist’s conversion to zydeco in 1999 was seen as treason by his fans, whose bitterness was only worsened by his racy song “That Butt Thing.”16 Trahan thus incarnates transgression, not only by his musical choices (his conversion from one style to another, and the subject matter of his songs) but also by his personal choices—he has lived with a black woman for several years. The controversy prompted by his musical conversion is also related to a fear of “racial” mixing. And yet his hit song, which he no longer sings, was a huge regional success among young audiences and made the top 40 on the radio. Though such sexual lyrics may seem to be an expression of primitivism and a threat to morality for some, in other contexts they are thought to express a liberated sexuality and are seen as being more modern, especially by the younger generation (Wade 2000: 142). The ambivalence of stereotypical representations of blackness, between fascination and repulsion, thus is discernible in—indeed integral to—the concept of creolization.

Sara Le Menestrel

72

The ubiquitous use of creolization and its regional symbols (cultural gumbo, melting pot) to characterize Louisiana French regional identity and music thus cannot be associated with the explicit promotion of any given ideology, and remains shaped by very specific influences and contexts.

The rhetoric of origins The privileged place given to the concept of creolization and the metaphor of mixing in the musical imaginary is inseparable from the racial imaginary. In addition, the prominence of references to exchange and mutual influences between Cajuns and Creoles is, among the very same speakers, accompanied by a rhetoric of origins that perpetuates the racialization of the Louisiana French repertoire. A taxonomic consensus is built on this dialectic relationship (Hoffmann 2009) bringing together researchers, musicians, specialized journalists, and tourism and museum authorities. In the case of the Louisiana French repertoire, the commonly established connection between a “racial” and/or “ethnic” identity and a specific sound was largely crafted by the music industry. The associations of the Cajun style with country and western and of zydeco with rhythm and blues are legacies of a distinction introduced by the recording industry in the 1920s, between “race music” and “hillbilly music.” This process was encouraged by the massive wave of migration to urban areas following World War I, which would prompt record companies to promote southern music to migrants by targeting audiences defined along racial criteria. After the war a new terminology would take over, perpetuating the distinction between what would henceforth be classified as rhythm and blues and country and western. Radio spread this classification, which supported the segmentation of audiences for more efficient targeting by advertisers (Peterson 1997). These marketing strategies had an impact on the choices of musicians themselves, who took inspiration from the commercial styles currently in fashion to position themselves within the musical markets. Leo Soileau, a pioneering figure in “French Music” who would make the first Cajun music record in 1928, went on to be influenced by Western swing in the 1930s. Mainly inspired by the icon of Texas swing Bob Wills, Soileau started to diversify his group’s instrumentation in 1937, bringing in an electric mandolin, a saxophone, and a piano. Regional production companies further contributed to this separation between what were considered black and white musical styles by creating different labels for Cajun, Creole, and zydeco.17 The recording industry, though not at the root of the distinction between the different styles of

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

73

Louisiana French music found today, greatly facilitated a process already underway by segmenting the musical repertoire (Peterson 1997: 196). These distinctions are also to be understood in the political climate of rising black nationalism, which was favorable to claims of cultural legitimacy based on racial criteria. Categories almost seem to evolve in an inverse relation to social dynamics: while during legal segregation one spoke of “French Music,” which brought together different styles interpreted by French-speaking Louisianans, it seems that starting in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, the perception of this broad genre gradually came to be shaped by overlapping boundaries, both ethnic (Cajun/Creole) and “racial.” Gradually the repertoire was redefined into separate categories (Cajun, Creole, zydeco) based on the ancestry and skin color of the musicians. Today, there appears to be a broad consensus around the idea that these musical categories are rooted in distinct categories of identity. Acknowledging a common musical tradition is considered to be perfectly compatible with claims to different styles. The arguments musicians use to demonstrate the distinction between Cajun and Creole styles are of a technical order: the more rhythmic, syncopated, dissonant, and asymmetrical sounds (“crooked,” “scratchy”) of Creole style are contrasted with the more fluid (“soft,” “smooth”) qualities of Cajun style. Some associate the Creole style with specific tones or structures. Differences stemming from the evolution of aesthetic conventions in the repertoire thus become naturalized. The distinctive sounds cited in such arguments are actually more connected to different styles in fashion at a given time more than they are to the musicians’ ancestry. The influence of western swing on Cajun music led to a more fluid style, for example, and made a succession of accordion and fiddle solos commonplace, whereas until that time these instruments had been played simultaneously and with a more choppy rhythm. Yet musicians themselves are gradually challenging these technical explanations as they articulate them, correct themselves, and find multiple exceptions to the invoked principals, ultimately admitting the difficulty of defining distinct musical characteristics. The established distinctions thus most often remain in the realm of the indefinable, a kind of feeling (a “distinctive soul,” “feel,” “flavor”), incorporated and experienced through playing music. In the back-and-forth between homogeneity and difference, the same aesthetic conventions are either attributed to a particular style or to the whole French Louisiana repertoire according to the contexts where they are pronounced. But many musicians claim that the more syncopated and rhythmic character attributed to the Creole style is the foundation of all Louisiana French music, whatever the style. It is predominantly specialists in French Louisiana music, academics, and journalists who give legitimacy to the distinction between Cajun and

Sara Le Menestrel

74

Creole styles. They speak of an “independent but parallel” development that comes to justify the systematic choice to not integrate Creole and zydeco music into texts devoted to Cajun music, and vice-versa.18 They acknowledge their similarities while affirming their differences by invoking commonplace arguments—for instance, about African influences that are associated with a syncopated rhythm—taken to be so irrefutable that they need no elaboration (Ancelet 1996; Broven 1983; Sexton 2000; Tisserand 1998; Wood 2001). The concept of creolization is in turn applied to Cajun music or to Creole and zydeco music to emphasize the diversity of their respective influences while ceaselessly reaffirming the given style’s distinctiveness. Cultural institutions willingly relay this discourse. The permanent exhibit on Louisiana history and culture at the Louisiana State Museum in the state capital Baton Rouge, Experiencing Louisiana: Discovering the Soul of America, has several sections on the music of southwestern Louisiana. The label terminology is a good example of the ambivalence of the musical imaginary: while the Louisiana French repertoire is characterized as a “mixture” or “amalgam,” it is still spoken of as exhibiting two distinct traditions that correspond to the respective origins of particular musical traits (particular instruments, rhythm): “Cajun and Creole music developed as true amalgams, borrowing elements from the many cultures that made up the region. Scholars trace these two related music traditions to a combination of the folk music of western France, Afro-Caribbean folk songs and drumming, African American blues, the Spanish guitar and the German/Austrian accordion and Anglo-American fiddle tunes.”

This rhetoric of origins is consistent with the “cultural mosaic” described in books dedicated to local history and culture. The primacy of parallel traditions and difference over fusion echoes local uses of the concept of creolization.

Individual creativity Alongside this naturalization of difference, there are constant claims to individual creativity. A performer’s originality is praised by pointing to specific musical techniques such as: variations in the bridge following the melody (part B in an AABB or AABA structure), particular ornamentation of the melody (sliding, rolling, or blue notes), more or less rhythmic bowing, or ways of accompanying the melody (seconding) by chords or by playing the same melody an octave apart. These techniques, among many others, contribute to developing a distinctive sound. Many musicians are proud of not being limited to imitation, but rather having his or her own

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

75

style or own version of a particular piece. In addition, different performers’ arrangements of many pieces are given different names, allowing artists to proclaim their creativity by rechristening their work. The diversity of playing styles and individual interpretations appears in constantly highlighted distinctions in discourse as well as in musical performances. Musicians’ claims to originality thus echo local researchers’ use of the creolization concept and the space for adaptation and creativity that it implies. But rather than placing creolization in a specifically Louisiana French cultural process (as academics, the artistic elite, and touristic and cultural institutions do), musicians experience it as an individual undertaking that demonstrates musical talent. We thus observe a shifting of scales from the collective to the individual as we move from one kind of social actor to another, and consider the stakes engaged for each. Regardless of how a musician lays claim to creativity, he or she always evokes roots in a tradition or lineage. Musicians commonly situate themselves as heir to a pioneering musician or family dynasty (the Balfas, the Ardoins, Dennis McGee, Clifton Chenier, Boozoo Chavis, and so on) through their discourse (in speech, websites, CD liner notes) and their musical practices (interpretation and arrangements of these leading figures’ songs, tributes) to legitimate their claims to specific musical traditions. Being a “son of ” or “disciple of ” makes innovation possible and creativity credible, or at least lets a performer join the musical canon. Because rootedness in a specific style and lineage confers legitimacy within the music industry and the local public, it effectively frees musicians from some limits to their choices and creativity.19 Balancing the goals of claiming a tradition and developing a unique personal style is a response to the political and economic stakes in one of the poorest states in the country. Businesses, private foundations, and public cultural institutions have been circulating the idea of a “cultural economy” for many years, giving rise in 2005 to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation, a public/private partnership that subsidizes cultural projects “that transform cultural skills, knowledge, and ideas into economically productive goods, services, and places.”20 Musical heritage— quite often incarnated by New Orleans—is a major draw for tourists to the state, with the Louisiana French repertoire holding a prominent position for thirty-odd years and benefitting from national and international recognition that confers high status on its performers. In 2007, after a long campaign by a Louisiana musician, the Grammy Awards established a “Cajun and Zydeco” category, which helped raise the status of Louisiana French music by giving it its own music industry niche (elevating it from a sub-category of “folk” or “traditional” music) and a place in mainstream culture. By keeping Cajun and zydeco together, the category reflected the ambivalence of these designations, uniting them under a single regional

76

Sara Le Menestrel

identity while differentiating them with race-based labels. In 2011, however, the Recording Academy decided to reduce the number of award categories, resulting in the removal of “Cajun and Zydeco” and several others; French Louisiana music has since been relegated to the “Regional Roots” category. The interplay between musical categories cannot be separated from access to a market and recognition strategies that seem to be differently expressed among Creoles and Cajuns, although this distinction is more indicative of trends than the confirmation of immutable factors of differentiation. Creoles more frequently aspire to be present on the American popular music market. Their socio-economic status, as the lowest of the Louisiana population, motivates a quest for social ascension through the commercial success of zydeco and its visibility within African American popular music. While remaining more or less rooted in tradition (depending on the artist), many zydeco groups are very interested in expanding their listener base. Buckwheat Zydeco was one of the first to implement this strategy, assisted by his New York producer Ted Fox, who laid the path for Buckwheat’s unparalleled success since the 1980s by loudly promoting zydeco (Tisserand 1998). With five Grammy awards, the latest in 2009, Buckwheat Zydeco was the first musician of the genre to record advertisements for global mass-consumption products (Isuzu, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Cheerios), and he played for the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as well as both of Bill Clinton’s presidential inaugurations. He recorded with stars such as Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Los Lobos, and has interpreted his own versions of several songs by hit artists (The Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” Bob Dylan’s “On a Night Like This”). Young zydeco groups (like those of Chris Ardoin, Sean Ardoin, J Paul Jr, and Keith Frank) explore reggae, hip-hop, soul, and funk by borrowing melody lines or lyrics from the greats of these styles—or even television series theme songs, some of them from the cable channel MTV.21 The Cajun group Beausoleil, on the other hand, has accumulated the most honors over its thirty-year career. With eleven Grammy-award nominations and three wins, the band appeared regularly on the legendary show A Prairie Home Companion on NPR (National Public Radio), played the Super Bowl halftime show in 1997, and opened for the Grateful Dead. Their leader Michel Doucet, who won such national honors as the United States Artists Fellowship (2007) and the National Heritage Fellowship (2005), is one of the first to have updated the traditional repertoire in the 1980s by appropriating elements of zydeco, New Orleans jazz, Tex-Mex, country, and blues. The range of influences explored by Beausoleil and its national visibility have made it the best-known Cajun group in the country. It appears that more recently formed Cajun groups are more inclined to target listeners within a narrower roots music market,

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

77

a category that emerged in the United States in the 1980s at the urging of rock critics who were inspired by musical styles thought to have heavily influenced twentieth-century American popular music.22 Despite its seal of authenticity, French Louisiana music nonetheless remains marginal within the world music market.

Conclusion Music clearly offers a useful way to make more audible the diversity of ways that Louisiana French identity is defined (French/Louisiana French, Cajun, Acadian, Coonass for those identifying themselves as white; Creole, Black, African American for those identifying as black). This variety of ways to be Louisiana French provides a space for social actors to play between contradictory, conflicting and competing memberships, combining them or moving from one to another depending on the context. These categories of belonging resonate with musical categories (themselves highly mutable) and also with the ways that Louisiana French music is presented, perceived, and experienced by those who practice it and appreciate it within Louisiana. Again, we can observe a constant oscillation between the metaphors of mixing, adaptation, and creativity on one hand, and a rhetoric of distinctive origins and the naturalization of difference on the other. While musical practices show that these two positions are in constant interaction, researchers working on the region have reworked he concept of creolization to suggest a beneficial and uplifting cultural process stripped of all division and pertinent only to a francophone heritage. Consequently, I find the concept of creolization per se to be of limited use for illuminating the social dynamics in play in Louisianan society. Rather, it is by examining this concept’s duality, and the ways it is used and reappropriated that we can hope to get a better grasp of local practices and representations, in a way that adequately takes account of all the actors involved (musicians, dancers, academics, activists, the music industry, cultural institutions, tourism organizations, experts, media) as well as of the circulation of pertinent categories and concepts. When analytical categories become entangled with vernacular categories, it behooves us as researchers to clearly think through our habitual ways of using them. We need to explicitly define the use we make of such concepts as researchers and to be careful about taking for granted their pertinence as analytical tools. The musical genealogy and categories used within the Louisiana French repertoire are validated by invoking an omnipresent racial imaginary that above all makes African or European ancestry a fundamental factor of differentiation.

Sara Le Menestrel

78

My experience as a musician gave me a vital perspective for seeing, hearing, and living within the mutable array of musical identities, categories and content that discourse tends to fix in place. Rather than seeing discourses of origins and mixing as contradictory, my own experiences of fieldwork, and of playing music in southwestern Louisiana, convinced me that they are inextricably linked. My status as a French woman also allowed me to cross tacit boundaries by using my naiveté, daring to ask touchy questions without raising suspicion or hackles, and taking advantage of the image of France as a country less inclined to “racial” discrimination. The salience of “racial” and “ethnic” dimensions in the conception of logics of differentiation is in line with the celebration of “diversity” that has become ubiquitous in American society. Distinguishing between Cajun and Creole heritages by falling back on Acadian and African ancestry as foundational to musical categories and content arises from a persistent concern with “respecting” racial and ethnic identifications without making them appear to be sources of tension or discrimination. Researchers, activists, and musicians set out to vigorously denounce past and present demonstrations of racism, but the underlying representations and racial imaginary of musical categories remain largely unaddressed.23 At the same time, the concept of class is mainly used as a unifying factor, a status shared by Creoles and Cajuns with rural roots that nonetheless avoids evoking the stratifications and social inequalities that exist between the two identity categories, or within each one. While musical styles and creativity are repeatedly depicted as the fruit of a heritage and a specific tradition, there is a need to analyze them as part of a quest for social ascension or legitimacy, or as a reaction to the market logics that have a considerable influence on musicians’ plans, career strategies, and musical choices. Research on Louisiana society—and American society at large— would be advanced by the further study of such categorization processes, deconstructing them by extracting the logics of differentiation and hierarchization that structure them, the stakes behind situations of domination related to the production of difference, and the social inequalities that so-called multicultural policies and their celebration of “diversity” tend to overshadow.

Notes Translated from the French by Juliette Rogers. In addition to the authors of this book who contributed to the development of this text, I would like to thank Anath Ariel de Vidas, Véronique Boyer, Guillaume Samson,

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

79

and Cécile Vidal, as well as the members of the “Anthropology” branch of the research group Mondes Americains for their critiques and valuable suggestions.   1. The authors of the manifesto “Eloge de la créolité” define “creoleness” as a double process of adaptation to the New World and cultural confrontation, resulting in the creation of a syncretic Creole culture (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1993: 31).   2. In particular, see the American Ethnologist forum (2005) and Stewart (2007).   3. Following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, opposing strategies draw on this imaginary: contestation of the city’s reconstruction based on its stigmatization as a den of iniquity, and displaced populations’ claim to a right to return; see Le Menestrel and Henry (2010).   4. For more detail on these various perceptions, see Le Menestrel (2006).   5. In such families, although they do define themselves as “black,” they nevertheless distance themselves from an ancestry in servitude and minimize the significance of their African ancestry. James Callier, a native of Lafayette who devoted his career to directing several educational programs, thus falls back on Native American ancestry: “Some of the Africans mixed with the Indians, and started to produce light-skinned people. It was Indian and African, and French and Indian. But never French and African. The French never took Africans as their wives. Femme jolie. They wanted the beautiful mulatto women.”   6. Some Creoles of color played decisive roles in the fight for equal rights for blacks during segregation. Among them, L. Martinet and R. Desdunes founded a citizen’s committee to challenge the constitutionality of the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Law, pushing it as far as the Supreme Court in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case (1896), which ended with a ruling against them.   7. The Creole Heritage Center in Natchitoches, which organizes annual meetings and lectures and produces publications, defends this perception. Sybil Klein, a Creole academic, musician, and poet from New Orleans, also places herself in this camp. In The New Orleans Tribune (2001: 14–15) she states, “The black, white and other color labels simply don’t fit us. You’re gonna leave somebody out if you put those labels on us. In fact those labels don’t fit anybody. Hope one day we’ll all be Americans […]. There is a lot, a whole lot of the Creole culture that’s from Africa, just as there is a whole lot that’s from Europe. You can strip the European contribution to our culture. If you put them together, you see, together, that’s when it’s beautiful” (Le Menestrel 2006: 231).   8. There were several waves of immigration following the colony’s establishment in 1699, from early eighteenth-century forced and voluntary immigration from France, followed by refugees from Santo Domingo, people fleeing the French Revolution, and Bonapartists taking refuge after his defeat. Twentieth century Louisiana took in Christian Libyan immigrants, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees, as well as migrants from France, Belgium, and Quebec, Canada.   9. Philip Tagg (1989) illustrates the incoherence of this musicological argument and the ideological dimension of these dichotomies point by point. If polyrhythm can legitimately be invoked as one of the traits that distinguishes European from some African musical traditions (especially those from West and Central Sudanese Africa), it distinguishes just as strongly these particular traditions from many other African musical styles (see Le Menestrel 2006).

80

Sara Le Menestrel

10. The eminent Cajun and Creole specialist Barry Ancelet is thus simultaneously an academic, activist, poet, and writer, involved in cultural programs, touristic projects, music festival organization, and the production of CD liner notes. The Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, home of a research center, the largest Cajun and Creole folklore and music archive in existence, and tourism projects and information, is a good illustration of this crossing of registers and domains. 11. See, for example, C. Brasseaux (2005), who regrets reciprocal racial discrimination but calls on researchers to explore the issue, as if this task was too trying and risky for a “native.” 12. Taking the opposing stance, J. Stouck presents creolization as an experience that is more destructive than creative, which he believes goes against Caribbean theories of the concept, as evidenced by the short stories of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a New Orleans Creole author of the late nineteenth century (2004). 13. This tendency is perceptible in “Acadian” historiography. While highlighting the polarization of the group’s social stratification during the nineteenth century, these texts put forth a uniform and homogeneous vision of identity representation, pleading for a unified collective mobilization (David 2005: 200). 14. In 1981, a resolution condemned the term “Coonass” as “insulting, vulgar and obscene” (Bernard 2003: 138). 15. See Ancelet (1989), whose book on music begins: “Like most other features of Louisiana French culture, Cajun music is the product of creolization” (Ancelet et al. 1992). 16. The refrain is: “I don’t like golf, I don’t like swimmin’, I just like chasin’ dem big butt women.” 17. For example Floyd Soileau, one of the best-known producers of the region, created the labels “Swallow” for Cajun recordings and “Maison de Soul” for zydeco. 18. This is the case for Ryan Brasseaux and Kevin Fontenot’s 2006 anthology. 19. This double allegiance to tradition and creativity is part of a cultural naturalization process perceptible in France, in the history of the appeal of foreign dance styles. The audiences of “exotic” dance performances are suspicious of any artist who does not come from the group whose dance he or she is performing, and of all artists whose creativity overtakes the original form, going so far as to judge them illegitimate (Décoret 2006). 20. This foundation is the result of an initiative led by Mitchell J. Landrieu, who at the time was Lieutenant Governor (in charge of the Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism) and went on to become mayor of New Orleans in 2010. 21. “What’s His Name,” one of Keith Frank’s most popular songs, was inspired by the rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, and the lyrics are a pastiche of references to American popular culture: “During a zydeco festival he played his local hit ‘Get on Boy’ with added accordion licks from ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and the themes to The Woody Woodpecker Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (Tisserand 1998: 319). 22. In their book on roots music, Santelli et al. (2001) cite jazz, blues, black spirituals, hillbilly, country, zydeco, Cajun, Tejano, Native American, and rockabilly. 23. In 1995, a black tourist from Chicago, in town for a conference, was refused entry to a Cajun dance hall; a few months later, a black Kentucky man suffered the same discrimination when he tried to join the Mardi Gras run in Eunice, LA.

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

81

References Amselle, Jean-Loup. 2001. Branchements. Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures. Paris: Flammarion. American Ethnologist. 2006. “Forum: Locating or Liberating Creolization.” Volume 33(4): 549–592. Ancelet, Barry. 1996. The Origins of Cajun Music. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies. Ancelet, Barry, and Elemore Morgan Jr. 1999 [1984]. Cajun and Creole Music Makers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ancelet, Barry, Jay Edwards, and Glen Pitre. 1992. Cajun Country. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bernabe, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1993 [1989]. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard. Bernard, Shane K. 2003. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bernard, Shane K. 1996. Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boyer, Véronique, and Sara Le Menestrel. 2009. “Introduction.” Special issue “Race, ethnie, communauté.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 95(1 and 2). Brasseaux, Carl A. 1992. Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a people, 1803–1877. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Brasseaux, Carl A., Keith P. Fontenot, and Claude F. Oubre. 1994. Creoles of color in the Bayou country. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Brasseaux, Ryan A. 2009. Cajun breakdown: The emergence of an American-made music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brasseaux, Ryan, and Kevin Fontenot. 2006. Accordions, fiddles, two-step and swing: A Cajun music reader. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies. Broven, John. 1983. South to Louisiana: The music of the Cajun bayous. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing. Celius, Carlo Avierl. 1999. «La créolisation, portée et limites d’un concept.” In Universalisation et différenciation des modèles culturels, ed. Sélim Abou and Katia Haddad. Beirut: St. Joseph University/Montreal: AUF. Creagh, Ronald. 1988. Nos cousins d’Amérique. Paris: Payot. David, Marc. 2005. “Memory’s warp: The cultural politics of history and race in South Louisiana.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Decoret-Ahiha, Anne. 2005. Les danses “exotiques” en France, 1880–1940. Paris: Editions du Centre national de la danse. Eriksen, Thomas H. 2007. “Creolization in anthropological theory and in Mauritius.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Charles Stewart. Walnut Creek, CA: West Coast Press. Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the folk: Public memory and American roots music. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press. Frith, Simon. 2008. “The Discourse of World Music.” In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh. Berkeley: University of California Press.

82

Sara Le Menestrel

Henry, Jacques M. and Carl L. Bankston III. 2002. Blue Collar Bayou: Louisiana Cajuns in the new economy of ethnicity. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Henry, Jacques M., and Sara Le Menestrel. 2009 [2006]. Working The Field: Accounts from French Louisiana. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Hoffmann, Odile. 2009. “The other and the same, together” (Commentary of Peter Wade’s “Defining Blackness in Colombia”), Nuevo Mundo Nuevos Mundos, http:// nuevomundo.revues.org/56664. Khan, Aisha. 2005. “Feats of engineering: Theory, ethnography, and other problems of model building in the social sciences.” American Ethnologist 33(4): 566–570. ———. 2007. “Creolization Moments.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Charles Stewart. Walnut Creek, CA: West Coast Press. Le Menestrel, Sara, and Jacques Henry. 2010. “Figure du survivor: usages de la mémoire et gestion de la catastrophe en Louisiane après les ouragans Katrina et Rita.” Ethnologie française 40(3): 493–506. Le Menestrel, Sara. 2006. “Introduction.” Special issue “Musiques ‘populaires’, catégorisations et usages sociaux,” Civilisations LIII(1-2): 7–22. ———. 2002. “Métissage, créolisation: usages et instrumentalisation.” Paper presented at the conference “Les Français aux Amériques : bilans et perspectives,” EHESS, Paris, France, December 2002. Lomax, Alan. 1999 [1987]. “Introduction.” In Cajun and Creole Music 1934/1937. Rounder Records. Cambridge, MA. Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Munasinghe, Viranjini. 2005. “Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization.” American Ethnologist 33(4): 549–562. Peterson, Richard. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2001. “Hybridity, So What? The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition.” Theory, Culture and Society 18(2–3): 219–245. Radano, Ronald and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sandmel, Ben and Rick Olivier. 1999. Zydeco! Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Savoy, Ann Allen. 1984. Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People. Eunice, LA: Bluebird Press. Sexton, Rocky. 2000. “Zydeco Music and Race Relations in French Louisiana.” In Multiculturalism in the United States, ed. Peter Kivisto and Georganne Rundblad. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Starr, Frederick, ed. 2001. Inventing New Orleans. Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Stewart, Charles. 2007. “Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Charles Stewart. Walnut Creek, CA: West Coast Press. Thompson, Shirley. 2001. “‘Ah Toucoutou, ye conin vous’: History and Memory in Creole New Orleans.” American Quarterly 53(2): 232–265. Tisserand, Michael. 1998. The Kingdom of Zydeco. New York: Arcade Publishers. Tomlinson, John. 2005. “Mixed Metaphors.” American Ethnologist 33(4): 571–572. Vidal, Cécile. 2008. “Usages et appropriations du terme créole en Louisiane: des colons français du XVIIIe siècle aux historiens états-uniens du XXIe siècle.” Pa-

Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana

83

per presented at the Fourth conference of the Groupe d’histoire de l’Atlantique français: “Histoires créoles—Creole histories: pratiques & poétique,” McGill University, Montreal Canada, May 1–3, 2008. Wade, Peter. 2000. Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience.” Journal of Latin American Studies 37: 239–257. Walton, Shana. 1999. “Louisiana’s Coonasses: Choosing Race and Class over Ethnicity.” In Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners: Representing Identity in Selected Souths, ed. Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Wood, Roger. 2001. “Southeast Texas: Hot House of Zydeco.” The Journal of Texas Music History (2001): 23–45.

4 Claiming Culture, Defending Culture Perspectives on culture in France and the United States David Beriss New Orleans Tourist: “You’re so blessed to live in such a rich culture!” Vic: “Funny how all da places in da woild wit’ lotsa cultcha ain’t nevuh got no money.” Nat’ly: “Me, I’d trade all dat cultcha fo’ a coupla supermawkets!”1 —from a “Vic and Nat’ly” comic, by Bunny Matthews, Gambit Weekly, May 8, 2007 (vol. 28, no. 9), p. 18.

Why Culture? Like most residents of New Orleans, I fled the city as hurricane Katrina approached in late August 2005. I first returned in mid-October, about six weeks after Katrina’s floods had struck. Soon after, I ran into a local food writer at one of the reopened coffee shops in my un-flooded neighborhood. We talked about how our respective houses had done and about the fate and location of mutual acquaintances. I told him that I had been making the rounds of various chefs in town, looking to see what challenges they faced as they struggled to reopen their restaurants. I asked what he thought of the future of the city and, especially, of our local culinary culture. He said that things did not look good. He knew as much, probably more, than I did about high-end restaurants reopening. But he was more concerned about the demise of neighborhood joints, especially African American neighborhood restaurants. The floods, he said, emptied out too many of those neighborhoods and now developers with bulldozers wanted to finish them off. He started to get worked up about it and soon,

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

85

much to my surprise, he was nearly shouting in anger. “Listen,” he said, “to the racism you hear from uptown white folks. They don’t want black people to come back.” He jabbed his finger at me, standing in, apparently, for all uptown white folks. “This is not your culture,” he shouted, “you can’t just take it!” I will return to the idea that someone might own a culture, or that someone could “just take it,” below. But this self-consciousness about culture, even amid disaster, is in itself striking. Wherever I look, it seems that people are making claims about culture. They assert ideas about who they are, or who other people are, and make claims for recognition, or condemnation, demand preservation or, in darker moments, elimination (cf. Mazzarella 2004). I first noticed this in the 1980s and 1990s in France, where I studied ethnic activism among Antilleans living in and around Paris. The Antillean activists I worked with often spoke in terms of “culture,” but they were far from alone in this. French policy makers and intellectuals were also deeply concerned about the challenges to the idea of a unified French culture posed by a variety of circumstances, including, of course, immigration. Such talk has only intensified in France in recent years. Policies that preserve and promote a distinctive French national culture have increasingly been seen as a way of carving out an alternative to the homogenizing—and perhaps Americanizing—forces of the global economy and the spread of neo-liberal ideology. In New Orleans, “culture talk” was already evident before the floods of 2005, but in their wake, confronted with challenges to the city’s right to rebuild, claims about culture have become noticeably more emphatic, frequent, and widespread. In the immediate aftermath of the floods, rebuilding the postdiluvian city was necessary, local leaders insisted, because New Orleans is a culturally distinct place and because south Louisiana is, in the words of the state’s former lieutenant governor (and the city’s current mayor), “the soul of America” (Landrieu 2005). In the years since, the city’s recovery has been increasingly linked to the idea that it is the home of a distinctive culture that deserves recognition and preservation. Elected officials, academics and activists frequently invoke the idea of a “cultural economy” and refer to culture as an “asset” the city must deploy carefully. Yet turning “culture” into an asset is not easy. As the New Orleans cartoonist Bunny Matthews illustrates in the extract at the head of this chapter, in the US, culture is often seen in opposition to market forces; a society (or city) can have either a rich culture or successful businesses, but rarely both. The self-conscious assertion of culture is hardly limited to France and the United States. Recent research has focused on the self-conscious use of culture and history to claim distinctiveness and as a way of controlling relations between groups with competitive claims on the state (Adams 2006, Armstrong-Fumero 2009, Dávila 2004, Saada-Ophir 2006). An-

86

David Beriss

thropologists have also noted that culture has been increasingly used as a marketable asset, with some groups claiming that such marketing is necessary for their continued existence (Bunten 2008, Cameron 2008, Castañeda 2005, Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Rather than opposing culture’s putative authenticity to the flattening forces of the market, it seems as if the spread of neoliberal ideology has been accompanied by increasing cultural consciousness in some instances (Appadurai 1990, Trouillot 2003, Mazzarella 2004). Culture of some sort appears to thrive in the marketplace. However, the idea of culture that develops in this context, at least if the analyses cited above are correct, may have acquired a certain marketable uniformity. It may be, to paraphrase John and Jean Comaroff (2009), that we have entered a period characterized by the rise of “Culture, Inc,” in which “culture” has become more or less uniform, at least in terms of what counts as distinct or authentic (cf. Bruner 1994). Perhaps the increased self-consciousness with which people assert their cultural identities around the world today can be best understood as efforts to adapt to—rather than resist—market forces. Or it could be that all this culture talk seems interesting precisely because it fits within the intellectual predispositions of American-trained anthropologists. The culture concept has been historically more significant in American anthropology than in British or French anthropology (Kuper 2000). Although exploring the specific national and institutional contexts is beyond the scope of this essay, American anthropologists have been more inclined to see culture as a key explanation for behavior, while British or French anthropologists have been more likely to dismiss culture as a gloss for social relations such as class. Despite this history, American anthropologists—a group often referred to as “cultural anthropologists”—have, until recently, been slow to make sense of the rise of culture talk and activism around the idea of culture. In the 1990s, some argued for abandoning the culture concept, precisely because the vernacular use, often associated with colonial domination, was too static, too totalizing, and therefore unable to account for the contested and shifting nature of social relations (see Abu-Lughod 1991, Trouillot 1992, cf. Bunzl 2008, Brightman 1995, De Genova 2007, Keane 2003). In fact, analyses that explicitly describe local, regional, or even national “cultures” seem especially absent in work by American anthropologists focusing on Europe and the United States. Instead, American researchers have focused their attention on political economic analyses of inequality or drawn on some combination of concepts from Habermas (usually the “public sphere”), Foucault (“biopower,” most notably), and Bourdieu (“habitus,” generally) that resemble, especially when combined, nothing so much as culture while allowing the authors to avoid using the concept itself.

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

87

This chapter is an attempt to re-assert the need for a robust concept of culture in anthropology. For anthropologists working in countries like France and the United States, this aim is a matter of establishing legitimacy and relevance for their work. Unlike anthropologists whose work is legitimized by association with the discipline’s historic relegation to the “savage slot” (Trouillot 1992), anthropological writing about France and the United States is created in a context in which the other social sciences have already established dominant discourses, generalizations, and explanations that make sense of social relations and history. Also, unlike earlier generations of anthropologists—Margaret Mead comes to mind—who were able to build cultural critiques based on comparative claims about other societies, anthropologists who actually study France and the US need to be able to develop concepts that help make sense of ethnographic research in ways that add distinct and persuasive insights to the accepted “truths” provided by other disciplines. Michael Fischer has asserted that “without a differentiated and relational notion of the cultural (the arts, media, styles, religions, value-orientations, ideologies, imaginaries, world­ views, soul, and the like), the social sciences would be crippled, reducing social action to notions of pure instrumentality” (2007: 1). I would argue that this sort of reduction is in fact characteristic of much social science work in the US and France today. A nuanced concept of culture of the sort he calls for is precisely what, I believe, anthropology is best suited to bring to the analysis of social life in these societies. The insights anthropology can provide must start, however, with an effort to distinguish the increasingly common vernacular use of “culture” from anthropological approaches to the concept. The specific meanings associated with culture can only be understood in relation to the history and social context in which they are deployed. At the same time, however, I will argue that a careful comparison of the vernacular meanings and uses of culture allows us to raise questions that we might otherwise miss. In the rest of this essay, I juxtapose my experiences with Antillean cultural activists in France with the claims about cultural identity made in New Orleans in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricanes and floods. At the core of this particular comparison is a link between race and culture. Louisiana and the French Antilles have similar histories of race and racialization, but those histories diverge in important ways with processes of Americanization, in the former case, and in the context of French Republican ideologies for the latter. In both cases, the self-conscious assertion of culture provides a key concept for dealing with that history. In France, a wide range of public policies have been designed to help create and recreate the idea of a coherent national culture, one that is not grounded in any explicit reference to race, but that takes on many of the characteristics associated

David Beriss

88

with race in the US. In this context, Antilleans must grapple with their relationship to this French national idea. If the concept of culture is central to public policy debates in France, it is often more marginal in the United States. Following the breaching of the flood control systems and the subsequent floods, some critics in the US argued against rebuilding New Orleans, citing issues that ranged from the city’s geographical location and diminished economic viability to ideas about intractable poverty and long histories of racial conflict. Although responses to these arguments were also varied, the core claim in support of the city asserted the existence of a distinct local culture with a particular relationship to the US. Legitimizing this claim required drawing on ideas about culture that were different from those deployed in the French context. It is precisely in making sense of such differences that anthropologists can bring something distinct and useful to the study of these societies.

Antilleans, France, and Le Culturel Debates about immigration policy frequently focus on practical matters, including how to police borders, working conditions, pay scales, questions of public health, and legal status.2 However, people seem to become most passionate about immigration when questions of national identity are invoked. Immigration debates provide an opportunity to examine not only the manner in which immigrants adapt to their new society, but to make explicit the principles that define belonging and difference in the host society (for examples of the vast literature on this topic, see Baumann 1996, Bowen 2007, Chavez 2008, Kastoryano 2002, Mandel 2008, and Werbner 2002). Even with a tightly interconnected world in which migrants can communicate with relative ease with family and friends in their country of origin (or elsewhere) and can sometimes move back and forth more frequently than in the past, the development of migrant identities are still largely shaped by the dominant cultural discourses and political-economic contexts of the host societies. For example, in the United States, immigrants must inevitably confront and find a position related to American ideas about race (Ong 1996, cf. Dominguez 1998, Sacks 1994). In France, immigrants are confronted with finding a way to participate in a French national culture that is putatively open to anyone willing to assimilate, but which practically establishes barriers to people of particular origins. Race haunted my field research in France in the 1980s and 1990s. I was interested in finding out why people from Martinique and Guadeloupe would engage in ethnic activism in a society that did not view such activism as legitimate. For many of my American friends and colleagues, the

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

89

answer seemed almost self-evident. “Aren’t they black?” they would inquire, usually implying that the simple observation of skin color ought to explain the need for activism. Although race remains a self-evident (if scientifically dubious) way of categorizing and evaluating people in the US, the situation in France is more complicated. Antilleans often experience racism and challenges to their French identity that start from observations about their skin color. Yet such challenges are usually met with a gruff assertion of French roots. Sociologist Michel Giraud writes that whenever his father, a black man from Guadeloupe, was harassed by people over his color, he would respond by saying, “I have been French since 1635, well before the people of Nice, Corsica, or even Strasbourg” (Giraud 1985).3 Prior to the 1980s (roughly speaking), immigration had been framed as a social issue, having mostly to do with labor, working conditions, and housing. However, by the early 1980s, the debate had moved onto cultural terrain. Because culture and assimilation were (and are) central to ideologies about what it means to be French as well as to French policies in a variety of domains, Antilleans—who are French, after all—chose culture as the terrain upon which to assert their own identities. As one of the Guadeloupan activists I knew put it, “Le culturel is really the best way to express a way of life.” Clearly, successive French governments and intellectuals have agreed with this insight and, over the past two decades, the number of events designed to express le culturel in France has been quite remarkable. Culture, in this sense, has become a central tool for managing difference within France, as well for projecting Frenchness into the wider world. At the same time, as I have argued elsewhere (Beriss 2004), the manner in which culture is deployed in French discourses about identity and difference, as well as in Antillean efforts to make their own identities in metropolitan France, suggests an idea of culture that resembles in some ways the biological determinism found in American conceptions of race. As I have noted, people from Martinique and Guadeloupe are French citizens and not, in the legal sense, immigrants to France. However, being a real citizen of France—being accepted by other French people as French—is more than a matter of legal status. In the French Antilles, as David Murray (2002, cf. Giraud 1999, Price 1998) has pointed out, one of the main objectives of political action in the past few decades has been to turn Martinicans and Guadeloupans into “cultural citizens,” in other words, people who are deeply aware of each island’s history and traditions. Likewise, French cultural citizenship has long been a prized objective of French policy, and its creation and promotion have—in efforts that seemingly transcended the ideological differences between political parties and successive governments—been accomplished through education (the education ministry is always one of the better funded and more prestigious—and politically dangerous—positions in any French government)

90

David Beriss

as well as through supporting artistic culture (culture has been a cabinet level position since 1959, spending a great deal annually on the development, promotion, and defense of the arts). That France should have a national impact on the world in artistic as well as political and economic terms is considered a significant aspect of what makes France a great nation. In France, culture has become a kind of fetish, an object that stands on its own, compelling, desirable, and necessary to the nation (cf. Beek 2000). It is often portrayed as a form of wealth—the French term is patrimoine culturel—belonging to the French nation, that can be catalogued and counted, much like real estate or jewelry. One objective of French cultural policy is to preserve and reproduce this culture. At the same time, however, another objective has been to create a national understanding of French culture that serves as the basis of a coherent national identity. This effort often focused on the repression of local languages and folk cultures, replacing them with French language and with a Paris-approved literary and artistic canon. Although often condemned as a form of imperialist racism when practiced in the colonies—including the French Antilles—these policies were exercised just as vigorously in the metropole itself, in an effort to turn Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans, among others, into French citizens. However, local cultures and their artifacts were not simply erased. At least since the establishment of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in the 1930s, local customs and traditions, collected and documented by ethnographers and folklorists, have been incorporated into French national ideology as elements of folk cultures from a diverse past that contribute to the rich national cultural present (Cuisenier 1991). Rather than representing distinct national cultures that might challenge dominant ideas of what it means to be French, national cultural policy has worked to define regional cultures as folk cultures that contribute to—but remain subordinate parts of—the national “high” culture. The discussion of the place of immigrants and their descendants in France has largely been framed by these ideas about national culture. Immigrants are associated with discrete cultures that they carry with them to France and transmit to their children. Often, the children are thought to be caught between two cultures, not fully members of either. By focusing on culture in this way, the French debate avoids the biological determinism of race, but replaces it with a kind of cultural determinism, or fundamentalism, that works in a similar manner (Stolcke 1995). Thus, although in theory anyone can become French by adopting French culture as their own, the way culture is defined suggests that some groups are thought to be more able to assimilate than others.4 France holds out the promise of assimilation and Frenchness to anyone willing to give up (at least in public) their attachment to another culture. But for many whose origins are in Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean, that promise is never fulfilled

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

91

precisely because they are seen as unable to assimilate. Immigrants and their children are reminded of this contradiction in multiple ways, from interactions with police, to discrimination in employment, housing, or education, and through everyday interactions with other people. It is in the context of having to either prove their Frenchness or find a way to challenge the dominant ways of thinking about culture that the Antillean activists I studied framed their work. The groups I worked with in France pursued both of these objectives. For example, I participated in the activities of two Antillean groups that used cultural performance to assert their cultural distinctiveness and challenge the failure of France’s assimilationist ideals. One group, composed of working-class Guadeloupan immigrants, performed amateur theater in night clubs and at parties. Their self-written plays, rooted in nostalgia for a lost Antillean authenticity, also reflected experiences of racism and rejection in France. The second group’s members were mostly born in the metropole, of parents from the Antilles. Middle-class and often universityeducated, they used music, art, and fashion to place creolization at the center of cultural creativity in France. If the cultural aspects of the arts are somewhat self-evident, making social policy “cultural” is not—at least not in France. Yet another group I worked with, comprised of Antillean social workers, psychologists, and social scientists, made promoting culture their main objective. In a country in which differences of class have long been central to the formation of social policy, these activists struggled to make the case for cultural recognition. They asserted that Antilleans in France suffer from a kind of cultural breakdown through being compelled to adopt a French value system that both corrupts and alienates them from their own values—especially those found in magic, religion, kinship and sexuality. Positioning themselves as engaged intellectuals and situating themselves between the French government and the Antillean population, they trained social workers to recognize specific Antillean cultural needs in France and to work against a wave of racialization to assert their claims for recognition of Antillean cultural specificity. Religion provided another arena in which Antilleans could challenge ideas about culture in French society. Many Antilleans give up regular Catholic practice when they settle in metropolitan France. Lay groups around Paris, organized by the Antillean Catholic center there, worked to make the French Church more responsive to Antilleans by explicitly inviting Creole practices into the Church. Antilleans also populate some of the Paris region’s rapidly growing Seventh Day Adventist Churches. Interestingly, in this case, the church worked to refocus Antilleans on being Adventists first, Antilleans second. This strategy drew less on ethnicity than on challenging the place of religion in French society.

