Reconstructing, Understanding and Inventing Past Cultures The Complex Dialogue between French Ethnology and History

The purpose of this paper is to present a short account of the inter-disciplinary relationships between history and the ethnology of France. This account is set within the larger framework of anthropology and tries to show, at the light of recent French research, what separates and what unites both views when tackling the same topics, such as death or kinship and inheritance practices. While the present­ day situation in France is characterized again by the drifting apart of both disciplines, the paper, to conclude, examines briefly the situation in other Europe­ an anthropologies and shows some striking discrepancies, notably between the German and the French traditions.

European ethnology can be counted on the fingers of one hand, when they don't belong to Sociology departments. We must be constantly aware of this crucial institutional lack of bal ance when evaluating the cross impact of disci plines. This situation has not been corrected nowadays as historianR arc probably today Len Limes m ore numerous th an ethnologists . Th is explains in pari why ethnology in general, and European ethnology, in particular, in its efJuris to establish itself as a scientific discipline, claimed it was a-historical.
Let us set briefly the situation of European ethnology within the larger fr ame of Social anthropology. Founding fathers of modern so cial anthropology were a-historicists as the so cieties they studied seemed to be motionless, compared with the rapid changes ofthc western world. For instance, African societies, which were the research laboratory of English social anthropology and th e French school of African ism lacked historical sources, and gave an im age of a-temporality.
At the end of the 19th century and during the 1930s, fo lklorists, for their part, often adopted a regressive position, looking for traces of a (glorious) Celtic past in customs and monu ments. In his effort to establish fo lklore as a scientific discipline, Van

Ethnology inspires history
What was new in the 1960s was that historians abandoned their traditional fields of interest for the very themes ethnology seemed to spe cialize in: many concepts and tools used by the ethnologist have greatly influenced the branch of the Annales school known as Histoire des mentalites.
The Annales school opens the way for a history caught by bulimia: all fa cets ofthe social become historical. Turning away fr om the study of major national events (battles, political re gimes), of the State and its rulers, history, through statistical analysis, discovered the com mon people, everyday life, material culture, but also cultural and cognitive categories. When Levy-Bruhl dealt with "la mentalite primitive dans les societes inferieures", "mentalites" then meant something like "worldviews", and was always attached to prim itive people, whereas, we, as developed nations, enjoyed a civilir.ation.
When Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre used this word, it carried quite a diffe rent meaning: it referred to the bulk of cultural meanings that participate in the complex and moving network of social fa cts, in constant inte raction. Bloch's goal was evidently to reconstruct a social proc ess fr om the ernie perspective and to add a sociological twist as he was interested in the various social strata of a group. Besides "men talite", Lucien Febvre wi ll usc the term "outil In the 1970s and 80s, a triumphant "histoire des mentalites" developed whose success resid ed precisely in its vagueness. Discovering new archival sources, historians built new research objects: religion, death, fe ar, violence, cognitive attitudes etc. But French historians have en deavoured less to reconstruct the interrelations in a social, regional, local community than to deal with a particular theme in a specific area.
The cross fe rtilization between history and ethnology has been most ciJ"cctive and we ll ba lanced in the Jicld of rituals and ki nship. Let us recall the important conferences that took place in the 70s on the charivari, on kinship etc .. where confrontations between historians and anthropologists allowed the changes of fo rms and meanings to be fo llowed over vast territories and long periods of time.
Ethnology and history: the field proof?
In his 1961 Manchester lecture, Evans-Pritch ard asserted that the fa ct that the social anthro pologist brings first-hand fa cts fr om his field work, while the historian gathers his material through his archival sources, is a technical , not a methodological difference.
Since then, a double movement has been observed; one acknowledges that beyond West ern societies, social anthropology also deals with complex societies structured around State, with centralized and hierarchical institutions, sometimes displaying a very elaborate written culture, carrying the weight of a rich past.
History, for its part, as we have seen, has amples of what appears to be rather irrcd ucti blc domains, in spite of the interdisciplinary dialogue they must entertain. In the 1 980s a ho::;t of work:; on ::;ocial a::;pccts of death was published. This is where the theme of"mental ites" was put to use by Philippe Ari es (1.977) when he observed that attitudes towards death were marked by very slow changes; after toying with all kinds of explanations, he ascribed them to "something situated in the collective uncon scious", and referred to "sensibility changes", when discussing the transition fr om closeness with death (early centuries) to distance with and horror of death (18th, 19th, 20th centuries).
Michel Vo velle, another eminent specialist of these questions, will criticize the usc of the concept of collective unconscious, which, he If I now refer to the study of death in an area which has been identified by its specific atti tudes towards death, Lower Brittany, the an thropological historian will reveal the system of death, with the Church at the parish center, and at the heart of social practices: belonging to a specific parish structures the identity pro cess, the "pays" landscape is marked by signs of religious affiliations, such as chapels and cross es, the sonorous space is also structured by the ringing of church bells. Priests speak Breton and preach in Breton. Death is quite familiar, constantly present with the devil and the ghost souls. Religious monuments, reliquaries and ossuaries testi fy to th is rich culture of death which mixes pre-Christian and Christian be liefs and attitudes (Alain Croix, 1981).

