ABELES Marc-How the Antrop

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Revue L'Homme1986 An thropo logie: Etat des lieux. Paris: Livre de Poche.Segalen, Martine1989 L 'A utre et le sem blable: Regards sur l'ethno log ie des socie"te"s contempo-

raines. Paris: Presses du CNRS .

How the Anthropology of France Has ChangedAnthropology in France: Assessing New Directionsin the FieldMarc AbelesLaboratoire d'Anthropologie des Institutions et des Organisations SocialesMaison des Sciences de I 'Homm e

It may seem a bit presumptuous to assert that the anthropology of France haschanged anthropology in France, and I believe that many of my colleagues w howork in distant societies in other parts of the world would not agree with thisidea. Anthropology has developed largely as the study of the "other." For a longtime, the obsession with alterity played an important part in the conception ofanthropological work in France, as elsewhere. There is a great tradition of an-thropology characterized by exotic fieldwork and the study of such topics askinship, religion, and symbolism. For many anthropologists, what is importantis the remoteness (in space or in time) of their object of study, whether it is atribe or a marginalized urban group. In the classical paradigm what is empha-sized is the distance of the object. I think it is poss ible to introduce another wayof practicing anthropology.

Until the 1970s the most noticeable contributions to anthropologicalknowledge in France were produced by anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss, Dum ont, and Balandier an Am ericanist, South Asianist, and A frican-ist, respectively. The Institute of Ethnology, the first such institution in France,was created before W orld W ar II. Until the end of the 1950s, other anthropolog i-cal research centers did not exist, and anthropology was taught only at the Sor-bonne for postgraduate students. The creation of Laboratoire d'AnthropologieSociale (LAS) by Lvi-Strauss, and a few years later of the Laboratory of Eth-nology and Com parative Sociology in Nan terre, and the developm ent of culturalareas centers in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, such as theCenter for African Studies and the Center for Indian S tudies, have played an im-portant role in the institutionalization of anthropo logy.

One must also take note of the existence of the Center for French Ethnol-ogy, w hich has been located in the Museum of Popular Art and Tradition sincebeing founded before World War II. In this research center, ethnological workon France was pursued very much-along the lines of more exotic anthropolog y.Its aim was to study tradit ions among the most distant communities: oral


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traditions, symbolism, kinship, and alliance in rural France were to be focusedon by the anthropologists. And Lvi-Strauss himself made a distinction betweenwhat he called authentic socie ties (small peasant comm unities to be studied byanthropologists) and "nonauthentic" groups (complex societies, which couldonly interest sociologists).

The pioneering fieldwork in France was carried out in small villages: Nou-ville in the north, and Minot in Burgundy. In the latter, there worked a team ofresearchers from the LA S (Zon abend 1980). Wh en I entered the LA S as a you ngdoctoral student, I found that the mo st prestigious researchers Clastres (1 97 4) ,Godelier (1984), and Izard (1992)were all working on more exotic sites. Mi-not was left to the wom en , and work there was treated more as a curiosity than assomething truly serious. The situation began to change at the end of the 1970s.There are three main reasons that can explain this shift. First, anthropologicalstudies in France not only provided em pirical data but also op ened new theoreti-cal perspectives, for example, on what Levi-Strauss termed "complex struc-tures" of kinship and marriage. Sec ond , there was a clo se co nne ction betw eenthe anthropology of France and new developments in historical scholarship.Historians and anthropologists shared a common interest in studying areas likekinship and sym bo lism in rural France. Third, and fina lly, after 19 68 , the Frenchpublic wa s increasingly interested in qu estions of identity, history, and m em ory.Bo oks dealing with rural France, for instance, found a large audience in France.The creation of the Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique is linked with this ex-pansion of anthropology at home.