92

David Beriss

The Antillean activists I worked with used art, social policy, and religion as frames for demanding cultural recognition in France. In doing so, they challenged some of the core principles behind the construction of French national unity and suggested a path toward creolization of French society and culture. Their activism took place within a broader context of debates about the ideological framework that defined France’s national culture. When I began my fieldwork in France, the 1989 bicentennial of the French revolution provided one such event, in which the making of French national culture—and the relationship of French national culture to subordinated local and world cultures—was dramatically staged for a presumably watching world in a parade on the Champs Elysée in Paris. That same year, the ejection from school of three girls wearing head scarves (by a Martinican principal, it is worth noting) set off a debate about national identity, culture, and religion in the French republic that has still not ended (Beriss 1990). For most of the 1990s, however, these and other events were framed by the insistent assertion of a kind of republican fundamentalism in France. The late 1990s seemed to mark a shift away from this fundamentalism, toward a broader acceptance of diversity, if not multiculturalism. Thus, in 1998 the French government’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the colonies markedly departed from 1989 festivities, which neglected to celebrate the revolution’s original abolition of slavery (overturned by Napoleon)—much to the consternation of the Antilleans I worked with. Also, the 1998 French victory in the Soccer World Cup with a team of very diverse origins elicited excited comments among the French political and intellectual classes that France was now reconciled with its own diverse self. More recently, the 2005 suburban riots provided a very useful canvas for these debates, especially in the absence of any kind of manifesto from participants.5 Culture—French culture, specifically—is clearly a key symbol in France, one that is central to discussions of the nation’s major issues, from immigration and the European Union to social policy and ways to confront globalization. The French have a knack for putting that symbol on display, as the 2006 establishment of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris demonstrates. A museum for “non-western arts,” it is represented as a space for cultural dialogue, but a visit shows that it is in many ways a classic ethnology museum, with the traditional reification of apparently static cultures from everywhere in the world but Europe.6 The implication, of course, is that European (or Occidental) cultures are qualitatively different. Nevertheless, the idea that this sort of cultural display is important is yet another measure of the central place and persistent ambiguity of culture in France. It is probably a measure of the successful assimilation of many immigrants that ethnic activists have chosen culture as one of the core ter-

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

93

rains on which to situate their battles. Culture stands for many things in France, but perhaps mostly it stands for the organization of society. For many French commentators (including those whose origins are in other countries) —from the curmudgeonly philosopher Alain Finkielkraut,who never misses an opportunity to denounce diversity and to express his dismay over the failure of young people to respect the old order to the socialist Jack Lang, who, as education minister in 2000, noted that in the new France, “unity does not require uniformity”7—the central question is what kind of society France will become. And the answer, whatever it is, will be described in terms of culture—unless the future should be American.

Food, Culture, and America’s Soul Explaining to American colleagues why race was eclipsed by culture for Antilleans in France was one of the more significant challenges I faced after my field research there. Yet that experience also prepared me to question the intersection of race and culture I found in New Orleans. In France, immigrants are thought to threaten the organization of society by challenging the idea of French cultural unity. In the US, ethnicity and race provide central organizing principles in popular (and social science) discourse about society. Ethnicity is generally understood in cultural terms, defined by a complex of descent, marriage, and customs that people may voluntarily adhere to or claim or, in many instances, simply ignore. Ethnicity contrasts with race, which is understood as biological destiny in American society. Any African ancestry renders one black, following the famous one drop rule historically practiced in much of the US south. White ethnics can choose to claim their ethnic affiliation, but black Americans cannot, in general, escape blackness. Even those who, by virtue of light skin color, can get by as white are referred to as “passing,” as if blackness was still their essential identity.8 In fact, when Americans speak about race in general, they are most often referring to blackness specifically. Escaping the racial binary and making black identity more a matter of culture and less one of biological destiny has been a core issue for African American activists and intellectuals since at least the end of the nineteenth century. This legacy is perhaps one of the reasons why New Orleans has long had complex relations with the rest of the United States. Instead of the racial binary practiced elsewhere in the country, New Orleans was characterized by a more complex system of classifications shaped by the existence, prior to the Civil War, of a large population of free people of color. This Creole population rendered adaptation of the American binary difficult (Hirsch and Logsdon 1992). Even today, the fact that the city’s popula-

94

David Beriss

tion is majority black does not translate in any simple way into broader American political and social categories. During and after the 2005 disaster, the city was often portrayed in the media as overwhelmingly black and poor, categories that seemed to give American politicians and pundits license to question the legitimacy of the city’s very existence. Resisting that classification, New Orleans leaders and activists argued that the city was home to a much more complex and rich culture, one that could not be summed up within America’s racial binary. Throughout the twentieth century, city leaders worked to promote New Orleans, which is a major port and oil industry center, as a modern American business center, a typical city. At the same time, since at least the 1920s, those same leaders vied to attract visitors by asserting that the city also had a distinct culture, one that could be linked to both Europe and the Caribbean and that could provide tourists with a ready escape from modern American life (Stanonis 2006). As I have argued elsewhere (Beriss 2012), promoters of New Orleans’s distinctiveness usually rely on three elements to define the ways the city resists the homogenizing influence of the United States. First, New Orleans is a Creole city, inhabited by people who resist the racial binary that is a central organizing principle in much of American life and who have also drawn on their mixed heritage—European, African, Native American—to create architecture, music, and food that together form a distinct culture. Second, in the face of the hyperactivity of contemporary American life, New Orleans is presented as a slow city, where people take the time to prepare and enjoy complex foods. Third, it is described as a black city (a “Chocolate City,” as former mayor C. Ray Nagin described it), in which African Americans have played key roles in shaping the city’s overall culture but which is said to be less segregated than most other American cities. These tropes shape the way people think about the city, but they also form a framework for ongoing disputes about who is an authorized representative of the city’s culture (cf. Beriss 2007). Before Katrina’s floods, New Orleans was the site of self-conscious struggles to maintain the idea of the city’s cultural distinctiveness in the face of the perceived onslaught of the homogenizing forces of putatively culture-free American commercialism. Music, architecture, and food were among the key symbols often cited as signs of a vibrant local culture that was not quite American. As I have noted, given New Orleans’s historic contributions to the development of America’s economy—as a major port and as a central player in the slave trade, in which the market economy was pushed to its logical limit with the commodification of human beings—it is more than a little ironic that New Orleans itself should have become, in the early twenty-first century, a symbol of resistance to neoliberalism and the forces of the free market (see Lipsitz 2006). Yet in the

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

95

post-Katrina struggle to justify to the rest of the US the value of restoring the city’s existence one core argument routinely made by city leaders was that it remained a unique place, unlike the putatively bland sameness of the rest of America. A formidable popular literature has appeared to justify this claim (see Abrahams et al. 2006, Baum 2009, James 2006, Piazza 2005, Spitzer 2006, Sublette 2008, among many others), while bitter editorials denouncing America’s inability to understand the real value of the city appear regularly in the local press and on internet blogs. Mitch Landrieu, then-Louisiana’s lieutenant governor and now the city’s mayor, proclaimed Louisiana to be the soul of America; to not save it would be to lose America’s soul. In 2002 I began a research project that focused on the ways in which food was used in the representation of New Orleans as a distinctive place. I found that the local culinary culture provided many of the key symbols in those struggles; indeed, it was not uncommon for locals to assert that one of the things that distinguished New Orleans from the rest of the country was that the city had a cuisine of its own, while the rest of America subsisted on industrialized food products. In addition, the production, consumption, and, most importantly, the discussion of food provided the framework through which some of the city’s deeper social fractures—race and class, in particular—were discussed, if not resolved. Food is sometimes invoked to support the claim that New Orleans culture forms a coherent and happy whole. Most New Orleans cookbooks feature a story of the origins of the local cuisine, usually invoking the contributions made by French explorers, Native Americans, the Spanish, Africans (sometimes by way of the Caribbean), the Germans, the Irish, and the Italians, mostly in that order. This story, most often told without any hint of conflicts that might have occurred along the way, results in Creole cuisine and, for the population, in a gumbo, rather than a melting pot.9 On menus, in cooking demonstrations, and in cookbooks, local chefs make a point of telling stories about the fisher or farmer who taught them about ingredients or recipes, about ritual events where the food might be made or consumed, or about the neighborhood restaurant in New Orleans (or in southern Louisiana) that inspired them to create a new recipe. Asserting links between home kitchens in southern Louisiana, neighborhood restaurants, and the dishes diners find in high end restaurants, they present people with the idea of a seamless cultural whole (cf. Mintz 1996). At the same time, however, food and, in particular, restaurants provide a framework for discussions of many of the city’s central social fractures. In 2002, the firing of a long-time waiter at the century-old Galatoire’s restaurant served as the trigger to a several-months-long public debate about sexual harassment, class privilege, and the representation of cultural au-

96

David Beriss

thenticity in New Orleans. The firing of the waiter, it turned out, was only the final straw in a series of changes instigated by the restaurant’s management that had upset many of their longtime patrons, many of whom were (and are still) members of the city’s social elite. The controversy revealed deeper concerns about threats to the city’s identity, something Galatoire’s was, it seems, as responsible for preserving as it was for maintaining a reputation for excellent shrimp remoulade. The case of the fired waiter played out in the media but was also the subject of satirical performances and discussions among ordinary people (Beriss 2007). Similar controversies have played out since Katrina but with a far more bitter edge to them. Now the stakes seem much higher and people in the city are much less tolerant of those who make light of the city’s culture. In 2006, for example, Alan Richman, a nationally-known food writer for GQ, a glossy men’s fashion magazine, published an article savaging the New Orleans restaurant scene. He noted that he did not enjoy the local food at all, suggesting that it was mostly out-of-date food, a reminder of styles long passed from fashion. But he went well beyond this, suggesting that local food traditions were either mythical (Creole people were referred to as “faerie folk, like leprechauns” and Creole cuisine’s existence was questioned) or simply out-of-touch with modern tastes (he seemed to think that New Orleans restaurants needed to serve food more like the food in New York or San Francisco). Richman denounced the city’s work ethic and invoked the superiority of food and behavior in the North. The local response to this article was swift and quite caustic. Local food writers questioned Richman’s credentials and taste, noted the errors in his writing and, especially, attacked him for simply not taking the time necessary to understand the complexities of local life. The vigor with which local writers responded to Richman suggested that his article was seen as an attack on the city’s legitimacy. This kind of response might seem surprising, given that it was only a magazine article. Yet fears that the city’s culture would vanish, to be replaced by something more homogenously American, were quite rampant in the years immediately after the floods. The food writer whose comments I cited at the beginning of this chapter suggested that New Orleans culture itself was likely to be snatched away by people with evil intentions. A milder version of this hypothesis played a central role at the meeting of the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA)10 in October 2005. At that meeting, a panel, led by New York Times writer R. W. Apple, discussed the fate of New Orleans food culture after Katrina. One of the panel’s central concerns, first noted by Apple himself, was the demise of hundreds of neighborhood plate-lunch and po-boy joints.11 What might this mean, he wondered, in a city whose most famous son signed his correspondence, “red beans and ricely yours”? Local writer Lolis Eric Elie added that the

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

97

disappearance of these restaurants was a trend started long before the disaster, but had since accelerated. The Creole neighborhood restaurant was disappearing, he said, like the neighborhood grocery store before it. Those that remained were increasingly in danger of becoming monuments to past glory rather than real restaurants. Katrina’s floods, however, ruined even those monuments. The SFA panelists raised the central question: can a culture that has suffered such significant damage survive? The answer depends on what one means by “culture.” The loss of lives and the destruction of many restaurants clearly dealt a blow to the city’s food infrastructure, especially to the many neighborhood po-boy joints. This loss extended to the symbolic, since some of the restaurants that failed to reopen had played important roles in defining the city’s culinary geography (for instance, nearly all the seafood houses in the West End neighborhood on Lake Pontchartrain were permanently wiped off the map by the storm surge). When the Times-Picayune’s restaurant writer, citing licensing statistics from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, reported that only 69% of pre-Katrina food operations had reopened by August 2007 (Anderson 2007a), the local food writer and radio personality Tom Fitzmorris reacted sharply, asserting that there were in fact more restaurants open than before the floods. The official numbers were based on a survey of all of the retail businesses that serve food, which included gas stations, convenience stores and, of course, fast-food chains. Fitzmorris argued that including these—many of which had not reopened since Katrina, especially in Orleans Parish—did a disservice to the restaurants that, in his view, “really matter” in determining the health of the local economy and culinary culture. High-end restaurants in the French Quarter, he asserted, are “real” because they shape the image of the city for both locals and tourists, while the neighborhood gas station, selling doughnuts and hot dogs, or even Starbuck’s, do not. Interestingly, Fitzmorris won that particular debate, and the rest of the local media, including the Times-Picayune, has taken to citing his on-going census of restaurants, defined in his way, whenever they need to refer to the postKatrina vibrancy of the local restaurant scene. When Joanne Clevenger reopened Upperline, her much praised uptown Creole bistro, chef Ken Smith put an appetizer called “Remembrance of Maylie’s” on the menu. The dish was meant to invoke the history of one of New Orleans most famous restaurants, Maylie’s, which is often remembered fondly by older, mostly white, New Orleanians for its old-style Creole cuisine. But it is also remembered by many others, especially African Americans of a certain age, as a restaurant that went out of business rather than integrate. It seems unlikely that Chef Smith, a Creole of color from Natchitoches, Louisiana, and a student of culinary history, meant to invoke that racist past, and Joanne Clevenger is unlikely

98

David Beriss

to be accused of glorifying that past either. The fact is that any effort to invoke history in New Orleans must necessarily bring up memories that, while useful, are not always pleasant. In addition, such memories raise questions about whose culture is being preserved. The answers are, of course, ambiguous. In fact, ambiguities abound in New Orleans recovery. Two prominent restaurants owned by African American women, Leah Chase’s restaurant Dooky Chase and Willie Mae Seaton’s Scotch House, suffered severe damage in the floods. Both have been the object of a great deal of attention from charities, food activists, and chefs. Leah Chase, whose restaurant was one of the city’s most significant institutions for African American families and for political leaders, has been invited to cook at events all over the country and is now, with the help of other chefs, marketing her gumbo z’herbes in frozen form in supermarkets around the region. Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a neighborhood joint that has become, in recent years, a favorite destination for people from outside its Tremé neighborhood seeking authenticity, was rebuilt and revived with help from the SFA (York 2006). These restaurants were exactly the sort of restaurants the SFA panelists had in mind when they expressed concern about the loss of key neighborhood institutions. But the process of restoration raised other questions. First, the surrounding neighborhood has been slow to recover, and, as of this writing, most of the customers in both restaurants are tourists. Second, the process through which these particular restaurants were designated as cultural institutions and deemed worth saving highlighted some of the power differentials in the city, where only some people have the power to make such determinations. The risk is that both restaurants have been reduced from their former roles as vibrant cultural centers to the status of commemorative museums. This caveat is not meant to diminish the accomplishments of those who have worked tirelessly to restore these institutions, especially as it is being offered by someone who has enjoyed dining at both many times. The return of the neighborhood is a work in progress and thus the future role of the restaurants remains unknown. In the months following Katrina, local chef and Slow Food leader Poppy Tooker worked to help storm victims in food-related industries recover. She was instrumental in finding assistance for shrimpers and fishers who needed to get their boats back in the water and find new markets for their products. She organized fundraisers for owners of devastated restaurants and traveled around the country finding sponsors for local culinary luminaries. In early October 2006, I watched as Poppy assisted Leah Chase in a cooking demonstration at the Crescent City Farmer’s Market. Leah kept up a friendly banter about her restaurant, her husband and, eventually, about Poppy, as she cooked. At one point, she commented on the importance of knowing when to stop cooking a roux, the essential

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

99

ingredient in many New Orleans dishes. “I just compare the color of the roux to my own skin,” Leah commented, adding with a wink to the crowd that it must be much harder for Poppy—who is white—to know when her roux is done. She then praised Poppy for her efforts to save foods that had been disappearing from the local repertoire. Rice calas, for instance, she noted, had vanished until Poppy started cooking them at the market and elsewhere—and now they seem to be making a comeback. “But remember,” Leah added, looking directly at Poppy, “that this is our food first.” Even when accompanied by the jovial tones of Leah Chase, the message seemed rather sharp. Yet that sharpness can be usefully compared with other startling incidents. Faced with a severely damaged building and a less-than-cooperative insurance company, the owners of the popular nouvelle-Creole restaurant Gabrielle, Greg and Mary Sonnier, bought, in 2006, a building in an unflooded uptown neighborhood and set about acquiring the permits necessary to turn what had been a catering hall into the new location for their restaurant. The neighborhood is already dotted with a few restaurants and other small businesses, a characteristic that many think enhances its walkable charm and raises property values. In a year-long saga chronicled in the newspapers and debated on websites, the Sonniers ran into resistance from the neighborhood association and, after several meetings, along with diminishing cooperation from city hall, were forced to give up on the site. Neighbors initially claimed they were concerned about parking and noise. Soon, however, other reasons began to surface. One woman explained her concerns to the newspaper: “Particularly now with the crime environment, you’re going to have opportunistic crime. … I’m not disparaging the workers he might have, but you’re going to have dishwashers, if not necessarily them, the people who are picking them up and dropping them off ” (Anderson 2007b). I should probably add that the neighborhood in question is predominantly white (as are the Sonniers) and, in New Orleans, most dishwashers (and, one assumes, the people who might drive them to work) are not. Controversies such as the one surrounding the Sonniers’ effort to rebuild their restaurant point to the intertwining of race and culture that defines New Orleans. Food activists like the people associated with the SFA and Slow Food, as well as my shouting food writer friend, have argued since Katrina for an idea of New Orleans food culture as a seamless whole rooted explicitly in Creole home kitchens and in the neighborhood restaurants that reproduce that food. In dozens of public events and discussions since the floods, they have reasserted that idea, raised money to help rebuild restaurants like Dooky Chase and even invested a great deal of sweat and labor in that effort themselves. But the seamlessness of that culture—the putative necessity of rooting New Orleans cuisine in

David Beriss

100

once-lively Creole neighborhoods—is often troubled by the eruption of conflicts rooted in race, class, and history. Deploying the idea of a unified culture, New Orleans activists hope to resist the racial binary that persists in American society. But it is still unclear if everyone in New Orleans— the very people whose culture the activists hope to portray—is ready to acknowledge that they do, indeed, share one culture. The complexities of race, in both the American and New Orleans sense of that term, continue to present challenges for those who would prefer the discussion to focus on culture alone.

Conclusion: The Seriousness of Culture What, then, are people talking about when they talk about culture? Antillean activists deploy culture as a way of engaging with a dominant French discourse that also employs the idea of culture. They (or their parents) come from societies that have historically been shaped by a particular kind of racialized discourse, derived from a history of slavery and colonialism. In France, they are confronted with a set of ideas about Frenchness that is theoretically open to them, as French citizens. Yet they are sometimes defined more as members of distinct Caribbean cultures and so rejected as being not, fundamentally, French. This idea of culture, in which some people are seen as frozen into a foreign identity, resembles the determinism usually associated with race elsewhere. Antillean activists struggle—with the arts, with social policy, and with religion—to find ways to transform their relationship to French culture. When they talk about culture, they are talking about a complex relationship with the French state, French national ideologies about belonging, about history and, in a roundabout way, about race. In New Orleans, the discourse about culture is more directly about race, but it is not only about race. As a city marked by disaster and known for its majority black population, the broader American racial binary often seems poised to overwhelm local ideas about identity and difference. City leaders have long worked to create and assert an idea about local culture that can represent New Orleans more complexly than the national debate would allow. Following the 2005 disasters, this emphasis on culture seemed to provide a way of demonstrating the city’s value to the rest of the United States while, at the same time, defining something shared around which the city’s residents could rally. Conflicts nevertheless have arisen, stemming from the complex racial and class divides that have long defined New Orleans. Using powerful symbols like food, New Orleanians debate who owns the city’s culture and who should be authorized to speak

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

101

about it. Culture has become an essential element in these debates, with race lurking not very far in the background. As I pointed out in the introduction, a number of analysts have argued that the development and spread of “culture talk” around the world represents both resistance to and accommodation with the dominant neoliberal market ideologies. There is clearly some truth to this interpretation. In France, culture can clearly stand for an idea of a unified national culture that resists the forces of global homogenization. It is in the name of that resistance that policy matters about publishing, music, and the arts are often decided there. Similarly, in New Orleans, for the better part of the last century, the idea of cultural difference has been actively marketed to residents and visitors alike, in an effort to sell the city as a unique destination. In the years since Katrina, activists in New Orleans have asserted that the city’s culture represents a kind of resistance to the homogenizing forces of American capitalism. This claim is made frequently by local food activists. Yet it should also be clear at this point that the culture concept does a great deal more work than merely defining a relationship to global capitalism in both France and New Orleans. Both of these efforts also hide important issues. In the French case, regional traditions and immigrant cultures have been either swept away or relegated to a lower status within the nation. Antilleans, who were promised full acceptance into French society if they agreed to remain French, find that promise unfulfilled. In New Orleans, the marketing of cultural distinctiveness has sometimes hidden both diversity and conflict within the city in the name of representing an idea of a coherent whole. It seems, then, that this is a moment to take culture seriously, to focus attention on both the explicit claims about culture people make as well as the implicit cultural context in which they make their claims. In this chapter, comparisons of the intersections of race and culture in particular instances in France and New Orleans have been drawn to provide insights into broader social issues in both places. It is worth recalling that this kind of comparative approach, which is also at the core of American anthropology, allows us to ask useful comparative questions that we might otherwise miss. Along with good ethnography, this approach to culture allows us to develop a better understanding of what people are talking about when they talk about culture. This approach also defines what anthropology offers that is distinct in the study of societies like France and the United States. In the end, we must take culture seriously—we must attend to the distinct ways the concept is used in different contexts—because few other social scientists or policy makers will, relying instead on their own assumptions about the meaning of things to guide their analyses.

David Beriss

102

Notes   1. Vic and Nat’ly are meant to portray working class New Orleans residents from the now infamous 9th Ward. They speak with a “yat” accent (from the phrase “where y’at?”), which resembles a Brooklyn accent. For more about the characters and the artist, see http://bunnymatthews.com/.   2. This section contains material from Beriss 2004.   3. “Je suis Français depuis 1635, bien avant les Niçois, les Corses, ou même les Strasbourgeois.”   4. As Gérard Noiriel (1996) has indicated, the view of who is able to assimilate successfully has changed over time.   5. Additionally, the 2005 rejection of the European constitution and the 2006 movement against youth work contracts may be counted amoug these recent events that stimulated debates about culture, as François Bégaudeau, Arno Bertina, and Oliver Rohé indicate in their book, Une année en France : Réferendum/banlieues/ CPE (Gallimard, 2006).   6. “Là Où Dialoguent Les Cultures,” as it says on the top of the museum’s website, http://www.quaibranly.fr/.   7. Cited in Le Monde, October 20, 2000.   8. “White” ethnics are racially marked as well, but that marking is most often implicit because whiteness is the dominant norm in the US, while blackness is always marked. The whiteness of Greek, Italian, Irish, and other non-African Americans is simply implied. More recent immigrants from Asia and Central and South America find themselves forced to confront and make sense of the American racial binary (Ong 1996, Sacks 1994).   9. The melting pot, in which elements are melted to form a new alloy, is one of the dominant metaphors used to describe the formation of American society out of mass immigration. A gumbo is a thick soup that is a key part of New Orleans cuisine in which the ingredients—ranging from a dark roux-based soup, to pieces of chicken, duck, sausage, seafood, and vegetables—remain recognizable, even while contributing to a delicious whole. 10. Based at the University of Mississippi, the Southern Foodways Alliance promotes the study and preservation of the foods of the US South. 11. These are restaurants that serve either Creole soul food or po-boy sandwiches, or both. Plate-lunch restaurants serve a standard set of meat dishes accompanied by two or three side vegetables (loosely defined), while po-boy joints usually serve roast beef or fried seafood on a New Orleans-style French loaf, dressed with pickles, lettuce, and tomatoes.

References Abrahams, Roger D., with Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson. 2006. Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. Writing Against Culture. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard Fox. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

103

Adams, Kathleen. 2006. Art as Politics: Re-Crafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Anderson, Brett. 2007a. “Restaurants: Eating Out Still a Healthy Habit.” The TimesPicayune. Tuesday, August 28. ———. 2007b. “Politics spoils Gabrielle’s uptown opening.” The Times-Picayune. Sunday, January 21. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2(2): 1–24. Armstrong-Fumero, Fernando. 2009. “A Heritage of Ambiguity: The Historical Substrate of Vernacular Multiculturalism in Yucatán, Mexico.” American Ethnologist 36(2): 300–316. Baumann, Gerd. 1996. Contesting cultures: discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baum, Dan. 2009. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Beek, Martijn van. 2000. “Beyond Identity Fetishism: “Communal” Conflict in Ladakh and the Limits of Autonomy.” Cultural Anthropology 15(4): 525–569. Bégaudeau, François, Arno Bertina and Oliver Rohé. 2006. Une année en France: Réferendum/banlieues/CPE. Paris: Gallimard. Beriss, David. 2004. Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France. Boulder, CO: Westview. ———. 2007. “Authentic Creole: Tourism, Style and Calamity in New Orleans Restaurants.” In The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, eds. David Beriss and David Sutton. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2012. “Red Beans and Rebuilding: An Iconic Dish, Memory, and Culture in New Orleans.” In Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places, eds. Richard Wilk and Livia Barbosa. London: Berg. Bowen, John R. 2007. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, The State, Public Space. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brightman, Robert. 1995. “Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification.” Cultural Anthropology 10(4): 509–546. Bruner, Edward M. 1994. “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism.” American Anthropologist 96(2): 397–415. Bunten, Alexis Celeste. 2008. “Sharing culture or selling out? Developing the Commodified Persona in the Heritage Industry.” American Ethnologist 35(3): 380–395. Bunzl, Matti. 2008. “The Quest for Anthropological Relevance: Borgesian Maps and Epistemological Pitfalls.” American Anthropologist 110(1): 53–60. Cameron, Catherine M. 2008. “The Marketing of Heritage: From the Western World to the Global Stage.” City and Society 20(2): 160–168. Castañeda, Quetzil E. 2005. “Between Pure and Applied Research: Experimental Ethnography in a Transcultural Tourist Art World.” National Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin 23(1): 87–118. Chavez, Leo R. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cuisenier, Jean. 1991. “Que faire des arts et traditions populaires?” Le Débat 65: 150–164.

104

David Beriss

Dávila, Arlene. 2004. Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Genova, Nicholas. 2007. “The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States.” CR: The New Centennial Review 7(2): 231–277. Dominguez, Virginia. 1998. “Exporting U.S. Concepts of Race: Are There Limits to the U.S. Model?” Social Research 65(2): 369–399. Fischer, Michael. 2007. “Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.” Cultural Anthropology 22(1): 1-65. Giraud, Michel. 1999. “La patrimonialisation des cultures antillaises. “Ethnologie française 29(3): 375–386. James, Rosemary, ed. 2006. My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers. New York: Touchstone. Kastoryano, Riva. 2002. Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(2): 222–248. Kuper, Adam. 1999. Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Landrieu, Mitch. 2005. Speech given at the Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference presented by The American Institute of Architects. http://www.crt.state .la.us/ltgovernor/media_view.aspx?id=64. Lipsitz, George. 2006. “Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship.” Cultural Anthropology 21(3): 451–468. Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, William. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345–367. Mintz, Sidney. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press. Murray, David A. B. 2002. Opacity: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and the “Problem” of Identity in Martinique. New York: Peter Lang. Nader, Laura. 2001. “Anthropology! Distinguished Lecture—2000.” American Anthropologist 103(3): 609–620. Noiriel, Gérard. 1996. The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1996. “Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in The United States.” Current Anthropology 37: 737–762. Piazza, Tom. 2005. Why New Orleans Matters. New York: Regan Books. Price, Richard. 1998. The Convict and the Colonel. Boston: Beacon Press. Reed, Jr., Adolph. 2011. Three Tremés. Nonsite.org. http://nonsite.org/editorial/ three-tremes. Richman, Alan. 2006. “Yes, We’re Open.” Gentlemen’s Quarterly. November. 294– 299, 337–338. Saada-Ophir, Galit. 2006. “Borderland Pop: Arab Jewish Musicians and the Politics of Performance.” Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 205–233.

Claiming Culture, Defending Culture

105

Sacks, Karen Brodkin. 1994. “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” In Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Spitzer, Nick. 2006. “Rebuilding the Land of Dreams with Music.” In Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, eds., Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stanonis, Anthony J. 2006. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Stolcke, Verena. 1995. “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe.” Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24. Sublette, Ned. 2008. The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Lawrence Hills Books. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1992. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard Fox. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. ———. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Werbner, Pnina. 2002. Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester’s Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. York, Joe. 2006. Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House. Documentary. Oxford, MS: Southern Foodways Alliance. http://www.southernfoodways.com/ documentary/film/willie_mae.html.

Part

II

Key Words Community, Healing

5 Gay Activism and the Question of Community William Poulin-Deltour It has become more than a platitude to say that “community” is a fundamentally American value and one that is invoked in the United States by “any and everyone pressing any sort of cause” (Joseph 2002: vii). In France, however, communauté has proved a much more controversial concept, especially since the late 1980s and early 1990s. More precisely, many French fear that the acceptance and recognition of certain types of minority communities will lead France down the slippery slope toward communautarisme, often translated into English as “communalism” (Bowen 2008). Many French perceive communalism as an American import threatening the French Republic’s unity and indivisibility. The concept has become so prevalent in spoken French that it now has its own entry in the 2003 edition of Le Petit Robert: “System which encourages the formation of communities (ethnic, religious, cultural, social …) able to divide the nation to the detriment of social integration” (485).1 The dictionary lists individualisme and universalisme as communalism’s antonyms. Self-declared anti-communautaristes in France have created a number of websites documenting any and all mouvement communautariste in France. The best-known site is perhaps “L’Observatoire du communautarisme”. These days, the site’s webmaster, Julien Landfried,2 has posted a number of articles warning that French communautaristes will soon be taking advantage of Barack Obama’s election in the US to push discrimination positive measures in France. While Landfried dedicates most of the site to Islamic and black threats to the French Republic’s integrity, he does include a significant section on the French gay and lesbian movement that he describes as “hysterical” in its reactions to the supposed question of homophobia.3 In fact, just behind ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, France’s gay and lesbian movement has been, since its revival in the early 1990s, rou-

110

William Poulin-Deltour

tinely accused of having imitated the American model and integrated communalism into its activism. These criticisms come from observers outside the movement as well as French gays themselves, active or formerly active in French gay associations. For example, in his book Le rose et le noir. L’histoire des homosexuels en France depuis 1968 (1996), Frédéric Martel4 warns his readers somewhat sensationally that the French gay movement and its communalist strategies are threatening France’s model of social integration. On the surface, then, we could easily create a dualism between the positive attitude in the US and the negative in France toward communitybuilding around a shared minority identity—and use it to analyze social and cultural phenomena in both societies. However, if we construe the two national notions of the concept as culturally incommensurable, we risk not seeing the dissenting meanings that certain social movements and subcultures within the United States as well as France give to a concept such as community. We might also miss the transfer and flow of such concepts between social movements in the two countries (most often today originating from the US and going toward France). A comparison of gay and AIDS activism in the United States and France during the 1990s illustrates the limits of reifying national definitions of community and communalism. In the United States, queer activists and theorists questioned the claims made in the name of a supposedly unified gay and lesbian community, claims that masked the dominant role middle-class white men played in that community. At the same time, in France, gay and AIDS activists were demanding the very creation of a gay community to challenge what they considered to be the myth of French universalism that, in reality, permitted and encouraged real discrimination against gays and other minority groups. In this chapter, I will first analyze briefly the critique of community that the American queer movement carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. Against this backdrop, I will then examine French efforts to appropriate and give meaning to the concept of community in France. Based on my find­ings from an ethnographic study of Paris’s Centre gay et lesbien carried out from August 1997 to July 1998, I hope to show that while American gay and AIDS activism inspired French militants, their communalist claims brought about specifically French challenges. For my analysis I will use my experiences as a student of queer theory, an ethnographer of the gay France of 1990s, and a professor of French Studies in a small, liberal arts American college.

American Queers: Contesting Community The late 1980s and early 1990s were both a disheartening and an exciting time in the United States to be starting dissertation research on gay and

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

111

lesbian activism. The eruption of the AIDS epidemic and the emergence of “queer theory” dominated the arena. With little progress at that point toward finding an effective treatment let alone a cure for AIDS and its related illnesses, a diagnosis of full-blown AIDS meant most likely death in two to five years, with little other than palliative therapy to alleviate painful symptoms. The epidemic’s effect on gay men—and gay communities—across the United States was ghastly. While AIDS devastated gay communities, it also created them. If in North America the 1970s and 1980s had witnessed the creation of gay and lesbian institutions in a number of urban enclaves resembling an ethnic minority model (Levine 1979; Epstein 1987), AIDS encouraged and solidified this development. At the same time, theories about the social construction of sexuality and gender, while hardly new, were becoming more and more popular in American colleges and universities. By 1990, this theoretical work had encouraged the emergence of “queer theory,” a loosely connected body of work that challenged a number of core concepts upon which lesbian and gay—as well as feminist—studies had been founded, most notably the conception of sexual identities as stable and unified. The social construction of sexuality held in part that western forms of sexuality were not universal and that social identities based on sexuality were neither necessary nor trans-historical. As Gayle Rubin (2002) has written, this shift had the effect of replacing the “history of the homosexual” with the “history of homosexualities.” Rubin writes that “Gay history was recast from the history of homosexuals, or even a unitary notion of homosexuality, to histories of homosexualities or homoerotic sexual practices whose precise social and cultural relationships and valences had to be determined” (39). The turn had much to do with AIDS and queer political activism outside the academy as well. Queer activists were especially invested in a critique of gay identity-politics and community-building. In particular, queer activism rejected the legitimacy of claims made on behalf of a gay community that it perceived as increasingly hegemonic and exclusive, reproducing socio-sexual hierarchies. Lisa Duggan argued in her 1992 article, “Making It Perfectly Queer” that “… any gay politics based on the primacy of sexual identity defined as … ‘essential,’ residing clearly, intelligibly and unalterably in the body or psyche, and fixing desire in a gendered direction, ultimately represents the view from the subject position ‘twentiethcentury, Western, white, gay male’” (162). Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (2002) is an excellent illustration of North American queer theory’s critical assessment of gay and lesbian community. Though the book was published in 2002, she carried out her research in the early to mid-1990s, and her lens of analysis is clearly informed by queer theory. Joseph chose a gay and lesbian non-profit theater in San Francisco’s Castro District as her ethnographic

112

William Poulin-Deltour

fieldwork site. The theater played a prominent role in creating and sustaining gay and lesbian community, functioning, according to Joseph, as “a ritual or healing space … a mechanism for affirming and documenting the history of a knowable and coherent community, … the site at which communal crises and changes were processed and subordinated to an ongoing identity and unity (xv).” Indeed, the theater members’ subordination of difference to a unified, gay identity, leads Joseph to characterize the workplace atmosphere as one of “homosexism” in which community claims “served to … prioritiz[e] … gayness over other identity features. And this homosexism worked to limit the theater’s orientation to white gays and lesbians of stable and unified gender identity” (xvii). This homosexism was also particularly exclusive of “a number of people, [myself] included, whose sense of identity and community were at that time powerfully mobilized under the name Queer, whose art and activism were enabled by a term that seemed to embrace flexibility and dynamism of gender and sexuality (xvii).” Citing the foundational works of Cherríe and Anzaldúa that had questioned the unity of a “women’s community,” Joseph concludes that claims made on behalf of community “on both left and right … [are] deployed to lower consciousness of difference, hierarchy, and oppression within the involved group” (xxiv).

Le Droit à l’indifférence: Gay France at the end of the 1980s France represented a particularly attractive object of research for those of us somewhat influenced by queer theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To begin with, France had produced a disproportionate, or so it seemed, number of intellectuals whose theories formed the basis of queer theory and its critique of identity politics and community-building. Most important was of course Michel Foucault, especially his History of Sexuality5 (1976). Yet, while gay and lesbian community-building was at its peak in the United States, there appeared to be little place or desire in France for making homosexuality an identity around which to mobilize politically and create community. I witnessed this apparent lack of community during one of my stays in Paris in the mid-1980s. I was stunned by what I took to be the triviality of the city’s gay pride march. While hundreds of thousands of folks were marching back in New York City, there were at best a few hundred souls in Paris, with floats representing a handful of gay bars making up the parade. In fact, socio-political mobilization around homosexuality was declining in France—and for several reasons. First and foremost, François Mitterrand had been elected president in 1981, and, as he had promised during the electoral campaign, his administration annulled all anti-

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

113

homosexual legislation. Also in 1981, the Ministry of Health had removed homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders, and the Socialist Party had insisted that police surveillance of gays stop. These concrete steps resulted in waning gay activism: indeed, how could one mobilize gays when the most visible signs of homophobic discrimination had just been abolished by a gay-friendly administration? Second, sharing a marginal sexuality did not lead most French gays to feel they shared a particular identity or culture around which they could organize as a community. Scott Gunther notes in his article “Building a More Stately Closet: French Gay Movements Since the Early 1980s” (2004), being gay became looked upon with supposed indifference in France during the 1980s. In response, most French gays themselves—very much unlike their American counterparts—claimed a droit à l’indifférence with regard to their sexuality. National responses to AIDS initially appeared to corroborate the distinction between being gay in the US and France. The epidemic did not develop in the same ways it had in the United States, where existing gay communities had been strengthened in defensive unity against an apparently indifferent if not hostile socio-political environment. Seen from the United States, where gay activism and community-building were ascendant throughout the 1980s, the French movements seemed to be stagnant. Foucault pithily captured why the scene in France interested those of us, mostly Americans, who were seeking to deconstruct notions of gay identity and community through examining the apparent absence of such concepts in France: “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit ourselves to its dissipation” (Foucault 1971 cited in Weeks 2005: 192). In short, French homosexuality/homosexualities and, to quote Rubin (2002) again, their “social and cultural relationships and valences” appeared to be significantly distinct from American homosexualities (39). The importance of this difference was most useful for disrupting the idea that one could speak of variation only in terms of “the West and the rest,” as if there were little if any meaningful difference in systems of sexuality throughout North America and Western Europe.

Quelle surprise! French Homosexuals and the “Gay Turn” … I decided early on that in order to be president of Act-Up, it was imperative for me not to read Foucault. Not that I had any sort of inferiority complex, but Foucault’s thought had so influenced the first AIDS associations that I had to protect myself from it. It was a way to start tabula rasa, to rid AIDS of all that philosophical and grand-bourgeois rubbish, to start from scratch. … And then, I sincerely believe that one’s behavior determines his importance … the fact that Foucault never acknowl-

114

William Poulin-Deltour

edged his illness called into question for me a large part of his philosophy’s validity. … For me, the HIV positive person who hides himself is always wrong. In any case, Foucault could have declared his HIV positive status, he was rich and famous (Lestrade 2000: 49, my emphasis).6

When I finally arrived in France in 1995 both to complete coursework and to begin preliminary fieldwork, one can only imagine my surprise to find a resurgent French gay movement, demanding the development and public recognition of gay identity and community in France.7 Moreover, as revealed above by Didier Lestrade, a central figure of France’s gay movement during the 1980s and 1990s and the first president of Act-Up Paris, many French gay militants found little inspiration in the work and life of Foucault. On the contrary, the movement seemed to get its marching orders from American-style gay identity politics, the very same politics that queer theory was denouncing in the United States. As an article in Le Monde described that year’s gay pride march, one that had attracted tens of thousands of participants and spectators: “Homosexuals want to create a recognized community: Following the American model, the French Gay Pride association wants to succeed in structuring the gay milieu and in organizing a population fighting AIDS” (Normand 1995). What might explain the revitalization of the French gay movement during the 1990s, a movement that I had pretty much written off as dormant prior to my arrival in France? In a word: AIDS. Contrary to what I had thought, AIDS turned out in the end to be as much the disaster for gay men in France as it had been in the United States, and perhaps even worse. For in France, the epidemic had at first been “dehomosexualized,” both by government officials and gay activists, in an effort to limit the potential stigmatization of gays and lesbians. When the epidemic hit in the mid-1980s, Mitterrand’s administration had only recently removed all references to homosexuality from France’s criminal and civil codes. There was a real fear on the part of gay activists that associating homosexuality with AIDS could only create a reaction of homophobia and moral panic, leading to increased discrimination and violence against gay men and lesbians. This dehomosexualization resulted first in very little if any prevention efforts. It was followed by universal and généraliste public health campaigns, the results of which were, as one might imagine, quite ineffective. It was only well into the epidemic, when large numbers of French gay men began developing AIDS, that any type of safe-sex campaigns were created for and targeted to men having sex with men (Broqua 2005). AIDS played a major role in the transformation of homosexuality’s socio-cultural meaning in France. Gay men who contracted the disease found that the tacit understanding they had established between themselves and their families could no longer hold. For many, AIDS compelled them to acknowledge publicly for the first time their homosexuality. At

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

115

the same time, the epidemic brought to the forefront existing discrimination against same-sex couples, concerning most especially inheritance rights. The impact of confronting both AIDS and discrimination because of their sexuality was to create a greater sense of belonging to a distinct and marked social group for French gay men. As the sociologist Michaël Pollak (1993), who would himself die of AIDS in 1994, made the point: “As it is with any marginalized group, the contours of a collective identity grow more when the group finds itself differentiated and under threat” (232). A particularly poignant and prescient example of this transformation was the philosopher Jean-Paul Aron’s public coming out in the Nouvel observateur in October 1987. In an interview entitled “Mon sida,” Aron emphasized that his only reason for speaking publicly and openly about his being gay was that he had AIDS: “For nothing in the world would I have spoken publically like I am doing today about my homosexuality. Only the illness could bring out my very recent spontaneity” (39–40). Adding toward the end of the interview: It was without doubt folly on my part, perhaps even inauthenticity, but I have never felt homosexual. Only the illness has forced me to admit that I belong, existentially and socially, to this category. I denied my specificity, not because I was ashamed of it, but because I didn’t want to be part of it. I was never very excited about being part of this community, because I didn’t feel cut out for it (43).

