Disciplinary Anthropology? Amateur Ethnography and the Production of ‘Heritage’ in Rural France

Hodges, Matt

doi:10.1080/00141844.2011.577228

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…In this respect, the cases described by Andrew Lass, Matt Hodges, and Michael Herzfeld are particularly significant because they are quite convergent with mine (Lass 1989 ; Hodges 2011 ; Herzfeld 1982 ). Even more consistent is the case of ‘Tarantism’ in southern Italy described by Giovanni Pizza in a piece that highlights and interprets the dynamics of social circulation, reinvention, and reappropriation of what was an anthropological theory (developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino in a series of groundbreaking works; for example, Martino 1961 ).…”

Section: Popular Frazerism: Cultural Bricolage and Circulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Fertility’ and the Carnival 2: Popular Frazerism and the Reconfiguration of Tradition in Europe Today

Testa

2017

Folklore

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This article examines European festive culture through the lens of two ethnographic case studies of carnivals, conducted in Italy and the Czech Republic. The article analyses processes of meaning construction, cultural circulation, and reconfiguration of local traditions that are currently widely at work in rural and marginal European contexts. It explains why I propose to name the cultural complex shaped by those processes ‘popular Frazerism’. The article also argues that these phenomena are representative of a certain post-modern romantic imaginary of magic, antiquity, and primitiveness, and explores the symbolic sources and the social needs from which this imaginary draws its strengths and legitimacy.This article is the second part of a broader study divided into two parts.

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Section: Popular Frazerism: Cultural Bricolage and Circulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Fertility’ and the Carnival 2: Popular Frazerism and the Reconfiguration of Tradition in Europe Today

Testa

2017

Folklore

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“…This was accompanied by a political economic weakening of Monadièrois status in the village. In this regard, it is telling that the authorities have now appropriated the Roman past for invocation in heritage tourism, while incomers are commoditizing Monadièrois "history" and cultural practices for use in heritage tourism (see Hodges 2011). The potential for similar "reversals" of historical narratives about Monadières have thus dissipated, for now.…”

Section: Historicity Emergence and The Compression Of Timespacementioning

confidence: 99%

Illuminating Vestige: Amateur Archaeology and the Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Rural France

Hodges

2013

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article provides a historical ethnography of an abrupt and transient awakening of interest in Roman vestige during the 1970s in rural France, and explores its implications for comparative understanding of historical consciousness in Western Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Languedoc, and particularly the commune of Monadières, it details a vogue for collecting pottery shards scattered in a nearby lagoon that developed among local inhabitants. The article frames this as a ritualized “expressive historicity” emergent from political economic restructuring, cultural transformation, and time-space compression. It analyses the catalyzing role of a historian who introduced discursive forms into the commune for symbolizing the shards, drawn from regionalist and socialist historiography, which local people adapted to rearticulate the historicity of lived experience as a novel, hybrid genre of “historical consciousness.” These activities are conceptualized as a “reverse historiography.” Elements of historiographical and archaeological discourses—for example, chronological depth, collation and evaluation of material relics—are reinvented to alternate ends, partly as a subversive “response” to contact with such discourses. The practice emerges as a mediation of distinct ways of apprehending the world at a significant historical juncture. Analysis explores the utility of new anthropological theories of “historicity”—an alternative to the established “historical idiom” for analyzing our relations with the past—which place historiography within the analytical frame, and enable consideration of the temporality of historical experience. Findings suggest that the alterity of popular Western cultural practices for invoking the past would reward further study.

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“…If this is comparable in some respects to the position advanced in the 'ontological turn' in anthropology, one notable omission from such debates is temporal nuance (cf. Hodges 2008). An immanent anthropology acknowledges the 'radical constructivism' endorsed by other anthropologists (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Time is likewise not a flowing or flux-like backdrop for anthropological analysis, but an emergent property of events. It is a differential multiplicity, materialistic, multi-vectorial, complex, aleatory (Deleuze 2004;Hodges 2008). Such images enable us to think process from Arendt's standpoint: as a contingent figure for configuring 'time' that both enables and disables; and as a concept that must be displaced from a totalizing discursive role, which often marks seminal social-scientific usages of 'process ' (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We can recall that, when integrated with disciplinary programmes, this is a key dimension of practices of instrumentalization and rationalization (Feenberg 2004), as suggested by the first of our cases, above. One overlap between this wider processualism and totalizing invocations of process where they occur in social-scientific discourses lies in how the social sciences themselves can constitute disciplinary activities (see Hodges 2011). To be processed, to be disciplined, is to enter into procedure.…”

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confidence: 99%

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1 Immanent anthropology: a comparative study of ‘process’ in contemporary France

Hodges

2014

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This paper presents a comparative critique of the ‘processual temporalities’ which infuse both social‐scientific theorizing and selected Western cultural practices. Through study of a public‐private partnership which emerged from a biotechnology project devised for producing ‘self‐cloning’ maize for resource‐poor farmers, I analyse how processual temporalities were central to re‐gearing knowledge practices towards market‐orientated solutions. In a study of characterizations of the ‘state of flux’ which affects life in a French peri‐urban village, I explore how processualism is identified as a component of a metropolitan hegemony which villagers ‘resist’ through idealizing ‘enduring temporalities’ of cultural practice. Drawing on Arendt and Deleuze, I analyse processualism as a dominant contemporary chronotope, mediating and disciplining conflictive temporalities and practices, underwriting economic projects of deterritorialization and restructuring – whose idiom is also prominent in social‐scientific paradigms. I substitute an ‘immanent anthropology’, which advocates a non‐transcendental ontology of cultural practice and analysis – displacing anthropological analysis onto a polychronic temporal foundation.

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Disciplinary Anthropology? Amateur Ethnography and the Production of ‘Heritage’ in Rural France

Cited by 9 publications

References 13 publications

‘Fertility’ and the Carnival 2: Popular Frazerism and the Reconfiguration of Tradition in Europe Today

‘Fertility’ and the Carnival 2: Popular Frazerism and the Reconfiguration of Tradition in Europe Today

Illuminating Vestige: Amateur Archaeology and the Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Rural France

1 Immanent anthropology: a comparative study of ‘process’ in contemporary France

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