The ethnologi�t nowaday� �tudying death in
Brittany must first question the construction of the image of Lower Brittany as the land where a specific culture of death is supposed to pre vail. Ellen Badone (1989) shows that this image participates, -together with the "petit breton"

Between history and ethnology
Sy mbologic anthropology" Since Van Gennep'� grand scheme ofthe rites of" passage, ethnologists have tried to understand, next to large, complex and spectacular rituals, a mass of minor rituals in vary many aspects of life. The anthropologist will begin with an ob servation ofthis kind -why is it said that ifthe bells don't ring at baptism the Christened child will remain dumb? (Giordana Charuty, 1985) and then explore all the objects, gestures, be liefs, rituals, myths and legends etc. that relate either to baptism, bell ringing, tongue, lan guage. In this research process, the ethnologist makes use of historical data in a very specific way, selected in various spatial and time di mensions, his goal being to help the meaning emerge.
Yv onne Ve rdier (1979) paved the way to wards this new direction, when she remarked the semantic proximity of the word "marquer" that designates both the first needle-work ap prenticeship and the way women refer to their monthly period; she also remarked that the "marquette" (sampler) was the name given to the canvas very subtly embroidered by young girls as they matured and became more expert at their needle-work. The lexical proximity that might sound preposterous is explained by the sociological fa ct that young girls were sent to the dress-maker where together with embroi dery and needle-work, they would learn about sexuality and marriage. Thus the time spent in the burgh or the near-by small town stands for some kind of popular finishing school for rural young girls, the process of maturation ending when the young bride is dressed by the "coutur iere" on the morning of her wedding.
But whereas Yv onne Ve rdier kept her analy sis within the limits of 19th century Burgundy, some daring researchers do not hesitate, in their pursuit of meaning, to place side by side fo lklorical fa cts, beliefs, customs or words that took place or were used in different times and spaces, thus rendering more fr agile their con struction. One could say that their use of histo ry runs against all the rules ofhistory, the basic one being the consecutive character of fa cts.
The analysis put fo rth by Claudine Fabre-Va s-sas (1994), a brilliant representative of this th eoretical strand, takes LI S through time and space, fro m one ritual to another; fi1r instance deal ing with th o Lost icl e hernia treatment am ong young boys which call upon tho black smith to proceed to a symbolical hammering, Fabre-Va ssas embarks on a voyage towards other rituals (passing the ailing child through a cloven tree whoso branches arc tied together afterwards: when the tree is cured, so is the child), historical evidence of testicle surgery in th e 17ih and 18th centurie::;, etc. The pieces of thi s puzzle arc bro ugh t together under the hypothesis ofthe symbolical proximity between young children and piglets, and is consonant with Levi-Strauss' statement, that when deal ing with rituals, "formalism annihilates the object": much greater attention should be de voted to ritual contents in their concrete as pects (1994, p. 71-72). Linked to marriage, a second major theme 152 emerged , initiated by the great divide drawn by ,J oh n Hajnul regardin g the diflcrence between age at marriage and fr eedom in the choice of a male in variou::; ::;ociotio::; ofiho world: ro ughly, it was only in European rural societies that peopl e married late (as far as data could be provided , fr om the 16th or l7ih centuries) and