Because of this greater consciousness, some French gays began to organize socio-politically in the fight against AIDS. For these activists, it was most especially the dehomosexualization of the illness that was responsible for the French government’s deplorable reaction. The creation and subsequent success in 1989 of Act-Up Paris is an excellent illustration of this new gay AIDS activism. Act-Up’s condemnation of the French government’s inaction—which the association considered criminal—served as an efficient rallying point, reinforced by the suffering of its members who were stricken with AIDS. As Christophe Martet, former president of ActUp Paris, wrote in his book Les Combattants du Sida (1993): The government and its deputies, elected by the people … knew about the existence of this illness … and we could have hoped that the government would act on this knowledge. Were we ever wrong. Total silence for years up until 1987. During those bleak years, Laurent, Olivier, tens of thousands became HIV positive. I am HIV positive. The government knew, it said nothing, it did nothing, it is guilty of not helping a person in danger (22–23, my emphasis).

Act-Up Paris adopted an American-style, communalist strategy to fight both AIDS and homophobia in France accusing the French government of refusing to recognize “specific groups, united by a common identity” (Arnal 1993: 104) thereby suppressing a more organic, community-based

116

William Poulin-Deltour

reaction to the epidemic. Act-Up Paris deployed this communalist rhetoric to challenge what it considered to be the French myth of universalism, debunking it as a façade that both masked discrimination against gay men and women and immobilized them from effectively organizing to defend themselves: “Rather than dream passively of a universal community … able to fight AIDS, we might as well start by defending, rebuilding or even building communities with a real capacity to resist the illness” (Martet: 20, my emphasis). Act-Up Paris contributed to and reflected a prevailing communalist rhetoric that emerged in the French gay movement from the late 1980s, even among individual activists who had earlier openly and vehemently denounced such language. For example, a collective to reorganize Gay Pride was formed in 1990, regrouping over thirty gay and lesbian associations in France. The collective, which went on to adopt the American name “la Lesbian and Gay Pride” (and would become La Marche des Fiertés in the early 2000s) published and distributed a short flyer in 1991, entitled Homosexuals in France Today. In it, the collective refers to gays and lesbians as a minority group, whose culture and communauté were to be constructed within a France pluriculturelle. The authors of the text define homosexuals as a minorité fragile who “are not born into a family. It is thus a very dispersed minority that has attempted to come together in spite of, or because of, social pressure.” Several times in the text the authors compare French gays and lesbians to ethnic groups in France whose socio-political mobilization appears less difficult given homosexuals’ lack of historic continuity: “Contrary to other minority groups, homosexuals don’t have a long collective history. … This absence … is without doubt one of the major elements behind the difficulty this community has had in organizing and structuring itself to wield autonomous and veritable political pressure, like religious and ethnic communities.”

Le Centre gay et lesbien de Paris: An Attempt to Create Community Within the Republic The ultimate manifestation of the French gay movement’s tournant communautaire during the early 1990s was the establishment of Paris’ Gay and Lesbian Center in 1994. Made up of members from various gay and lesbian associations as well as Act-Up, the first Board of Directors used as its model American gay community centers, that offer a wide range of services, from AIDS-related medical and legal counseling to community cultural events (art shows, conferences, debates, etc.). Located in a storefront in Paris’s Bastille neighborhood, the Center also had a café and meeting facilities that member associations could rent for activities and meetings.

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

117

From August 1997 to June 1998, I carried out ethnographic research at the Center, focusing on the role of American influence in the Center’s creation and its goals (Poulin-Deltour 2004). For my fieldwork, I became a volunteer, working at the Center up to twenty hours a week. As part of my volunteer orientation, I had to attend a training on the French gay movement and Center’s history as well as HIV and prevention programs. Act-Up’s participation in the Center’s creation was considerable, and its influence manifested itself most prominently through its repetitive usage of identité and communauté. When the Center opened its doors, it declared its mission to be: 1. The fight against all discrimination based on sexual orientation. 2. A proactive solidarity with gays and lesbians. 3. The enhancement of a culture and an identité communautaire. 4. The fight against AIDS and assistance to all those affected by HIV. While such an overt embrace of the American model exposed such activism to accusations of being divorced from French reality and therefore illegitimate, it also served to disrupt and change the terms of the debate— and allowed the Center to be perceived of as forging new ground, playing the role of avant-garde in the field of gay and lesbian associations.8 Beyond the symbolic and polemical use of the American model, however, the key concepts assigned to it meant strikingly different things to different activists. There were at least three distinct general definitions of gay community and identity, definitions that could potentially be the source of real tension. First, some younger volunteers, from 25 to 30 years old, perceived the ideals of a gay community as a positive and viable goal for France. Nonetheless, they felt that the notions of community and identity were quintessentially American and that the foundations for the creation of a veritable gay and lesbian community were not yet in place. Second, among even younger, more radical members, often coming from Act-Up Paris, the differences between the American and French contexts were minimal. They contended that both societies had communities which were, simply put, groups coalescing around common interests. The difference was in the French state’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of certain communities such as the gay and lesbian community and minority ethnic communities. These members saw themselves as using the example of American communities to expose the French state’s hypocritical denial of social actuality. They showed particular interest in American political practices such as lobbying to advance the interests of the gay community. Third, there were older members, over 30, who remained ambivalent about the viability of such American ideals in French society, and questioned their desirability. Some of these members held on to earlier, more

118

William Poulin-Deltour

radical beliefs of gay liberation. They espoused many core concepts from the 1960s around “sexual liberation”—ideas that American queer activists were advancing at the same time—such as going beyond a binary difference in sexuality toward a polymorphous sexuality. Still others were earnest defenders of the French Republic’s goal of justice and equality for all citizens regardless of sexuality. They did not see a conflict in their participation as volunteers at the Center and the French Republic’s traditional values, values that might be undermined by official recognition of separate communities. I was struck by these differences in position during my orientation session as a Center volunteer in November 1997. My orientation group had only three members, myself, Marc, a 22-year-old university student, and Philippe, a 35-year-old elementary school teacher.9 The Center’s Executive Director—who had been an Act-Up activist—led the session. Throughout the two-hour session, Philippe stressed over and again his being très républicain—this was why he so hated the Marais quarter and its emphasis on “uniformity, on clones, on a ghettoized existence in a separate community.” When Philippe found out that I was American, he went on at length about the vast différences culturelles between the AngloSaxon world and France, “which could account for the stronger presence of voluntary associations in the US.” Indeed, for Philippe, the “idea of community was totally absent from the French mentality.” The Executive Director responded violently to Philippe’s assertions, retorting loudly that France was “full of communities,” which were, after all, just “groups based on common interests.” While the criterion for their official recognition might not be the same in France as in the United States, he shouted, “communities do exist in France.” At another point, the Executive Director gave his justification for the Center’s lobbying the French government on behalf of the gay and lesbian community to extend legal marriage rights to same-sex couples. While public opinion in France might not have been ready for such a change, he reasoned, “I couldn’t care less about that or society in general—what is important in lobbying is access to the people who have power … after that, if the baker’s wife two doors down doesn’t accept it, I don’t give a damn!” Philippe was visibly offended by this remark, commenting on the side, “Me, I’m a true républicain, so for me that woman is just as important as he is!” Marc remained rather quiet throughout the sessions, though he did take notable exception to Philippe’s description of the Marais. For Marc, Philippe had only internalized common negative and misleading societal stereotypes about the neighborhood and gays in general. Marc found the Marais, far from the “stifling ghetto of uniformity” Philippe had decried, full of diversity and interesting, different people. In fact, on another occa-

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

119

sion Marc told me he very much liked the concept of community, which he defined as “a group of people coming together around the same interests and the same culture.” However, he felt quite contradictory about the role the American model might play in the making of a French gay community. He first expressed frustration that the French context was always being negatively compared to the United States, about which he admitted he knew little and cared even less, saying, “The image of the US, it’s always ‘five years ahead of us,’ I find that aggravating, the ‘we’ve lived it before you’ attitude … I know absolutely nothing about the American community … and I couldn’t care less about it.” He nonetheless, in the very next sentence, expressed his admiration for that same model, adding that if the same thing could be produced in France, it would represent a major achievement: “The American myth is attractive, it’s got punch, things that don’t exist here … I admire it a lot, but what irritates me is the “model” side … but I can only admire it and the day we get there, with the same importance, we will have taken a big step …” There were also several other questions about the Center’s role in the gay and lesbian community that separated volunteers. Should the Center be at the service of an existing community or should it make as one of its goals the creation and shape of that community? What resources should the Center put toward programs fighting AIDS? This question was particularly sensitive given that the funds for the operating budget came mainly from the French state and were supposedly distributed for HIV prevention programs and social services for people living with HIV. How could the Center justify its spending on activités communautaires such as gay and lesbian art shows or its “Friday Ladies’ Night,” activities which had little directly to do with the fight against AIDS? Should the Center be politicized? The American model had little if any concrete influence in these discussions, given the important differences between the two national contexts. In fact, the function of the American model varied greatly depending on the circumstances at the Center. For example, in 1998, the Executive Director, who had received New York’s Lesbian and Gay Services Center’s Annual Report, asked me to translate certain terms such as planned giving. He was amazed by the amount of money donated to the Center as well as by the wide range of services it could offer. He announced to me that he was going to use the Annual Report as a model for the Paris Center’s own Rapport annuel, in an effort to obtain additional funds. I asked him if what he had in mind was to attract private giving, and he replied that that would never work in France: “It’s just not part of French culture.” He was thinking of distributing the Rapport to several state-run agencies to ask for more public grants. Many times during the year, he approached me, joking that upon my return to New York City I create an American

William Poulin-Deltour

120

association, “Friends of the Centre Gay et Lesbien de Paris,” which would offer French language courses to rich Francophile Americans to finance activities in Paris.

Discussion The different meanings attributed to the word community in France and in the United States are a wonderful illustration of the linguistic phenomenon of faux amis or “false friends.” As we have seen, avant-garde social movements in both countries challenged the conventional definitions of this word (Bourdieu 1989). For queer activists in the United States, the concept of a gay community and gay identity politics in general had become reductionist and exclusionary. They questioned the assumptions of a community that would be based on a single gay identity, “a unitary, unproblematic given” (Duggan 1995: 162). In France, on the other hand, gay and AIDS activists saw American-style communalist and “identitarian” strategies as disrupting the deceptive narrative of French Republican assimilation and universalism. Indeed, queer activists in the United States were attacking the rhetoric of gay community as hegemonic, while in France, gay and AIDS activists were couching their own countercurrent critique of French Republican dominant discourse in that same rhetoric. In the United States, the work and person of Michel Foucault seemed a natural source for this critique (David Halperin’s Saint Foucault [1995] comes to mind). In France, however, Foucault’s influence was much more problematic given his reluctance to come out and publicly acknowledge both his homosexuality and his AIDS. Had we oversimplified the equation that in the United States, community has a positive value while in France it is negative, we would have missed this paradoxical situation. Nonetheless, we have also seen that adopting an American communalist discourse in France did not result in the reproduction of an Americanstyle community. The usage of concepts from the American gay movement forced French activists to adapt them to the socio-political and cultural structures particular to France, such as the relationship between non-profit associations and the state and the separation of public and private spheres. The appropriation of ideas from the American movement did in fact play a role in shaping French gay activism during the 1990s, but their influence was most often limited to an abstract level. American activism continues to influence Paris’s Center, which in fact changed its name in 2002 to the Centre Lesbien Gai Bi & Trans (LGBT). However, the Center has since distanced itself from the communalist rhetoric that it had adopted at its opening in 1994. Today, the Center defines its mission as taking part in a “culture and an identitarian history,

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

121

following a citizen’s approach, non-communalist and with respect for difference”. The Center’s 2009 informational brochure continued, “It [the Center] is laïc and independent from all political parties and unions” (bold in original). It would appear that the Center adopted a particular version of the French republican model that, rhetorically at least, can accommodate certain identities and cultures as long as these are chosen freely by an autonomous citizen. All references to things communautaires appear now stigmatized, referring to exclusive and closed communities that the citizen does not freely choose but to which he is assigned, thereby threatening the social cohesion of the Republic (Gunther 2008).10

Conclusion The concept of community that groups such as Act-Up Paris and Paris’ Gay and Lesbian Center adopted in the late 1980s and early 1990s obviously had its origins in American new social movements that had brought differences previously thought of as private (religious, ethnic, gender) out and into the political realm. With little precedent for such mobilization in France, similar minority movements there turned to the United States for potential models. The Conseil Représerntatif des Associations Noires (CRAN), for example, invited NAACP members to France in April 2007 to discuss the French presidential elections. The association’s website publicized the meeting as follows: “So that blacks are not forgotten during the presidential campaign, the CRAN is organizing—and has invited to France the inheritors and comagnons de route of Martin Luther King.” Of course, the route of Martin Luther King and the NAACP was quite different from the one that the CRAN would follow. In order to function effectively in France, it would have to be considerably altered. As the sociologist Eric Fassin observed in Le Monde (2007): Social movements [in France] make minority claims as opposed to multiculturalist ones made in North America. Therefore, the CRAN does not celebrate a black “difference” but, rather, fights discrimination against blacks, who are victims by virtue of their color. It begins with the experience of discrimination, without assuming the existence of a community behind that experience.

This approach does, of course, beg the question as to whether coalescing and mobilizing around a common experience, and making claims on behalf of a given minority, would not necessarily lead to forming some type of community. However, embracing universalism is a preemptive strategy in France, defending oneself against communautarisme before being accused of it. As the association declares on its website, “In reality, the CRAN says yes to l’universalisme, but no to l’uniformalisme.”

William Poulin-Deltour

122

In carrying out comparative work like this and, in my case, teaching French Studies in a liberal arts curriculum, we must try to strike a balance between two potential misrepresentations: either over-emphasizing the similarities between France and America or construing the two societies as starkly distinct and culturally incommensurate. The clear influence American social movements have on their French counterparts leads more often than not to conceiving of France as little more than a deferred version of the US; whereas obscuring the connections and similarities between them advances cultural determinism in which, according to Eric Fassin, “French [or American] culture explains it all. Indeed, it almost becomes a French [or American] nature. Nothing ever happens in France [or America] except the eternal return of Frenchness [or Americanness] in its confrontation with history” (1995: 454; additions my own). My analytic approach transforms these distorted images of the United States and France in this chapter, through underscoring the processes determined by practical needs, contingency, and ideological constraints.

Notes   1. All translations from French to English are the author’s.   2. Author of Contre le communatuarisme (2007).   3. http://www.communautarisme.net/Homophobie_r36.html. The site also promotes books such as Les Khmers roses (François Devoucoux, 2003) that it describes as offering a precise assessment of “the paranoid strategies of homosexual activism” through “denounc[ing] its communalist excesses. It most notably demonstrates how the khmers roses, minority within the minority, have arbitrarily spoken out on the question of homosexuality and taken as hostage the vast majority of homosexuals who nonetheless requested nothing of them.”   4. Journalist and writer, Martel had posts in several French administrations during the 1990s under Prime Ministers Rocard and Jospin, most notably as assistant to the Minister of Labor and Solidarity, Martine Aubry (1997–2000). From 2001 to 2005, he was the attaché culturel for the French Consulate in Boston, MA.   5. Rubin (2002) correctly points out that Foucault hardly originated the concept of the social construction of sexuality—certainly other historians such as Jeffrey Weeks (1977) had advanced similar accounts for an Anglophone public. However, Foucault’s work, according to Rubin, had a “legitimating effect” that “stemmed not only from the undoubted quality of his work but also from his reputation as a major thinker and the fact that in the mid to late 1970s his homosexuality was little known in the United States” (40). For more on the introduction of French theory and theorists into the American academy during this time, see Cusset’s French Theory (2003).   6. Lestrade and other AIDS activists found that Foucault’s reticence to speak publicly about his sexuality and AIDS added to the “dehomosexualization” of the epidemic, thereby preventing the emergence of prevention efforts within the

Gay Activism and the Question of Community

123

gay community, as had been done in the United States. AIDES—the association founded by Foucault’s partner, Daniel Defert, after the former’s death—was also accused of “dehomosexualizing” the illness by not emphasizing the fact that it primarily affected, at that point in time at least, men who had sexual relations with men.   7. I realize that this lag between what I thought to be the case and the reality would not be so stark today, given the development of the internet. In fact, there could be ethnographic studies on the internet’s role in the construction of LGBTQ movements worldwide.   8. This strategic use of the American referent (“queer”) in French gay activism has also been used by other groups in France, especially urban youth of North-African, Caribbean, and African descent who have appropriated African American hiphop and rap to contest French norms.   9. All names are pseudonyms. 10. All mention of laïcité has since been removed from the Center’s website. http:// www.centrelgbtparis.org/nous-connaitre

References Act-Up Paris. 1994. Le Sida. Paris: Editions Dagorno. Aron, Jean-Paul. 1987. “Mon sida,” Le Nouvel observateur, 30 October–5 November: 126–131. Bowen, John. 2008. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves. Islam, the State and Public Space. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. “Quelques questions sur le mouvement gai et lesbien.” In La domination masculine. 129–134. Paris: Seuil. Broqua, Christophe. 2005. Agir pour ne pas mourir! Act Up, les homosexuels et le sida. Paris: Les Preseses de Sciences Po. Collectif Gay Pride. 1991. Les Homosexuels/les en France aujourd’hui. Flyer for distribution. http://www.inter-lgbt.org/IMG/pdf/livreblanc91LGP.pdf. Cusset, François. 2003. French Theory. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La Découverte. D’Emilio, John. 1983. Sexual Politics. Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duggan, Lisa and Nan Hunter. 1995. Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Epstein, Steven. 1987. “Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social Constructionism.” Socialist Review 93/94 (May–August): 9–54. ———. 1996. “A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality.” In Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Epstein, 145–167. Cambridge: Blackwell. Eribon, Didier, ed. 1998. Les études gay et lesbiennes. Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou. ———. 1999. Réflexions sur la question gay. Paris: Fayard. Fassin, Eric. 1995. “Fearful Symmetry: Culturalism and Cultural Comparison after Tocqueville.” French Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (Autumn): 451–460. ———. 2005. L’inversion de la question homosexuelle. Paris: Editions Amsterdam.

124

William Poulin-Deltour

Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité (vol. 1). Paris: Gallimard. Gamson, Joshua. 1995. “Must Identity Movements Self-destruct? A Queer Dilemma.” Social Problems 42, no. 3 (December): 390–407. Gunther, Scott. 2004. “Building a More Stately Closet: French Gay Movements Since the Early 1980s.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 3 (July): 326–347. ———. 2008. “Not ‘Communautaire’ but ‘Identitaire.’ Linguistic Acrobatics on France’s Pink TV.” Contemporary French Civilization 32, no. 1 (January): 75–99. Halperin, David. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford U. Press. Joseph, Miranda. 2002. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lestrade, Didier. 2000. Act Up. Une Histoire. Paris: Denoël. Levine, Martin. 1979. “Gay Ghetto.” In Gay Men: The Sociology of Male Homosexuality, ed. M. Levine, 182–204. New York: Harper & Row. Mangeot, Philippe. 2003. “Communautarisme.” In Dictionnaire de l’homophobie, ed. Louis-Georges Tin, 99–103. Paris: PUF. Martel, Frédéric. 1996. Le Rose et le noir. L’histoire des homosexuels en France depuis 1968. Paris: Seuil. Pollak, Michaël. 1993. Une identité blessée: étude de sociologie et d’histoire. Paris: Métaillié. Poulin-Deltour, William. 2004. “French Gay Activism and the American Referent in Contemporary France.” French Review 78, no. 1(October): 118–127. Rousseul, Yves. 1995. “Le mouvement homosexuel face aux stratégies identitaires.” Les Temps modernes. http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/roussel -TM582.html Rubin, Gayle. 2002. “Studying Sexual Subcultures: Excavating the Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America.” In Out in Theory. The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, eds. Ellen Lewin and William Leap, 17–68. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press. Weeks, Jeffrey. 1981. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman. __________. 2005. “Remembering Foucault.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, Nos 1–2 (January–April): 186–201.

6 Confronting “Community” From rural France to the Vietnamese diaspora Deborah Reed-Danahay

In my research both in France and in the United States I have confronted dilemmas posed by the labels “rural community” and “ethnic community.” I argue here that these terms of commonsense speech, especially in English, interfere with attempts to describe and analyze social groups ethnographically. My research has concerned native-born French people living in a farming region of rural France (which some might call a rural community), former Vietnamese refugees and their children living in urban and suburban settings in north-central Texas (which some might call an ethnic community),1 and more recently the Vietnamese diaspora population settled in France. I have a long-standing discomfort with using the term community to describe the people and places I study as an anthropologist. I see this word, which is used widely in everyday life, as caught in the tensions between emic and etic categories.2 By calling into question the uses of the terms community and communauté in ethnographic writing, my aim in this chapter is to use the comparative perspectives I have gained as an anthropologist moving back and forth between two nation-states in order to demonstrate that our understandings of social groups and their formations do not benefit from the continued deployment of these terms community as descriptors.

Fieldwork Encounter—Clermont-Ferrand—Summer 2009 I was speaking to a man born in Vietnam who moved to France during the 1970s as a refugee and settled in the city of Clermont-Ferrand where he found work at the Michelin rubber and tire factory. This man, whom I will

126

Deborah Reed-Danahay

refer to here as N., had retired from Michelin and was the proprietor of a Vietnamese restaurant. At the time of our meeting, N. was also leader of a local Vietnamese ethnic association. Staunchly anti-communist and opposed to the current government of Vietnam, as are also many former Vietnamese refugees in the United States, N. had extensive contacts with other former Vietnamese refugees throughout France and was aware of political activities of Vietnamese diasporic activist groups in North America. Having recently completed a study of civic engagement among Vietnamese in the United States (Reed-Danahay 2008 and 2010; Brettell and Reed-Danahay 2012)3 and now beginning to explore comparisons between the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States and in France, I asked him about the ethnic association and its activities. As I will explain in more detail later in this chapter, many Vietnamese American ethnic associations are referred to in Vietnamese as cong dong— a phrase translated into English as community. Intrigued by that translation, I worked with research participants in Texas to explore the uses and meanings of cong dong and other phrases used to express group-ness. I asked N. if he thought of his association as a cong dong and if that was the word used in Vietnamese among his peers (our conversation was in French). He stopped for a minute and laughed uncomfortably, and then replied that yes, he and other Vietnamese referred to it as a cong dong. He continued, however, to tell me that he had to be very careful in using that term (and especially translating it into the French term communauté) because he did not want anyone to think he was, as he put it, involved in a cult—like “scientology.” In expressing his uneasiness with the term communauté, N. illustrated the vast differences in connotation that are communicated when talking about an ethnic community/communauté in the United States and France. The phrase cong dong refers to an ethnic “overseas” community in the Vietnamese diaspora that is primarily involved in political activism among former refugees.4 Vietnamese Americans in Texas, in contrast to N., have no anxiety about translating this term as community, because it is so common in the United States to view each new immigrant group as forming their own ethnic community alongside those of other groups—such as the Mexican, Chinese, or Native American communities. In France, however, as my interlocutor was keenly aware, forming such communautés can be subject to criticism—because this may signal the threat of a separation from the polity and a disavowal of certain Republican ideas of French citizenship. As N. spoke about the life of people of Vietnamese origin in Clermont-Ferrand, and in France more generally, he was also revealing insecurities about his own position there through his caution regarding the vocabulary he could employ to talk about associations formed by this population.

Confronting “Community”

127

The Uses of Community: Critical Perspectives In our ethnographic research and writing, anthropologists should be reflexive about the conceptual tools and terms we use to describe groups of people and their geographical and social locations. I agree with Gerald Creed (2004: 7) that “we need to examine community as a culturally contingent notion and document what it means to particular people in local and historical contexts.” In order to undertake a critically reflexive approach to our work, we should unpack the use(s) of the term community among our research participants and within the wider cultural models and institutional requirements that shape their vocabularies. For example, if I were to describe the Vietnamese in Clermont-Ferrand as a community (in English), then I would be making assumptions about the existence of a certain type of group rather than exploring the modes of sociality among this population and the ways it is perceived by others. My argument is not that the term community should be banished from our anthropological vocabulary but, rather, that it should be used selectively and in limited contexts that are precisely detailed. My own use of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) “community of practice” framework to discuss Vietnamese associations and organizations is an example of that approach (see ReedDanahay 2008; Brettell and Reed-Danahay 2012). Other terms, such as social space, as I will argue toward the end of this chapter, are preferable to community in many contexts. Anthropologists frequently study people who live in so-called communities. We also historically adopted what was known as the “community study method”—one that was applied both to rural areas (see Arensberg 1961) and to urban areas and ethnic groups (Warner 1963). Although this method has been repudiated, particularly since the late 1970s, the term community continues to be applied to research populations and endures as a shorthand label for a studied group. As Michael Herzfeld (2008) points out, we continue to seek the exotic in “modernity.” A group living in a community has, by definition, some nonmodern aspects to it, as Tönnies observed in his discussion of Gemeinschaft versus Gesellshaft (2002 [1887]), both capturing this value system and helping to solidify it through his sociological naming of it. When rural people are labeled as having communities, they are positioned as traditional and somewhat backward.5 When immigrants are labeled as having communities, they too are being positioned both as tradition-bound in some ways (especially in America) but also as organized in potentially threatening groups claiming rights and deserving recognition collectively (especially in France). The meanings of community/communauté have shifted over time both in the scholarly literature and the popular uses of it since I first began field-

128

Deborah Reed-Danahay

work in rural Auvergne in the early 1980s. Ideas of community in popular culture have ranged from nostalgic views of rural idylls (and a critique of such nostalgia) to political notions used to claim rights for groups of various sorts in urban settings.6 I started out doing rural French ethnography within the context of a scholarly environment in Europeanist anthropology that attempted to discredit a nostalgic view of the rural community.7 More recently, in the early twenty-first century, I undertook an urban study of Vietnamese immigrants in Texas in an environment in which many scholars of immigration were engaging with the ideas of writers, such as Robert Putnam (2000), who decry the loss of community and argue for more “civic community.” In an ironic twist on current French and American perspectives on community, authors like Putnam rely upon the observations of a French visitor to America, Alexis de Tocqueville, who praised the high degree of civic participation in 19th-century America, in their expressions of regret for what they perceive to be the loss of a previously vibrant civic culture based on voluntary associations as forms of community building. In the United States, it is almost impossible for individuals not to be defined (or to define themselves) as members of at least one community and usually several. This (self‑)identification is, for the most part, considered a natural state of affairs and a good thing. Anthropologist Hervé Varenne, a native of France who lives and teaches in the United States, has written about his encounters with the word community. His account reveals the ways in which he came to see it as a key symbol in American life: When I first arrived in the United States, one of the many things that did surprise me was the use of the word “community” in contexts where I was sure it was never used in France. The University of Chicago, I was told, was a community. Hyde Park-Kenwood (the university neighborhood) was another such community. … Moving from Chicago to New York … I encountered the word in many other settings. … I have lost my initial surprise. I have learned the power of a reference to community. … I have also tried to keep in a corner of my memory the awareness that the French word communauté cannot be used in most of the contexts where “community” is appropriate in America. George Herbert Mead (1967[1934]) cannot write about social organization without using “community” as a synonym for it. The word communauté seems never to come from Marcel Mauss’s pen (1950). The Sorbonne is never a communauté. A local hospital is always l’hôpital de la ville; it is never l’hôpital communautaire (italics in original) (1986: 213–4).

Varenne suggests, as does Anthony Cohen (1985), that community is a symbolic notion.8 He argues that people get “caught” in it because of its emotional meaning in the society, whatever they may think of the concept (as having a negative or positive value). Indeed much of the scholarly attention to the idea of community in the Anglo-Saxon world and to the term itself alludes to its generally positive connotations, often derived from the nostalgic, romanticizing ideas

Confronting “Community”

129

connected to the work of Ferdinand Tönnies.9 Thus, Alan McFarland (1977: 632) has written that the belief in communities is “one of the most powerful myths in industrial society” and a “controlling” myth. And, Nigel Rapport (2000: 65) notes that community “is a concept of always positive evaluation and evocation, whose usage expresses and elicits a socio-cultural grouping and milieu to which people would expect, advocate, or wish to belong.” Although such enthusiasm for community may be prevalent in the UK and in North America, the current politics of ethnicity in France, especially since the 1990s, contravene a comparable blanket claim about the positive evocations of communauté. In France, communautarianisme has become a point of contention. Whereas the US term communitarianism10 is applied to a movement endorsing forms of civic community, in France this idea has come under attack. The symbolic meaning of communauté can be negative when it is perceived as the action of forming a group that sets itself apart from the greater collectivity of the French nation. Historically, this French term has referred to such social units as religious congregations and corporate joint households. In the current climate of immigrant activism in France, however, those who claim membership in an ethnic or religious communauté can be considered suspect. In France, the word connotes a special interest group in a negative way, in contrast to the primarily positive connotations of the term in America. Contemporary French critics of the formation of separate communities based on the claiming of rights (Schnapper 1994; 2007) look back toward Rousseau and the notion of the social contract in order to advance instead the idea of one unified national Communauté rather than several separate ethnically-based ones. In a recent European Commission report on debates about multiculturalism in France, Valérie Sala Pala and Patrick Simon (2007: 6) write that: … in the French debates, the notion of “communitarianism” refers to the risk of political mobilization of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities and the consequences of their recognition for the French political model. …Through the reference to “communitarianism,” the insistence on “ethnic identities” is constructed as a major threat against the values of the Republic.

In the current political climate of France, where struggles to deal with immigrants confront Republican ideals, ethnic communautés are viewed negatively by many as antithetical to the integration of individuals to the polity. There are, however, other uses of the term communauté with a more positive slant in France, especially its use in contexts in which it serves to unify socially and is connected to administrative units or governance—for example, the European Economic Community (now the European Union) or the administrative grouping of local municipalities that is known as the communauté de communes.

130

Deborah Reed-Danahay

In the following sections of this chapter, I turn first to ideas about the rural community, and then to those regarding the ethnic community, through the lens of my own fieldwork experiences. A final section proposes that the concept of social space, as articulated in slightly different ways by Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Bourdieu, may be a better analytical framework for understanding forms of sociality than that of community.

“Communities” in Rural France During the fieldwork I conducted in rural Auvergne in 1980 and 1981, I wanted to discover what the parameters of understandings of belonging were and, consequently, I eschewed the community-study approach that had characterized some earlier studies in rural Europe. I did not want to assume that concepts of belonging overlapped with the administrative unit of the commune.11 I did not imagine the commune and its several hamlets that I studied as a “community” and I never heard anyone in Lavialle (the pseudonym I use for this commune) use the word communauté to describe their local social sphere. I wanted to avoid both a methodological approach that took community as a unit of study (Arensberg and Kimball 1965) and a theoretical approach that romanticized social groupings by calling them communities. In my book Education and Identity in Rural France: The Politics of Schooling (1996), which was based on research in Lavialle, I made a point of stating that, as Geertz had put it earlier, we “anthropologists don’t study villages, we study in villages” (1973: 22; cited in Reed-Danahay 1996: 42). Although my original fieldwork was based on ethnographic observations in a particular locality (a commune), I resisted the approach of community studies by attempting to address wider historical and social issues related to regionalism, the nation-state, and the centralized French educational system. During my subsequent visits to Lavialle over the past thirty-plus years, I have observed that in contrast to the case in the United States, where it would be common to hear a person in a rural setting speak of “our community,” the Laviallois do not use the term as part of their verbal repertoire. Although there is a certain pride in being from Lavialle, residents are more attached to their extended kin networks and the rural neighborhoods of the hamlets than to the commune as a whole. Rarely do they even refer to a social grouping in terms that that would be as vague and labile as the word community. They will refer to les gens de la commune (the people or folks of Lavialle), or les gens d’ici (folks from here) or just les gens to refer to the diffuse local social group, but these expressions do not have the same ideological weight, I would argue, as the term community.

Confronting “Community”

131

Lavialle has, since my initial fieldwork, subsequently become part of what is called a communauté de communes—an administrative unit of the French government that was established by law in 1992.12 This law, which was part of the decentralizing efforts of the French government during this period, was intended to promote local democracy, cooperation, and solidarity (terms used in the law itself) among rural communes that lacked sufficient resources individually. Just as the commune itself was an externally imposed administrative unit based on earlier Catholic parishes, the communauté de communes is a state-mandated grouping. Although this new unit is used strategically by local political actors to acquire resources, it does not always reflect other intercommunal relationships (for instance, involving marriage ties) that predated these units and may involve other communes not grouped together by the administrative apparatus. The vocabulary of communauté is in play now, therefore, in ways that it was not in the original settings of my fieldwork in rural France. It is now used primarily by politicians and other social actors who are involved in regional development, and the term has not been adopted as a signifier of collective identity and belonging among informants. Although people in Lavialle do not use communauté in an emic way to describe their social group, they do have notions of affinity that are expressed otherwise. One of these is the notion of the region: that of Auvergne more broadly, but also the smaller more localized region or pays to which they feel a part—which shares a patois, certain farming methods, and is a location for many shared ties of kinship. I am struck, however, by the ways in which the commune itself is and is not a unit on which feelings of belonging are based.13 If a community is a sort of closed social unit where one’s primary affective as well as economic and social ties are focused, then it is difficult to see Lavialle that way. The commune has its own primary school and all children from Lavialle who attend public school go to that school, creating a sense of shared experience among them. And because a commune is the smallest political unit in France, people vote in elections (local, national, and European) and file all official documents there—including birth, death, and marriage certificates. The Catholic church in Lavialle used to be a major symbol of the commune as a site of affective ties, as the location for weekly masses, weddings, baptisms, and funerals. However, rural depopulation has led to restructurings of the church so that masses are rarely held now in Lavialle. For the most part, the commune of Lavialle is not a coherent or primary unit of sociality for many of its inhabitants, who have social ties that extend well beyond it related to kin, economic exchanges, and forms of expressive culture. It is an administrative unit with a certain shared identity among its inhabitants, but by no means the only source for identity and belonging at the local level.

132

Deborah Reed-Danahay

The idea of belonging in rural France is based more on issues of terroir, pays, land, and so on, than on the idea of community as such. There is a romanticization of the local region, related to landscape, customs, and history. But it does not entail romanticizing the kinds of affective ties, social solidarity, and mutual aid that form the basis of ideas about community in rural America. Nonetheless, in some classic texts of the ethnography and history of rural France, as opposed to the everyday speech of inhabitants in Lavialle, one can see some references to communauté in French villages that do evoke a nostalgic romanticization of rural life. Historian Gabriel Le Bras, for example, in his study of the role of the church in rural France, has written that “l’église est dans le village, comme le centre d’un pays, la capitale d’une communauté.” (“The church is in the village, as the center of a country, the capital of a community” [1976: 14; his italics; my translation]). Sociologists Marcel Jollivet and Henri Mendras (1971), in contrast, use the term collectivités rurales, rather than communautés, in the title of their survey of various rural monographs. And it is this term that Mendras (1967) also used in his study La Fin des Paysans. Nevertheless, although they refer to the social units as collectivities, Jollivet and Mendras stress what they call the “eclatement de la communauté” (“the breakdown of community”) as a feature of social change, thereby seeming to distinguish more recent diversity of the collectivity from the cohesion of an earlier community. Two parallel books from the 1950s—Laurence Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse (1957) and Lucien Bernot and René Blanchard’s Nouville (1953)—provide explicit contrasts between North American and French literature on rural France. In their study of a village at the border of Normandy and Picardy, Bernot and Blanchard refer to forms of agricultural labor that can lead to forms of society that are more or less communautaire and also use the phrase “communauté d’intérêts” (community of interests). For the most part, however, they use the terms village or commune rather than communauté. Wylie also did not use the term community much in his first edition to the book, deploying more often instead “village” to speak of the commune he calls Peyrane. But, curiously, in the third edition of his book, a vocabulary of community becomes more prevalent as Wylie looks back 25 years. He writes that “Peyrane has ceased to be a tight little community” (1974: 317) and that “Peyrane’s sense of community has diminished” (378). Wylie writes this despite having spent many pages in the first edition talking about tensions and mistrust among the inhabitants of Peyrane. These books reflect the waxing and waning nature of the uses of the terms and concepts community and communauté (perhaps reflecting also that of rural studies in France more generally—see Rogers 1995). In the 1950s, when anthropologists were just beginning to undertake rural studies in Europe, the “community studies approach”—with its vocabu-

Confronting “Community”

133

lary of community that seems now so unavoidable—had not yet reached its heyday. As John Cole’s 1977 review of the literature indicates, by the 1970s, however, the idea of community studies in Europe was well established, at least among British and American anthropologists. Wylie’s work thus adopts the vocabulary of a community breaking down or diminishing that is also used by Jollivet and Mendras. These texts were also working with a modernization studies paradigm that contrasted “traditional” and “modern” societies. Consequently, it seems that the term rural community and the ideas of social cohesion associated with it came into use during the 1960s and 1970s as a sign of nostalgia for a loss associated with social change and modernization—rather than as a description of the present ethnographic situation. Other French rural studies being conducted by French anthropologists during the same period were influenced by other paradigms, such as French structuralism (for example in the studies coming out of Minot by Pingaud [1978], Verdier [1979], and Zonabend [1980]).14 They rely less on ideas of community in their analyses. In my work on rural France, it has not been overly difficult to avoid using the term community to describe places and people there not only because my research participants do not refer to their social group(s) as communities, but also because there is a range of ways in which rural places are described in the French-language ethnographic literature. Although there is a long tradition in English-language ethnography of describing such places as rural communities, this terminology was not so common in France. I have faced a more difficult challenge in avoiding the word community, however, in my more recent work among former Vietnamese refugees and their children both in the United States and in France.