All of this created a new dynamic. Some researchers whose doctoral re-search had been on exotic sites became eager to work on their own societies. Inpart, this was for external reasons, having to do with the larger social and politi-cal context (for instance, it beca m e m ore difficult to gain acc ess to foreign fieldsites), but bey ond this there wa s an intellectual c ha lleng e. W as it po ssib le to usesimilar methods to understand complex modern societies? This was the begin-ning of a new impulse in French anthropology. The 1980s were witness to am ove toward new fieldwork sites. W ith the developm ent of urban anthropology,anthr opologists began to take an interest in groups that had receiv ed very littleattention previously, such as ethnic minorities living in the suburbs. The mid-dle-c lass a nthrop ologist thus continue d to be attracted to groups m arked by dif-ference. The dominant idea remained that anthropology should work foremoston microgroups situated at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy or other-wise at the margins. Where interest was once focused on the village, it was nowfocused on mem bers of A lcoh olics Ano nym ous or on the hom eless w ho slept inthe Paris metro.

If one looks at the work published by French anthropologists in the 1980s,one can distinguish three principal tendencies:

1. studies of peasant societies and of traditional forms of social organization(work by Augustins [1989] andS egalen [1985])


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2. studies of oral traditions and sym bols influenced by the work of French struc-turalists (work by Belmont, Fabre, and members of the Centre d'Anthropolo-gie)

3. studies of minorities and urban groups (work by Althabe and associates[1992])

In addition, history and anthropology were tightly linked in the 1980s. Atthat time the dominant French historical school, les Annales, was at its climax.Fernand Braudel and Geo rges D uby had bec om e "official historians." They ap-peared in the mass media and received invitations from President Mitterrand.Television programs adapted from historical scholarship appeared, includingone based on Duby's work on medieval art (1976) and another on Braudel'swork on the Mediterranean (1949). Two books by historians found very largeaudiences: L'Identite de la France by Braudel (1986) and Les lieuxde mem oire,a work by multiple authors working under the direction of Pierre Nora (1984).In Bra ude l's book , on e finds an echo of the anxiety of French pe op le in the faceof glo ba lization . Imm igration had created a situation in France characterized bythe co ex iste nc e o f different cu ltures. Intellectuals faced a new ch allen ge: how toredefine our national identity. The book edited by Nora is similarly concernedwith this problem of national identity. Focusing on sites of memory was a wayof investigating the relationship between tradition and modernity. The symbol-ism o f place w as addressed by the different con tributors as a way of better under-standing the role of history and memory in both the building of national unityand the problematic of national identity. The development of anthropology andhistory in France during the 1970s and 1980s was not without epistemologicalconsequences. The close connection between the two disciplines was illus-trated, on the one hand, by the deep interest of historians in the classical topicsand m ethod s of anthrop ology (Leroy-Ladurie 197 5). On the other hand, anthro-pologists became concerned with historical background and context, and theybegan to make more and more use of archives.

Fina lly, in the anthropological literature of the 198 0s, identity w as a centralissue. The sym bolic construction of identity, as well as the dialectic b etween lo-cal ethnic diversity on the one hand and national unity on the other, were at thecenter of numerous studies. These issues led some anthropologists to examinethe articulation between the local and the global. How can one understand localspecificities while taking into account their place within the nation-state? Thisis one exa m ple of the type of question that began to be asked at the beginn ing o fthe 1990s.

At the same time, some anthropologists shifted their gaze to a different setof actors. As I mentioned earlier, anthropologists traditionally focused theirstudies on minorities and socially disadvantaged groups. Beginning in the late1980s, some anthropologists became interested in elites: members of the bour-geoisie, politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators (Abeles 1991). Thesescholars initiated, in contrast to an anthro pology of the peripheral, an anth ropol-ogy of the center. They focused on processes of social legitimation and on the


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exerc ise and transmission of power. A new anthropology of pow er and institutionsdeveloped at this time, one interested in such phenomena as sporting events, themass media, and corporations.

By n ow , French anthropology of contemporary France incorpo rates a rangeof perspectives and raises several epistemological questions:

1. H ow do w e apply to our own societies concepts invented for exotic societies?For exa m ple, is the notion of ritual that Brom berger (199 5) app lies to the studyof football or that I apply to the study of certain political practices adequate?