Ki nship between history and ethnology
where the choice of a mate was , oflicially at least, free. Jn all other societies, males and fe males were married at very young ages, and married by th e i r parents, clans, lineages etc. according to rules Levi -Strauss had delineated. This is the "late European marriage pattern" The achieved example of inter-disciplinary mutual benefit is provided here again by Jack Goody (1983)  Reconstructing the past: ethnology and "p atri moine" servicing local identities As long as "patrimoine" can be defined as goods and assets, transmitted through generations, we are on the secure ground of fa mily and kinship, in this legitimate field of research which has been very successful in French eth nology. But over the past fifteen years, another meaning of "patrimoine" has been prevailing, married with "ethnologique". This is part of a complex institutional power game between var ious ministries (a story which will not be told here), but it is clear that both French history and ethnology are now maintaining a complex and ambiguous relationship with the idea of "patrimoine ethnologique". Patrimony or bet ter yet heritage was a qualificative used only to designate the monuments of our civilisation, testifying to the grandeur of the Nation, cathe drals, palaces and castles. In the 1980s, it extended to encompass all traces of social groups, whether material (vernacular architecture) or immaterial (beliefs, know-how etc.) (lsac Chi va, 1990). The course of its success is associated with that of museums and eco-museums (or so called eco-museums) which opened by the hun dreds all over France, and threatened to open wherever a workshop, a mine, a plant was closing down. The great novelty is that research is not the incentive for the work carried around the closing site whose existence rather stems fr om a local will to keep alive, if not th rough economic activity, through something consid ered as pertaining to its identity as a testimony of the past. Thus those "patrimoine" objects stand first and fo remost as symbols; those relics have been elevated to the honorable position of embodying past times, of showing the specific identity of such or such group, and of using the past they are laden with as a sign of continuity. This is the French version ofthe German devel opment called by Wolfgang Kaschuba (this is sue) the "historicization of the present" or the "processes of ethnification".
Ethnologists stand here in an ambiguous position, since, as professionnals on the one hand, they are required to provide help to inves tigate the new monuments of this selected past, and on the other hand, to study th e patrimony movement, scrutinize these specific views re garding the past, and the things ofthe past. As Appadurai (1981) has shown, some societies live in a world where there is no place fo r the past, where the present carries the past, where as our contemporary (a better word than mod ern or post-modern) societies elaborate a com plex discourse vis-a-vis the past: this past is not a whole, but a space for selection and competi tion, according to rules fixed as the outcome of political fights. As a result what bears the honour ofbeing defined as "patrimoine" (whether it is a house, fo untain, mine, object, song, even a landscape) is, so to speak, torn out of its context, detached fr om it, and constructed as an object that will embody the identity of a group.
We definitely are conservative societies, but what changes is the historical references we are attached to. Instead of building our identities on the idea of nation or offatherland ("patrie"), we prefer to use more local references rooted in the invented identity of a region.5 This is where the ethnologist, provided he is institutionnally fr ee to do it, has to understand the construction of the image of the past put fo rward by local authorities, fr om museums to politicians. For instance, Bernadette Bucher (1995)  The 18th congress of historical sciences held in Montreal6 in 1995 shows the renewed impor tance of political history, cultural studies and minority studies, the two latter fields being of course topics to be discussed between disci plines, on a rather equal par. If European eth nology and history now seem more separated than they have been over the past twenty years, at the risk of seeing one being engulfed by the other, the new themes of interest will necessar ily re-unite them. Historians discuss the con cepts of state and nation, a topic which they had largely abandoned unti l the unfortunate con tempora ry events brought them back to the fo re. They now seem to more or less shun the ethnological interpretation put forth by Eric Hobsbawm (1992)

Conclusion
However schematic, this exploration of the French relationships between history and eth nology appear to contrast sharply with a simi lar diachronic German presentation (Bock 1995, Kaschuba, this issue). It is clear that, beyond the question of language, since German and French often speak to one another through the mediation of English, the chronology of these relationships and the interpretations of their contents differ widely. To summarize, one can say that at the time when Germany was trying to build a historically coherent culture and put Volkskunde to use for this aim, French fo lklore developed in a very centralized country where regionalist movements were directed against French jacobinism; instead of searching fo r a French soul, fo lklorists were at pains to invent local or regional identities. When, in Germany, fo lklore was called upon as a science oflegitima tion of conservative values, in France, it was the "popular" aspect of culture that was set fo rth with the movement and the establishment of the Musee des "arts et traditions populaires" fo unded under the Front populaire in 1937.
Again theAbschied von Vo lksleben starts at the onset of the Annales school, which is so present by contrast at the beginnings of a scientific ethnology in France and initiates an ever-going dialogue with ethnology. By contrast, in Germa ny, since historical anthropology is understood as a subjectivist or irrational approach, it was rejected as reminiscent of the misuse of Volks kunde -constantly referring to the irrational soul of the people -by National Socialism.
Thus, there was a lack of interest in cultural anthropology among both ethnologists and so cial historians until ten years ago, when it was then booming in France . And now that historical anthropology seems to re cede in France, with a return to politics and narratives and that ethnology is -willy nilly involved in the "patrimoine" movement, it seems to be growing in importance in Germany. Swe den presents another history of these complex relationships where influent scholars like Si gurd Erixon set the tone at the European level during decades, after which, ethnologists aban doned the study of material culture, and be came interested in the cultural changes of their society, and produced influent works pertain ing both to history and ethnology (LOfgren and Frykman 1987).
Nowadays, among French ethnologists, the use of historical data and the incorporation of historical perspectives do not raise any ques tion, but the fo cus is still on the "here and now" of an ever-changing present; hence some of the misunderstandings in our European dialogue when the past seems to be the core of the material. The building of a European ethnology rests on the necessity of knowing one another better.

Notes
1. If everyone agrees on the definition of history, it is useful to remark that such is not the case for ethnology. It suffices to glance at the list of the participants' affiliations to the Pees conference and more generally to the authors of Ethnologia Europaea to be convinced of the diversities or even discrepancies housed by the word "Ethnology". Conversely the same discipline or research tech niques can be referred to as Study of fo lk culture, social anthropology etc. 2. Except for Marcel Griaule's chair in 1943.