“Ethnic Communities” in the United States and France In my recent research with Vietnamese Americans in the Dallas–Arlington–Fort Worth (DFW) region of north central Texas, I frequently confronted the term community because the phrases ethnic community and Vietnamese community are so much a part of the everyday vocabulary of urban life and the scholarly literature on immigration. When I first started my research on Vietnamese immigrants and their children in 2006, I became increasingly aware of the phrase “The Vietnamese American Community,” particularly in local newspaper reports on such events as the responses to hurricanes Katrina and Rita that had affected Vietnamese populations living in the Gulf Coast of the United States. One of my first fieldwork contacts gave me the name of the President or Chairman (he is variously called both) of an association called “The Vietnamese American Community of Tarrant County,” the county where I was focusing my

134

Deborah Reed-Danahay

fieldwork. I learned also that this VAC (its acronym) was referred to in Vietnamese with the phrase cong dong (a term I introduced earlier in this chapter that is translated into English as “community”). In north-central Texas, the “Vietnamese American Community” refers to a specific voluntary association and not the entire population of ethnically Vietnamese people living in the large metropolitan DFW area. There is, however, confusion about this among non-Vietnamese people, who frequently assume, based on its name, that this group literally represents all Vietnamese immigrants/refugees in this part of Texas. Such is not the case; there is a slippage. While there are many Vietnamese associations in North America that identify themselves as a cong dong/community (as in The Vietnamese American Community of [a particular city or region]), there are also many other Vietnamese ethnically-based voluntary associations that are not known as a cong dong. For example, the Vietnamese Science and Culture Association does not use this label. Those associations that describe themselves as a cong dong tend to be both politically active in opposing the current Vietnamese government and associated with the anti-communist leanings of many former refugees who fled Vietnam after the war and settled in the United States. The confusion arises because many other minority and/or immigrant groups are labeled as communities (“the Latino community,” the “African American community,” “the Muslim community,” and so on). It appears as a matter of common sense that the Vietnamese population would also form a “community,” and this population is frequently referred to in the media as “the Vietnamese community.” By using the term community, Vietnamese American leaders in American cities and towns, who are aware of its positive connotations in English, lend legitimacy to their organizations and activities. To outsiders, leaders of the VAC in Tarrant County are viewed as representing the entire local Vietnamese population, especially in the eyes of non-Vietnamese political actors (who are mainly Anglo and Latino in the DFW region where I conducted my fieldwork). This more general and common American usage of the term community to refer to an ethnic group thereby becomes conflated with a specific voluntary association (the VAC), whose membership does not literally include the entire Vietnamese population in this region and which exists alongside several other Vietnamese associations. Among the Vietnamese, the VAC is a cong dong, but for non-Vietnamese English-speakers, it is not just one association among many, but the Vietnamese American community. In contrast to the case of France, the US context is very much one in which ethnic groups are expected to form communities. This expectation of community can be found in scholarly work as well as among the general public. For example, in her pioneering work on Vietnamese Americans in the Philadelphia region over 20 years ago, Nazli Kibria noted the

Confronting “Community”

135

“absence of a strong and cohesive Vietnamese community organization in the area” (1993: 26) despite the fact that “there were numerous competing Vietnamese ethnic associations in the city that claimed to represent the community.” In her recent book on place-making among Vietnamese Americans, Karin Aguilar-San Juan (2009: xxii) advocates strong immigrant communities and argues that “one thing that makes a community strong, then, is the capacity to determine its own spatial fate.” Despite the persistent use of the term community for Vietnamese Americans situated in large metropolitan area and dispersed across a wide geographical region, I argue that the term should not be used by anthropologists as a descriptor referring to a group of people. Rather, its meanings and uses by social actors should be unpacked as part of our analysis. Although the VAC refers to itself as a community and this is the way it is perceived by other locals in the region, as an anthropologist I prefer to call it an association. The relationship between Vietnamese native understandings of cong dong and the term community in English is important to consider in the context of this discussion. During my conversations with research participants, several people told me that the word cong means addition or together, while dong means agreeing or being united. So the two words together have to do with people coming together with various shared agendas. When I asked one man if the term could be used to refer to a village in Vietnam, he laughed and found that to be an absurd idea. “In Vietnam,” he told me, “a village is based around the idea of a shared ancestor, it is united around that.” For him, this is different from a “cong dong” which forms in a diaspora situation. Research participants mention that this phrase refers to people coming together as exiles and newcomers to a host country. As was explained to me by several people, the more general usage of cong dong refers to all of the Vietnamese in a particular city or region in a host country, who form a diaspora population with shared national origins and culture. Some people told me they had never heard this phrase in Vietnam, and first learned about it after they arrived in the United States. There is, therefore, an overlap between the specific meanings of ethnic community in English and the Vietnamese term cong dong, but the terms are not congruent. There are many ways in which the Vietnamese American Community (Cong Dong) symbolically represents itself and builds social ties within the local Vietnamese diaspora population—through ritual celebrations, the establishment of a community center (a physical space that represents and reifies the group), and various forms of political mobilization related to anti-communist causes. At the same time, cong dong has the more specialized connotations of the French communauté as a social unit with shared interests that is somewhat set apart from the wider society or polity.

136

Deborah Reed-Danahay

Just as I have avoided referring to Lavialle in rural Auvergne as a community, so do I avoid referring to the Vietnamese in Texas as a community. Even though Vietnamese Americans might be called a community based on two different criteria, the first related to geographic place and history, the second related to ethnicity and immigration, I find the term community problematic in both cases for an anthropologist. According to Creed (2006a), the idea of community has become so politicized that it is now associated with rights rather than with shared spaces of residence. This is how the concept of the ethnic community is often expressed, as is that of other minority communities claiming rights. My Vietnamese American interlocutors state that cong dong is about people coming together to work for a shared purpose with shared goals. It was in trying to understand the meanings of cong dong among the Vietnamese population in Texas that I was brought full circle back to France, because as I prepared to do comparative research on Vietnamese people in France, I investigated the translation of cong dong in French and found that it is communauté. This led me to the subject of this chapter and to think more about how the French use the term communauté. As I noted in the beginning of this chapter with the example of the man in Clermont-Ferrand who felt insecure in his uses of the phrase cong dong or communauté to describe Vietnamese groups in France, the situation in France is very different from the United States. France’s colonial past is linked with two major groups of immigrants—those from North Africa (especially Algeria) and those from Indochina (especially Vietnam). The discourse of immigration in France today is oriented primarily toward the North African immigrants and their French-born offspring—with issues of Islam and the burqua or veil capturing attention at national and international levels. The discourse of anti-communitarianism in France is aimed primarily at people of North African origin who are Muslim. Robert Derderian (2005) has pointed to the relative invisibility of the Vietnamese (particularly in Paris) in contrast to the visibility of North Africans, linking this, in Stuart Hall’s terms, to the different “imperial pasts” these two groups have experienced and to stereotypes that position the Vietnamese presence in France as less of a problem. Derderian writes that Vietnamese spaces in Paris are seen as folkloric, interesting culturally but not threatening (in contrast to North African neighborhoods). Anne Raulin (2000) has chronicled the history of the management of cultural diversity or what she calls “pluri-culturalism” in the Asian neighborhood of Paris, the so-called Choissy Triangle. Vietnamese in America also experience a form of invisibility, due to the politics of forgetting about the Vietnam war (Espiritu 2006; Lieu 2011) as much as to their contrast to other more visible (and considered problematic) immigrant groups, such as those from Latin America (see,

Confronting “Community”

137

for example, Chavez 2008). For Vietnamese Americans, claiming to have their own ethnic community is a way to enter into the civic sphere and to practice ways of civic engagement that make their presence more visible (see Reed-Danahay 2008 and Brettell and Reed-Danahay 2012) as political actors. This is an expected trajectory for immigrants groups in the United States. For the Vietnamese in France, however, forming a communauté has negative connotations, as I have described earlier. The appropriateness of using the term communauté to describe the Vietnamese in France is, therefore, quite complicated for scholars. In her landmark study of the Vietnamese diaspora and its political activism in Paris (published in English, although she is of French origin), Gisèle Bousquet (1991) subtitled her book with the phrase “The Parisian Vietnamese Community.” And yet, Bousquet is confusing in her use of terminology. She vacillates between using the term community to discuss ethnic and cultural cohesiveness in the singular and writing about two opposed Vietnamese communities in Paris—one anti-communist and composed of former refugees, and the other supportive of the communist regime in Vietnam. Her book appeared both before the rhetorical force of anti-communitarianism had become so strong in France and before there was much attention to immigrant populations among French anthropologists. Two authors of books on the Franco-Vietnamese published in French illustrate shifts in the literature, perhaps reflecting the adoption by French scholars of the more common use of community in American ethnic studies. In the first example, Le Huu Khoa (1995) rarely uses the term communauté as a descriptor for the group of Vietnamese or other southeast Asians in France, although he does speak of communitarian aspects to their sociality. In contrast, in a more recent book Mong Hang Vu-Renaud (2002) refers frequently to the communauté vietnamienne and the communauté asiatique. She also refers to “la vie communitaire.” Her aim is to describe the distinct features of this ethnic community based on the influence of Confucianism. As scholars in France conduct research among Vietnamese populations, they seek a way of identifying unique characteristics that set them apart. Such labeling may, however, be viewed quite differently by a Vietnamese ethnic association claiming its own unique-ness as a cong dong or communauté.

Social Spaces and Groups Immigrants, ethnic groups, and others will continue to employ the words community or communauté strategically when they are politically useful and, like the Vietnamese man in Clermont-Ferrand, will avoid such terms when they are not. Whether or not anthropologists and other ethnographers should use these terms is the main question I have raised in this

138

Deborah Reed-Danahay

essay. I propose that it is more useful to consider the social space of the people or groups that we study than to use a word with so much baggage as that of community. I briefly draw here upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Bourdieu in this argument about social space.15 Lefebvre wrote that to have a social existence, groups must have a spatial existence—“they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself ” (1991: 129). While Lefebvre was sometimes talking about physical places (the places of social space) his notion is more abstract than that of place-making per se (as in Aguilar-San Juan’s work, referred to earlier). He distinguishes between mental space, physical space, and social space. Lefebvre is, moreover, interested in structural relationships (social relations, relations of production) that generate social space. By calling something a social space and not a community we can try to articulate its dimensions. A different approach to social space was developed by Pierre Bourdieu, who also sees social space as a system of relations. In contrast to Lefebvre, Bourdieu views social space in terms of relations of power based on different forms of capital (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic), rather than primarily as relations of production. For Bourdieu, social space is about social distance or proximity (both in our everyday sense of those terms and in the framework adopted by Bourdieu to identify and map positions of power). He addresses what he calls “symbolic struggles over the perception of the social world” (1989: 20). These struggles, Bourdieu suggests, are enacted through practices deployed to represent a collectivity or an individual (the presentation of self), as “demonstrations whose goal is to exhibit a group, its size, its strength, its cohesiveness, to make it exist visibly” (1989: 20). Symbolic power can also involve systems of naming, classifying, and describing the social world or individuals within it. For Bourdieu, symbolic power is the power to make groups, so that self-proclaimed leaders bring a group into existence by naming themselves as its leader. I propose that immigrants and refugees position themselves in social space as a way of coming into existence as an identifiable ethnic population, and that in order to be seen as a group they must have a spatial existence. When a group uses the term community to describe itself in wider social space, this is a way of making itself visible. The concept of social space can help us move beyond vague references to communities to better understandings of the spatial and temporal practices of immigrants and their positioning in social space. A rural commune can also be viewed in terms of “social space” in ways that do not assume any particular form of sociality existing among the people interacting and residing within it. To label a population with the word community is to overlook issues of power—and issues of exclusion and inclusion. It may also, as I sug-

Confronting “Community”

139

gested earlier in this essay, connote a traditional or less modern quality to the people described (be they rural or ethnic) which can be problematic whether or not this labeling is considered a positive thing. In this chapter, I have argued that there are unfortunate consequences for research when anthropologists identify the group of people and/or the place they study as a community or communauté. This issue can be further complicated when our research participants define their own social group using one of these terms. The meanings of community and communauté have shifted over time in both France and the United States since I first began doing fieldwork in rural France in 1981. As an American anthropologist working in both countries, my perspectives on community/communauté have been influenced by my travels back and forth between France and the United States, and between rural and more urban settings. I suggest that we should describe and analyze the social spaces produced and inhabited by our research participants in ways that interrogate the forms of sociality within them. We should also investigate the ways in which our research participants use and respond to the vocabularies of community in those social spaces, rather than adopt this vocabulary to describe the groups of people we study.

Notes   1. Creed (2006a) usefully points to the ways in which urban and rural applications of community inform each other in the social science literature.   2. See Banton (2007) for a discussion of Weber’s criticism of the concept of ethnic community on the grounds that it was an emic or folk concept.   3. This research, funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, was conducted over a three-year period from 2005 to 2008 and involved a comparative study of Vietnamese (studied by Deborah Reed-Danahay) and Asian Indian (studied by Caroline Brettell) immigrants in Texas. The critique of notions of community that I put forth in this chapter is not part of the joint project, however, and the ideas I express here are my own.   4. In Vietnam, “overseas” Vietnamese (those who have migrated and live outside of Vietnam’s borders) are referred to as Viet Kieu. Although this term is used more frequently among Vietnamese living in France, most of my Vietnamese American research participants reject this term in favor of the phrase cong dong which, they believe, signals their position as a diaspora group that opposes the current regime.   5. For a related discussion of the ways in which teachers talk about the lack of modernity among rural and urban immigrant children in France, see Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt (1991).   6. There have been several recent attempts to unpack and critique various uses of the term community. See especially Amit (2002), Creed (2006), and Amit and Rapport (2002).   7. I was influenced by such works as Bell and Newby (1972); Boissevain and Friedl (1975); Cole (1977); and Williams (1983).

Deborah Reed-Danahay

140

  8. To see a community as a symbolic construction is different from seeing it as “imagined” (Anderson 1985), although both types of approach deal with the emotional component to forms of social belonging.   9. Tönnies’ book Community and Society (2002 [1887]) contrasted older forms of “belonging” based on kinship, place, and sentiment (Gemeinschaft or “community”) with more modern forms based on society (Gesellschaft). There are parallels to Durkheim’s contrast between mechanical and organic solidarity, although Durkheim tends to see more merit in the “modern” forms of solidarity which he labels as organic (see Aldous 1972). 10. Although several scholars have been linked to “communitarianism” (including Robert Putnam and Charles Taylor), the person most associated with this term at present is Amitai Etzioni. See the website for the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University, directed by Etzioni, for more information regarding this approach (http://icps.gwu.edu/). For an interesting reflection upon the original reception and criticism of his book Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al. 1985), often associated with communitarianism, see Robert Bellah (2007). 11. A commune is the smallest administrative unit in France, governed by a mayor and town council. 12. Law 92–125, February 6, 1992 Regarding the Territorial Administration of the Republic http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT 000000722113&dateTexte= 13. It is useful to consider the etymology of these French words. Commune comes from the Latin communis—meaning “that which is common” (see http://www .etymonline.com/index.php?term=commune). And the term communauté, from the Older French communite, comes from the Latin communitas—meaning “public, general, shared by all or many” (see http://www.etymonline.com/index .php?search=communaute&searchmode=none) 14. See Abélès (1999) for an overview of the anthropology of France. 15. See Reed-Danahay (2015) for an overview of anthropological concepts of social space related to sociality.

Bibliography Abélès, Marc. 1999. “How the Anthropology of France has Changed Anthropology in France: Assessing New Directions in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 3. 404–8. Aguilar-San Juan, Karen. 2009. Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Aldous, Joan. 1972. “An Exchange between Durkheim and Tonnies on the Nature of Social Relations.” American Journal of Sociology 77. 1191–1200. Amit, Vered, ed. 2002. Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments. London and New York: Routledge. Amit, Vered and Nigel Rapport. 2002. The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity, and Collectivity. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.

Confronting “Community”

141

Anderson, Benedict. 1985. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arensberg, Conrad M. 1961. “The Community as Object and Sample.” American Anthropologist 63, no. 2. 241–64. Arensberg, Conrad M. and Solon T. Kimball. 1965. Culture and Community. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc. Banton, Michael. 2007. “Weber on Ethnic Communities: A Critique.” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 1. 19–35. Bell, Colin and Howard Newby. 1972. Community Studies: An Introduction to the Sociology of the Local Community. New York: Praeger. Bellah, Robert N. 2007. “Reading and Misreading Habits of the Heart.” Sociology of Religion 68, no. 2. 189–93. Bellah, Robert N. et al. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bernot, Lucien and René Blanchard. 1953. Nouville: Un village français. Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. Boissevain, Jeremy and John Friedl, eds. 1975. Beyond the Community: Social Process in Europe. The Hague: European-Mediterranean Study Group, University of Amsterdam. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1. 14–25. Bousquet, Gisèle L. 1991. Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Brettell, Caroline B. and Deborah Reed-Danahay. 2012. Civic Engagements: The Citizenship Practices of Indian and Vietnamese Immigrants. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chavez, Leo. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cole, John W. 1977. “Anthropology Comes Part-Way Home: Community Studies in Europe.” Annual Review of Anthropology 6. 349–78. Creed, Gerald. 2004. “Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual.” American Anthropologist 106, no. 1. 56–70. Creed, Gerald, ed. 2006. The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Derderian, Richard L. 2003. “Urban Space in the French Imperial Past and the Postcolonial Present: Perspectives from France’s Vietnamese and Algerian Communities.” Asian Europe Journal 1. 75–90. Espiritu, Yen Le. 2006. “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in U.S. Scholarship.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2. 410–33. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Herzfeld, Michael. 2008. “Mere Symbols.” Anthropologica 50, no. 1. 141–55. Jollivet, Marcel and Henri Mendras. 1971. Les collectivités rurales françaises, étude comparative de changement social. Paris: Armand Colin. Le Bras, Gabriel. 1976. L’Eglise et le village. Paris: Flammarion. Le Huu Khoa. 1995. Asiatiques en France: Les expériences d’intégration locale. Paris: L’Harmattan. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

142

Deborah Reed-Danahay

Mendras, Henri. 1967. La Fin des paysans : changement et innovations dans les societés rurales françaises. Paris: S.E.D.E.I.S. Lieu, Nhi. T. 2011. The American Dream in Vietnamese. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rapport, Nigel. 2000. “Community.” In Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts, eds. Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overling. London and New York: Routledge. Raulin, Anne. 2000. L’Ethnique est Quotidien: diasporas, marchés et cultures métropolitaines. Paris: L’Harmattan. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 1996. Education and identity in rural France: the politics of schooling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008 “From the ‘Imagined Community’ to ‘Communities of Practice’: Immigrant Belonging Among Vietnamese Americans.” In Citizenship, Political Engagement, and Belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States, eds. Deborah Reed-Danahay and Caroline B. Brettell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2010. “Citizenship, Immigration, and Embodiment: Vietnamese Americans in North-Central Texas.” In Contested Spaces: Citizenship and Belonging in Contemporary Times, ed. Meenakshi Thapan. Hyderabad, India: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2015. “Social Space: Distance, Proximity, and Thresholds of Affinity.” In Thinking Through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts, ed. Vered Amit. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Reed-Danahay, Deborah and Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt. 1991. “Backward Countryside, Troubled City: Teachers’ Images of Families in Rural and Urban France.” American Ethnologist. Sala Pala, Valerie and Patrick Simon. 2007. Public and Political Debates on Multicultural Crises in France. Report for Emilie. Brussels: European Commission. https://ec .europa.eu/migrant-integration/librarydoc/public-and-political-debates-on-multi cultural-crises-in-france Schnapper, Dominique. 1994. La Communauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation. Paris : Gallimard. ———. 2007 Qu’est-ce que l’intégration ? Paris: Gallimard. Tönnies, Ferdinand. 2002 [1887] Community and Society. Trans. and ed., Charles P. Loomis. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Varenne, Hervé. 1986. “‘Drop in Anytime’: Community and Authenticity in American Everyday Life.” In Symbolizing America, ed. Hervé Varenne. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vu-Renaud, Mong Hang. 2002. Réfugiés Vietnamiens en France: interaction et distinction de la culture confucéenne. Paris: L’Harmattan. Warner, Lloyd. 1963 [1948]. Yankee City. New Haven: Yale University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Society and Culture. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Wylie, Laurence. 1974 [1957] Village in the Vaucluse. Third edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

7 Healing the Community Ethics and ancestry in Orisha religious practices in the United States Stefania Capone

I am no longer deaf, dumb or blind. I am, by the inspiration of our Ancestors and the grace of our Creator, a New Afrikan! The New Afrikan Creed, 1969 (Obadele 1975)

Cultural globalization is often perceived as being a homogenizing process that imposes a “global,” western culture on the rest of the world. This “west and the rest” logic is challenged by studies of religious globalization, which show how other cultural flows—South-South and SouthNorth—also play a pivotal role in globalization. This text aims to analyze the particularities of the globalization of the Orisha religion1 and the reinterpretations engendered by African Americans’ appropriation of African religious practices and their Latin American variants in the United States. To do so, I return to the materials used in my book The Yoruba of the New World (Capone 2005), focusing my attention on the role of “healing” in the religious practices of African Americans following the Orisha religion. This study was inspired by my encounter with Adefunmi, the founder of Oyotunji Village (the first “African” village on North American soil), at the Fifth World Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture (COMTOC) in San Francisco, August 1997. The multiplicity and polysemy of the notion of tradition at the core of the Afro-Brazilian universe (the primary field site for my first research activities) and the variety of references to an “African purity,” which are preserved in the most traditional cult houses in Africa or the Americas, were also prominent in the North American setting. Was it possible, as defenders of the re-Africanization movement claimed (see Capone 2010 and forthcoming), to return to a pure religious

144

Stefania Capone

practice by erasing all the external elements (especially Roman Catholic influences) that supposedly resulted from the history of domination and discrimination? And what led to the process of re-Africanization in ritual practice? My research on Brazilian Candomblé had made me familiar with AfroBrazilian religions’ claims to a fundamental unity based on African origins, claims that have always struck me as somewhat shaky. International forums, chiefly COMTOC, have brought together practitioners of different variants of Orisha worship since the early 1980s to debate the unification and preservation of religious practices of African origin; such encounters have provided the essential locus for the enactment of the very idea of a basic unity of African culture. But here, there exists an opposition between two models of tradition: one defended by ilés (cult houses, a term also referring to their communities of practice) of the diaspora, presenting themselves as the sole depositories of a religious heritage and ancestral knowledge that had been irredeemably lost in contemporary Africa, and another connected with the “Motherland,” the immemorial Africa that persists despite the damage of colonialism and legitimates the return to the roots extoled by re-Africanized cult houses. The creation and development of the Orisha-Voodoo religion since the 1960s seemed to be a prime example of this rediscovery of African roots, in a context where religious engagement also played an overtly political role. I was struck by the fact that African American initiates constantly put forward the concept of healing in their appropriation of the practices composing the Orisha religion. This concept, already present in African American Spiritualist churches, refers to all manner of healing—physical, spiritual, and moral. According to African American initiates’ interpretation of the Orisha religion, the ultimate goal is the spiritual, social, and cultural healing of the African American community, leading toward the resolution of its afflictions, including violence, ignorance, and forgetting its own history. In this text I aim to show how emphasizing a specifically African American ethic, which draws its principles from the body of Ifá knowledge (the main Yoruba divination system), and from prominence accorded to the ancestral cult inspired a community of practitioners to identify as an “ethnic community.” We will see that the revival of ancestor worship was intended to moralize the community of African descendants in the United States through the introduction of an African ethic of which ancestors are the primary guarantors. Unlike the situations in other regional settings, such as Brazil and Cuba, religion in the US is intimately linked to politics, since the development of ritual and cultural practices is intended to raise the consciousness of “Afrikans in America” as members of a nation fighting for self-determination.

Healing the Community

145

From spiritual healing to rediscovering one’s true identity With the first great waves of Cuban immigration to North America following the Castro revolution, new religious practices such as Afro-Cuban Santería (also known as Regla de Ocha) took root in the United States in the 1960s. This religion, born of the encounter between the beliefs of African slaves and those of their masters, venerated entities of predominantly African origin that had been syncretized with Roman Catholic saints. The arrival of Regla de Ocha ritual specialists would put African Americans in contact with religious practices emphasizing African origins for the first time. Some elements of Vodou found their way into New Orleans Spiritualist churches, which were created in Louisiana in the early twentieth century and became quite popular in large cities like Chicago. Yet most of these churches denied any association with Vodou, which was considered akin to witchcraft. Authors such as Zora Neale Hurston (1931: 318–319) have shown, however, that Spiritualist churches offered a genuine protective screen for “hoodoo doctors” and their adepts.2 Like Vodou, these churches emphasized the importance of mysteries and secrets in their religion. They were known for healing and prophesy, considered to be “two gifts of the spirit” (Jacobs 2005: 333). Spiritualist churches brought together different denominations that came out of the schism within a church founded by Mother Leafy Anderson in early twentieth-century New Orleans. These churches, which rapidly spread to the northern United States during the Depression (Frazier 1974: 67), offered consultations to help the faithful resolve all manner of problems in a process called “healing advice” (Kaslow and Jacobs 1981). Spiritualist churches took up Baptist and Methodist hymns and Roman Catholic symbols, such as candles and statues of saints. In the 1950s and 1960s, confronted with segregation and reduced possibilities for social ascension, these churches promised their followers an improvement in social status through the practice of specific rituals and a fundamental change of attitude, defined as “positive thinking.” Most Spiritualist churches were exclusively black, with the exception of those in New York where Puerto Ricans and other Latinos had joined African Americans. The presence of mediums, also known as “messengers,” among the faithful brought these churches closer to white Spiritism.3 The mediums possessed the gift of prophecy and were able to read people, revealing aspects of their pasts or futures. They transmitted messages during religious sessions (called “prophecy and healing services” or “deliverance services”) and also gave private consultations to people who were not members of the church, responding to all manner of problems. In the 1930s and 1940s, reacting to the confusion between these churches and Spiritism, several groups changed their names from Spiritualist to Spiri-

146

Stefania Capone

tual to set themselves more clearly apart from such practices (Baer and Singer 1992: 196). Nevertheless, the resemblance remained strong, since (at least in the New Orleans churches) the medium could be possessed, not just by the Holy Spirit, but also by a variety of “spirit guides” that might include “deceased relatives, individuals from the Old or New Testament,” and even Native American spirits, such as the spirit guide Black Hawk (Jacobs 1989: 47). The actions of these spirits did not have a collective impact: Spiritualist churches did not advocate a challenge of the status quo, and healing remained at the individual level. Political conflict was glossed over by the emphasis on the individual and the relationships he or she had with other people. The everyday problems African Americans endured were portrayed not as the result of a perverse system such as racial segregation but as the consequence of a spiritual imbalance in the individual. The individual’s moral responsibility was thus directly engaged in the treatment of his or her problems (Jacobs 2005). Other churches at the time did combine religious practice with a fundamental critique of the American system. The imbrication of the religious and the political had been a characteristic of the “Black Church” from the very beginning. Yet Protestant denominations left little space for addressing the identity questions that the African American community was probing so deeply. Some intellectuals such as Edward Blyden (1887 [1967]) believed that the African American community’s problems could only be healed through the adoption of Islam, which was considered to be the natural religion of Africans and blacks of the diaspora. Adoption of this religion would allow the image of black people to be dissociated from that of the “pagan fetishist” commonly stuck on them at the time, while taking a permanent distance from the religions of their former white masters. By the early twentieth century, religious movements like the Black Jews and the Moorish Science Temple, had begun to associate religious engagement with the quest for African Americans’ true origins. Claiming a Muslim identity, the Moorish Science Temple’s project would allow erasure of the trauma of slavery with the rediscovery of the African man’s original identity: “Afro-Asian” (Lincoln 1961: 162). For some African Americans conversion to Islam was a step toward a re-evaluation of African American history. They were no longer cast as descendants of an inferior people, reduced to slavery by whites of a superior civilization, but were identified as members of a free people, North African Muslims. The Islamic religion thus became the black people’s “original religion” (Gardell 1996: 37), predating slavery and forced conversion to Christianity. For the first time, a religious movement recommended that its followers rejoin their true origin—and their ancestors—by adopting a lifestyle in harmony with “the blood of the race” (Lincoln 1961: 55).

Healing the Community

147

The Moorish Science Temple was the first movement to preach a black Islam, opening the door to other movements, such as the Ahmadyya Movement in America, Fard Muhammad, and Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam (see Lincoln 1961, Gardell 1996). Yet members of the Nation of Islam, the best known of these movements, did not defend a newly invented identity. The movement offered instead the return to an identity that white domination had repressed. All signs of American identity had to be abandoned, starting with the institution of specific ceremonies to replace Anglo-American names as the main symbol of slavery. Critiquing American society and claiming a new identity closer to the true essence of their African origins thus became constants in North American Black Nationalist circles.

Oyotunji Village, a Yoruba kingdom in the United States The influx of Cubans to the United States following the Cuban revolution led some Black Nationalist activists to identify with African gods and Yoruba kings and queens, through the adoption of a religious identity making reference to the sub-Saharan cultures from which most North American slaves had come. Starting in the 1960s, some African Americans would gradually join ilés (cult houses) practicing Santería, first in New York then nationwide. At the time, cultural nationalism, advocated by activists such as Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka, defended the idea that African Americans could only free themselves from the yoke of oppression by rediscovering their original culture—their African culture. Since the late 1950s the decolonization of Africa had come to symbolize the future emancipation of the African American community in activist circles. The Afro-Asian identity advanced by the Nation of Islam (among other groups) thus found its match in the rediscovery of African cultures and the new Pan-Africanist boom, which was incarnated by African American cultural nationalism. For members of the movement, Afro-Cuban religions were a unique opportunity to rediscover African beliefs that had been forgotten in the United States. Walter “Serge” King (1928–2005) was the first Black Nationalist activist to be initiated into an Afro-Cuban religion; he would come to be known as Baba Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I, King of Oyotunji Village, the “Yoruba” village he founded in South Carolina in 1970 (Clarke 2004; Capone 2005). Born in 1928 in Detroit, his parents had encouraged him to study African culture from a very young age. His father, originally from Georgia, was an activist in Marcus Garvey’s movement and a member of the Moorish Science Temple, the religious nationalist movement that preached a black Islam adapted to African American

148

Stefania Capone

needs. In the 1950s King began to study African dance, joining the troupe of Katherine Dunham, a prominent American dancer who played a very important role in the diffusion of Afro-Cuban religious practices in the United States (Capone 2005: 91–94). In 1952, King went to Egypt to rediscover the origins of African civilization, and he visited Haiti two years later. Upon his return he decided to found a religious organization called the Order of Damballah Hwedo, named after the serpent god in Haitian Vodou. Members, who were predominantly Black Nationalists, gathered to practice Akan and Dahomean religions originating in Ghana and Benin. King changed his name at the time, henceforth going by the name Nana Oseijeman, Nana being an Akan title signifying “honorable chief.”4 In the late 1950s Cuban practitioners of Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions began arriving in New York. King, already quite drawn to religions of African origin, became convinced that he must be one with his origins, adopting an African cultural identity, to be able to exercise true leadership within the Black Nationalist movement. Cuban Santería was the only religion that emphasized a connection with sub-Saharan cultures (Yoruba culture in particular), contrasting starkly with the messages of religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, which offered identification with a monotheistic religion as legitimate as Christianity but without any direct reference to black Africa. After coming into contact with practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, King decided to go to Cuba to be initiated. At the time, the Civil Rights movement was led by ministers of black Christian churches. King, a Black Nationalist, believed that his initiation in an “African”5 religion was a prerequisite that would authorize him to speak in the name of African Americans, by expressing “ontological questions that the Christian clergy could not understand” (Capone 2005: 130). For King and his comrades in the endeavor, political work could no longer move forward without parallel cultural redemption work. Indeed, Black Nationalism’s platform in the 1960s had three main aims: the cultural redemption of African Americans, the promotion of racial separatism as the only solution to white racism and discrimination, and the creation of an independent Black state on American soil. Walter King was initiated into Santería on 26 August 1959 in Matanzas, Cuba, by a santero named Sonagba, a member of the famed AfroCuban religious lineage of Ferminita Gómez. King opened his first cult house, the Shangó Temple, upon his return to New York; and in 1960 he inaugurated the Yoruba Temple in Harlem. His Yoruba name at the time, Adefunmi, meant “the crown that was given to me.” In Harlem, King developed a training program that stressed the historical and cultural connections uniting African Americans with Africans, paying special attention both to the emergence of the Black Nationalist movement and its

Healing the Community

149

cultural branch in the United States and to the birth of independent nations in sub-Saharan Africa. To reinforce the connection between African Americans and their African siblings, Afro hairstyles and African clothing were encouraged. External signs of this Africanness were overtly displayed as a political act. The goal was to make African Americans aware of their heritage and culture, which Adefunmi held to be primarily Yoruba, by putting an end to centuries of cultural amnesia. This rediscovery of African cultural heritage led members of the Yoruba Temple to re-name their Harlem neighborhood “New Oyo” after the main symbol of the Yoruba empire’s greatness—its capital Oyo, from which thousands of Yoruba were enslaved after it was sacked by the Fulani around 1830. The creation of the Yoruba Temple was a first step toward the regeneration of Yoruba cultural heritage, a project many cultural nationalist activists identified with. Their primary aim was to make their African cultural identity visible: members of the Yoruba Temple started parading in the streets of Harlem wearing African clothing, carrying Orisha statues, conducting ceremonies, and playing sacred drums in public. This new visibility of practices of African origin was bound to upset the Cuban santeros of New York, who—afraid of being repressed by the American government—were accustomed to keeping their ceremonies secret. On the other hand, African American practitioners wanted to shout their new identity from the rooftops, and they conducted a sometimes rather aggressive proselytizing campaign to convince their African American brothers and sisters that it was possible to reclaim their African origins. Religion had become a path leading to the rediscovery of one’s genuine cultural identity.

Reinterpreting Santería from an African American perspective The main African American changes to Santería religious practices were lifting the secrecy of rituals and removing Catholic influences. For African Americans to accept it, the religion had to be adapted to Protestant culture, especially to the Baptist faith that predominated among black Christians. Catholic saints, which had been symbolically represented simply as white masks over the faces of black gods, were no longer needed in this new setting, since Catholicism was not the dominant religion in the United States and African religion was no longer forced to hide, as it had been during slavery in Cuba. But practicing an African religion also gave Black Nationalist activists a model for action in the world. Worshipping an Orisha amounted to venerating one’s own personhood by re-establishing a close connection

150

Stefania Capone

with the cosmic forces and energies that structure the world, a spiritual connection that would bring about the “spiritual healing” of the African American people by restoring their own cultural and social references. To return to their African roots, practitioners had to purify the religious practices brought over by Cubans to safeguard the dominant Yoruba model. To better signal the split with Cuban santeros, Adefunmi chose a new name for his religion that emphasized the old connection between Yoruba and Dahomean religions: Orisha-Voodoo. The first step in renewing ties with one’s African origins at the Yoruba Temple was a naming ceremony to abandon one’s old slave name for a new African name. Other religious movements associated with Black Nationalism, such as the Nation of Islam, had already been changing names for some time. After the naming ceremony, new temple members got African clothing. Those wishing to pursue the spiritual path first received elekés, the sacred necklaces of Cuban Santería, and then received the “warriors,” the Orisha deities Eleguá, Ogun, Oshosi, and Osun, in the initial santero ritual for individual protection. Adefunmi declared that if it was natural for descendants of Europeans to preserve their motherland’s traditions, African Americans likewise should “re-Africanize” their lives, customs, names, religion, and clothing6—thus freeing themselves from the external signs of white subjugation. Following the closing of the Yoruba Temple in late 1965, Adefunmi began to plan the founding of an African village according to a political project for an “African cultural restoration.” In 1969 Adefunmi left New York for South Carolina to devote himself to religious activities, and in April 1970 he conducted his first initiations of some of the African Americans who had settled with his family on an old farm, where they had begun building altars for the deities. The first village was built on a South Carolina island in 1970, and two years later it was moved to the Sheldon area, in Beaufort County. It was the first attempt to establish a “black territory” on American soil, completely dedicated to the worship of African gods. The choice of South Carolina was particularly significant since it was part of the subjugated territory that the Republic of New Afrika, a parallel government founded by North American Black Nationalists in the 1960s, hoped to liberate to form a black republic. In 1968 Adefunmi had been named one of the Republic of New Afrika’s Ministers of Culture in the movement’s “provisional government,” which aimed to assemble 5 million African Americans on the territory of the “former” states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina in reparation for slavery and discrimination. This independence program was also associated with the New Afrikan Creed, which advocated new social relations based on brotherhood, mutual respect, and honoring exemplary behavior,

Healing the Community

151

through which the individual would become a true reflection of his or her community. Those defending the New Afrikan Creed stated that no free people should practice the religion of another people, nor willingly accept another culture. Religion was intimately connected to the history of a people, making a universal religion impossible. Christianity thus could not be considered to be a universal religion because it was the product of white history and part of the oppression of black people. Consequently, New Afrikans owed it to themselves to study the sacred literature of West Africa and master the rituals of its belief systems, especially those of the Yoruba, Fon, and Akan, in order to reinforce the moral and spiritual foundations of the “black nation” fighting for self-determination. In August 1972 Nana Yao Oparebea Dinizulu, the father of the Akan movement in the United States, invited Adefunmi to join his dance troupe’s African tour. The invitation offered him the opportunity to correct the destiny revealed during his initiation in Matanzas, Cuba. During the itá divination on the third day of his initiation, Adefunmi had learned that his odù—the symbol that reveals an individual’s destiny in the Ifá system—was Oshé Meji in a negative configuration (osogbo), so the Cuban santero forbade him from initiating others. When he started to conduct initiations at Oyotunji Village, Adefunmi had reinterpreted this ban as being a manifestation of Cuban santeros’ discrimination against African Americans. The trip to Africa allowed him to legitimate his position visà-vis the community of Orisha practitioners in the United States, further exacerbating the split with Cubans. Adefunmi traveled from Ghana to Nigeria, where he was initiated into the cult of Ifá and became a babalawo, a divinatory ritual specialist. Upon his return from Nigeria in 1972, Adefunmi was made Oba (king) of Oyotunji Village, whose name meant “Rebirth of Oyo” (Òyó-tún-jí, literally “Oyo re-awakened”), referencing once again the main symbol of Yoruba grandeur.

The rediscovery of the cult of the ancestors, guardians of an African ethic The most significant change to the practice of Cuban Santería, however, was the introduction of ancestor worship. Since the ancestor cult had fallen out of practice in Cuba, Cuban Santería had a gap that North American practitioners would exploit. For the “Yoruba” of Oyotunji Village, most problems confronting African Americans were the direct result of having abandoned the cult of the ancestors and funerary rituals according to African custom. They believe that because African ancestors were not allowed into the Christian paradise, “reserved for whites,” they were

152

Stefania Capone

held in a restless state of limbo causing all manner of problems for their descendants. Following Adefunmi’s trip to Nigeria, the village created an Egúngún society, devoted to masks of the ancestors, in 1973 and in the early 1980s started planning an Egúngún Festival.7 The annual ceremonies ended with offerings at the Atlantic shore in honor of all those who perished in the Middle Passage. This revitalization of the ancestor cult allowed continuity to be established between the African past and the American present, reforging connections with African lineages and symbolically erasing the fundamental rupture of African American history: the slave trade and slavery. But the central position given to ancestrality also justified a racialized interpretation of religion of Yoruba origin, an interpretation that was already the norm in the Yoruba Temple in New York and was one of the reasons behind the definitive split with Cuban Santería.8 Yet this emphasis on ancestrality and Egúngún (or Egún) worship are at the roots of a reinterpretation of the Yoruba religion that places religious healing in the foreground. Oyotunji Village is not the only setting where exploring one’s history, both personal and collective, was connected to resolving problems arising from centuries of violence, discrimination, and racism. At the Fifth World Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture n San Francisco, August 1997, an African American initiate in the Yoruba religion named Michael d’Oshosi devoted his presentation to the question of ancestrality and the presence of whites in the religion. He posited that there is a specific type of Orisha, the “guardian Orisha,” that differs from the “master of the head,” the main Orisha to which novices are generally initiated. He described how these guardian Orisha are ancestors who transmit a particular type of sacred energy called “ancestral ashé” to their descendants. Only African Americans can accumulate this kind of ashé, since only they are descended from Africans. Whites initiated in the Orisha religion thus cannot reach upper positions in the religious hierarchy because they lack this ancestral ashé. In fact, whites’ ancestors are “adversarial Egún,” since they are the spirits of former slave masters who cannot be venerated alongside African ancestors, tormenters alongside their victims. The prominence given to ancestral connections proves to be fundamental, since it deeply disrupts the relationship between the individual and religion, a relationship that henceforth depends on genealogical ties. With the revitalization of the ancestor cult, African Americans rediscovered the African way of transmitting tutelary divinity along a single lineage that had been broken by slavery. Santería, like most religions of African origin in the Americas, had replaced the idilé (the lineage) with the ilé (the worship group)9 by substituting a religious lineage for the biological. But in order to be able to recreate ties with their African lineages, people had to

Healing the Community

153

rediscover their family histories, and this need led to the appearance of a new form of divination at Oyotunji Village called “roots divination.” This divination, conducted only once in a follower’s lifetime, identifies where his or her African lineage is from, the clan’s name and main occupation, factors that led to his or her ancestors’ enslavement, and their experiences during the Middle Passage. Most roots divination sessions establish a direct connection with Africa (with the Yoruba or the former Dahomean kingdom) and call for “cultural redemption” (Clarke 2004). Roots divination (or d’afa oro idilé10) became an established practice that helped the African American community to fill the emptiness left by the slave trade’s destruction of family structure: “As a result of Oba Adefunmi’s work, Africans of North America can now fill this gap by coming to some of our priests to better understand their genetic propensities” (Ifatunji 2003). During a roots divination, for example, a person consulting the deities may discover that he or she is a descendant within a lineage devoted to Orisha worship, and consequently genetically predisposed to spiritual engagement. This type of divination also allowed a repositioning with respect to Cubans because, with the symbolic reconstruction of ties with traditional Yoruba lineages, African American Orisha practitioners in the United States could claim a monopoly on the “real Yoruba tradition,” making the experience of slavery reversible and delegitimizing Cuban Santería practices. Roots divination thus recasts African American history by shifting “healing” from the individual level, as in Spiritualist churches, to the collective level. This healing through roots divination was for an entire people—a healing that was meant to be racial since it was also a response to the ravages of racism and discrimination in American society.