2. How can one study the conn ection between local and global?3. How can anthropologists who work in increasingly urbanized societies takeinto account the hybridization that characterizes such so cie ties ? In the French

context, where cultural heterogeneity has in the past been dealt with from acentralist and nationalist perspective, the necessity of a theory of culture thatdoes not dism iss such hybridization is som ething new . The traditional Frenchpolicy for the integration of minorities was a re-elaboration of the republicanmod el, which for one century had been an efficient means of reinforcing na-tional unity and absorbing cultural disparities. French anthropologists werenot prepared to deal with the issues raised by cultural heterogeneity, and themost important contributions on multiculturalism and interethnic relation-ships in contemporary France have been made by sociologists (Wieviorka1991). Recently, one of these sociologists was consulted by the governm ent inthe process of reforming the legislation concerning imm igration.

However, anthropologists must now take into account the changes in theirown society and thereby reform their own approach to modernity. One noticesin France a true tension betw een those wh o study tradition, transm ission, a nc es-tral rituals, and symbols and those who consider that anthropology, first of all, isthe study of the present. The development of an anthropology working in thepresent implies a critical approach to the construction of identity and stereo-types that are generated in a context dominated by processes of globalizationand deterritorialization (Appadurai 1996; Herzfeld 1997). The time has comefor French anthropolog ists to undertake a critical reflection on French anthro-pology. Although anthropologists had methods that could have helped them tostudy cultural issues in a more acute way than their sociologist colleagues, an-thropologists left to sociologists a sort of monopoly on the study of the present.

Today things have begun to change: it is worth noting emerging critics ofthe French anthropological tradition and, simultaneously, a new impulse in thefield of anthropology. Anthropology in France has gained some distance fromthe classical approach and is now trying to open itself to new perspectives.

The creation in 1994 of my laboratory, the Laboratoire d'Anthropologiedes Institutions et des Organisations Sociales, is significant. We are researchingareas of interest relevant to understanding the changing economic, social, andcultural landscapes. This includes various projects, such as an anthropologicalstudy of the European Union, which examines multicultural political practicesand social relationships in the European Commission and Parliament. We arealso researching transformations taking pace in central and Eastern Europe


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(changes taking place in the organization of corporations, as well as identityconflicts in the former Yugoslavia). We have recently undertaken research com-paring the notion of patrimony in France and Japan.

Twenty years ago, no one would have thought about doing this kind of re-search. In the face of this change one can distinguish two different attitudes amongFrench anthropologists: those who are afraid that anthropology will lose its dis-tinctiveness and remain attached to a more traditional Levi-Straussian concept ofanthropology and those who believe it is the best way to develop the discipline. Ifyou have been listening at all, you understand in which camp I am situated.

References Cited

Abeles, Marc1991 Qu iet Days in Burgundy. Cam bridge: Cam bridge University Press.Althabe, Ge"rard, Daniel Fabre, and Gerard Lenclud1992 Vers une ethnologie du present. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences del 'Homme.Appadurai, Arjun1996 Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Augustins, Georges1989 Comment se pere"tuer? Devenir des ligne"es, destin des patrim oines. Paris: So-cite d'Ethnologie.Braudel, Fernand1949 La Me"diterranee et le monde me'diterrane'en au siecle de Ph ilippe II. Paris: Ar-mand Colin.1986 L'Identite de laFrance. Paris: Armand Colin.Bromberger, Christian1995 Le match de football. Ethnologie d'une passion partisane a Marseille, Napleset Turin. P aris: Editions de laMaison des Sciences de l'Homme.Clastres, Pierre1974 La socie'te' contre l'Etat. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Duby, Georges1976 Le temps des cathedrales: l'Art et les society. Paris: Gallimond.Godelier, Maurice1984 L'id6el et le materiel. Paris: Fayard.Herzfeld, Michael1997 Cu ltural Intimacy. Social Poetics of the Nation-State. London: Routledge.Izard, Michel1992 L'odysse"e du pouvoir. Paris: Editions de l'EH ES S.Leroy-Ladurie, Emmanuel1975 M ontaillou village occitan de 1294 a 1324. Paris: Gallimard.Nora, P ierre, ed.1984 Les lieux deme"moire. Paris: Gallimard.Segalen, Martine1985 Qu inze generations deBas-Bretons. Paris: PUF .

Wieviorka, M ichel1991 L'espace du racisme. Paris: Le Seuil.Zonabend, Franchise1980 La me"moire longue. Paris: PUF.

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ABELES Marc-How the Antrop