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

Abstract

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.

Deciphering everyday meaning-making with Gramsci

“…Gramsci’s call to approach humans as historical beings and take seriously the ways the past enters and permeates the everyday echoes engagements with historicity and lived temporality in anthropology. While the historic turn in anthropology that developed from the 1980s onwards led to the acknowledgement that in non-Western cultural contexts people often deploy experiential, non-narrative ways of relating to the past (Hastrup 1992 ; Lambek 2002 ), in recent years, a growing number of anthropologists have argued that we need to go a step further and apply the same focus to European and North American societies (Hirsch & Stewart 2005 ; Rebel 2010 ; Hodges 2013 ). The prism of historicity allows anthropologists to look at history as a social practice: It enables them to focus on the everyday practices and ideas people deploy to actively make sense of and bestow meaning upon the past (Hodges, 2013 : 479).…”

“…While the historic turn in anthropology that developed from the 1980s onwards led to the acknowledgement that in non-Western cultural contexts people often deploy experiential, non-narrative ways of relating to the past (Hastrup 1992 ; Lambek 2002 ), in recent years, a growing number of anthropologists have argued that we need to go a step further and apply the same focus to European and North American societies (Hirsch & Stewart 2005 ; Rebel 2010 ; Hodges 2013 ). The prism of historicity allows anthropologists to look at history as a social practice: It enables them to focus on the everyday practices and ideas people deploy to actively make sense of and bestow meaning upon the past (Hodges, 2013 : 479). Historicity, or ‘everyday history’, as phenomenologists prefer to call it (Carr 2014 ), is a helpful prism for approximating the social function of common sense ideas in Carinthia.…”

Introduction

“…1 An anthropology of history, as envisioned in this collection, extends the exploration of how history is conceived and represented to take in non-Western societies, where ethnographic study can reveal local forms of historical production that do not conform to the canons of standard historiography (Hastrup 1991;Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 157; and see Feierman 1999 for striking examples). People produce representations of the past obliquely, in practices such as dancing (McCall 2000), spirit séances (Lambek 2002;Palmié 2013a), or encounters with artifacts (Hodges 2013;Stewart 2012). Just as kinship studies have come to focus on the practices by which consociates establish relationships with one another (Howell 2001), the anthropological study of history takes on the broader task of establishing and analyzing what the historian J. G. A.…”