From religious to racial healing Linking religion and healing was not new in the United States, nor was it limited to Spiritualist churches. The idea that religious practices have a therapeutic impact on believers was already found, for example, in the New Thought movement at the end of the nineteenth century. This movement proposed correcting the way followers understood illness and misfortune, holding that such problems could only be resolved by understanding that the human being was intimately connected to the “Divine Infinite Intelligence.” The healing of individual or collective ills was thus the consequence of a change in the believer’s attitude. Responsibility for this healing was clearly placed on the individual. Belief in the possibility of faith healing is also present in many Protestant denominations, especially those practicing the laying on of hands. In

154

Stefania Capone

the early twentieth century, Pentecostal and Charismatic movements attracted followers from the Holiness and Spiritualist churches who already believed in divine healing. Likewise, Christian Science defends a vision of healing that takes place through understanding the perfection of the divine creation. Members of this faith believe that suffering is only an illusion and that healing depends on acquiring a new way of understanding reality. Correcting how one thinks leads to physical and spiritual healing (Koliss 2001). In parallel to the personal development movements like New Age that blossomed beginning in the 1960s, healing services and circles multiplied in many North American churches (see Barnes and Sered 2005, Mitchem and Townes 2008). African American magazines such as Essence and Ebony frequently presented Afrocentric versions of alternative therapies like yoga and Asian martial arts. The International Association of Black Yoga Teachers offered a trip to Cuba to practice yoga, associating it with capoeira, a danced martial art of African origin practiced in Brazil. Likewise, meditation became a possible path to self-realization and discovering one’s nature, especially highlighting connections with ancient Egypt and glorious African civilizations. But the notion of “healing” does not simply refer to physical healing. Although some churches pursue physical healing through spiritual means, Oyotunji Village’s approach put spiritual and moral healing in the foreground, a healing that would take place through spiritual as well as political means. This healing process is simultaneously individual and collective, since the individual can only be fulfilled within his or her community of origin. Already in 1969 the New Afrikan Creed declared: “I believe in the family and the community and the community as a family, and I will work to make this concept live. I believe in the community as more important than the individual” (Obadele 1975: 153). In order to heal the African American community, power relations in American society also had to be redefined. The main factor in the oppression subjugating blacks was the lack of control over their lives. The idea of empowerment thus requires an attempt to regain one’s voice, to lay claim to one’s own cultural and social heritage and one’s own history. Healing the community demands recognizing the social and spiritual roots of the malaise and seeking a holistic and balanced relationship both in oneself and with others, while conquering spaces of freedom and power to gain self-esteem and respect in American society. As the only religious institutions that are entirely managed and controlled by African Americans, African American churches became prominent places for racial healing to be carried out. The notion of racial healing is also invoked by several North American civic and religious organizations. The Mennonite Church USA works to

Healing the Community

155

resolve problems resulting from racism with “restorative justice.” The W. K. Kellogg Foundation recently launched Community-based Racial Healing Grants, putting 75 million dollars into its America Healing initiative. Such healing may also aim to put humanity back into balance with nature by restoring a delicate ecological equilibrium. One example lies in the ceremonies New Orleans Vodou groups held to ask the forgiveness of Ocean spirits following the environmental tragedy caused by the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The main officiant, the mambo Sallie Ann Glassman, interpreted their rituals dedicated to Lasiren, the sea deity: “Maybe in healing her, we will heal ourselves. We are all connected. We are all in this together.” She also conducted rituals of protection against hurricanes by evoking another powerful lwa, Erzulie Dantor. This deity is said to have driven Hurricane Katrina off its projected path, averting even greater damage. This kind of ritual is also very common among santeros, as observed during the October 2005 arrival of Hurricane Wilma in Miami, when propitiatory rituals were held to protect the city and its population. Thus the notion of healing can refer to the idea of a return to balance, within the individual and between the individual and his or her social circle, as well as with surrounding society and nature. In this sense, it requires reforging a connection with one’s own history and past to better prepare the future. But to attain racial healing, “Afrikans in America” need to find a lost ethic that only the ancestor cult and the study of Ifá sacred knowledge can provide.

An African ethic to “heal” the ills of the African American community One example of the central role of ancestrality in the discovery of an “African” ethic was offered in the speech of Baba Ifatunji at the Eighth World Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture, held in Havana in 2003. Baba Ifatunji was initiated at Oyotunji Village in 1983; later that year he helped found the Ilé Ifá Jalumí in Chicago, the first Egbé Egúngún(house dedicated to the ancestor cult) in the United States. He holds that Yoruba history and the writings of Ifá allow comprehension of why “the Africans of North America” lost all cultural connection with Africa. Ifatunji began his speech by quoting the odù Oturopon Meji, who told the story of a Yoruba named Oyepolu who was separated from his parents at a very young age and thus no longer knew the culture and religious rituals of his people. Oyepolu’s life was very hard. In a consultation with Ifá, he was counseled to go to his ancestors’ grave. Oyepolu did, and his life improved.

156

Stefania Capone

Oyepolu’s story is a perfect metaphor for the history of African Americans in the United States, allowing the incorporation of African American historical elements into the interpretation of the odùs, the signs and configurations of the Ifá divinatory system. Knowledge of one’s own history becomes the supreme ideal to which all African Americans should aspire. The first rift suffered by the African of North America was separation from his African family under the regime of slavery. Like Oyepolu, the African American does not know his father, has no family or points of reference. Ifatunji believes that African Americans should venerate their “cultural Egúngún,” incarnations of the “African ancestral soul” and that to reconnect with them each individual should learn his or her own culture and study his or her historical and ethnic heritage (2003). The rediscovery of an African ancestrality is intimately linked to the attribution of an ethical character to the Orisha religion. This emphasis on ancestrality means drastically modifying the Afro-Cuban religious practices that were at the origin of Orisha-Voodoo’s development. In Cuba, Santería deities are not necessarily good or bad, since their behavior toward humans always depends on humans’ actions. Any transgression of an alliance with a deity engenders a negative reaction, which could even go so far as the supreme punishment: sickness or death. In addition, when an Orisha works for his or her follower to solve everyday problems, the results are not always good because the happiness of one may bring about the misfortune of another. Recommendations that should guide followers’ conduct in society are found in the patakís, the myths associated with the body of Ifá knowledge in the Afro-Cuban tradition, but in daily practice ethical concerns are not necessarily part of a new initiate’s apprenticeship. Among practitioners of Orisha-Voodoo, on the other hand, ethics holds a central position. We have already seen that one of the main goals behind the development of a Yoruba religion for African Americans is the healing of African American society. Ancestor worship as revived at Oyotunji aims to moralize the community of the descendants of Africans in America, since the ancestors are the guardians of an African ethics. If the priest has a duty to be a community leader, it is because without religion, without an ethics, there is no community. The role of a Yoruba priest in restructuring his community thus becomes foundational. He must take a leadership role to help rebuild African culture in North America: The expectation of service priests is that we are able to help more than just ourselves. If we are not aware of the past four hundred years of … social, political, economic and cultural background, we could misdiagnose [our people’s] problem. Egúngún priesthood for Africans of North America endeavors to prepare its initiates for an accurate and useful diagnosis of our kin people. (Ifatunji 2003)

Healing the Community

157

This diagnosis leads to a healing of the community that is spiritual as well as social and cultural. The subject is no longer the individual, as in AfroCuban religions, but the entire community. For this healing work to succeed, the ancient sacred Yoruba writings—the body of Ifá knowledge—had to be reinterpreted in light of the modern-day needs of the African American community. There has been a proliferation of works written by North American authors or Yoruba living in the United States proposing a sort of native theology based on reading the odùs, the signs of the Ifá divinatory system. The Yoruba oral tradition is inscribed in the divinatory literature, especially the itàn (histories) that serve as models for the African American community. But any divinatory process is open to multiple interpretations. Some interpretations of these texts are thought to be legitimate because they come from African Americans who, moreover, are engaged in the struggle to restore African culture. Maulana Karenga is a case in point: he developed an interpretation of the Ifá odù based on the precepts of Kawaida philosophy, which he defined as a “synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world … in the ongoing quest to become and be the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense” (Karenga 1999: iii–iv). His text aimed “to present the ethical teachings of the odú in the language of modern moral discourse while at the same time preserving and building on its distinctiveness as an ancient body of moral literature capable of framing and inspiring modern ethical philosophical reflection” (ibid.: iii). Based on the Kawaida tradition, Karenga suggests a dialogue with African culture to better understand the impact of what it has to teach and its significance for the African American community. The tradition is thus considered to be in a constant process of reinterpretation—not just to understand it but also to grasp how its concepts can be applicable in the current-day setting. To this end, Karenga proposes “a Kawaida or African American form of Ifá tradition” that would allow a shift from a purely divinatory tradition to an essentially ethical interpretation (ibid.: iv–v). A reading of Ifá knowledge according to Kawaida’s philosophy would, then, emphasize: the four fundamental pillars of the larger African ethical tradition: the dignity and rights of the human person; the well-being and flourishing of family and community; the integrity and value of the environment; and the reciprocal solidarity and common interests of humanity. (ibid: xi)

Such a reading makes the body of Ifá knowledge the Book par excellence, the reservoir of ancestral ethics and wisdom. Additionally, initiation into the Orisha religion, at least in the United States, involves pursuing an ideal: the development of ìwà pèlé, good char-

Stefania Capone

158

acter. Having ìwà pèlé means respecting one’s elders, not seeking personal wealth, and putting one’s personal interests aside for the good of the community. It also means reconnecting with one’s origins, rediscovering a glorious past, and establishing ancestor worship, because without ancestors there can be no community of the descendants of Africans. Yoruba priests’ and priestesses’ role is thus as political as it is religious. For Adefunmi, politics and religion are heavily intertwined, since “politics is the highest religion” (Adefunmi 1993). The African American community is the instrument of this spiritual and social healing. But religion is first and foremost a political act, and the cultural redemption laying the groundwork for political autonomy plays out at the family level. For Orisha-Voodoo practitioners, the family is the main conduit making it possible to reorganize the black nation and giving direction to the dream of an African American community.

Conclusions We have seen that the notion of healing is particularly complex, referring as much to physical healing as it does to moral and spiritual healing. It can designate the healing of a physical illness, with the permanent disappearance of symptoms, but it can also mean learning to live with something that cannot be changed, like psychological trauma or incurable illness (Barnes and Sered 2005: 10). The notion of healing also refers to restoring the connection between all the components of your being, including ties to your own history and culture. To heal means to repair relations with others, your family, the people you frequent, your ancestors, your community, and even your planet. Barnes and Sered (ibid.) rightly remind us that religious healing’s objective is often stated in non-medical terms: rituals aim to heal, not cure. Healing is the result of a process of reinterpreting the causes and meanings of individual or collective suffering. Its ultimate result should be a deep restructuring of social relationships through full acceptance of an ethic that may be helpful in the fight against the structural violence afflicting both individuals and social bodies. Illness is thus the direct manifestation of certain social forces, and healing is a way to counter those forces and their consequences in individual lives. What matters to African American practitioners of Orisha-Voduo is not just the resolution of everyday problems but also a reorganization of their lived experience through the incorporation of a new set of African values and principles that allow them to reinterpret their place and role in American society by introducing a new frame of reference. Developing an ethical approach based on religious practices of African origin is in continuity with other African American traditions aiming to moralize

Healing the Community

159

the lives of the descendants of Africans in the United States: the ritual of Kwanzaa, created by Maulana Karenga in 1966, fully incarnates this desire to establish a religious tradition rich with ethical precepts completely apart from monotheistic religions, Christian ones in particular (Karenga 1988). In their self-proclaimed role as a chosen people with a mission to redeem all African descendants in the diaspora, Yoruba-Americans reconnect with an ethic that was already at work in movements like the Nation of Islam and African American traditions like Kwanzaa. They share a core perception of the unity of the African American family reaching back to genealogical roots, since they believe that a people without ties to its ancestors cannot build its future. The Yoruba American movement is thus part of the long history of the struggle of African American people, since the revival of the ancestor cult allows continuity to be established between the African past and an American present. The healing process—both spiritual and racial—should let the African American community overcome its malaise and in so doing, remedy some of the most pernicious ills eating away at America.

Notes Translated from the French by Juliette Rogers.   1. With this term I designate all forms of worship venerating the Orisha, the Yoruba gods, both in Africa and in the Americas. This expression began to take hold during the international encounters organized by the leaders of regional variants of the Orisha religion (Nigerian, Cuban, Brazilian, Trinidadian, and others), especially during the World Yoruba Congress (COMTOC), where an effort was made to build a shared vision of their religious practice (Argyriadis and Capone 2011). On the COMTOC, see Capone (2005: 283–297).   2. “Hoodoo” is another term for Vodou in Louisiana; for more on New Orleans Vodou, see Tallant (1983 [1946]).   3. The existence of two words in English denoting spirit-based practices—spiritualism and spiritism—only exacerbated confusion between the two movements.   4. People change their names upon initiation and the assumption of ritual responsibilities. King’s new name would be changed again upon his initiation into Santería and the founding of the Yoruba Temple and, subsequently, of Oyotunji Village.   5. In this attention to Africanness we can see a cultural misunderstanding that facilitated African Americans’ adoption of these religions. For Cubans, Santería was above all an expression of their Cuban cultural heritage—a Cuban, Latino religion. But for Black Nationalist activists, Santería was an African religion, thus naturally associated with African descendants in the diaspora. This difference in interpretation lies behind their break from Cubans and the creation of Oyotunji Village.   6. I have analyzed the re-Africanization movement and its political and ritual issues elsewhere (Capone 2010 and forthcoming).

Stefania Capone

160

  7. The Yoruba term egúngún is sometimes replaced with a contracted form, égún. Both designate the masks of the ancestors. But in Cuban Santería, the term egún (sometimes written eggun) also refers to the disembodied spirits, dead who are not necessarily part of any particular biological or spiritual family.   8. For some time now, Santería (like Brazilian Candomblé) has ceased to be an “ethnic” religion and is open to all, regardless of racial or social origin.   9. The Yoruba term ìdílé designates the patrilineal clan, a group of descendants from a common ancestor. Among the Yoruba, Orisha are usually inherited within lineages. The term ilé, on the other hand, designates the house, and by extension in Cuban and Brazilian usage, the cult house. 10. From dáfá, “to consult the Ifá oracle,” and ìdílé, “lineage descending from the same ancestor” (Abraham 1958).

References Abraham, R. C. 1958. Dictionary of Modern Yoruba. London: University of London Press. Adefunmi, Oseijeman. 1993. Keynote Address. Delivered at Columbia University 16 January 1993. http://www.jalumi.com/articles/adefunmi_newyork_address.htm, accessed 17 march 2014. Argyriadis, Kali and Stefania Capone, eds. 2011. La religion des orisha: Un champ social transnational en pleine recomposition. Paris: Hermann Editions. Baer, Hans A. and Merrill Singer. 1992. African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Barnes, Linda L. and Susan S. Sered, eds. 2005. Religion and Healing in America. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blyden, Edward W. 1967 [1887]. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Capone, Stefania. 2005. Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: Religion, ethnicité et nationalisme noir aux Etats-Unis. Paris: Karthala. ———. 2010 [1999]. Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomblé, trans Lucy L. Grant. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ———. Forthcoming. “Reafricanisation in Afro-Brazilian Religions. Rethinking Religious Syncretism.” In The Brill Handbook of Contemporary Religions in Brazil, eds. S. Engler and B. Schimdt. Leiden: Brill. Clarke, Kamari M. 2004. Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Frazier, Edward Franklin. 1974 [1963]. The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books. Gardell, Mattias. 1996. In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1931. “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44: 317–417. Ifatunji, Baba. 2003. “Fufu and bar-b-que: Africans of America in Egungun.” Paper presented at the Eighth World Congress on the Orisa Tradition and Culture, Havana, Cuba, 7–13 July 2003. (http://www.jalumi.com/articles/fufubbq.htm)

Healing the Community

161

Jacobs, Claude F. 1989. “Spirit Guides and Possession in the New Orleans Black Spiritual Churches.” Journal of American Folklore 102: 45–67. Jacobs, Claude F. 2005. “Rituals of Healing in African American Spiritual Churches.” In Religion and Healing in America, eds. Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karenga, Maulana R. 1988. The African American Holiday of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. ———. 1999. Odù Ifá: The ethical teachings. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Kaslow, Andrew J. and Claude Jacobs. 1981. Prophecy, Healing, and Power: The AfroAmerican Spiritual Churches of New Orleans. Study for the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and the National Park Service, Department of Anthropology and Geography, University of New Orleans. Koliss, Kathryn. 2001. “Healing encounters in two communities: African American Protestantism and Christian Science.” In Religious Healing in Boston: First Findings, eds. Susan Sered and Linda L. Barnes. Cambridge MA: Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, The Divinity School. Lincoln, C. Eric. 1961. The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Mitchem, Stephanie Y. and Emilie M. Townes, eds. 2008. Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life. Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Obadele, Imari Abubakari. 1975. Foundations of the Black Nation. Detroit: House of Songhay. Tallant, Robert 1983 [1946]. Voodoo in New Orleans. Gretna LA: Pelican Publishing Co.

8 Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers Beyond the trauma of 9/11 Anne Raulin

The concept of trauma has been developing over the last century, initially in connection with European historical events. It is indelibly rooted in the horror of the Great War, followed by that of the Holocaust. In the United States, the nosology of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which took shape in the wake of the Vietnam War and movements denouncing sexual abuse, was formalized by its appearance in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the American psychiatric reference manual. In the 1990s this symptomatology was also established in Europe and France, in connection with the rash of terrorist attacks that shook the continent at the time. Indeed, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman observed that this class of trauma was so completely adopted that its acronym, PTSD, was not even translated out of its Englishlanguage configuration. Does this reflect a globalization of trauma, of its causes and its medical interpretation? Or perhaps a feeling of simultaneity, even solidarity, among all human beings? Generally speaking, a new discourse on the relationship between the human and the inhuman is manifest in these conceptions: “Trauma is both the product of an experience of inhumanity and the proof of the humanity of those who have endured it,” as Fassin and Rechtman put it (2009: 20). Strengthened by this awareness and by advances in knowledge, the scale of psychological counseling for trauma resulting from the 11 September 2001 attacks was massive, if not excessive. No fewer than 9,000 therapists were mobilized to listen to thousands of New Yorkers who were traumatized by having seen the towers fall, witnessed people jumping from windows, been caught up in dust clouds, stepped over bodies, been stuck in elevators, run miles in a state of shock, had to move or change jobs, and/or lost close colleagues and friends. This therapeutic mobiliza-

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

163

tion, including one initiative dubbed Project Liberty, was not without its own problems—including for the therapists themselves, as Karen Seeley (2005) found in her study. Many were not trained to handle this kind of situation and had only a passing knowledge of PTSD symptomology: they had to train themselves rapidly to avoid compounding problems by using unsuitable classic methods. But most of all, many of them did not know how (or were unable) to protect themselves from the “emotional contagion” stemming from their exposure to these accounts. This vulnerability arose because they belonged to the same “urban body” and were all also stricken and weakened themselves: “The injured social body inhabited the clinical consulting room” (Seeley 2005: 275). Consequently, the patient/therapist relationship was seriously challenged by the collective trauma of September 11. The psychological healing process experienced a displacement; it could no longer be understood as a simple professional engagement and had instead to be understood more as a personal disposition, sealing a relationship with human suffering and reinstating it as an integral part of the human condition. The research presented in this chapter addresses an experience similar to this therapeutic effort, taking place, not in a clinical context, but in a religious place physically located in immediate proximity to the World Trade Center (WTC) site. Integrating the advancements outlined above, it is both a practice and an ideology of healing that was gradually put in place, step-by-step restoring people involved in the disaster. The aim is not to address the material and architectural reconstruction of the WTC site, but to reconstruct the phases of this distinctive development for personal and collective reconstruction following a traumatic event of such a scale. Focused on a society marked by a particular conception of the religious, where the terms “civil religion” (Bellah 1975) or “civic religion” (Marienstras 1997) convey the integration of religiosity both into civil life and into the foundational myths of the nation, this contribution seeks to demonstrate how a religious response took charge of healing processes.

The coincidence of places By the happenstance of history, tradition and circumstance—which some would call Providence—our church was positioned to offer an almost instant on-site response to the terrorist attack. (Mark S. Sisk, Bishop of New York, writing in Franklin and Donovan 2003: v.)

Observation at St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church parish, one of the major post-9/11 sites that served as an emergency center for the nine months the site was being cleared, allows the observer to witness a singular expe-

164

Anne Raulin

rience of post-traumatic recovery in a sacred space. A small building, its identity is linked with one of the religious powers of the United States whose role might be qualified as historic. Indeed, St. Paul’s parish belongs to an institution with unequaled prestige and dynamism: the Episcopal Church is heir both to the Church of England and to the American Revolution, associated with signers of the Declaration of Independence, the first American presidents, and of great twentieth-century reformer presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who initiated the welfare state. Its congregation had included the great landowners who colonized Manhattan Island and its surroundings and the families of the great industrial fortunes of the Gilded Age, and it played an important part in the peace movement against the Vietnam War. Established at the southern tip of the island by royal charter in the seventeenth century, the parish territory originally covered the whole current World Trade Center site.1 Trinity Church’s real estate holdings are still significant to this day, consisting of approximately 135 acres in Manhattan primarily developed as office space. The institution’s continuing relations with England and the Anglican Communion network help to shape its contemporary orientations. The Manhattan landscape is dotted with Episcopal buildings, churches, chapels, and cathedrals: Trinity Church, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Grace Church, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, St. Bartholomew’s, and St. Thomas, to name the most prominent. The entire institutional network was mobilized following the September 11 tragedy.2 The Seaman’s Church Institute, founded in 1834 and located in Lower Manhattan about ten blocks from the WTC, put its experience helping distressed sailors to use by immediately opening its food services to emergency workers and providing them with a place to rest. St. Paul’s became the preferred location for these services due to its proximity to the site of the drama,3 ultimately assuring the building’s exceptional destiny. Nicknamed “The Little Chapel That Stood,” St. Paul’s has remained intact amid the many transformations the neighborhood has undergone since its construction, especially the heavy blows associated with the Revolution, multiple real estate booms, and the WTC attacks. Its physical permanence—seemingly rather miraculous under such circumstances—has conferred a certain prestige on the place, symbolic of the city’s moral resistance.4 St. Paul’s may well be proud of its central role in national history. George Washington attended a thanksgiving service there following his inauguration as the first president of the United States in 1789, because its parent-church Trinity had not yet been rebuilt after being burned to the ground during a Revolutionary battle in 1776. It held on to its status as a historical monument and place of national memory, a feature of the union

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

165

between the colonial past (its architecture was inspired by London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields) and the independent nation. It was George Washington’s place of worship until 1790, when the nation’s capital was moved from New York to Philadelphia before settling in Washington, D.C., in 1800. It would play a primary historic role once again in 2001, this time for geographical reasons. September 11 placed it at the center of current events, this time as an emergency response center. It revived its historical role by symbolically linking the heroic memories of two major events: Valley Forge, where Washington’s troops endured the paralyzing cold of the winter of 1777, and the WTC, where salvage workers would likewise go through an ordeal clearing the WTC ruins after the 2001 attacks. Indeed, George Washington’s little box-pew, facing that of the first governor of New York, George Clinton, was converted into a podiatry clinic to care for burns and injuries from the towers’ hot, sharp debris, which still held smoldering pockets of fire in their ruins. Stuart Hoke, St. Paul’s executive assistant to the rector in 2001 (and later staff chaplain until 2013) recalled how the chapel’s mission was galvanized by 9/11: Saint Paul’s in the last twenty years has become almost a museum. It had one service on Sunday morning and a few people during the week would come in and say their prayers and look at George Washington’s pew. And that was about it. After several attempts over the years to revive it, 9/11 comes and suddenly the mission is thrown at it. I mean, all of a sudden people started gathering around here and knocking at the doors saying “Let us in, we want to be in the Church, can we sleep, can we eat here, can we get clothes here, can we go to the bathroom here?” So the place just came alive, and it hasn’t lost that yet, and it was the most incredible experience that I’ve ever seen. After that horrible disaster, that local tragedy made us come together, so I just said it’s like God is making good out of evil and darkness, light out of death, it’s a process, not an event, and it proved positive, what can happen? What place is this? This place has become the unofficial shrine for the memory of those who died on 9/11, because of its proximity to Ground Zero, and because of its substantial work of recovery in the year, in the months following the disaster. (Stuart Hoke, interviewed in 2005)

But the development of the church’s narrative does not end with the emphasis on historical parallels. It also draws on the church’s tradition: a body of written or recorded accounts, spontaneously produced then edited, has contributed to transforming a cataclysmic event into a narrative of ordeal and solidarity in faith that brought new hope. Might this have been the opening of a new book of Scriptures? Would the total catastrophe that took place quite literally at the chapel’s doorstep spark a new spiritual resurgence? What form should it take? Another narrative developed in response to this initial question: “Where was God on 9/11 and thereafter?” This narrative found parallels with the

166

Anne Raulin

history of Christianity and the fall of Rome, which had been weakened by the invasions of so-called barbarians. Saint Augustine had turned to the Psalms in these equally dramatic circumstances, and they would be a point of reference as the towers fell, suddenly returned to the dust of time. In their introduction to the collection Will the Dust Praise You [from Psalm 30:9]: Spiritual responses to 9/115, the volume editors wrote Dust was the meaning of the disaster, for the twin towers, the proud embodiment of all that modern civilization had to offer, were literally turned to dust. … Augustine of Hippo, a bishop that served in North Africa a millennium and a half ago, turned more than once to the psalm verse of our title as a text for sermons that gave hope to congregations faced with the destruction of the Roman Empire, struck repeatedly by violent invasions of Goths and Visigoths. Where was God, the Christians of North Africa asked their bishop, when the Roman world into which Jesus himself had been born was collapsing around them. … “Will the dust praise you?” to Augustine meant that faith in the resurrection allows the People of God to take a heroic stand even when all seems lost. (Franklin and Donovan 2003: XV–XVI)

The verses of Psalm 30 indeed are well suited for expressing both the great distress of confronting “the pit” created by the towers’ fall, the mass of ash, and the Danté-esque debris, and the hope that this ordeal might bring about a spiritual renewal of great magnitude: “What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? (Psalm 30:9, English Standard Version)

“Will the Dust Praise You?” became the title of a book that recorded the experience of this New York Episcopal church and tried to compose a liturgical discourse adapted to the situation: “Our experience of the bombing acquired a liturgical cadence. It became a story” (Franklin and Donovan 2003: 194). That book and the interviews I conducted in St. Paul’s Chapel between 2005 and 2007 manifest a need to give theological as well as teleological meaning to September 11 to answer these questions: Can a truth be born from the fall of the highest of towers? After destruction, will resurrection follow?

From emotion to forgiveness and reconciliation In late 2004, when this study began, the chapel’s walls were covered with an exhibit entitled Unwavering Spirit: Hope and Healing at Ground Zero. Its panels and display cases related the nine months spent transforming the chapel into an emergency response center for two thousand temporary workers:

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

167

In the hands of ordinary people, St. Paul’s ministry achieved extraordinary heights. Strangers from all walks of life joined together to support and comfort the workers at Ground Zero. For nine months, they served hot meals, organized and dispensed supplies, loaned their expertise, and offered warm smiles. Their hospitality remains a testament to humanity and the power of community. Hundreds of volunteers organized the ministry into a finely tuned machine. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, podiatrists, chiropractors, massage therapists, musicians, artists, chefs, counselors, clergy, and countless others signed on for 12-hour shifts. They often put aside their own grief and spent nights soothing those immersed in the tragedy at Ground Zero. (Text copied from a poster displayed in the chapel)

In this collective and voluntary effort, professional skills—therapeutic6 or other—contributed to an ensemble where the qualities of the place’s hospitality were given as essential, as a proof of solidarity for humanity, conveying the more general meaning of the expression “power of community.” A community of ordeal was evident at the heart of the mobilization. There had been no climate of hostility, no declaration of war preceding the shock, no mental preparation that could anticipate its effect. Even the weather was strikingly beautiful: “It was such a beautiful, gorgeous day…” is the leitmotif of most 9/11 stories. The unpredictability of the attacks provoked an extraordinarily powerful emotional reaction, exacerbated by being unprepared, in a phenomenon described by Freud: In the case of the ordinary traumatic neuroses two characteristics emerge prominently: first, that the chief weight of their causation seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against the development of a neurosis. “Fright”, “fear” and “anxiety” are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their relation to danger. … There is something about anxiety that protects its subjects against fright. (Freud 1955: 12–13)7

A place to recover Initially the volunteers responded to an inner need for “being there.” The call of place was irresistible to some, because they were from New York (“Being born and raised in the city, I need to be there”), because they felt like a New Yorker, because they identified with New York, even if they were from California or elsewhere. People came to help, to help each other, because they could not stay alone with the teeming emotions that desperately needed an outlet. They poured their energy into serving others, out of generosity but also from personal need, so that the emotions would not turn violently against the self. Presence is essential, even if it is silent, or perhaps because it is silent: it is about being there, offering a coffee, a look, some words of comfort, a treat wrapped in a message from a child. The presence of dogs and the

Anne Raulin

168

petting lavished on them established a physical contact without verbal intrusion that would prove to be a remarkably appropriate form of support for first-aid and site-clearing workers. These emotional mixes—combining anger, sadness, grief and the fear of seeing the event repeated—were not necessarily ready for verbal expression, but they could be mutually shared, heard, supported, relived and (paradoxically) exhausted within the group: I remember seeing the bookstore that I would go to for my lunch completely burned out. There was nothing standing there but the skeleton of it. I thought I could probably deal with my own emotion, my own anger, by spending some time at Saint Paul’s and helping out, and that’s exactly what I did for about a month. I came down every day, I did night shift, basically serving coffee, serving meals to the police officers, the firefighters and the rescue workers that would come to our doors, making beds, changing the candles, waking them up, because some of them would come and rest for an hour or two—many of them were so eager hoping to find the remains of a fellow firefighter … It was a wonderful experience for me to be able to do that and find some peace within myself by doing so, after experiencing 9/11. (Omayra Ribeira, program coordinator at St. Paul’s Chapel, interviewed in 2005)

Faced with the scale of the national tragedy, some of the most directly affected felt that their personal distress—like the death of a father for a son—was not taken as seriously as it should have been, and resented a situation that included too wide a range of suffering. But for each of them, volunteers included, the experience of vulnerability and uncertainty for the future brutally laid bare his or her own deep personality, which once so dramatically exposed—would require lengthy and slow work and a major personal re-adjustment. But by the mid-2000s, this phase had passed, making room for a collective construction aligned with an explicit ideological and religious framework. At the time of my initial contact with the clergy of St. Paul’s Chapel, its affiliation with an institutional network developed by the Anglican church since World War II had come to the fore.

International networks, from Coventry to Beirut The parish’s affiliation with the Community of the Cross of Nails was officially announced at the commemorative ceremony on 11 September 2005. Created by the Anglican community of Coventry, England, after the German bombing of its cathedral,8 it is a network of individuals and churches that work for the reconciliation of people in conflict: In 1941, Coventry Cathedral was bombed by the Germans. The next day, the congregation and the priest of the Cathedral came out, and in the shell of the Cathedral, in the smoldering ruins, they wrote the words on the high altar: “Father

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

169

forgives”; and they began doing the work of reconciliation and forgiveness at that moment, at a time when, in England, it was horribly unpopular because people wanted to chase down the bombers. But the movement lived, and it became the first center of reconciliation, and it inspired the second and the third: one is in Dresden, the other one is in Berlin … The day after the bombing in 1941, they found great big nails that had held the cathedral together and they put them up in the shape of a cross, and that became their symbol. (Stuart Hoke, interviewed in 2005)

In the sixty-odd years since, the movement spread to Germany and the Netherlands, then to South Africa and the Middle East, working on the reconciliation of parties divided by race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Reverend Stuart Hoke would likewise perform the act of forgiveness when charged with improvising a religious service for people who had taken refuge in Trinity Church after the first plane hit the North Tower. As the towers fell, Stuart Hoke continued reading the Beatitudes: We knew that terrorists were bombing us. And here we were saying, “Pray for those who persecute you. Never exchange evil for evil. Turn the other cheek.” The very things I don’t think I would have ever said, things that go against the American grain in such an incalculable way, especially right now. (Stuart Hoke, writing in Franklin and Donovan 2003: 14)

The prayers spoken at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine were similar: “The bishop led the prayers. Right away, forgiveness was part of the prayers. The prayers for the victims included the hijackers, which I thought was really beautiful and very bold” (Asha Golliher quoted in Frank­lin and Donovan 2003: 28). From the first moments, forgiveness was one spontaneous form of reaction, an alternative to counter-attack, revenge, violence, or war. It would establish itself as an element in the process of healing work done on oneself and with others, as an ideological and political construction with international scope. In November of 2005, at the initiative of Lyndon Harris, the clergyman in charge of the relief ministry at St. Paul’s Chapel at the time, a major program called the Sacred City Project initiated the construction of a Garden of Forgiveness at Ground Zero. It was modeled on a similar garden being built in Beirut,9 and echoed the words of Desmond Tutu, himself archbishop of the Anglican Church, whose aphorism “There is no future without forgiveness” was posted in the chapel (1999).

Victims’ Families’ Associations This is also the creed of some civic organizations10 that have chosen to proclaim their affinity with the positions of St. Paul’s Chapel. Bringing together the families of people killed in the attacks, the organization Sep-

Anne Raulin

170

tember Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows took its name from a 1967 speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows” (King 2008: 83). It was formed following a march organized from Washington to New York in November 2001, christened The Walk for Healing and Peace. One of the many goals of this pilgrimage from the Pentagon to Ground Zero was to use physical effort to fill the emotional void left by the attacks and the death of “our lost loved ones”. But the goal was also clearly political, and upon their arrival in New York, the march’s leaders expressed their opposition to the American government’s military response in Afghanistan. There was no question of justifying a war whose primary victims would be civilians in the name of their loved ones: “Not in their names” would become a rallying cry, with many personal variations depending on the relationship between the activist and the deceased. Committed to refusing to resort to military force and vengeance (“My revenge is peace”), this organization also gave itself the mission of founding a project for all humanity, of transforming “the deaths of our family members into the birth of a new paradigm for the planet” (Potorti 2003: 9). This vision claims to follow the notion of “restorative justice” developed by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,11 which opposed punitive justice and advocated healing instead of imposing sanctions. It became a matter of replacing the spirit of vengeance with that of healing, and being opposed to generating violence. The aim was to break the cycle of violence and find ways to respond to aggression other than being aggressive in return by, for example, giving voice to the victims of terrorism worldwide, on all sides of religious, national, ethnic, or hostile divides.12

Interfaith dialogues and actions The diversity of attack victims’ religious faiths was significant and inspired multi-faith religious services, most prominently the ecumenical service held at Yankee Stadium 23 September 2001. Civic organizations as well as religious ones aimed to promote inter-faith recognition between Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, traditional religions from North America and Africa, and others. Thus, in April 2002, a group of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors visited St. Paul’s Chapel for an event organized by September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows to celebrate their shared convictions—renouncing revenge, refusing retaliatory violence, building “a civilization of love”—in a Buddhist ceremony. Likewise, for the 2007 anniversary commemoration, St. Paul’s included the organization Kids4Peace, which brought together young Palestinians and Israelis from the three major monotheistic faiths, aiming to promote mutual

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

171

encounters and understanding that could allow participants to imagine living together.13 Thus, the experience of vulnerability on home ground helped people project themselves and their experience into other settings, where suffering and violence are part of daily life. Civic and religious worlds merged in this response to the trauma of September 11, affirming the distinctive form of porosity between the sacred and profane that characterizes “counter-power in the global age” (Beck 2005). By supporting everyone touched or threatened by terrorism, regardless of their national, political, or religious affiliations, these international networks gave form to a “global Ecumene,” in the sense formulated by Ulf Hannerz (1992). As civil society’s counter-power against strategies of the state, they placed themselves in the movement of an historic religious power, while still including highly personalized actions, as the following account illustrates.

A personal story of reconciliation: Phyllis Rodriguez & Aïcha el-Wafi Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez , members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,14 spoke out against the idea of a war in Afghanistan on 14 September 2001 in a public letter entitled “Not in Our Son’s Name.” Three days later, they wrote to President Bush to denounce the far-reaching powers he had just been granted for pursuing this war and to press him to find other responses to terrorism. In 2001, Phyllis Rodriguez was a 58-year-old teacher. Raised in working-class neighborhoods of New York, she came from a family of activists: her mother fought for tenants’ rights and her father, a commercial sign painter, was active in union activities. She married Orlando Rodriguez, a Cuban-born sociology professor teaching at Fordham University. One of their two children, Greg, was killed in the September 11 attacks, at the age of 31. Following a difficult period in his teens—he had dropped out of school and wore his hair in a Mohawk—he ended up working at Cantor Fitzgerald Investment Bank on the 103rd floor of the North Tower, living in White Plains, an affluent suburb of the city, with his wife Elizabeth. Trying to bury their pain, Phyllis and Orlando spent time with family and friends, as well as families of other September 11 victims. They went to therapy. In line with their political convictions, they wrote to newspapers, especially the New York Times, demanding the United States government not go to war in the name of their son Greg. They avoided commemorations, news reports, and the television. They did not want to be ambushed by the memory of their son. They read heavily about grief and death, and they slept a lot.

172

Anne Raulin

Phyllis’s anger then took a more specific focus. It was aimed at Osama Bin Laden and his lack of respect for people’s lives, both those he saw as his enemies as well as those under his influence. It was also aimed at the United States government and political choices that seemed harmful and wrong. In addition, she felt guilty for not having been able to stop what had happened, as if she blamed herself for not being powerful enough, for not being omnipotent. Then one morning a few weeks after the attacks, while the grief and guilt still boiled inside her, Phyllis saw a newspaper story about Aïcha elWafi, mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been arrested as a suspected co-conspirator in the 9/11 attacks. In November 2001 Aïcha had declared that her son had written to her assuring her of his innocence, and she believed him. But she was also reported to have said that although she did not hold herself responsible for the choices he had made as an adult, she still felt guilty for having given birth to him. Reading this, Phyllis felt compassion for her as a mother and thought that she would like to meet her. The meeting took place with the intervention of Robert A. Cushing from the organization “Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation.” The Rodriguez’s letter denouncing the declaration of war had drawn his attention, and Cushing thought that they might be open to a meeting with Aïcha el-Wafi, with whom he had been in contact thanks to his connections with death-penalty-abolition organizations in France, where el-Wafi lives. He asked the Rodriguezes if they would be inclined to meet her during her next trip to the United States. The meeting took place with four other parents of September 11 victims. Aïcha shyly entered the room to an oppressive silence, until Phyllis approached her and gave her “a bear hug”; the two cried like this for several minutes. Aïcha broke the silence and surprised everyone with these words: “I don’t know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I want to apologize to you for what has happened to you and your family.” She would later write, “We were only two moms whose sons had been caught up in a history that went beyond them.” (El-Wafi 2006). Phyllis was struck by Aïcha’s courage, strength, and sense of humor. She was touched by her life story, her early forced marriage, the conjugal violence, her life as a single mother. They also found many common interests: a love for cooking and sewing, but above all loving and losing their sons. In April 2005 Phyllis learned that Zacarias Moussaoui had chosen to plead guilty of conspiring with the planners of the September 11 attacks, and she understood that the coming court case would once more stir up the painful memories that she had tried to bury. If this prospect made her suffer, she wondered how the accused’s mother would be able to withstand such an ordeal. Phyllis wrote to Aïcha offering to help and to be by her side while in the United States for the trial. Phyllis acted not out of friendship but to be “true to [herself].” Aïcha was going to go through a

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

173

terrible experience in the United States, and Phyllis imagined that if their places were changed she too would need support and friendship—and declared herself a one-woman “Support Aïcha Committee.” The trial took place a year later in Alexandria, Virginia. Aïcha el-Wafi made the trip from Narbonne, France, wearing an origami peace crane pin Phyllis had given her.15 When Aïcha landed, Phyllis took her by the arm to confront the reporters and cameras by her side. Orlando Rodriguez would testify at the trial in Moussaoui’s defense because, like his wife and several other parents of September 11 victims, he was opposed to the death penalty. The verdict was life in prison. Phyllis visited Aïcha in France the following summer, where their travels across the country and their friendship drew wide attention from French and German media. How did Phyllis explain her relationship with Aïcha el-Wafi? “Desmond Tutu says that it seems like an altruistic thing to do, but forgiveness is actually in one’s own self-interest,” she said. “Because it kind of lifts a burden of anger and hatred from you—I’m not saying you don’t flip back and forth, but it feeds something very deep. And there are different definitions for forgiveness. It doesn’t mean, I forgive you for killing my son. It’s saying, ‘You did something that’s really awful, but I want to see what makes you tick as a human being.’” Consuming guilt was the basis of these two mothers’ relationship, women who found themselves at the opposite ends of a historic tragedy. Their respective sons were disturbed and moody young men questing for something their mothers did not understand. Phyllis claims this friendship dissolved her guilt: “In trying to help Aïcha overcome the terrible feelings of guilt that she has from her lack of ability to prevent bad things from happening to her son, I am explaining these things to myself, too… I don’t beat myself up that he was at the Trade Center on that day anymore.” In her son’s name, Phyllis tried to “push the limits of grace and generosity,” as one journalist put it (Yeung 2006). She also interpreted the meaning of her gesture herself: “How do you accept death when you don’t believe there’s a heaven or an afterlife? It’s a fact of life. It’s an end. It’s a loss. The only thing I feel I can do is to not succumb to the tragedy and define myself through it—always be the long-suffering mother.” Aïcha el-Wafi honors this exceptional support: “I came to support my son, accused of having hidden information that would have allowed prevention of the attacks, and it’s ultimately the families of the victims of these attacks who bring me comfort.” She particularly remembers many invitations to the homes of these families and the ceremony at St. Paul’s. On the eve of her departure following the 2006 trial of her son, Phyllis announced: “The pastor is organizing an evening of forgiveness in your honor and he would be very touched if you could participate” (el Wafi 2006: 223). Aïcha was left speechless. When she opened the door to the

Anne Raulin

174

little church in New York, thirty-some people welcomed her and hugged her warmly. The heartfelt forgiveness expressed by this pair of women is part of an institutional quest for justice and international mobilization against the death penalty, affirmed here by Orlando Rodriguez and other members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. This forgiveness is expressed in civil society, in a relational pact rather than a legal act, thanks to the strength and depth of personal engagements in the issue: “Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it” (Arendt 1998: 241). This reconciliation story bears a strong resemblance to the trope of a conversion story described by Sébastien Tank-Storper (2007: 35–40): it intimately imbricates forms of justification with the expression of the tensions and contradictions entailed by such an undertaking. The disapproval such positions are sure to provoke, including disapproval by those close to people taking them, should also be mentioned. As with conversion stories, the meeting is the crucial moment, a vital step in a personal undertaking, allowing reconciliation—first and foremost with oneself, drained by remorse, regret, and grief, but also with the enemy, the opposite-other in whom one sees oneself in spite of everything, despite the extreme improbability, the near-impossibility, of seeing oneself in them. This voyage through the looking-glass goes beyond seeing forgiving as the final ordeal, by making forgiving the initial test, opening the door to personal reconstruction by recognizing yourself in the enemy-other. This extreme process of overcoming such a challenge also creates humanity, since it builds bridges over radical adversity, and exposes shared vulnerability: “A self reminded of the vulnerability of the condition of mortality can receive from the friend’s weakness more than he or she can give in return by drawing from his or her own reserves of strength” (Ricoeur 1995: 191). This paradoxical work “of sympathy for the suffering other” (ibid.: 192), rooted in one’s own suffering, describes the highest intensity of human relations. Does forgiving the unforgiveable amount to “the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness that deserves the name, […] a forgiveness without power,” in Derrida’s formulation (2001: 133)?

Healing: on the effectiveness of ritual This endeavor remains exceptional in that it requires a heightened degree of affective awareness and individual engagement: it corresponds to a decision that reveals the person’s most intimate values, where he or she exercises his or her own moral authority. The more ordinary practice of prayer

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

175

intervenes as a ritualized act of faith, and in the post-traumatic setting it may be an essential time for recovery. Prayer’s ability to channel collective emotion did not escape Maurice Halbwachs, who spoke of a social form of abreaction as follows: Ritual gesture or movement and emotional expression are closely connected, … there is something that recalls religious gestures, in those who have the role of expressing feelings. Collective emotion being connected to these movements, these attitudes, it seems that it depends on them, that they are enough to maintain, to conjure, everything that it is not. It seems that in emotion itself, thus shared and multiplied, there is an effectiveness and a power that must not be left to disappear, that must be directed toward prayer, invocation, supplication, as much toward adoration and gratitude as toward the curse. (Halbwachs 1972: 172)

The sacramental character of the Episcopal Church favors this ritual implementation, because—although its theology rests on Protestantism’s freedom of conscience16—it has also retained a liturgy from the Roman Catholic tradition rich in ceremonial acts. The days following September 11 reactivated certain rites that had fallen more or less out of use, gave life to new symbols, and opened multi-faith modes of expression. In 2006, a memorial ceremony was held in the cemetery facing the WTC, led by representatives from the widest range of faiths: Roman Catholic, Bahá-í, Buddhist, Hindu, Jainist, Jewish, Muslim, Native African, Native American, Shinto, Sikh, Zoroastrian. It would take place around two monuments recently installed in the cemetery: a Bell of Hope offered by the City of London to New Yorkers as a sign of solidarity and remembrance of the long shared history of the two cities and of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches; and a cast bronze sculpture of the roots of the sycamore tree that had protected the chapel from the brunt of the falling tower debris that would uproot it, evoking the common roots of all on American soil. The Bell of Hope is tolled for important services for peace, and daily services renew the liturgy by including the prayers for peace from all the aforementioned religions that are printed in the booklet Prayers for Peace, found alongside The Book of Common Prayer in the pews: Every liturgy, every day there are prayers for peace, at 12:00, prayers in different languages and prayers from different traditions: there are Jewish prayers, Muslim prayers, Christian prayers, Buddhist prayers, because we want to hold up that sense of healing and unity. Every single day … [p]eople of all faiths, of all nationalities died in the towers, they weren’t just Americans and they certainly weren’t all Christian either: Jews died, Muslims died, Buddhists and atheists died, and so, when you honor the dead and when you seek to find healing, it’s so important that the healing respects the people whom you try to honor. (Mark Franscisco Bozzuti-Jones, priest for Pastoral Care and Nurture, St. Paul’s Chapel, interviewed in 2009)

Anne Raulin

176

For a long time the chapel sheltered one of the only altars devoted to the victims of September 11, making it a place of contemplation—where candles flickered alongside a multitude of photographs, flowers, handwritten letters, and children’s drawings—and maintaining the affective intimacy of the place. Some gestures became sanctified, like that of firemen ripping the patches from their uniforms to place them on the altar of St. Paul in memory of a comrade who died in the torment—a gesture that has been repeated by many firemen from around the world come to honor their colleagues’ heroism. Gigantic rolls of messages, as big as bolts of fabric, bear the traces of innumerable visitors. In 2005 they still overlapped with banners of support from various cities and states across the country, but by 2006 the tapestries collected from around the world illustrated the weaving of a universal history and attested to the will to pursue symbolic creativity in the church while neither fixing it to the moment of the attacks nor returning to its previously bare walls. In fact, this chapel of rare elegance is also of great decorative sobriety: the pale blue, pink, and white décor is punctuated only by the organ and the gilded work of Pierre-Charles L’Enfant,17 illuminated by clear windows and crystal chandeliers.

Anointing and the laying on of hands The rite of anointing (unction) is one of the Episcopal Church’s sacramental forms, and the 1789 American edition of the Book of Common Prayer offers several versions.18 The revision of liturgical and charismatic forms dating back to the 1960s gave strength to these rituals, which met post-9/11 needs particularly well: a desire to be touched, physically as well as verbally, and to be blessed by it. This re-activation following the attacks would be confirmed over the ensuing years. At the end of services, long lines form at the altar, people patiently waiting their turn to engage in a personalized verbal and physical exchange: the officiant addresses the communicant face-to-face to learn the object of his or her prayer before tracing a cross on the forehead with holy oil and placing his or her hands on the shoulders or head while they pray together. Anointing is believed to have complete purifying power, transferring the corporal to the spiritual and thus giving a feeling of being anointed within (as implied by the expression “inward anointing”). It is expected to bring the anointed into the community of presence—beyond hurt, conflict, and separation: The power of anointing is about cleansing the heart and the spirit of any problems you may have. This is why [officiants] do the anointing, to cleanse the body, the mind, the spirit of any frustrations or angers that you may have in your life. So it’s something that started on 9/11—it’s something the Episcopal Church has always done, but during 9/11 so many of the firefighters and rescuers were in such need

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

177

of having a priest pray for them during services and doing anointing and blessing their patches, that it became very common in the Church at that time, and we decided to keep doing it because people found it useful. It’s a contact prayer. It’s something very personal between you and the priest that no one else hears and no one else sees. Yes, it’s a contact between the priest and the person speaking in prayer. It’s something that the rescue workers loved a lot, with the blessing of their patches. (Omayra Ribeira, interviewed in 2005)

A traditional ritual practice, unction in this case is part of a holistic conception of the person, taking consideration of his or her psychosomatic unity. The process of reconstruction in this way engages a “multi-sensory rhetoric,” the implementation of which guided the mobilization of exception at St. Paul’s, where the rescuers were determined to offer both physical and spiritual comfort: Holiness includes and is built on wholeness. … One reason why we were so influential in the relief effort is because we were able to embrace the whole person. In our approach at St. Paul’s we paid attention to the needs of the body. We did not set up prayer stations like some of the Fundamentalists. We had massage therapists praying with their hands. We had chiropractors. We insisted on saying that the love of Christ is extravagant. We tried to embody that extravagant love at St. Paul’s. We didn’t serve bologna sandwiches. We had the finest food we could get our hands on. (Franklin and Donovan 2003: 187)

If “holiness is built on wholeness:” this expression is literally making a semantic aggregation between healthy and sainted, between health and saintliness, between physical integrity and spiritual fulfillment, along the same lines as the German word heilig (happy, full, whole, as well as sainted and holy). This usage contrasts with the French language, which instead distinguishes between healthy (sain) and holy (saint), health (santé) and sanctity (sainteté), and does not associate physical integrity with spiritual fulfillment. “Holy,” like “hallow” (as in “hallowed ground”), shares the same etymology as “health” and “healing,” the process of returning to health. This makes this preoccupation with the body, this propensity for “caring,” understandable as a manifestation of faith, as a representation of incarnation as it was introduced by Christ: “The person is not only an immortal soul but also a psychosomatic unity. The body is crucial to the identity and to the spiritual life of the person. Ground Zero spirituality is radically positive in that it recognizes in the crucified and risen Christ the power to transform the body” (Franklin and Donovan 2003: 189). If the feeling of vulnerability brings one back to one’s own humanity, it also brings one to humanity at large, to this human wholeness that John Donne, a seventeenth-century poet who joined the Anglican Church late in life, celebrated with words that would be quoted by Archbishop George L. Carey the day after September 11: “No man is an island, en-

Anne Raulin

178

tire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. … Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”19 (Donne 2010: 151). Contemporary globalization technologically, economically, and culturally amplifies this sense of interdependence between people, groups, nations, cities, and islands—including Manhattan. “We belong together” is the most succinct shorthand for translating this sentiment of reminding each other of shared humanity, where the vulnerability of some resonates with the vulnerability of others, nourishing a sense of emotional and existential solidarity on a planetary scale and across history. Seen from St. Paul’s, September 11, then, was a time of ordeal for humanity and for faith. Faced with this double ordeal, the collective reply was partly ideological: the chapel confirmed its peace work, distanced itself from all passivity, engaged in acts of reconciliation and reconstruction, refused to participate in the spiral of violence, and opposed the military response. It also consequently adopted ritual forms, mobilizing its sense of community in which the rites could become effective, reunite, make one, and heal: bringing body and soul together, reuniting people, reforming mankind, and restoring an understanding with God. The recovery takes place here in the confirmation of faith and by the rejection of fear of the other. Vulnerable interdependence is inverted into an interdependence of mutual salvation: “Hope gets connected to hope.” It even runs the risk of turning into a new mission: “We are to be the healers of the world.”

Observations of “sacred horror” During direct observation of sites like this, an anthropologist is impressionable, an echo-chamber: considering the emotional dimension of these ceremonies requires the anthropologist to go through the ordeal herself, at least at the outset, then to subject the experience to intense reflexivity. How exactly could I participate in this communion, through which ordeals? How is the experience affecting or not affecting? What does my work as an anthropologist have in common with what the observed actors are doing, and how do our activities differ? Subjectivity is derived in great part from the relationship one has to the event, what it means to oneself, in one’s own personal and collective history: what might it mean for me, a European anthropologist, partly trained in an American university in New York? The attack on the Twin Towers was not simply an act of aggression against a nation, or a people, or a city; it also sounded the end of this city as a sanctuary, an inviolable space, sheltered from the foreign-fought conflicts of the twentieth century, making the attack a quasi profanation.20

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

179

The observation of services, ceremonies, and even press conferences meant experiencing moments that were simultaneously very formal and extremely emotional. Being at the site in August and September of the years 2005–2007 forced me to develop internally: is it possible to simply observe these events, to stay aloof of the ceremonies’ emotional intensity, whether they be commemorations, healing rituals, or ideological elaborations on a planetary scale? My desire to materially record (filming, for example) was thus quickly dampened by the fervor of the settings, which were vibrant and reverential, full of grief and humor, exalted and thoughtful. After three consecutive years of observation, it is out of the question to speak of my research in terms of reporting. Instead, periodic and sustained participant observation required me to share emotions—melt into the assembly, follow its pace and its exchanges, go through its emotions, respect its turmoil—because participant observation cannot buffer the observer from the affective communion the rituals are designed to arouse and control with their dramatization.21 Lacking any personal religious practice or upbringing,22 it was important for me to attend daily services to learn how to follow services in this setting, how to use The Book of Common Prayer, how to turn to my neighbors to pass the peace with a hug or a handshake, how to pray to myself while staying attentive. After the fact, it also appeared to be an experience in testing the effect of ritual on myself: another sensibility and vision of the world is built through apprenticeship in its pacing, gestures, and words, without necessarily leading to conversion. The term “sacred horror” gives full meaning to this feeling of being caught up in historic moments that cannot exclude certain forms of communion that leave inchoate spiritual impulses in their wakes: “Among the emotions raised by [the global-political], hope and belief are certainly present,” writes Marc Abélès (2007: 168), who asserts that “the anthropologist is well-placed to grasp the symbolic impact of these great, worldwide emotions” (2008: 164).

Spiritualities and globalized temporalities The meaning of “healing,” a potentially long, slow process, must be examined in relation to its particular history in the United States, and from the integrating role it plays between the dimensions of “body, mind, and spirit”: a semantic combination that is difficult to translate literally into French since it is meant to associate physical, psychic, and spiritual (even mystic) aspects of the person.23 The Body/Mind/Spirit trinity found a particular expression in the United States over the nineteenth century in many theological, philosophical, psychological, and medical currents. The

180

Anne Raulin

city of Boston, which Stefan Zweig qualified as the “Jerusalem of Americano-religious spirituality” (2003: 223), has long been one important center of this current, which has yielded both theoretical formulations (as in the work of William James) and practical applications (as in the Emmanuel Movement in the early twentieth century24 or more recently in the women’s movement25). Today this mind-body-spirit trinity is shared by an entire customary and popular religiosity: it is found in so-called holistic therapies, alternative medicines, and self-help practices. It contributes to different movements such as New Thought, New Age, positive thinking, and the Human Potential Movement.26 The Trinity Church parish has locally institutionalized this combination of religious references and practices and scientific practices of personal growth: since 1975 the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute, located in Trinity Place, offers a range of psychotherapeutic services in a multi-faith non-profit setting: I think religion becomes destructive if it doesn’t make use of the sciences and certainly all that we learn from psychology. And I would be very surprised if [the] Church were to try and be healer not knowing how the mind works, without understanding the power of depression, or the power of positive thinking, or the power of understanding what leads to trauma and how human beings deal with trauma. (Mark Bozzuti-Jones, priest for Pastoral Care and Nurture at St. Paul’s, interviewed in 2009)

Here religious meaning is seen as fully complementary to scientific knowledge of the human, a perspective that is less plausible in contexts that are more dominated by a clear opposition between science and religion. In France a comparable vision combining scientific and spiritual dimensions of the human arose in the 1970s, but outside of dominant religious institutions. Described as a “mystic-esoteric cluster” by Françoise Champion (1990), a sociologist who nonetheless recognized its influence on traditional institutions, it involved a re-interpretation of Christian semantics, especially concerning the relationship between healing and salvation: In the traditional Christian universe, the theme of healing is regularly associated with the issue of salvation, which finds itself metaphorically signified (and concretely anticipated) in the former. In new religious movements within Christianity (especially in some charismatic currents heavily influenced by the contributions of psychology and human relations theory), we often observe an inversion of perspective: the theme of “salvation” no longer refers back to the (culturally devalued) expectation of a fulfilling life in another world. It works like a symbolic locus that increases the demand for healing to all aspects of self-realization. (Hervieu-Léger 1990: 242)

Whichever tradition it may be connected with, this quest for self-realization and health appears to be a common denominator among many

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

181

religions, and it puts Christian religions in harmony with religions concerned with healing (various shamanisms, native American and African religions, and Eastern religions, Buddhism in particular). Might this be a new form of ecumenicalism, with aims that are more pragmatic than dogmatic, developing rituals of redress based on a common perception of humanity, its resources, and its vulnerability on this earth, whose equilibria— between nature and culture, between cultures, between destruction and production, between living and dead—are threatened around the world? In the observed religious setting, forgiveness is given an essential role in the healing process. In the secular world, this moral notion has also acquired a central position in philosophical thought, as mentioned earlier. That commonality was acknowledged by Hannah Arendt: “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense” (1998: 238). Today it is important to wonder what consequence this value might have in anthropology, theoretically or in practice.27 Has not forgiveness become necessary in this particular moment of global co-existence, both real and virtual, where difference may be perceived as complementary and salutary, but may also be formulated or experienced as an aggression? How to symbolize prejudice and its redress? Forgiveness, which displaces the perception of the other in the relationship shift it provokes, could lead to the recognition of the radical other, not understood in the sense of diversity but in the sense of adversity.

Notes Translated from the French by Juliette Rogers. My thanks to Shirley Lindenbaum, who was intent on seeing this book become a reality.   1. The World Trade Center site is a rectangle of about 16 acres delimited by streets that were established in the eighteenth century. The architect Francis Maerschalk created the first grid neighborhood of New York here, on land along the Hudson River belonging to Trinity Church. All the streets were named for ecclesiastical or lay-persons in the parish, priests allied with the great New York families and presiding over its first educational institutions (see Raulin 1997).   2. General Theological Seminary, founded in Chelsea in 1817 to train priests, served as a logistical base for organizing volunteer work teams and distributing donations. It shared this role with St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village. St. Thomas, located on Fifth Avenue not far from St. Patrick Roman Catholic cathedral, hosted the memorial service for the hundreds of victims from the British Commonwealth, attended by Tony Blair.   3. St. Paul’s is separated from the WTC site by just one street, Church Street. The

182

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.   8.

  9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Anne Raulin

falling towers missed the building, which was somewhat protected by the trees in its cemetery, though all were covered in a thick coating of ash. A 1910 engraving of St. Paul’s Chapel shows it much as it appears today, although the particular buildings already dwarfing it in the image have since disappeared: these jewels of early twentieth century architecture have all been replaced by modern international style buildings since the 1960s. On these themes and their interpretation in terms of urban resilience since September 11, see Raulin 2013. The book Will the Dust Praise You? Spiritual Responses to 9/11 had limited production and distribution. It was produced jointly by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the New York Historical Society, the Church Pension Fund, and Trinity Church. Bridging these organizations is Kenneth Jackson, a history professor at Columbia University who is editor of and contributor to the quite remarkable Encyclopedia of New York (1995) and president of the New York Historical Society, as well as being a member of Trinity Church’s vestry (parish council). Therapists came to treat what are called “Critical Incident Stress” problems, or the symptoms of people directly involved in the crisis situation: police officers, firefighters, technicians, a variety of experts, and religious people responsible for conducting sacramental rites over the bodies and body parts found in the ruins. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a text published in 1920, Freud was, of course, reckoning with the horrors of World War I. In November 1940, during the Battle of Britain, an eleven-hour raid destroyed the entire city center of Coventry, including its fourteenth-century cathedral. The word Coventrization would come to be used to designate this technique of systematic destruction of a city. In the heart of Beirut, at the topographical and historical center of religious coexistence, on a site bordered by mosques and churches (including a chapel to the Virgin Mary venerated by both Christians and Muslims) and an archaeological site testifying to the city’s Roman past, a “Garden of Forgiveness” is being built to foster inter-faith and inter-community reconciliation in Lebanon. Inspired by Alexandra Asseily, an Anglo-Lebanese woman who also describes it as a “garden of healing,” in connection with the Anglican confessional network, the initiative has gained a following and today has come to be a significant ideological trend. (See Brones 2010.) Some of the many associations of families of victims, to the contrary, supported the retaliatory strategy. For a study of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, presided by Desmond Tutu, see J. Favret-Saada (2008). At a press conference held by September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, held on 8 September 2006 in St. Paul’s Chapel, terrorism victims from Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan, Colombia, Japan, Chechnya, and South Africa took turns speaking. Likewise, the organization supported specific initiatives such as rebuilding schools, clinics, and mosques destroyed by American bombing in Afghanistan. To this end, it organizes group exchange sojourns in the United States and Canada through the network of Episcopal churches. This account is based on various sources, primarily those of Yeung (2006), Portori (2003), and el-Wafi (2006). See also http://theforgivenessproject.com/ stories/phyllis-rodriguez-aicha-el-wafi-usa/

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

183

15. Sadako Sasaki, a young Hiroshima victim, made the Japanese Peace Crane, a bird made of folded paper, a symbol of peace between nations. 16. “We are a Church of free thinkers” (interview with Jerry Becker, seminarian, St. Paul’s Chapel, 2005). 17. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, chosen by George Washington to draft the initial plans for the new US capital that would bear his name, also left his mark in St. Paul’s: the image that he designed under the altar represents Mount Sinai in cloud and lightning, capped by the name of God in Hebrew and decorated with the tablets of the Commandments—arguably a mythical reference to the articles of the US Constitution. 18. Laying on of Hands and Anointing (one of the available versions): If oil for the Anointing of the Sick is to be blessed, the Priest says: O Lord, holy Father, giver of health and salvation: send your Holy Spirit to sanctify this oil; that, as your holy apostles anointed many that were sick and healed them, so may those who in faith and repentance receive this holy unction be made whole; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen The Priest then lays hands upon the sick person, and says one of the following: N., I lay my hands upon you in the Name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, beseeching him to uphold you and fill you with his grace, that you may know the Healing power of his love. Amen. If the person is to be anointed, the Priest dips a thumb in the holy oil, and makes the sign of the cross on the sick person’s forehead, saying: N., I anoint you with oil in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The Priest may add: As you are outwardly anointed with this holy oil, so may our heavenly Father grant you the inward anointing of the Holy Spirit. Of his great Mercy, may he forgive you your sins, release you from suffering, and restore you to wholeness and strength. May he deliver you from all evil, preserve you in all goodness, and bring you to everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 19. A poignant coincidence was related in the contribution to “we all have our own story of 9/11” by Mira Rapp-Hooper, who as a student at the elite public Stuyvesant School only a few blocks away from the WTC was in the midst of reading John Donne’s meditation “For whom the bell tolls” when the first tower was hit. 20. This is because New York, seen from Europe through the history of the twentieth century, appeared to be a place of refuge for the millions of immigrants who converged there, as well as a place of exile for all who had to flee persecution in their countries of origin. In academic institutional memory, the title adopted by the New School of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s, the “University in Exile,” was due to its role as a refuge for many European intellectuals threatened in their own countries. The university was also the cradle of the Free School for Advanced Studies (Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, founded in 1942 with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation), where Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss would meet and lay out the premises of structuralism by the crossing of linguistics and anthropology. Hannah Arendt taught there late in life, until her death in 1975. 21. A converse phenomenon is recorded in a study of funeral ceremonies, in which Julien Bernard describes the collectivization of “emotional work” that, in the

Anne Raulin

184

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

face of affective intensity, allows the preservation of a certain emotional distance through the distribution of roles among funeral home employees (Bernard 2009). This church was not entirely unfamiliar to me, however, since I had been a member of the chorale at St. Luke in the Fields (an Episcopal church in Greenwich Village), directed by Gwen Gould, organist. In this context, “spirit” comes from faith, the cosmic or divine breath, and designates the “spiritual voyage”: it is a blend of the spiritual, moral, and mystical. “Mind” includes emotions and feelings, or even memory, and cannot be entirely equated with understanding, intellect, or reason. The Emmanuel Movement developed in an Episcopal parish of the same name in Boston, led by two priests, Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb. In 1906 they founded a clinic combining religious, psychological, and medical approaches to healing; the concept would have a lasting influence on forms of treatment for alcoholism, and be formative in the development of Alcoholics Anonymous. See McComb and Worcester (1909/2009). The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s book, Our Bodies, Ourselves (originally published in 1971, with many revised editions), usefully distinguishes between healing and curing: “Though the words ‘heal’ and ‘cure’ are often used interchangeably, they are not synonymous. Sometimes no cures exist for particular diseases, yet people feel ‘healed,’ that is, able to reconcile themselves, accept and live with the effects of asthma, polio or even a terminal illness. Illness can provide opportunities for self-examination, growth and change” (1992: 81). My participation in the translation and adaptation of this book into French, published by Albin Michel in 1977, first made me aware of this vocabulary of health and healing. On this subject, see the chapter “Reaching out” in Habits of the Heart (1985) and Moskowitz (2001). This would be to follow the path laid out by Julian Pitt-Rivers in his remarkable article “The Place of Grace in Anthropology” (2001).

References Abélès, Marc. 2007. Le spectacle du pouvoir. Paris: L’Herne. ———. 2008. Anthropologie de la globalisation. Paris: Payot. Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1999. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998 (1958). The Human Condition, second edition, ed. Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2005. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bellah, Robert N. 1975. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury Press. Bellah Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper and Row. Bensa, Alban, and Eric Fassin. 2002. “Les sciences sociales face à l’événement,” Terrain 38: 5–20.

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

185

Bernard, Julien. 2009. Croque-mort. Une anthropologie des émotions. Paris: Métailié. Boltanski, Luc. 1990. L’amour et la justice comme compétences. Trois essais de sociologie de l’action. Paris: Métailié. Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 1993. The New Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1977 Notre Corps, Nous-mêmes. Paris: Albin Michel Brones, Sophie. “Beyrouth et ses ruines (1990–2010). Une approche anthropologique.” PhD Dissertation, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 2010. Caldwell, Sandra M. and Ronald J. Caldwell. 1993. The History of the Episcopal Church of America, 1607–1991: A Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Calhoun, Craig, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer, eds. 2002. Understanding September 11th. New York: New Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Champion, Françoise and Danièle Hervieu-Léger, eds. 1990. De l’émotion en religion. Renouveaux et traditions. Paris: Centurion. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Foi et savoir. Le siècle et le pardon (interview with Michel Wieviorka). Paris: Seuil. Donne, John. 2010 (1624). Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. El-Wafi, Aïcha. 2006. Mon fils perdu. Paris: Plon. Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. 2009 (2007). The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans Rachel Gomme. Princeton NJ: Prince­ ton University Press. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 2008. “Vérités et réconciliations,” penser/rêver 13: 29–41. Foner, Nancy, ed. 2005. Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Fraenkel, Béatrice. 2002. Les écrits de septembre, New York 2001. Paris: Textuel. Franklin, R. William and Mary Sudman Donovan, eds. 2003. Will the Dust Praise You? Spiritual Responses to 9/11. New York: Church Publishers. Freud, Sigmund. 1955 (1920). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XVIII: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and other works. London: The Hogarth Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 (1950). On Collective Memory, ed. and trans by Lewis Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1972. Classes sociales et morphologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies of the social organization of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. James, William. 1896. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green, and Company. King, Coretta Scott. 2008. The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. NY, NY: Newmarket Press. Laplantine, François. 2005. Le social et le sensible. Introduction à une anthropologie modale. Paris: Téraèdre.

186

Anne Raulin

Lavabre, Marie-Claire. 2006. “Les institutions qui produisent des récits communs.” In Après le conflit, la réconciliation, ed. S. Lefranc. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 82–97. Loyer, Emmanuelle. 2005. Paris à New York. Intellectuels et artistes français en exil: 1940–1947. Paris: Grasset. Marienstras, Elise. 1997. “Nation et religion aux Etats-Unis.” In Religion et Démocratie, ed. Patrick Michel. Paris: Albin Michel. McComb, Samuel and Elwood Worcester. 2009 (1909). The Christian Religion As A Healing Power. Charleston: Bibliolife. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005 (1945). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. 2003. History and September 11th. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Micoud, André. 1991. Des Hauts Lieux. La construction sociale de l’exemplarité. Paris: CNRS Editions. Moskowitz, Eva S. 2001. In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Nobel, Philip. 2005. Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. New York: Metropolitan Books. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1996 (1992). Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Piette, Albert. 2009. Anthropologie existentiale, Paris: Editions Pétra. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 2001 (1992). “The Place of Grace in Anthropology.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1(1): 423–450. Potorti, David, ed. 2003. September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows: Turning Our Grief into Action for Peace. New York: RDV Books/Akashic Books. Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A 1977. The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing. Randaxhe, Fabienne. 2003. “De ‘l’exception religieuse’ états-unienne. Retour sur un débat.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 122: 7–25. Raulin, Anne. 1997. Manhattan ou la mémoire insulaire. Paris: Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle. ———. 2013. “Résilience urbaine à Lower Manhattan: Raccords mémoriels et déni de l’après 11 septembre.” In Mémoire et mémorialisation. De l’absence à la représentation, ed. D. Peschanski. Paris: Hermann. Rhoden, L. Nancy. 1999. Revolutionary Anglicanism. The Colonial Church of England Clergy during the American Revolution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richet, Isabelle. 2001. La religion aux Etats-Unis. Paris: PUF. Ricoeur Paul, 1995 (1990). Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004 (2000). Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saint Augustine. 1958. The City of God, trans. Gerald Walsh. New York: Doubleday, Image Books. Schneider, Jane and Ida Susser, eds. 2003. Wounded Cities. Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. Oxford: Berg. Seeley, Karen. 2005. “The Psychological Treatment of Trauma and the Trauma of Psychological Treatment: Talking to Psychotherapists about 9/11.” In The Wounded

Healing at the Foot of the Twin Towers

187

City: The Social Impact of 9/11, ed. Nancy Foner. Russell Sage Foundation, 263–289. Tank-Storper, Sébastien. 2007. Juifs d’élection. Se convertir au judaïsme. Paris: CNRS Editions. Turner, Victor. 1995 (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway NJ: Transaction Publishers. Tutu, Desmond. 1999. No Future without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday. Yeung, Berenice. 2006. “Weeping with the Enemy.” The Village Voice, 6–12 September 2006. Young, Allen. 1993. “A Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder).” In Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, eds. S. Lindenbaum and M. Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 108–128. ———. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions. Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press. Zweig, Stepfan. 2003 (1932). La guérison par l’esprit. Paris: Belfond.

Part

III

Myths Endless possibility, Countrysides

9 To Live in a World of Possibilities A New Age version of the American Myth Christian Ghasarian Systems of ethics are always sustained by a few specific values. Without falling into the culturalist trap and generalizations of the “patterns of culture” school, it is nonetheless clear that there are a variety of ways of articulating and emphasizing the same universal values. Due to the way the United States was established as a country, its cultural models are organized around a particular value system, holding some attitudes and ways of thinking in high esteem and playing down others. Traits such as individualism, independence, self-reliance, risk-taking, innovation, and equality are quite central, while those of dependency, social reproduction, and hierarchy (to mention only a few) are much less appreciated. Of course these values and anti-values exist in other societies as well, but they are configured in a particular way in the United States. Another concept, possibility, is also central in the American cultural framework for representing reality, and it deserves particular attention when trying to understand American society. The possible and the impossible are obviously of general concern for people everywhere. Yet in the United States it seems that a clear emphasis is put on one end of this continuum: what is possible. In fact the word possibility has multiple meanings, and it is more appropriate to speak of possibilities, the variant people evoke most often. The idea that the world is full of possibilities is widespread in the specific configuration of values that has developed in the United States (and which continues to evolve). Five years of fieldwork, regular return visits, and a general interest in American social life have convinced me that this concept has considerable value in everyday American life, in explicit and implicit forms. My analysis of this key local concept in the US is shaped by the anthropologist’s outsider perspective, with its (unavoidable) cultural distance, along with

192

Christian Ghasarian

my experience as a long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area. I was a Research Associate at the University of California-Berkeley from 1992 to 1997 and did post-doctoral research on the cultural adjustments and reformulations of people of Asian Indian heritage, focusing on encounters and mixtures of values in migrants’ and trans-nationals’ lives. Like the people I studied, I was constantly confronted with the concept of possibility. In the following analysis, I will try to decipher why and how that concept became particularly relevant there. I will also show how the idea of possibilities has been reinterpreted in the New Age thought system, which I also studied in the United States. Although so-called New Age messages are less aimed at material success than they are at the individual’s spiritual development, the widespread marketing slogans “Just do it” and “Get up and go”—and the values associated with them—are still found behind new models for a better life. Before beginning my localized exploration of the idea of possibility, it would be useful to retrace the meaning of the word itself. If the word impossible indicates that something cannot be done, the Latin root of possibility (or possibilities) refers to the ideas of “capacity and ability. It also refers to something unlikely that nonetheless could happen. What is interesting here is that a false statement (“the sky is green”) could be considered logically possible if people are able to conceive of some logically coherent world where this false statement might potentially be true (the existence of a green sky). In other words, if there is a logical way to imagine the world described in a false statement, it becomes logically possible, and can be asserted without implying a logical contradiction. In modal logic, philosophers consider logical possibility as the broadest sort of subjunctive (also called alethic or metaphysical) possibility, in contrast with epistemic possibility (dealing with how the world may be) and deontic possibility (dealing with how the world ought to be). Some of the most commonly discussed types of subjective modality are logical possibility (a proposition said to be logically possible), metaphysical possibility (equal to or narrower than logical possibility), monological possibility (under the law of nature), and temporal possibility (given by the actual history of the world). There is also mathematical possibility theory, an extension of fuzzy logic and an alternative to probability theory dealing with certain types of uncertainty (Von Altrock 1995). The concept of “possible worlds,” attributed to Gottfried Leibniz (Belaval 2005) and central to many philosophical developments in the 1960s, is thus widespread in contemporary philosophical discourse and has occasionally been compared to quantum mechanics’ “many-worlds” interpretation (in the quantum worlds theory, all specifically conceivable worlds are physically possible) (Barrett 1999). Theorists avidly discuss the ontological status and nature of possible worlds, in contrast to the actual world (Divers 2005). While

To Live in a World of Possibilities

193

contingent propositions are true in some possible worlds and false in others, necessary propositions are true in all possible worlds. This brief summation of theoretical debates—which are still quite active—indicates how the idea of possibility is at the center of philosophical and physical research. It is also central in human life in general, and particularly in American society and the cultural models it exports.

An optimistic worldview The idea that anything is possible goes far back in American history, with European immigrants and pioneers who were driven by the principle that a new life was possible. The very idea of the frontier—a physical and imaginary space to cross—is based on belief in possibilities. Individualism was mixed with the feeling that life could give newcomers what they wanted if they worked hard and took risks. With an appropriate state of mind and a will to change, one could change one’s life and take a new direction. The concepts of social mobility (highly valued in the United States) and the American Dream—or more precisely, belief in the American Dream—are clearly based on the conviction that possibilities exist. These optimistic ideas are related to hope and renewal. They are behind, for example, the decision to go back to school for a more rewarding professional activity.1 The idea of new possibilities is also implicitly behind the high post-divorce remarriage rate in American society. Significantly, divorces are followed by hope in the possibility of a new marriage. Divorces and re-marriages succeed one another in a constant search for a new beginning, expressing the lasting hope that a new relationship may be waiting in the near future, despite disillusioning experiences and regardless of age. Since America is thought of as the land of opportunity, the notion of possibilities can be used in many ways. A cursory internet search reveals the extent to which the word has become a key concept in everyday thought. The word (in the singular or plural) is so significant that it is used to brand products in a variety of ways. To give just a few examples: an interactive game named Children of Possibility; the jazz musician Herbie Hancock, in collaboration with several guest musicians, entitled a recent album Possibilities; a weekly radio program offering in-depth analysis of contemporary problems “to open minds and inspire new possibilities” is significantly entitled A World of Possibilities. At the individual level, many writings use the word possibility: a book by Margaret Wheatley, for instance, is called The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, and seeks to engage its readers in “the rewards of the door-opening notion” of possibility as an art of living (Zander and Zander 2000). Another book, called Possibility Living: Add Years to Your Life and Life to Your

194

Christian Ghasarian

Years, invites people “to walk the road of Possibility Living,” stating that “your journey toward a Possibility Living fulfilled life can begin now!” “By taking positive steps, such as eating a natural diet, fasting, and praying, you can tap into your innate power for possibility living, remaining open to the voice of God in your life as you nurture your whole being” (Schuller and Di Siena 2002: 35). It is not difficult to find other examples. The concept of possibility is also commonly used to express the idea of an achievable change, even for people whose circumstances do not make it easy for them. Project: Possibility is, for instance, the name of “a nonprofit, community service project committed to creating groundbreaking open source software for persons with disabilities” so they can gain “access to experiences previously impossible to achieve.” A fundraising program opens its website with the following statement: “The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude anything from possibility,” and subsequently affirms that “Life is full of possibilities.” (http:// www.projectpossibility.org/) An “education and service foundation dedicated to helping eliminate social injustices such as economic hardship, disease, hunger and illiteracy in the United States and abroad” decided to call itself Unlimited Possibilities (http://www.updoitnow.org/). A conference to promote, encourage and support minority women interested in mathematics and statistics was named The Infinite Possibilities Conference. A non-profit organization dedicated to solar and renewable energy is called Global Possibilities. The professional career services center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln calls its program The Power of Possibilities. Posters in the streets of Berkeley declare “A Degree of Possibilities” in advertising an open house at John F. Kennedy University (motto: “Transforming lives, changing the world”). The list could go on and on. Significantly, Barack Obama’s political campaign also used the theme of possibilities. For example, a website declared: “For one night at least, it was all about possibilities. Possibilities that Barack Obama, America’s new president-elect, weaved in a tapestry of patriotism and change, with his trademark eloquence …” (McCarthy 2008). It was no surprise to see Barack Obama using the expression “Yes we can” as a leitmotiv to express the possibility of his election and political change. In the same logic, his acceptance speech on 5 November 2008, began: “If there is anybody out there that still doubts that all things are possible, who still wonders if the American Dream is still alive … , tonight is the answer” (Obama 2008). Those who subscribe to a particular behavioral logic inevitably try to avoid or distance themselves from things that are devalued. As I said earlier, values have opposites that are part of everyday reality: “changes” and “improvement” are defined in opposition to “continuities” and “status quo”; innovation is distinguished from any model of social reproduction; taking risks is opposed to seeking security; success is opposed to

To Live in a World of Possibilities

195

failure; and so on. On the axis between opposing values is the “field of possibilities” that people explicitly or implicitly evoke. When considering desired situations and outcomes, references to responsibility, choice, and will predominate in the face of new possibilities. Unwanted external factors are thought to be avoidable if one is really committed to the cause and if circumstances are favorable (a less-evoked condition). An individual’s decision to try for something or not therefore depends on how much potential for concrete results he or she attributes to the field of possibilities. The significant dichotomies at work in American society—with negative or positive situations or outcomes—can be diagrammed as shown in Table 9.1 (the list is far from exhaustive). Possibilities are primarily found between a before and an after, with a great focus on the after, consistent with a widespread belief that the future will or should be better than the past. Prevailing American cultural models are distinctive for clearly valuing change more than continuity. Although the idea of tradition has a place in the cultural landscape, modernity is a key word and innovation is therefore constantly given higher value than social reproduction. In this rationale, self-reliance is always more valued than dependency, which is not the case in every culture (in India, for example, children learn parental dependency very early on). In American society, the psychological transition from a child’s initial unavoidable dependency to his or her ability to “stand on his (or her) own two feet” is again a matter of possibility. It implies taking charge of one’s own economic fate. The very idea of security is thus often associated with an uninteresting status quo and considered an impediment to improvement. Table 9.1.  Significant dichotomies Negative situations or outcome

The field of POSSIBILITIES

Positive situations or outcome

BEFORE

Through

AFTER

continuity

Responsibility

change

social reproduction

Choice

innovation

dependency

Will

self-reliance

security

risk-taking

status quo

improvement

failure

success

196

Christian Ghasarian

In the realm of finance, some risk is considered necessary for success. Being successful is thought to be the manifestation of an ability to exploit the opportunities that the world has to offer. Although failure is always a possible outcome, the main cultural focus is clearly on future success. Success stories are thus particularly appreciated and common in the surrounding psychological environment. The idea of individual responsibility—and therefore the considerable range of choices a person may make at any given time—is taken for granted, regardless of the social forces and circumstances the individual may be subject to. It bears stating that the concrete reality of this thought system is not the object of my analysis—no-one could realistically argue that all possibilities are real and equal for everyone, so there is no need for case studies to prove it! I wish only to emphasize the fact that possibilities are part of a widespread psychological mindset in American society, despite its complex multicultural character. The extent to which people are attached to this idea depends on a variety of life circumstances (including family background, personal psychology, finances, education, etc.) that are beyond the scope of this analysis. Even though the idea of possibilities underpins occupational and geographical mobility in American society (as anywhere else), not everyone can successfully move on. Some social classes—a significantly neglected theme in the US (Ortner 1991)—are more able to do so than others. Education and money help considerably, and different kinds of possibilities are unequally distributed. In the land of the American Dream, the success of some may be shown empirically to be based on the failure of others: it is simply part of competition for limited goods. Consequently success and the American Dream are often experienced and conceived of more individualistically than societally. Fundamentally the notion of possibilities is an affirmation of a resolutely optimistic psychological mindset—anything is possible—that can be observed in private and public life and has consequences for the social world. It is clearly what motivates migrants and transnationals coming to the country hoping for a better future. In this respect, hard work is a basic value, and without it, no accomplishment is thought to be possible.

New Age potential for self-transformation Skepticism about the promise of modernity and critiques of the market’s commodification of the individual by mass market forces have prompted a growing number of people to search for new models for happiness. This has taken a variety of forms, and of course it does not concern all Americans. Because of their prominence, possibilities are still highly valued, but more oriented towards personal achievement than social success,

To Live in a World of Possibilities

197

keeping the focus on the individual and his or her aspirations. This is the case for the New Age movement that has emerged in American society since the 1960s. It consists mainly of alternative spiritual and therapeutic practices that rest on a deep-rooted field of possibilities taking the form of a “potential for inner transformation.” This self-development principle has also gained popularity in other societies in recent decades, in Europe in particular. Exploring how New Age spiritual practices have developed the notion of possibilities should be done in the context of the main religious models found in the United States. These well-established models present a world of possibilities corresponding to one or another set of religious beliefs. New revelations of faith and ensuing changes in daily habits may open new horizons—and bring redemption to individual sinners. Particularly in the Protestant tradition, there is the idea of before- and after-conversion, particularly marked within Evangelical groups who speak of the possibility of being born again. Faith is seen as the key that opens new possibilities for this life and the next. Generally—across the vast variety of Christian denominations—possibility is mainly understood as being external to the individual, a result of God’s grace, with the individual surrendering to what happens to him or her. However, in New Age spiritualities, there is a pronounced emphasis on individual choice and enhanced personal awareness. Significantly, New Age approaches to religion and spirituality are generally considered to have their roots in the Human Potential Movement (HPM), associated with the Esalen Institute (Kripal 2007:315). The very idea of potential is explicitly associated with that of possibility. Before analyzing how this notion is understood in the American New Age milieu, I would like to briefly return to the circumstances that led me to study these meaning and activity systems. My interest in practices qualified as New Age naturally arose from my fieldwork when I was living in Berkeley, California (1992–97). Month after month, while conducting my research on people of Asian-Indian descent, I observed a cultural phenomenon surrounding me. By simply living in the San Francisco Bay area, I was inevitably exposed to ways of thinking, verbal formulations, and local practices that valued personal development and broke away from established models for material success. After studying the cultural reformulations of Asian-Indians in the United States for four years, I shifted my research to focus on the Berkeley counterculture, including a set of alternative New Age practices related to personal development. Encounters, discussions, participation in various activities, visits to expositions with friends, and everyday life in the Bay area immersed me in the complex universe of New Age meanings. Alongside these personal experiences, I conducted a careful study of several local

198

Christian Ghasarian

newspapers, magazines, and websites explicitly oriented toward self-development. I also attended conferences and participated in retreats that allowed me to note some recurrent themes in a common meaning system sustained by the value of individualism. Within New Age spiritualities, I focused on neo-shamanic activities, later opening my study to a multisited approach (including Europe), following the cosmopolitan milieu involved in these practices (Ghasarian 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010). The New Age world of meanings may be understood as symptomatic of widespread cultural phenomena found in Californian and American society at large. Indeed, the various explorations of sacredness and medical alternatives it offers shed light on the engagement of an increasing number of people looking for a more authentic spirituality than what they could find in Christianity—and/or for therapies that are more “natural” than those of the dominant biomedical system. Four interrelated dimensions of everyday life are systematically evoked in the New Age general worldview: spirituality, personal development, natural health, and global change (implying both social and environmental change). Study of recurring concepts and related activities allowed me to sketch the outline of a value system that may represent a distinctive cultural moment, based on the idea that, although it may not be possible to change the world, it is at least possible to change one’s own life. It is important to reiterate that for me, a French anthropologist out of his social and cultural context in the San Francisco Bay area, the value system and practices I analyzed and observed there did not appear to be part of a marginal sub-culture, but almost seemed to be the dominant local way of life. I could thus see how people understood New Age models of “well-being” in terms of “potential for self-transformation,” allowing them to get involved selectively in particular activities. Among New Age’s main references, implicit or explicit, are the notions of potential, life choices, self-responsibility, self-transformation, and personal experiences. These notions are related to fundamental categories such as energy, nature, ancient traditions, authentic spirituality, preventive medicine, community, etc. At the core of these ideas is that of inner capacities, which can be developed if one really wants to do so. A central aspect of the general New Age approach to spirituality is the idea of exploring human potential, so explicit allusions to the notion of potential are recurrent. Personal development is portrayed as being accessible to all, and it is associated with experimentation and self-transformation. Everyone is thought to hold existential answers, in the here and now: anyone can engage in a process of transformation to find the reason for his or her existence, also referred to as inner peace. The general message is clearly optimistic—it is possible to redirect and reinforce one’s life, if the will is there. People are thought to be masters of their habitus

To Live in a World of Possibilities

199

(a Bourdieusian notion that conflicts with the “change is always possible” ideal referred to above). Many affirmations, such as “start improving your life right now,” emphasize this idea. The thought that one can voluntarily act to change one’s life is therefore at the heart of New Age significations (according to which it is merely a matter of cultivating our determination and will). Significantly, the fundamental “just do it” (almost an American caricature) is behind the idea that it is possible to realize one’s dreams (making your dreams tangible in your life … here and now), and this slogan implies a relative urgency. My fieldwork led me to key terms and valued ideas of this general meaning system, where a “potential for transformation” is at stake: enhancing well-being, health and inner strength, (re)connecting with nature, mixing ancient wisdoms and modern science, developing spirituality beyond formal religion, exploring the unknown, developing one’s feminine side, and being in process toward happiness and inner peace—all with the hope/ conviction that changing one’s life can have global impact. Although these values are thought to be present in life already (at hidden levels), they are for the most part projected into a positive future. In lieu of lengthy case studies, I present examples of relevant commonly used expressions from the New Age milieu I studied. All of the dimensions evoked above depend on the alignment of individual responsibility and choice values of society at large, and an understanding that there is a “field of energy” both within and external to the person awaiting awakening. The fundamental notion of energy is clearly related to that of “power.” Energy, associated with physical and psychic practices and formulated in either explicit (“higher energy levels”) or implicit ways (“a thousand times more powerful”), is thought to exist in a variety of forms that a person can integrate into himself: light, air, music, vitamins, anti-oxidants, food, etc. Energy’s unexpressed potential also exists in the mind (“mind power”). Its development is a source of strength (“unlock your power”), healing (“healing chi energy,” “chakra energy”), happiness, and peace. References to other medical traditions (especially Asian and South American) that account for invisible life forces contribute to a double dynamic: dissatisfaction with western therapeutic practices paired with allegiance to an alternative belief system with a heavily “mysterious” dimension that cannot be scientifically confirmed. In New Age thinking, being in good health is clearly a matter of individual responsibility (indeed, good health is a fundamental concern of human life, especially in American society where fear of losing it is quite present and part of a huge medical-industrial market). The holistic dimension of well-being appears in continual references to the body, mind, and spirit connection. Individuals are thought to construct external and internal limits with the forces responsible for their health. Since all

200

Christian Ghasarian

humans are believed to possess the potential to avoid illness and be in good health, it is up to them to know how to explore their “personal resources.” This expectation of individual responsibility is expressed explicitly in the following sentence from a website for New Age meditation tapes: “It is your inner light that determines what you experience.” (https://www.orindaben.com/catalog/prodno/MM010/) Significantly, New Age’s health-related attitudes focus on preventing illness through the search for well-being, happiness, and peace. Being masters of their own destinies, everyone is thought to have the choice to be in good health. Healing (a central notion in the New Age milieu) is the transition from illness to health and is always possible with the right state of mind. Physical weakness can be overcome with the development of an inner strength, itself a precondition for good health. Specific physical practices (yoga, tai chi, qigong, etc.) and nurturing a positive attitude can begin an empowerment process that relies on believing in one’s capacities (already present as an unexploited “energetic potential”) and expressing them. It is said that confronting a weakness is the condition for, and the first step toward, overcoming it. The idea of process is omnipresent in the New Age milieu. People speak of “being in process,” meaning working on oneself. This process is most often associated with difficult times to be gotten through and a need to better understand oneself and one’s life. It presupposes challenging established assumptions and attitudes that had controlled one’s life up to that point. As painful as it may be, the outcome of this process is always considered positive because it frees the person from his or her previous limitations. Such change stands in opposition to being stuck, which should be avoided because it means one is not engaged in inner transformation. One of the main psychological tools favoring the process is fluidity, which implies letting go of what could prevent the person from elevating his or her consciousness and existence. A positive state of mind, fluidity also refers to energy (which can be blocked or circulating) with which anyone can work. In New Age models, the religious references are principally non-Christian (Sufism, Buddhism …). A certain dissatisfaction with the three principal monotheist religions and their dogmatic answers is confirmed by the fact that the word religion has the connotation of empty and stultified rituals, rigid rules, and power struggles, all associated with attitudes contradicting the idea of an authentic spirituality. New Agers look for answers to doubts and existential questions outside of more fundamentalist discourses, neo-evangelical movements in particular. Significantly, in the New Age milieu, explicit allusions to religion (especially Christianity) are limited in favor of references to spirituality. If concepts such as divinity and soul are fundamental to this milieu, other religious terms—like faith,

To Live in a World of Possibilities

201

belief, church, pastor, priest—are explicitly avoided. Individual intention and will are preponderant in New Age practices, instead of a desire to rely on a celestial authority. Key New Age ideas such as “God is inside” or “I am God” (since everything is a microcosm of the divine) affirm the power of the individual, although this is just a potential power that can only be developed through the development of “inner energy,” provided the individual becomes aware of it and learns how to activate it. This attitude, thought to express openness, rejects the Christian dogma of guilt and its tenet that “man is a sinner,” and consequently many conventional Christian religions strongly condemn New Age beliefs as an expression of human arrogance (when it is not simply attributed to Satanic illusions). In the New Age meaning system, belief in oneself and in one’s capacity to express “the divinity within” predominates. The high level of women’s involvement in New Age spiritualities is explained particularly by the fact that mainstream religions exclude women from power. Ideas of divine or cosmic power and personal experiences are present in numerous New Age activities such as channeling and shamanism. In this system, alternative spiritual practices mostly attract women (“wise woman ways,” “strong women building a gentle world”), with recurrent references to “woman energy” and “woman power.” Women are thought to have the same potential as men for self-development (if not more!). In this respect, the idea that everyone should develop his or her energetic feminine side—peaceful, sensitive, and gentle (among many other qualifiers)—in an overly masculine world (built on competition, egocentrism, violence, etc.) is very widespread in the New Age milieu— and has consequences on peoples’ lives. New Age spiritualities interestingly try to combine modern science and ancient knowledge in a way of life (“self-improvement program”). Many references are made to the possibility of living and dealing with one’s health in a unified, overarching way. Holistic living is thus held in high esteem, to be practiced in daily life. In the New Age rationale of a potential-filled world and life, frequent reference is made to the tools and resources available for realizing the energetic possibilities of science and ancient wisdom that could make a better life more accessible. New Age products (remedies, meditation tapes, etc.) are routinely legitimized by reference to authenticity, ancient and exotic characteristics, and established successful reception (“internationally acclaimed”). The valued symbolic position of practices believed to take account of nature (traditional, unaltered, pure form) is rooted in an interest in the indigenous peoples of the world, the environment, alternative ways to cure disease, and an improved individual and societal relationship with nature (“living in balance with the earth”). The evocation of diverse traditions confirms that the New Age belief system rests above all on a quest for an accessible alternative

Christian Ghasarian

202

knowledge. Experimental eclecticism thus leads people to engage in traditional oriental medicines (from Chinese qigong to the chakras of yoga) and to explore ancient Celtic, Hopi, Pueblo, Zulu, Inca, Maya, Aboriginal, and shamanic knowledge in general. Significantly, if nature and the ancient are constant references, they are usually combined with respect for progress (“modern method based on ancient wisdom,” “high-tech meditation”), and all manner of products’ claims to legitimacy make reference to science (“its power has undergone scientific scrutiny”). Holism includes rather than excludes. Although it brings together the modern and the ancient, New Age thought still strongly values a “(re)connection to nature.” The growing interest in indigenous populations, considered to live in harmony with nature, and in ethnobotany, traditional medicines, magic, and spiritual healing has, for instance, favored the emergence of what has been called “neo-shamanism” in the United States (where it began forty years ago) and elsewhere in the world. It is part of a system of representation that sees nature as another “world of possibilities and transformation” with neglected positive “energetic potential” that should be rediscovered and preserved. Using non-toxic products is thus highly regarded not only for health reasons, but also because they do not pollute the environment (“making life style choices that are conducive to the well-being of all”). The ecological thinking behind recycling, reducing consumption and developing a new relationship to materialism is widespread in the United States today, because it conveys a message of hope (“a light shining through the environmental and political despair of our time”).

Changing oneself and the world An exploration of the New Age worldview would be incomplete without consideration of a few more interrelated concepts that also play an important role in the “personal transformation process”: exploration and personal experimentation, consciousness-raising, love, and changing one’s life. People’s main motivation for exploring new possibilities is the search for happiness. The New Age meaning and activities system primarily appeals to people who are dissatisfied with their lives as they are—or who hope to overcome a persistent condition of sadness. Consequently, development of awareness and consciousness of oneself and one’s situation are considered essential. Confronting and exploring the unknown is particularly valued as a prerequisite for finding answers about oneself and the world. This logic explains why people consume psychoactive plants (which they usu-

To Live in a World of Possibilities

203

ally know little about) in neo-shamanistic practices; they want to undergo totally unpredictable—and often quite profound—experiences. Love is probably the most explicitly evoked notion in the New Age milieu, where learning to love oneself first is the precondition for being able to love the rest of the world. From this perspective, all of a person’s difficulties (stress, distress, suffering, anguish, etc.) are the result of a lack of love in his or her life. Pervasive in alternative spiritual approaches, the concept of love, like that of energy, is a “floating signifier” (Lévi-Strauss, 1950). It allows an attribution of meaning to any kind of situation by signaling how the expression of love would be beneficial to the quest for inner peace, the ultimate goal of New Age spiritualities to which love is the key. The holistic approach in New Age spiritualities also explains the wish for a social dimension to health. The ideas that “the future can be redefined” and that one can “change the world” are accompanied by the idea that one must first change one’s own life—a notion pithily expressed by Gandhi, who is very popular in the New Age milieu: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” In this logic, civil society seeks to take control of itself and give itself new worth by combining the local (the individual and the community) and the global (the world) (“We, as resident of the surface, are connected to this planet, not unlike the cells of our body are connected to us”). The local/global correlation can also be found in the idea that a person should find a mission (“discover your purpose in life”) to fulfill during his or her “journey on earth.” The notion of community, widespread across the United States, also regularly appears in the New Age formulations. The explicit aim is to participate in a new phase of social evolution in which creativity has a social, economic, intellectual, and spiritual nature (whether it is put into practice or not). Table 9.2 shows the main value/anti-value dichotomies and acts of responsibility one should engage in to fully express the “potential of transformation” according to New Age spiritualities. The categories in the middle column indicate the ideal state of mind favoring positive situations or creating positive outcomes. This brief presentation of some common New Age themes shows the fluid, complex and fragmented character of this movement that speaks to people looking for new answers to life’s questions. As noted earlier, one way or another, virtually everyone in the San Francisco Bay area is exposed to some aspect of New Age, as well as elsewhere in California and to some extent in American society at large. Today New Age models have to varying degrees become commonsense across the country, so they can be analyzed in terms of the variety of ways individuals give form to a complex culture. New Age qualities—health, enthusiasm, innovation, love

Christian Ghasarian

204

Table 9.2.  New Age potential for transformation Negative situations or outcome BEFORE

illness

ENERGY POTENTIAL FOR Transformation through Responsibility Choice Will

Positive situations or outcome AFTER

 EMPOWERMENT 

well-being & health

weakness

 HEALING 

inner strength

stuck

 FLUIDITY 

in process

religion

 OPENNESS 

spirituality

masculine side

 SENSITIVITY 

modern science

 HOLISTIC LIVING 

science & ancient wisdom

 ECOLOGICAL THINKING 

reconnection with nature

disconnection from basic truths

feminine side

known

 EXPLORATION 

unknown

sadness

 CONSCIOUSNESS 

happiness

suffering

 LOVE 

local acts

 CHANGING ONE’S LIFE 

inner peace global impacts

and compassion, intuition, creativity, vision and inspiration—are all part of a “world of possibilities,” of potential for transformation. The more I became interested in New Age culture, the more I found in it some of the basic principles and values shaping American society generally, such as optimism about the future, perfectibility of self and society, the idea that paradise can be achieved in this life, especially through individual effort; pervasive emphasis on the individual associated with an explicit valorization. Basic economic models are also still at work in New Age spiritualities, since forms of capitalism and consumerism are not exempt from most New Age logics and attitudes. Authenticity and otherness are commodities in a lucrative spirituality and self-transformation market expressed through numerous artifacts.

To Live in a World of Possibilities

205

Conclusion In closing this chapter, I would like to once again remind the reader that cultural and social change is, of course, not unique to American society: change obviously happens everywhere. Yet the constant use of the verb “can” in the United States is quite striking in this respect. There is probably no other country that so emphasizes the concept of possibilities in everyday life as the New Age vocabulary does. The idea of being responsible for your own destiny (“just do it”) is explained here in terms of a “potential for transformation” and the “new possibilities that you can open for yourself, if you are ready. In France, the popular expression “Impossible n’est pas français” (“Impossible isn’t French”) also indicates that there is space in France for taking on difficult undertakings. However, the knowledge that it will not be easy appears in the negative formulation (“impossible …”). Analyzing developments in French society (scarcity of employment, growing individualism, new technologies, etc.), Eric Maurin (2002) imagines the conditions necessary for attaining an “equality of opportunity,” but hope remains far on the horizon. Indeed, another point that seems to demonstrate a difference in how the two societies understand the concept of possibility is a greater emphasis on abstractions in France (a slogan in May 1968 proclaimed: “Ce que nous voulons? Tout!” (“What do we want? Everything!”), while American society is more inclined to pragmatism (“What can we do? Anything!”). “To want” and “to be able to” have somewhat different connotations. Significantly, a common remark I have heard many times from first-time French visitors to the United States is that they feel younger there … as if they rediscovered an inner potential. Interestingly, the cultural concept of social and geographical mobility, related to the idea of possibilities/potential, can also be traced in American social theories. It is striking that the ideas of habitus and social reproduction (Bourdieu 2006) have not been widely used in the United States, where Pierre Bourdieu has nonetheless been acclaimed for his theoretical work on reflexivity. It is obvious that social theories are interrelated with their cultural contexts: whereas European and French research has focused on systems and structures and their impact on the individual, the American research has emphasized the individual and his or her opportunities. It comes as no surprise to see that Max Weber has always been more influential than Emile Durkheim or Claude Lévi-Strauss in the US and that theories such as symbolic interactionism, social phenomenology, and ethnomethodology have developed there instead (Udéhn 2005). We should remember that the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel understood the social world as a “field of possibilities” and that his followers have replaced the concept of rules and norms with that of “resources” in an approach

Christian Ghasarian

206

that implies that the individual is at the center of society and has considerable flexibility in constructing his or her social reality. A worldview emphasizing the value of human possibilities stands in opposition to one built on the idea of a life lacking opportunities for change. At the heart of the dominant system of meaning in the United States and congruent New Age attitudes, positive thinking (and increasingly exported visualization techniques) allows the concepts of “possibility” and “potential” to fully contribute to an emphasis on the individual and his or her capacity to turn his or her choices into reality.

Notes   1. By comparison, it is striking to see how French media treat an older person’s decision to go back to school and get a degree: the act is so far from the norm that it often makes local news reports, which emphasize how unusual it is and the considerable courage of the person involved.

References Barrett, Jeffrey. 1999. The Quantum Mechanics of Minds and Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Battaglia, Debbora, ed. 1995. The Rhetoric of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belaval, Yvon. 2005. Leibniz, initiation à sa philosophie. Paris: Vrin. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2006 [2001]. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Trans., Richard Nice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Divers, John. 2002. Possible Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Ghasarian, Christian. 2002. “Santé alternative et New Age à San Francisco.” In Convocations thérapeutiques du sacré, ed. Raymond Massé and Jean Benoist. Paris: Khartala. ———, ed. 2002. De l’ethnographie à l’anthropologie réflexive. Nouveaux terrains, nouvelles pratiques, nouveaux enjeux. Paris: Armand Colin. ———. 2006. “Réflexions sur les rapports corps/conscience /esprit(s) dans les représentations et pratiques néo-shamaniques.” In Les médecines en parallèle: multiplicité des recours aux soins en Occident, ed. Olivier Schmitz. Paris: Karthala. ———. 2009. “Explorations néo-shamaniques en terra incognita de l’anthropologie.” In La conscience dans tous ses états. Approches anthropologiques et psychiatriques: cultures et thérapies, eds. Sébastien Baud and Nancy Midol. Paris: Masson. ———. 2010. “Introspections néo-shamaniques au travers du San Pedro.” In Plantes psychotropes. Initations, thérapies et quêtes de soi, eds. Sébastien Baud and Christian Ghasarian. Paris: Imago. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2007. Esalen : America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

To Live in a World of Possibilities

207

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1950. “Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss.” In Sociologie et anthropologie, Marcel Mauss. Paris: PUF. Maurin, Eric. 2002. L’égalité des possibles. La nouvelle société française. Paris: Seuil. McCarthy, Andrew. 2008. “The Possibilities of President Obama.” National Review Online, 5 November 2008. http://m.nationalreview.com/articles/226255/possi bilities-president-obama/andrew-c-mccarthy, accessed 21 March 2014 Obama, Barack. 2008. Victory speech, Chicago, 5 November 2008. http://elections .nytimes.com/2008/results/president/speeches/obama-victory-speech.html, accessed 21 March 2014. Ortner, Sherry B. 1991. Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Schuller, Robert and Douglas Di Siena. 2002. Possibility Living: Add Years to Your Life and Life to Your Years with God’s Health Plan. San Francisco: HarperOne. Udéhn, Lars. 2001. Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning. London and New York: Routledge. Von Altrock, Constantin. 1995. Fuzzy Logic and NeuroFuzzy Applications Explained. Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. Zander, Rosamund Stone, and Benjamin Zander. 2000. The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. Boston MA: Harvard Business School Press.

10 Faux Amis in the Countryside Deciphering the familiar Susan Carol Rogers

As an American ethnographer of rural France, I have always been struck by the very strong attraction of many French urbanites to rural landscapes and lifeways, usually inextricably tied in the public imaginary with farming. Extensive coverage by the national media of Paris’s annual Salon d’Agriculture (Agriculture Expo), the ease of mobilizing broad public support in defense of French agriculture, the popularity of rural vacations among French city dwellers, for example, all suggest a French attachment to the countryside that stands in strong contrast to American attitudes. Such cross-national differences in meaning and sentiment are all the more intriguing because French and American rural life and agriculture are in fact broadly similar on many demographic and economic terms. Indeed, the French countryside offers one useful focus for exploring the kind of faux amis that are arguably one important focus for anthropologies “close to home.” Technically, faux amis (literally: false friends) refers to two words in different languages that look or sound similar but carry substantially different meanings. This concept is usually used with reference to a particular kind of translation error, but I have found it a useful tool for thinking more broadly about some of the pitfalls of cross-cultural interpretation. If classic anthropologies of the exotic were largely concerned to identify the human commonalities underlying radical cultural/ social difference across place or time, then a crucial task of contemporary anthropologies of the familiar is to decipher the cultural or social differences hidden under apparent similarities. As suggested by the concept of faux amis, the potential for misunderstanding resulting from complacent assumptions of similarity may be more insidious than the pitfalls generated by obvious difference.

Faux Amis in the Countryside

209

In this paper, then, I shall explore some French meanings of the countryside. I will begin by roughly sketching some of the apparent general similarities between France and the US with respect to agriculture and rural life, as well as the sharply divergent associations that have been elaborated about each place. I will then draw on my fieldwork on rural tourism in the Limousin region of central France to consider in more detail some of the meanings associated with the French countryside, paying particular attention to the variable pertinence of one or another form of knowledge across time and social position. My first example here is the emergence at the turn of this century of a broadly appealing and widely accessible generic countryside as a leisure destination, defined in terms of a simple opposition to familiar urban landscapes. This generic countryside, I argue, partially displaces a status-conferring connoisseur’s recreational countryside which was elaborated around the turn of the last century. I will then explore how my own emplacement in the Limousin countryside—and the value attributed to my knowledge about it—varied with the position of my interlocutors: permanent residents were generally inclined to accord me the conventional ethnographer’s position as a naïve outsider, while visiting tourists saw me instead as a kind of super-tourist, more knowledgeable than ordinary visitors and a more objective source of information than most residents. This discussion will allow me to conclude with some final thoughts about faux amis and the production of anthropological knowledge.

Rural Places in the Post-Industrial West (US and France in particular) Both France and the US are richly endowed with agricultural resources, have developed exceptionally productive and technologically sophisticated farm sectors, and are major players in international agricultural markets. In most years, in fact, they are the world’s two leading exporters of agricultural goods. Like many other places in the world, they once had predominantly agrarian economies and rural populations, but over the course of the twentieth century (though at somewhat different rhythms) both countries became increasingly urban, with their economies becoming overwhelmingly dominated by non-agricultural activity. In the US, for example, the urban population first surpassed 50% of the total population during the decade between 1910 and 1920; in France, this threshold was crossed in the 1930s. Today about 75–80% of each country’s population lives in areas classified as urban. In 1900, about 40% of each country’s labor force was employed in agriculture, while today the figure is about

210

Susan Carol Rogers

1% for the US and 2% for France. By the same token, production agriculture’s contribution to each country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is now relatively minor: again about 1% for the US and 2% for France. Although the agricultural sector is deeply integrated into each country’s markets, the peculiarities of its biological (rather than industrial) production processes and of market demand for food (in contrast to that for other consumer goods) mean that production agriculture1 is chronically out-of-step with the dynamics of our post-industrial economies and recurrently in a state of severe crisis. For example, the particularly high risk, narrow profit margins, and quickly-reached diseconomies of scale inherent in plant cultivation and animal husbandry mean that individual farms remain relatively small by industrial standards, lodged in an extremely weak market position with respect to the giant multinational corporations on which they depend for buying farm inputs and selling the raw materials produced.2 Further, spiraling costs of production, together with everincreasing productivity in the face of easily-saturated domestic demand for food and increasingly fierce competition for international market shares combine to make farming generally unsustainable economically without public subsidy in both countries. In sum, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Rogers 2000), production agriculture is not significantly more important to or problematic in the French economy than the American; French farmers are no more quaint, numerous (proportionately), or engaged in non-market production than are their American counterparts; and the French citizenry is not much more likely to have farming forebears than are Americans. By many measures, the evolution of the farm sector in the two countries has in fact been broadly convergent. And yet contemporary meanings associated with farming and rural life take sharply different forms in each. Dominant stereotypes of farming in the two countries, for example, are broadly shared across national boundaries and equally fantastic, but are rooted in opposite imagery. Conventional images of French farming generally exaggerate continuities with the past, emphasizing (now bygone) picturesque small farms that use simple technologies for highly diverse production, largely for home consumption (Hervieu and Viard 1996, for example). In contrast, common ideas about American farming tend to exaggerate its integration into contemporary corporate industrial modes of production, calling up images of gigantic soulless “factories in the field” that confuse the structure of production agriculture with that of the farm-input and food-processing industries. Another kind of contrast can be found in widely-shared French notions of agriculture as a social good deeply implicated in the general interest of the nation, as opposed to American conceptions of farming as an essentially economic matter pertaining to narrow special interests potentially

Faux Amis in the Countryside

211

detrimental to the commonweal. It was not always so: the image of the yeoman farmer as the backbone of American democracy was an important theme in much of the nation’s history. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, dominant ideas about agriculture shifted in the US from a crucial part of the body politic’s architecture to one form of merchandise production among others (Danbom 1979, Marcus 1985, Rogers 1997, Dudley 2000). Conceptions of farming as a way of life crucial to the well-being of the American national psyche, spirit, or social fabric continue occasionally to be expressed, but generally in an oppositional or counter-cultural mode (Hightower 1972, Berry 1977, Jackson 1985, Pollan 2006). In France, on the other hand, the peasant farmer has continued to stand for the soul of the nation, representing the deep-rooted cultural traditions implanted in the national territory which define France, as well as various kinds of equilibria which guarantee the health of society. Such themes are regularly evoked—often in mainstream media and by key decision makers—in the context of French debates around European Union agricultural policy, international trade agreements, and other matters concerning the nation’s food supply (Rogers 1987, 2000). In the French logic, insofar as agriculture is considered a public good crucial to the well-being of society, the state or other public bodies are understood to have direct responsibility for its protection, management, and financing. For Americans, the proper role of the state—and the range of issues considered to be in the general interest—is widely considered to be much narrower. In the domain of agriculture (as in many others, such as health care or education), it is generally believed in the US that the state’s legitimate role should be limited to maintaining a level playing field among the array of private interests that, in the process of competing with each other, are expected to best provide for the needs of the collectivity and of individual citizens. Indeed, in my experience among farmers in the Lorraine and Aveyron regions of France on one hand and the American Midwest on the other, the terms they use to talk about their positions within the larger society are strikingly similar, with the notable exception of their chronic complaints about state interventions in agriculture. French farmers routinely consider state (or EU) policy to be misguided and believe that different interventions would significantly improve their lives and livelihoods. Most of the American farmers I have known, in contrast, are persuaded that their difficulties result directly from the very fact of state interventions in agriculture (“this monkey on our back”); for them, the best solutions lie, not in different policies, but in the state’s retreat from any involvement at all in the agricultural domain. Most of their compatriots would undoubtedly agree. Of course, as suggested by the figures cited above, the countryside is not reducible to agriculture in either France or the US. Indeed, although

212

Susan Carol Rogers

some rural areas in both countries are dominated by farm-related activity, only a small minority of the rural population in either country now lives directly from full-time farming. Large numbers of rural-dwellers combine part-time farming with other activity, do non-agricultural work in rural settings, commute to work in urban or peri-urban areas, or are inactive (retired or unemployed). In a sense, there is nothing new about such diversity: prior to twentieth-century urbanization, many rural areas had highly mixed economies, combining for example various kinds of manufacturing and service provision with mixed farming. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, a new source of rural diversity became well entrenched, especially in France: images of the countryside as a site of productive work have been partially displaced by an idea of the countryside as a refuge associated with leisure, whether on a daily basis (commuters), seasonally (weekenders or vacationers), or as part of the life course (retirees). If the French countryside has acquired a stronger magnetic pull as a place for recreation than its American counterpart, it is partly because it is part of a two-way system of classifying space (urban, rural) rather than the three-way system that defines American space (urban, rural, wilderness). Generally speaking, the uncultivated and uninhabited space associated with the American West may be exotically attractive to French tourists and others, but such places within the French Hexagon are considered abhorrently un-French. Alarmist critiques of the reckless abandonment of French farmland, for example, often draw on unappealing, even tragic images of cultivated landscapes displaced by desert or undisciplined nature: All consideration of the relationship between agriculture and territory is inevitably dominated by the tragic image of a formerly lively countryside now transformed into deserts.3 (Hervieu 1993: 113) As man retreats, scrub advances.4 (Crozes 1992: 254)

In France, the alternative to city life—by turns appealing or repulsive— is to be found in rural places, associated with the peasant whose positive persona includes guardianship of the nation’s soul, its deep-rooted heritage, and closeness to nature. In the US, rural places may sometimes take on such meanings, but farmers there do not carry the same symbolic charge as French peasants—and the American countryside is more often just the intermediary element between city and its quintessentially American alternative, wilderness (Shortridge 1989). It is arguably in wide-open or otherwise “empty” wilderness spaces, lightly occupied if at all by Native Americans, that Americans are most likely to look for their national soul, deepest heritage, and harmony with nature (or just a memorable vacation).5 A cabin in the woods and a rifle constitute a more American

Faux Amis in the Countryside

213

fantasy than a herd of sheep and a shepherd’s crook on the High Plains (causses). With this quick sketch, let us leave American meanings of rural places, to look in more detail at French ideas about the countryside of leisure. Here, I will draw principally on my fieldwork on rural tourism in the Limousin region, conducted in 1997 and 1998,6 to explore part of the French repertoire of ideas about rural places across time and social perspective.

From Connoisseurship to the Generic: the French countryside in the era of mass tourism There exists a substantial historical literature that links the development of leisure travel in France between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth with the elaboration and codification of definitions of French rural/provincial regions in terms of distinctive landscapes, gastronomy, folklore, and other elements. For example, Bertho-Lavenir (1999) traces the influence of Le Touring Club de France (TCF), founded in 1890 and disbanded 1983. Led by bourgeois elites, this organization successfully drew a broadening swath of upper/middle classes to the pleasures of automobile touring during the early decades of the twentieth century.7 Most notably, she argues, the TCF monthly magazine helped define a geography of regional difference by disseminating information about the sites to be seen across the French Hexagon: unique sites and region-specific landscapes, architecture, and folklore provided an incentive to travel, while their promotion or protection justified the TCF as an organization. Beginning in the 1920s, the magazine also began to promote regional cuisines. Although much of the food available in the provinces until then was in fact monotonously uniform and—in the case of that routinely eaten by rural populations—often well below urban bourgeois standards, new efforts were underway by tourism and restaurant professionals to create and publicize regional dishes inspired by local produce but using modern cooking techniques. This movement, notes Bertho-Lavenir (1999: 235) coincided exactly with an emergent literary and political interest in regionalism. It resulted in a plethora of new local specialty dishes both associated with one or another provincial town or region, and characterized by ingredients available there (though not necessarily exclusively so). Beginning with its 1920 edition, the Michelin Guide, targeting a similar audience as the TCF magazine, first included a map showing the main foods associated with each region as well as the “strictly local” dishes to be found in each location described (Rauch 1996: 91). The promise of delectable foods that could only be found in particular places in the French provinces provided a potentially insatiable incentive to tour the countryside, while

214

Susan Carol Rogers

knowledge about regional cuisines came to be one mark of distinction available to those with the means to tour frequently. Laferté’s (2006) case study of the processes by which Burgundy and its wines acquired distinguishable and distinguished identities illustrates this trajectory. He too links forms of tourism emergent in the late nineteenth century with the elaboration and codification of regional differences, initially defined largely in terms of typical landscapes and distinctive monuments. He then shows how, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a more or less erudite intertwining of folklore and regionalism further helped distinguish and render attractive particular provincial destinations. As a result of the astute maneuvers of certain actors in the wine business, Burgundy wines (and cuisine) acquired strong and appealing localized associations authenticated by putatively ageless and distinctive folk traditions. Carefully managed, the result was the creation of an arena of cosmopolitan connoisseurship as well as a far-flung and lucrative market based on claims to elaborate regional distinction. A great deal more could be said about this history. Here, I mean mainly to draw attention to the fact that although we may have naturalized many of the elements conventionally distinguishing particular French regions, supposing them to be more or less self-evident and eternal, they in fact have a history and a relatively short one at that. Further, this history is substantially grounded in the promotion of a form of leisure travel that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, was becoming more widely accessible but still remained beyond the reach of most people. The elaboration of a conventional repertoire of regional distinctions in terms of elements such as landscape, folklore, and gastronomy was consistent with efforts to enhance the appeal of traveling widely throughout France, but also lent itself to a kind of status-conferring connoisseurship among those with the means and good taste to do so. Of course, many elements of this repertoire remain widely familiar: tourist literature from Brittany, Burgundy, or Provence, for example, often utilizes readily recognizable, distinctive images on those well-established terms. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these elaborate codes of regional distinction were partially displaced by the constitution of a much simpler, broadly appealing and widely accessible generic countryside, defined in terms of clear-cut opposition to equally generic urban landscapes and lifestyles. This shift is undoubtedly linked to several other twentieth-century histories. First, France experienced massive rural-to-urban migration and a dramatic decline in its agricultural population during the 1950s and 1960s. This means that by the 1980s, a large majority of the French population was at least a generation or two removed from life on the land and, therefore, free to imagine the countryside in whatever appealing (or

Faux Amis in the Countryside

215

repulsive) terms might be widely in circulation, unencumbered by much direct experience. Although some people retain ties to one or another specific rural place, an ever-growing number claim no strong family links to any particular rural area, even if they generally see country roots as part of their French heritage. More important perhaps, the history of French tourism has been shaped by the emergence of mass tourism in the 1950s and 60s. For a variety of reasons, tourism grew so rapidly during the postwar decades that by the late 1960s a majority of French persons were taking away-from-home vacations each year. As a result, by the 1980s, most young adults had acquired life-long experience of regular vacations. In contrast to other Europeans, a large majority of the French prefer to vacation in their own country rather than traveling abroad. For some time, rural vacations have comprised at least a third of all away-from-home vacations for those large numbers of French persons vacationing in France.8 In the past, these excursions mainly involved a return to an ancestral hometown, either to an inherited secondary residence or for a stay with family or friends. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, in contrast, rural vacations were increasingly chosen as a bucolic alternative to crowded beach resorts and other mass-tourism destinations. Those vacationing in the countryside are less and less likely to carry the baggage of prior family ties there and are more likely to bring along expectations and standards acquired in other kinds of vacation settings. These histories have converged on a twenty-first-century conception of rural space that is not only more likely to be associated with the sweet perspiration of leisure rather than with the smelly sweat of productive labor but is also coming to be less differentiated regionally for many visitors. A century ago, the possibility of leisured exploration of provincial France (other than one’s own ancestral home) was limited to a comfortable upper middle class, making mastery of the distinguishing features among the provinces into a mark of social distinction. Today’s consumers of rural vacations come from a very broad social spectrum and are considerably less likely than in the past to be bringing much inherited local knowledge—or to be seeking social distinction through this vacation choice. Rather, they are most frequently looking for an escape from everyday urban life in a predictable set of “country” scenes, goods, and services. A story about cows in the Limousin landscape illustrates what I mean: Farm wife Virginie Lambert gets very animated as she tells me about how badly their neighbors reacted when in the 1970s, her husband decided to raise (white) Charolais beef cattle instead of the (red) Limousin beef cattle native to the area. “You’d think we’d taken to putting poison in the streams or something, for the insults and mistreatment we got!” Virginie goes on to explain that she

216

Susan Carol Rogers

and her husband had both moved to the area in the 1960s as teenagers with their families from Brittany; the problem, she guessed, probably had more to do with their being outsiders than with the kind of cattle they raised. In light of various other remarks that the Lamberts make about their adoptive neighbors, it seems likely that the choice of Charolais was intended as a provocation: an immediately visible rejection of the local heritage and a flaunted preference for one from elsewhere (Burgundy).9 The story is an old one, and no one else I met seemed very upset by the idea of Charolais cattle in the Limousin landscape. Several people who live in the area, though, mentioned that the Charolais always strike them as odd: “Normally it’s just [red] Limousins here, so it always seems kind of funny to see [white] Charolais or [black and white] Holsteins [dairy cows]. It somehow just doesn’t look quite right.” In this cattle-producing region, local knowledge—even among persons not directly involved with animal husbandry—is likely to include the ability to distinguish between those breeds of cattle that “belong” and those that do not. Perhaps only an anthropologist would be inclined to comment on the political symbolism of red and white beef cattle, but native Limousins do sometimes joke that the indigenous cows suit this historically left-wing and anti-clerical region: “Even the cows are red here!” White, of course, stands for different politics, and the Lamberts, like many Breton and Normand settler families, are devout Catholics who are critical of their neighbors’ godlessness. It is certainly possible to imagine a visitor with sufficiently cosmopolitan or specialist knowledge to recognize which cows are associated with which French regions, perhaps even extending to the kinds of social or political inferences suggested above. But none of the tourists I worked with in the Limousin—even among those who came back year after year—ever had much to say about the cows there. It was clear that for them, this rural landscape would look odd if there were no cows at all. But the distinctions among red, white, or black-and-white cattle are of no consequence to them and, quite likely, not even noticeable to them at all. The political distinctions between Limousin natives and Breton settlers are as invisible and uninteresting to most visitors to the region as is the geography of various cattle breeds. Indeed, insofar as it would disrupt a placid and generic image of rural life, both kinds of information are equally unlikely to be absorbable by visitors, even were it to be offered by locals. This example of Limousin cattle calls attention to two important points about the generic countryside. First, a few French regions can boast a distinctive identity that is widely familiar, but there are many more—including the Limousin region and all of the others where I have conducted research—that carry no particular association for most French people, except as somewhere in the French heartland (la France profonde).10 More important, this indeterminate quality cannot necessarily be explained by

Faux Amis in the Countryside

217

a lack of potentially distinctive elements: Limousin cattle, for example, are well-known in France as particularly good beef, are easy to identify by their distinctive golden-red color, and have given their name to at least a dozen Parisian butcher shops. But although they are native to the Limousin region and are a ubiquitous feature of rural landscapes there (and less common elsewhere), they are not widely associated, even in France, with the region whose name they carry.11 If early twentieth-century elaborations of a conventional repertoire of regional distinctions are better explained as the product of particular historic circumstances and considerable effort than as a straightforward expression of the inherent qualities of specific regions, the same can be said of twenty-first-century inclinations to blur such distinctions. The appeal of the rural tourism found in much of contemporary France rests neither on status-conferring connoisseurship nor on the pleasures or imperatives of specialized local knowledge. Rather, it draws a sociologically broad range of people to a countryside defined in simple, immediately recognizable, relaxing contrast to their everyday, workaday urban life. This point is consistent with much of the tourist literature produced for the Limousin (and many other rural regions): most frequently illustrated with a predictable set of images—old buildings, well-tended nature, bodies of water, people enjoying simple outdoor recreational activities—this material portrays recognizably rural landscapes that could be located almost anywhere in France. The notion of a generic countryside is also consistent with the culinary produits de terroir (local products)12 that tourists expect to find in rural vacation spots. Visitors to the “Hills and Dams”13 area I studied, for example, can find abundant local produce at regular farmers markets and occasional farm festivals during the tourist season. Some producers encourage clients to visit their farm to make purchases, and a few have cultivated a year-round mail-order clientele. Many tourists enjoy this opportunity to establish ties with their own personal supplier of direct-from-farm produce, a service once available only to those with family or feudal ties to the countryside. Very little of this local produce would set this area off from many other French farming regions: free-range poultry, artisanally cured pork, homemade jams and local honey, artisanal cheeses and other dairy products, fresh garden vegetables and fruits can all be considered generically country foods. Further, among the most successful producers who engage in directmarketing, several offer foods that have either been strongly associated with regional cuisines elsewhere or have been introduced only recently in France. Visitors readily place these foods in the same category as freerange chicken and homemade strawberry jam, foods expected to be found in any authentic French country setting. Some stories about duck confit and foie gras, snails, and blueberries illustrate the point.

218

Susan Carol Rogers

Martine and Georges grew up on Limousin farms but left to pursue other careers, before returning in 1980 to some land owned by Martine’s family, where they established a sizeable sheep herd. Martine took an extension course to learn how to force-feed ducks, originally intending to produce just enough confit and foie gras for friends and family. But her duck operation quickly grew and by the 1990s she had a sizeable clientele. She offers weekly visits around her farm during the tourist season and sells patés and prepared duck dishes both on the farm and at several weekly markets in the area. Her mail order business (especially busy at Christmas time) allows tourists to continue buying once they have returned home and has also drawn a sizeable clientele in Limoges. Although this type of food has been strongly associated with such southwestern French regions as Périgord or Gascony, there are no practical obstacles to its adoption over a larger geographic area, as Martine’s experience shows. Her experience also suggests a weakening of the conventions that restricted this production to certain regions: many of the tourists I knew bought her products at least occasionally, and I never heard any express the least surprise about finding this “traditional” form of production on a “traditional” farm. For the connoisseur perhaps, foie gras production is as out of place in the Limousin region as are Charolais cattle, but for most twenty-first-century consumers, both blend perfectly with any rural landscape. Sylvie followed a somewhat different path to her involvement in snail production. By the early 1990s, then in her 40s, she felt burned out by her successful career as a marketing executive in the Paris region and decided to try something different. Her snail operation in the Limousin is the result of a series of pragmatic choices: she wanted to produce some kind of niche food that required easily-learned techniques and little land or other major capital investment. She chose the Limousin for its low costs and amenable politics. As snail production goes, her operation is very small (about 80,000 snails a year), but because she processes them herself, selling them as frozen prepared food, she has been quite successful financially. Almost all of her sales are by mail order; she has made very effective use of her contacts in the corporate world and generally sells in bulk through her contacts in a number of large Paris-based companies. Snails have conventionally been strongly associated with regional cuisines located even farther away from the Limousin than those associated with foie gras (especially Burgundy). Nonetheless, Sylvie has been successful at selling hers as an artisanal product of the French countryside. Now widely available in any supermarket, snails that arrive directly from a small-scale producer deep in the hinterlands carry an implication of authentic quality that is independent of their particular hinterland of origin. Françoise and her Limousin husband began their married life in the Paris region and in the 1970s bought an old Limousin farm to use for vacations; ten years later both lost their jobs, so they moved to their farmstead and found work

Faux Amis in the Countryside

219

in the area. In a chance conversation with a local agricultural extension agent, Françoise was intrigued to hear about the possibility of growing blueberries.14 Soil tests of their land showed it to be potentially suitable, and she launched her enterprise. Within a few years, her plants had begun to bear fruit; within ten years, she was selling 2–3,000 jars of blueberry jam annually, about half to tourists and the other half to a local clientele, mainly at farmers markets. She also had secured contracts with several local supermarkets to sell the fresh fruit in season. Françoise’s challenge has been that blueberries are unfamiliar to most French consumers; unlike snails or confit, they are an essentially exotic food associated with no place or cuisine at all. Françoise—unlike Martine or Sylvie, who found no particular difficulty in finding a clientele willing to buy their [displaced] produce—determined that she needed to develop a demand by informing potential consumers about blueberries and how to use them. To this end, she began a pick-your-own operation on her farm in the mid-90s and started distributing blueberry recipes there and at the markets where she sells her jams. By trading on the familiarity of homemade jams (even made with unfamiliar fruit) as well as the down-home novelty of picking-your-own at a farm as an appropriate activity for a country vacation, she successfully introduced blueberries to the repertoire of rural foods available to visitors and residents in the Limousin countryside. These three examples are by no means unique in the Hills and Dams area, and many similar cases could no doubt be found elsewhere in rural France. The first two suggest the possibility that some foods in contemporary France are coming unmoored from the specific regional cuisines with which they have been strongly associated for a century or so, acquiring instead more generic rural associations. The blueberries example illustrates how new foods or dishes might, under certain conditions, be absorbed into a generically rural repertoire. All of this is consistent with the proposition that the elaborate geography of regional distinctions—largely codified in France a century or so ago—may be giving way to a less complex conception based on a generic notion of countryside as standing in simple contrast to the urban landscapes and goods that define most people’s daily lives. In making this argument, I emphatically do not mean to suggest that the French countryside is necessarily becoming any more homogeneous than it ever was in any empirical sense. Rather, my argument is that the reasons for elaborating and emphasizing those differences may, under contemporary conditions, be giving way to now-more persuasive reasons for rearranging and simplifying expectations and perceptions of rural places. This displacement of one way of conceptualizing the countryside by quite another illustrates the changing meanings of rural space over time—even when we limit ourselves to the relatively narrow rubric of the recreational countryside. At root is an ongoing history of how the criteria that are

220

Susan Carol Rogers

involved in perceiving and classifying landscapes and their constituent elements shift along with the contexts within which people make such identifications.

Who knows what? Locals, Visitors, and Foreign Anthropologists in the French Countryside So far, I have suggested some of the variation across place and time in the meanings associated with rural space. Most notably, although American and French agriculture and rural life have followed broadly similar trajectories over the twentieth century, the meanings associated with each are strikingly different. Further, within each national context, we are dealing with an identifiable semantic repertoire that is neither static over time nor homogeneous across social contexts. For example, rural France has been an attractive vacation destination for well over a century, but the conceptual frames conventionally making it so at the turn of the twentieth century were demonstrably quite different from those emerging at the turn of the twenty-first. In this final section, I draw attention to variations across social position, again using a small and restricted example as illustration: the contrasting ways that permanent residents and visiting tourists in the Hills and Dams area placed me, as a foreign ethnographer, in the countryside and attributed value to my knowledge about it. My research in Hills and Dams was intended to capture the experience of tourists there, as well as that of tourism planners and service providers. To this end, my time was spent quite differently from season to season. During two summers I immersed myself in tourist sites and activities, coming to know as many tourists as I could. I spent a roughly equal period of time off-season with tourism planners and service providers who live permanently in the area. There is of course some connection between what tourists do and see, and what preoccupies those planning or providing services for them. However, these differently interested parties have sharply contrasting perceptions of the physical place they temporarily share, no less so than those we would be likely to find, for example, among students who attend a university during a relatively brief but especially intense period of their lives, on one hand, and the faculty and administrators whose careers are invested in its longer-term functioning, on the other. Neither account of the place is necessarily more “authentic” or consequential than the other, nor are they entirely independent of each other. But, as I expected, Hills and Dams looked and felt substantially different as I shifted my focus between residents and visitors. I was less prepared for the quite radical difference in my own persona as I switched between milieus from season to season.

Faux Amis in the Countryside

221

One reason for selecting the Hills and Dams area as a fieldsite was the willingness of the tourist division of its development agency to give me an informal affiliation, promising friendly support though without formal commitments. I first arrived in early February, well outside of the summer tourist season, and generally presented myself as an independent researcher conducting a study on rural tourism. As in my earlier rural French fieldsites, I became known in the area mainly as “L’Américaine.” Many of the people I met seemed to have difficulty believing that I had undertaken this project on my own and were convinced that I must be working under contract to some organization. I was always careful to make clear that I was not accountable to any local group, but it was sometimes easier to let stand the idea that my project had been commissioned (for some unspecified reason) by my university. These assumptions are no doubt best explained by the fact that people involved in the tourist trade are generally familiar with the various kinds of feasibility studies conducted by outside consultants, and are likely to have also encountered professionally-guided public relations campaigns, marketing strategies, or other forms of expertise. Associating my study with one or another of those functions was one way that local residents made sense of my presence. Indeed, some of the tourism planners expressed some expectation that my study might yield new insights about the dynamics of local tourism or the motivations of tourists visiting the area, while service providers hoped it might draw an American clientele. Both expectations seemed uncomfortably unlikely to me. That my study could be fit into a familiar activity and was seen to have some potential for practical, local use was a striking departure from my earlier experience as an ethnographer of rural France. Among the small farmers with whom I have worked in the past, I have always had the impression that my settling in their communities was seen as a real novelty. Further, although my presence might have been considered entertaining or intriguing (and “l’Americaine” has always been warmly received on return visits), it has been exceedingly rare that anyone in those settings seemed to consider that whatever-I-was-doing was of any significant interest or use. In fact, this contrast is a subtle one: my being categorized in Hills and Dams as an “outside expert” was undoubtedly consistent with an imputation of resounding ignorance of local knowledge; in that sense, my persona among permanent residents was actually quite similar to that I had experienced in those other settings. For some people (especially some of the tourism professionals, local politicians, or other elites), the presence of a university professor from New York City provided pleasant reconfirmation of their own sense of the value of their region, activity, or selves. For most people, however, my connection to New York was only mildly interesting, and my academic credentials considerably less so. On the whole, it

222

Susan Carol Rogers

was assumed that as an urban foreigner with no professional experience in tourism, I must know considerably less about rural life, France, the Limousin region, and (often) the tourist trade than almost any local resident I was likely to meet. In other words, I was generally understood to be a neophyte, one who was sufficiently friendly and interested—even knowledgeable, after a while—to be a pleasant enough interlocutor. But there was rarely any question that my role in this context was properly that of a learner, not of a teacher. The ethnographic method, of course, depends heavily on this kind of assumption: much of our best data comes from our interlocutors’ sense that we require careful explanation of even the most fundamental or banal matters. Most of the tourists used quite a different logic to place me and my expertise. First, for them, no less than for permanent residents, my foreignness was immediately signaled by my accent, but it marked me as one of “we” who do not belong in this place. It followed that they were generally inclined to insist on an exchange of information of the kind familiar to anyone who has been a tourist: “Where are you from? … Where have you been? … What do you think of this place?” That is, most tourists were quite willing to answer my questions, but they expected me to reciprocate by answering their own. In my experience as an ethnographic fieldworker until then (including among Hills and Dams residents), my interlocutors have usually been happy for the opportunity to talk about themselves without having to do very much listening in return. Many of the tourists, on the contrary, demanded an account of my experiences—in New York and on travels elsewhere—rather than just a discreet and sympathetic ear in exchange for the information they had to offer. This meant that I was pressed into more talk about myself than I necessarily found very profitable or interesting. The usual conventions of ethnographic research were even more radically upended to the extent that the tourists treated me, not as a neophyte or even as a peer, but as an expert or super-tourist. From our exchanges of information, they were apt to conclude that I was both more knowledgeable about the area than most tourists and more objective than permanent residents, and thus a particularly good source of advice about truly worthwhile things to do, sites to see, and places to eat in the area. This persona was a welcome relief from my role among residents as a likeable ignoramus, but it was much less compatible with the ethnographic purpose of understanding my interlocutors’ choices and perspectives. Further, it quickly became apparent that most tourists were interested in only small parts of what I knew about the area. There was little reason to expect that they would care very much about the pettier bits of local gossip I so enjoyed knowing about, but even those distinctive elements of the region’s history, politics, and economics that were equally fascinating to me were

Faux Amis in the Countryside

223

apt to make their eyes glaze over. That is, my expertise was pertinent only insofar as it concerned the life of a tourist in a quite generic countryside. Everyone I knew in Hills and Dams considered it valuable to know something about the French countryside in general and about that area in particular, but their ideas about exactly what was worth knowing—and who was most likely to know it—varied a great deal with their relationships to the place. These differences were thrown into especially sharp relief by the contrasting ways that permanent residents and holiday visitors positioned me and my expertise.

Conclusions Insofar as rural places and lifeways generate strikingly strong and enduring appeal to many French people, careful attention to the meanings and uses they attribute to this terrain is bound to illuminate more general aspects of French society. Indeed, as I have suggested here—and analyzed in more detail elsewhere (1987, 1995, 2000)—conventional images of the French countryside often function as potent vehicles for claims and counterclaims about such weighty themes as tradition and modernity, nature and culture, or legitimate social standing. A productive ethnographic strategy is to identify one or several arenas that play this role in any given society and then to systematically decipher them to gain insights into the society that uses them. Part of the value of this strategy resides in identifying the particular diversity of interests, inherent contradictions, and shared beliefs that inevitably define any human society. It is crucial in such work—as I have consistently done here—to refer to “meanings,” “uses,” and “perceptions” in the plural. Like other highly charged and powerfully communicative arenas (such as “race” in the US, for example), rural France necessarily carries an array or repertoire of associations, variably activated and combined as we move from one temporal or social context to another. Here, I have illustrated this point first by considering the emergence of a connoisseur’s countryside in France a century ago and its partial displacement with a generic countryside more recently, and second with a comparison of resident and tourist emplacements of the foreign anthropologist in the context of contemporary rural tourism. These examples of the variability of ideas about the countryside—and the shifting value of one or another form of knowledge about it—offer further insights into some of the historic and social dynamics that define contemporary rural France; and they provide a useful corrective to overly static or homogenous visions of the French countryside (or the broader themes for which it often stands).

224

Susan Carol Rogers

But this kind of variation is not infinite: perennial French ways of thinking about and acting upon the countryside, for example, are defined by recurrent associations (albeit with variable valence or relative emphasis), as well as identifiable underlying common denominators and outer edges of possibility. Cross-national comparison provides one useful device for identifying these. Indeed, my own fascination with French ideas about the countryside began with my first extended stay in France in the early 1970s, when my American sensibilities were struck by what seemed a curious fascination for rural life among urban French people, expressed for instance by ubiquitous references to rural phenomena in French politics, popular culture, advertising, and so on. On my return to the US, having semi-internalized such attitudes myself, I was just as struck by the resounding indifference to rural things in most American contexts. This lack of interest was perhaps most clearly driven home to me when I worked for a farm-state US Congressman during the farm crisis of the early 1980s. Several of my initial drafts of speeches for him rested on ringing claims about the importance of agriculture to the nation’s general interest. While these appeals might well have been effective in France, they were rejected as uselessly implausible in the US setting; and I was obliged to rework those speeches around more culturally appropriate arguments for why and how the interests of farmers and other rural dwellers should be defended. And so we return to the idea of faux amis and the production of anthropological knowledge. Had my initial experiences as an ethnographer been in a more exotic setting than France, it undoubtedly would not have occurred to me to attempt such a direct translation from my fieldwork experience abroad to a Congressional speech in the US. But it was easy to mistake the obvious formal similarities of farm crises in France and the US for similarities of meaning attributed to them in each setting. More generally, the absence of obvious radical difference invites misleading assumptions about the universality of our own terms of reference, assumptions that risk washing out the possibility of perceiving any significant difference at all. In the classical tradition of Anglo-American and French anthropologies, the encounter with radically unfamiliar settings is expected to result in the kind of translation that both allows our audiences to see the human commonalities underlying obvious cross-cultural difference and invites them to challenge complacent assumptions about the universality of their own taken-for-granted habits. The possibilities for mistranslation in such an undertaking are obvious and legion, and in fact have animated many of the scholarly debates within our discipline. Insofar as anthropology has always been concerned with the full range of human societies and cultures, it has never been limited, strictly speaking, to the study of exotic or primitive peoples per se. But those conduct-

Faux Amis in the Countryside

225

ing anthropological inquiry at or close to home effectively give up the key tactic of radical unfamiliarity. In such cases, fieldwork does not so much demand the effort to find the sense in radically different ways of managing the world as it more so poses the challenge to notice contours of every-day life likely to be similar to one’s own taken-for-granted habits. Further, this type of translation exercise requires engaging with our audiences’ (often elaborate) prior knowledge about the society under study, thus challenging them (and ourselves) to rethink what is in fact truly familiar and what is only apparently so. Indeed, the human inclination to naturalize and universalize our own ways of understanding the world is apt to be reinforced under these conditions, leading to another kind of mistranslation: An American inclination to suppose that French people should and will be outraged about farm subsidies on the same terms that most Americans are, for example, or a broadly shared French expectation that it must be just as obvious to Americans as to most French people that the reduction of agriculture to mere commodity production amounts to a morally bankrupt disregard of the national heritage and well-being. Arguably, it is the identification of such faux amis—the misunderstandings that result from overlooking differences in meaning that may underlie apparent similarities in form—that will become a central purpose of twenty-first-century anthropology. Today, goods, ideas, and people circulate in ways that make most of the world seem more or less familiar. There are relatively few corners that cannot readily be documented via internet, drawn into far-flung markets, seen on TV, or toured in person. Radical unfamiliarity may largely be a thing of the past, and the range of observable social/cultural diversity in the contemporary world may well appear to be shrinking under the pressures of universalizing exposure. It follows that the classic tactic of the anthropological enterprise may be losing its pertinence. But the classic purpose of our discipline—the aim to better understand the range and forms of social/cultural diversity and the nature of human commonalities—surely remains no less important than ever. It may well be that in today’s world this goal may be best served by careful attention to the faux amis we encounter, in faraway places no less than close to home.

Notes   1. I am of course drawing a sharp distinction between the production of agricultural raw materials (farming), on the one hand, and, on the other, such other parts of the agricultural sector as the food-processing or farm-input industries. The latter do rest on industrial processes and, in this and other ways, are more similar to other economic sectors.

226

Susan Carol Rogers

  2. American farmers I knew in Illinois liked to say, “We’re the only ones crazy enough to buy retail and sell wholesale.”   3. “Toute réflexion sur les rapports entre agriculture et territoire est invinciblement dominée par l’image tragique de campagnes autrefois vivante, aujourd’hui transformées en ‘déserts’.” All translations from the French are mine.   4. “Lorsque l’homme recule, le maquis avance.”   5. In both national traditions, it is sometimes the city that is portrayed as the more appealing alternative. But again, its clearest opposite in France is the crude countryside, and uncouth or brutish peasants. In the US, it is lawless wilderness—and wild or sub-human Indians—that play this role, with American rural spaces again appearing as a relatively less highly charged intermediary category.   6. I conducted a total of eleven months of participant-observation field work in the three-canton area regrouped as Monts et Barrages (Hills and Dams), an administrative entity devoted to facilitating agricultural and tourist development. It is located in the Haute Vienne, one of the three departments comprising the Limousin region (capital city: Limoges). This research involved work with persons involved with tourism as development specialists, service providers, or tourists.   7. In contrast to the American automobile industry’s rapid turn to mass production aimed at a broad consumer base, the French automobile industry long remained principally oriented toward a stylish clientele drawn to luxury models, often for leisure use. It was only after World War II that cars became accessible to a very large proportion of the French population.   8. A great deal of statistical data is available on French tourism, but they are not necessarily very reliable. Those for rural tourism are especially shaky because relatively few of the services offered have been fully commercialized. Ambiguity about what exactly constitutes “rural tourism” only adds to the difficulty. By most accounts, though, rural destinations are second only to the seaside for French vacationers, and well ahead of mountain or urban holidays. Roughly two thirds of rural vacationers are French, and one third foreign (predominantly British or Dutch).   9. Charolais are associated with a region in Burgundy, on the other side of France. My guess about the Lambert’s motives is supported by the resentment still sometimes expressed by local Limousin farmers about the “arrogant immigrant mentality” of the Bretons and Normans who arrived in the area in the early 1960s through a government-sponsored rural resettlement program, as well as by the fact that, even in Virginie’s rendition, no one was bothered by her husband’s decision to raise brown-and-white Normande dairy cows as well as beef cattle. Dairy production, which was introduced to the area by settlers from Normandy and Brittany in the 1960s, seems to have been perceived not as a direct affront to established local habits but just as an inoffensive—because unlikely to succeed— novelty import. 10. La France profonde (literally: deep France) refers to an undifferentiated provincial France that remains relatively untouched by the sophistication or cosmopolitanism associated with Paris and other urban centers. It carries a similar set of ambiguous meanings—sometimes attractive, sometimes repulsive—as does the countryside, though the la France profonde is perhaps more often used derisively or ironically, at least by Parisians.

Faux Amis in the Countryside

227

11. Similarly, Limoges china is well known throughout France (and elsewhere), but few people seem to associate it with the city where it is made and whose name it bears, or to be aware that this city is the capital of the Limousin region. 12. There exists a sizable recent English-language literature on the notion of “terroir” (e.g. Trubek 2008). In France, although it still sometimes refers to the specific environmental characteristics of a particular place that result in distinguishable produce (especially wine grapes), it often refers to any locally produced food. The notion is also routinely used to market industrially processed foods that have been conventionally associated with a specific place in provincial France. In other words, in its habitual French usage, it has taken on an increasingly generic meaning. 13. Monts et Barrages. The generic flavor of the name given to this area in 1979, when its inter-township development agency was first constituted, is striking. 14. Blueberries are native to North America. First cultivated in Europe in the 1930s, they remain relatively rare there.

References Berry, Wendell. 1977. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. New York: Avon. Bertho-Lavenir, Catherine. 1999. La roue et le stylo: Comment nous sommes devenus touristes. Paris: Odile Jacob. Crozes, Daniel. 1992. Raymond Lacombe: Un combat pour la terre. Rodez: Editions de Rouergue. Danbom, David. 1979. The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture. Ames IA: Iowa State University Press. Dudley, Kathryn. 2000. Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hervieu, Bertrand. 1993. Les Champs du futur. Paris: François Bourin. ———, and Jean Viard. 1996. Au bonheur des campagnes (et des provinces). La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de L’Aube. Hightower, Jim. 1972. Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: The Failure of the Land Grant College Complex. Boston: Schenkman. Jackson, Wes. 1985. New Roots for Agriculture. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press. Laferté, Gilles. 2006. La Bourgogne et ses vins: Image d’origine contrôlée. Paris: Belin. Marcus, Alan. 1985. Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy. Ames IA: Iowa State University Press. Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin. Rauch, André. 1996. Vacances en France de 1830 à nos jours. Paris: Hachette. Rogers, Susan Carol. 1987. “Good to Think: The ‘Peasant’ in Contemporary France.” Anthropological Quarterly 60: 56–63. ———. 1995. “Natural Histories: The Rise and Fall of French Rural Studies.” French Historical Studies 19(2): 381–397. ———. 1997. “L’enseignement agricole aux Etats-Unis: A propos du système Landgrant 1862–1914.” Histoire et Sociétés Rurales 7: 97–132.

228

Susan Carol Rogers

———. 2000. “Farming Visions: Agriculture in French Culture.” French Politics Culture and Society 18(1): 50–70. ———. 2002. “Which Heritage? Nature, Culture and Identity in French Rural Tourism.” French Historical Studies 25(3): 475–503. Shortridge, James R. 1989. The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Trubek, Amy. 2008. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Contributors David BERISS is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans. He is co-editor (with David Sutton) of The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of where we eat (Berg, 2007) and author of Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean ethnicity and activism in urban France (Westview, 2004). His current research focuses on food, ethnicity, and the production of culture in New Orleans. Stefania CAPONE is an anthropologist, Director of Research at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), and member of the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (IIAC, EHESS, Paris). Her research focuses on the transnationalization of Afro-American religions in the United States, Brazil, and Europe as well as on the links between the reconstruction of African memory and ritual re-Africanization. Her published works include Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and tradition in Candomblé (Duke University Press, 2010; originally published in French, 1999; and in Portuguese translation, 2004), Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: Religion, ethnicité et nationalisme noir aux Etats-Unis (Karthala, 2005; published in Portuguese translation 2011), and La religion des orisha: un champ social transnational en pleine recomposition (edited with K. Argyriadis, Hermann Editions, 2011). Beth EPSTEIN is an anthropologist and Academic Director of NYUParis, and an associate faculty member of the Gallatin School at NYU. Her work focuses on the politics of integration in France and the development of the French suburbs, as well as on race and social inequality in France and the United States. She is co-director of the documentary Kofi chez les Français (with Carlyn Saltman, 1993), and author of Collective Terms: Race, culture and community in a state-planned city in France (Berghahn, 2011). Patrick GABORIAU is an anthropologist and Director of Research at CNRS, affiliated with the Laboratoire Architecture Ville Urbanisme Enveronnement (LAVUE). He trained in both psychology and social anthropology, and his research focuses on the study of persons living in extreme

230

Contributors

poverty. His publications include Clochard: L’univers d’un groupe de sansabris parisiens (Julliard, 1993); Ethnologie des sans-logis : Etude d’une forme de domination sociale (co-edited with D. Terrolle, L’Harmattan, 2003); Le chercheur et la politique (Aux Lieux d’Etre, 2008). Christian GHASARIAN is Professor of Ethnology at the Université de Neuchatel. After conducting initial fieldwork with Indian migrants to the Reunion Islands, he studied the sociocultural adjustments of Indian migrants and also New Age practices in the San Francisco Bay area. His current research concerns multiculturalism in the Reunion Islands, New Age practices in the US and in Europe, and the construction of social relations in French Polynesia. His publications include Honneur, chance et destin: La culture indienne à la Réunion (1991), Introduction à l’étude de la parenté (1996), De l’ethnographie à l’anthropologie réflexive (2002), Anthropologies de La Réunion (2008), Plantes psychotropes: Initiations, thérapies, quêtes de soi (2010). Sara LE MENESTREL is an anthropologist and a CNRS researcher affiliated with the Center for North American Studies and the Laboratory of American Worlds at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her work on the role of music in managing difference is published in Negotiating Difference in French Louisiana Music: Categories, Stereotypes and Identifications (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). In 2005, she extended her research interests to the anthropology of disaster through the study of Louisiana in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. She has recently begun new fieldwork on the development of meditative practices in hospitals and their circulation between the United States and France. William POULIN-DELTOUR is Associate Professor of French Studies at Middlebury College. His ethnographic research both explores the nature of American influences on French debates about gender and sexuality and addresses efforts to diversify access to prestigious forms of higher education. He has published a number of articles on gay activism in France, as well as on “discrimination positive” in French secondary and higher education. Anne RAULIN is Professor of Anthropology at the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and member of Sophiapol and the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (IIAC, CNRSEHESS). She earned her Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research (New York), which launched her interest in urban anthropology, first dealing with history and memory inscribed in urban space (Manhattan

Contributors

231

ou la mémoire insulaire, 1997). In Paris, her research concerns urban minorities (L’ethnique est quotidien: Diasporas, marchés et cultures métropolitaines, 2000). She is also the author of a general textbook in urban anthropology (Anthropologie Urbaine, 2001, 2nd edition 2007). Her current research focuses on interpersonal dynamics in antagonistic groups or societies. Deborah REED-DANAHAY is Professor of Anthropology and founding Director of the Center for European Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Her current research focus is on citizenship and mobility, but she also continues long-standing interests in memoir and personal narrative, the Auvergne region of France, and social theory. She is author of Education and identity in rural France: The politics of schooling (Cambridge, 1996) and Locating Bourdieu (Indiana, 2005), and co-author (with Caroline Brettell) of Civic Engagements: The citizenship practices of Indian and Vietnamese immigrants (Stanford, 2012). Her edited volumes include Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social (Berg, 1997) and (with Caroline Brettell) Citizenship, political engagement and belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States (Rutgers, 2008). Susan Carol ROGERS is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University, where she also taught for many years at the Institute of French Studies. Having conducted ethnographic research in rural France since the 1970s, she is co-author (with Hugues Lamarche and Claude Karnoouh) of Paysans, femmes et citoyens: Luttes pour le pouvoir dans un village lorrain (Actes Sud, 1980) and author of Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The transformation and reproduction of an Aveyronnais community (Princeton, 1991). Co-founder of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe within the American Anthropological Association, she has also published a number of articles in French and American journals about the anthropology of France and anthropology close-to-home.

Index

academics, legitimation work of, 65, 67, 73, 75, 77 Acadians, 61, 64, 68, 77, 78 diaspora, 68 history, 64, 68 See also Cajun; identity, Louisiana French Act-Up Paris, 113, 144, 115–16, 117, 121 activism cultural, 67, 68, 77–8, 85, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101 ethnicity-related, 85, 88–9, 91, 92, 101, 116, 126, 129, 134–5 race-related, 48, 88–9, 93, 109, 129, 147 sexuality-related, 109–11, 114–17, 129 Adefunmi, 143, 147–9, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158 affirmative action, 56n21, 109 Africa, 62, 63, 66, 147, 151, 155 influence in US, 11, 74, 77, 78, 143, 144, 145, 148, 157 African Americans, 19, 25, 30, 33, 34, 67, 77, 84, 93, 94, 143–159 ethic, 144, 155–9 identity. See identity, race-related African diaspora, 144, 146, 159 agriculture, 209 imaginary of in France and US, 210–12, 224 AIDS, 28, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119

consequences on homosexual activism in France, 114–16 American Dream, 7, 12, 13, 34, 193, 194, 196 ancestor cult, 144, 151, 152, 156, 158 Anglican (religion), 164, 168, 169, 175, 177 Anglo-Saxon, 39, 118, 128 anthropologists. See ethnographers anthropology, vii-viii, 1, 8, 86–7, 101, 127, 181, 224–5 close to home, 2, 208, 225 comparative, 3, 4, 5, 101, 122, 125, 136, 224 contemporary challenges, vii, 2, 5, 208, 225 reciprocal, vii, 2–5, 13–15 Antilleans, 7, 9, 85, 87, 88–92, 100 Ardoin, Amédé, 69, 71, 75 assimilation, 39, 53, 67, 70, 88, 89, 90–1, 93, 120. See also integration. Auvergne (region), 130–2, 136 banlieue, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 52, 53. See also suburbs. Baptist (religion), 66, 145, 149 Berkeley (CA), 192, 197 Black Nationalism, 73, 147, 148, 149, 150 body/mind/spirit connection, 12, 179–80, 199 borrowing of ideas between France and US, 5, 10, 13, 48, 112, 114, 118–19, 120, 121, 122, 132–3, 137, 197

Index233

Cajun, 61, 64–9, 78 purported adaptability, 67, 70, 71 music, 65–6, 69–71, 72, 73, 74, 75–6 See also Acadian; identity, Louisiana French California, 19–20, 22–7, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33–4, 35 192, 197, 198, 203 Catholic, Roman (religion), 66, 91, 131, 144, 145, 149, 175, 216 Centre Gai et Lesbien de Paris, 110, 116, 120, 121 Cergy (France), 39, 45, 49 cité de transit, 42–3. See also public housing. civic practice, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47–8, 128, 137 civil rights movement (US), 56n21, 63, 69, 70, 73, 148 class, 8, 24, 25, 33, 69, 78, 86, 95 American conceptions of, 8, 34, 64, 68–9, 110, 196 French conceptions of, 22, 40, 41, 42, 48, 51, 91, 92 and race, 8, 25, 30, 40, 61, 63, 69, 78, 95, 100 common interest, 25, 29, 35, 44–50, 53, 100, 117, 118, 119, 121, 127, 129, 135 communalism (communautarisme), 39, 40, 109, 110, 116, 120, 121, 129, 136, 137 communauté. See community, as used in France. communitarianism. See communalism community critique of term, 10, 111–112, 125, 127–9, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138–9 of practice, 127 studies, 127, 130, 132–3 as used in France, 6, 9, 10, 109, 110, 117, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130–33, 136, 137 as used in US, 9, 109, 110, 111, 112, 120, 126, 128, 132, 133, 134, 154, 167, 198, 203 cong dong, 126, 134–6, 137 conversion story, 174

“coonass,” 68–9, 77 countryside, generic, 209, 214, 216, 217, 219, 223. See also rurality. Creole culture Antillean, 91 Louisiana, 60, 61–3, 64, 66–9, 76, 78, 93–7, 99–100 music, 65–7, 69, 72–4 purported African influences on, 66, 74, 78 polysemy of term, 62, 63 creolization, 60, 66–71, 74, 77 cuisine, 8 French, 213–14 Louisiana, 62, 65 New Orleans, 84, 94–7, 99 cultural citizenship, 89 economy, 64, 75, 85, 90, 97 pluralism, 8, 39, 41, 45, 46, 92, 116, 101, 121, 136 culture anthropological concept, 7–8, 10, 85–7, 101, 122, 191 concern about homogenization of, 85, 86, 94, 96, 101 as expressive arts, 7, 62, 65, 68, 74, 75, 77, 90, 91, 92, 97 mainstream national in France, 39, 85–92, 101, 119 mainstream national in US, 70, 75, 86 minority/local, 88, 90–2, 95, 98, 100 as system of beliefs and practices, 1, 7, 8, 10, 31, 39, 40, 46–50, 53, 60–69, 71, 73–4, 85–7, 89–101, 109–111, 113, 116–21, 127–8, 131, 135–7, 143, 144, 147, 159, 178, 181, 191–3, 195, 198, 203–5, 223–4 and race, 7, 8–9, 39, 40, 43, 52, 73, 87, 89, 90–1, 93, 98–100, 144, 149, 151, 156 democracy, 21, 27–8, 131, 211 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 20–1, 27, 128 diaspora. See Acadian, African, Vietnamese. differentiation, social, 6, 8, 44–5, 48, 78, 61, 69, 76, 77, 214, 215

234

discrimination racial, 38, 49, 52, 60, 62, 63, 71, 78, 86, 99, 121, 148, 152, 153 against sexual minority, 110, 113–17 against social group, 61, 64 discrimination positive. See affirmative action distinction. See differentiation, social diversity. See cultural pluralism domination, social, 25, 32, 34, 35 ecumenicalism, 170, 175, 180, 181 educational system, role in instilling societal values, 51, 89, 92, 130, 131 el-Waïfi, Aïcha, 172–7 emic/etic categories, 125, 131 emotion, 167–8, 175, 178, 179 enclaves, 39, 42, 45, 111 energy, New Age, 198–201, 203, 204 Episcopal (religion), 11, 164, 175, 176 equality/inequality, 20–22, 27, 28, 32 ethnic groups, 8, 39, 41–3, 53, 109, 111, 116, 117, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136–7, 138, 144, 156. See also African Americans, Antilleans, Cajuns, Vietnamese diaspora. ethnicity, 45, 46, 48, 52, 69, 85, 91, 93, 126, 129, 136, 137 and race, 48, 72, 73, 78, 93 ethnographer perceptions of, 2, 220, 221–2 presumed naiveté of, 78, 209, 221–2 European Union and its institutions, 92, 129, 131, 211 farmers, perceptions of, 210–11, 212 faux ami, 5, 120, 208, 209, 224–5 fieldwork, 19–20, 78, 110, 114, 117, 125, 130, 179, 191–2, 197, 209, 213, 220–1, 225 methods, viii, 4, 26, 60, 179, 220, 222 food, 62, 65, 84, 94, 95–100, 199, 213–15, 217. See also cuisine. forgiveness, 11, 155, 169, 170, 173, 174, 181 Foucault, Michel, 113, 114, 120

Index

Gay and Lesbian Center, Paris. See Centre Gai et Lesbien de Paris gay milieu, 111–16 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, 127 globalization, 14, 52, 92, 143, 162, 178, 179, 181 grand ensemble. See public housing “Ground Zero.” See World Trade Center site habitus, 86, 198–9, 205 healing, 6, 9, 11, 12, 143, 144, 145, 153–4, 158, 159, 163, 170, 175, 179, 180, 181, 190, 200, 204 collective, 150, 154, 156, 158 etymology, 177 Hoke, Reverend Stuart, 165, 169 holistic health/healing, 154, 177, 180, 198–202, 204 HIV. See AIDS. homeless people, 7, 9 in France, 7, 20, 24, 28, 29, 35 in the US, 7, 19, 22, 26, 28 homosexual movement in France, 9, 112–113 in the US, 9, 110–112 Human Potential Movement, 180, 197 Hurricane Katrina and aftermath, 7, 9, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94–5, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 133, 155 hybridity, 52, 60, 61, 62 identity/ies American national, 68 collective/group, 27, 38, 39, 40, 46, 48, 73, 87, 89, 93, 100, 131 French national, 88, 89, 90, 92 Louisiana French (incl. Acadian, Cajun, Creole), 60–2, 64–5, 68–9, 72, 76, 77, 78 personal, 177 race-related, 33, 93, 100, 146–7, 148, 149 rural, 68, 131 sexual, 10, 112, 113, 114, 117 immigrants/people with immigrant backgrounds, 8, 28, 31, 38, 47, 50–2,

Index235

53, 64, 88, 89, 90–1, 92, 127, 129, 135–7, 138, 145, 192, 193, 197 perceptions of in France, 8, 38, 52, 89, 90, 93, 101, 127, 136, 137 perceptions of in the US, 127, 134, 136 immigration to France after WWII, 38–9, 40–1 policy. See policy, immigration inconsistency, 32–3, 34–5 indifference, right to (droit à l’indifférence), 113 integration racial, 69, 70, 97 social/cultural, 39–40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52–3, 89–90, 109, 110, 129 See also assimilation Islam (religion), 136, 146, 147, 170, 175 Karenga, Maulana, 147, 157, 159 laïcité, 121 laying on of hands, 153, 176 liberalism, economic. See neoliberalism Limousin (region), 209, 213, 215–19, 222 Lomax, Alan, 66, 67 Los Angeles, 12, 19, 20, 32, 35 Louisiana, 8, 61, 62, 85, 95, 145, 150 history, 62, 64, 67 tourism, 64, 65, 67, 73, 75, 94, 98 love, 170, 177, 203, 204 McGee, Denis, 69, 71, 75 Methodist (religion), 145 minority groups. See African American, Antilleans, Cajun, Vietnamese. misinterpretation, 5, 10, 159n5, 208, 225 Mitterrand, François, 112, 114 mixing cultural, 60, 68 racial, 63, 68, 71 social, 38, 40–5 multi-culturalism. See cultural pluralism music, 91, 94, 101, 167, 199

categories, 61, 72, 73, 76, 77 lineages, 74 Louisiana, 7, 9, 60–78 purity versus adaptation, 70 racial issues within, 60, 69–70, 71, 72, 73 world, 60, 77 Muslims. See Islam Nation of Islam, 147, 148, 149, 150, 159 neo-liberalism, 22, 29, 30, 34, 85, 86, 94, 101 New Afrika(n), 143, 144, 150, 151, 154 New Age, 12, 154, 180, 191–206 and the environment, 202 and women, 201 New Orleans, 9, 62, 63, 65, 75, 84, 93–101, 145, 146, 155 claims to distinctiveness, 61, 85, 94, 95 cuisine. See cuisine, New Orleans New Towns, 7, 8, 39, 44, 45–6 New York City, 112, 119, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 162–180, 221, 222 9/11. See September 11, 2001, attacks and aftermath Obama, Barack, 109, 194 optimism, 12, 193, 204 Orisha(-Voodoo) (religion), 7, 11, 143, 144, 148, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158 Oyotunji Village, 143, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156 paradox social, 31–3, 34 terminal, 31 Paris, 4, 7, 8, 20,27, 29, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 85, 90, 91, 92, 110, 1132, 115, 116, 120, 121, 136, 137, 213, 218 personal development. See self-transformation police, 23, 24, 26, 29, 88, 91 harassment by, 23, 25, 38, 113 policy agricultural, 211

236

cultural, 64–5, 75, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91 HIV/AIDS, 114, 115 housing, 41–44, 45 immigration/integration, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, 52–3, 85, 88, 89, 90 social, 28, 42, 91, 92, 100 political tendencies left-wing, 29, 35, 112, 216 right-wing, 40, 112 polysemy, 62, 143 positive thinking, 145, 180, 200, 206 possibility academic treatments of, 191, 205–6 as used in France, 205 as used in US, 12, 191–7, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206 poverty and the poor, 22, 25, 32, 42, 44, 46, 64, 67, 75, 88, 94 power as used in New Age, 199, 201 socio-economic, 3, 25, 35, 62, 67, 98, 138, 154 state, 28, 29 symbolic, 138 prejudice. See discrimination Protestant (religions), 66, 146, 149, 153, 175, 197 psychological support, 162–3, 180 PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), 162, 163 public and/or private spheres, 43, 47, 49, 50, 68, 86, 120 public housing, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49. See also banlieue; cité de transit queer movement, 10, 110, 112, 118 theory, 111, 112, 114 race, 7–9, 25, 60 “music,” 72 as perceived in France, 8–9, 39, 48, 52, 55n21, 62, 87, 88–9, 91, 100 as perceived in the US, 8, 25, 30, 33, 68, 70, 78, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 100, 223 three-tier system in Louisiana, 62–3, 93

Index

racial imaginary, 61, 66, 72, 77, 78 racism. See discrimination, racial re-Africanization movement, 143, 147, 150, 157 reconciliation, 11, 168–9, 172, 174, 178 recording industry, 72, 75, 77 regionalism, 130, 213–14, 217 religion, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 47, 53, 87, 91, 92, 101, 100, 116, 121, 129, 163, 168, 169, 170–1, 175, 180, 181, 197, 200, 201, 204. See also Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Islam, Methodist, Orisha, Santería, Spiritualism civic/civil, 163 and politics, 144, 146, 148, 158 republicanism, French, 9, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 52, 87, 92, 118, 120, 121, 126, 129 research methods. See fieldwork, methods restaurants, 7, 84, 95–9, 126, 213 restorative justice, 155, 170 ritual, 95, 112, 135, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 155, 158, 159, 174, 179, 181 Rodriguez, Phyllis, 171–4 rural areas, 10, 125, 127, 130–3, 138, 209, 212, 214 comparison between France and US, 209, 211–3, 220, 224 as leisure destination, 209, 212, 213, 214 perceptions of, 209, 215–6, 219 rural imaginary, 13, 132, 208, 214–15, 223, 224 San Francisco area, 143, 152, 192, 197, 203 Santería (religion), 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156 segregation, 69, 70, 71, 73, 94, 145, 146, 151 self-reliance, 34–5, 191, 195, 200 self-transformation, 180, 196–205 September 11, 2001, attacks and aftermath, 11, 162, 164–5, 167, 171–2, 176–8

Index237

commemorations and monuments, 169, 170, 171, 175, 176 emotional shock of, 162, 167–8, 171 theological responses to, 165–6. 169, 170, 176–8 September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, 169–70, 171, 174 sexuality and ethnicity, 91 homosexual/queer, 111, 112, 113, 118 and race, 71 shamanism, 181, 198, 201, 202, 203 slavery, 63, 92, 94, 100, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156 social space, 10, 127, 138 solidarity, 11, 24, 40, 117, 131, 132, 157 organic, 45 spatial classification, 212, 213, 219–20 Spiritualism (religion), 145–6, 153, 154 spirituality, 177, 197, 198, 200, 204 state, role of the, 7, 9, 29–30, 34, 35, 47, 85, 120, 211 St Paul’s Chapel, 163–5, 167–8, 169, 170, 173, 176, 177 as emergency response center, 165–8 history and symbolism, 164–5 suburbs, 8, 38–47, 125. See also banlieue suffering, 35, 154, 158, 163, 168, 171, 174, 203, 204 terminology perils of translation/borrowing. See faux ami vernacular versus scientific, 7, 9, 10–11, 87, 128

Texas, 125, 126, 133–6 tolerance, threshold of (seuil de tolerance), 42, 43 tourism, 94, 97, 98 social distinctions within, 215, 217, 223 See also Louisiana, tourism trauma, 11, 146, 158, 162, 163, 167, 171, 180 Trinity Church (NYC), 163, 164, 169, 180 unction, 176–7 unemployment, 38, 46, 212 universalism, 47, 48, 49, 53, 109, 110, 116, 120, 121 Vietnamese diaspora in France, 10, 125, 126, 136, 137 in the US, 10, 125, 126, 128, 133–6 White Americans, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68–9, 70, 71, 77, 85, 93, 97, 99, 110, 111, 112, 145, 148, 152 rejection of their practices, 146, 147, 150, 151 wilderness, perceptions of, 212 World Trade Center site, 163, 164, 165, 167, 170, 175 Yoruba, 144, 147, 248, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 youth disaffection, 38, 44, 46 zydeco, 65, 66, 71, 72, 74, 75–6