Transcript Robert Darnton and The Great Cat Massacre: history as anthropology

Robert Darnton and The Great Cat
Massacre: history as anthropology
“The past is a foreign country; they do things
differently there.”
[L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)]
Structure of lecture:
• Account of ‘the great cat massacre’ in 1730s
France, and Robert Darnton’s investigation of it.
• Broad contexts: changes in twentieth-century
historiography; emergence of ‘culture’ as a key
category of research.
• Specific contexts: history and anthropology (in
particular, the work of Clifford Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures.
• Conclusions: history a changed field by the
1980s.
The Great Cat Massacre in Paris, late
1730s
• Paris printing industry: organized on artisanal, largely precapitalist basis in 18th century. Hierarchy within workshops:
master printers, journeymen printers, apprentices, casual hires.
Changing patterns of control and authority: bigger master printers
taking over; conditions of work squeezed. New social, cultural
hierarchies between masters and workers.
• Printing shop of Jacques Vincent: two workers, Nicolas Contat
(‘Jerome’) and Leveille suffering fierce resentments: badly treated
and paid, fed scraps from master’s table, unable to sleep at night
because of caterwauling.
• They decide to take revenge – with a practical joke. Imitate cats
howling and fighting; instructed to get rid of alley cats. They
torture/kill all cats in the vicinity (including one belonging to their
master’s wife) – hold mock trials and hang dozens. This is related
again and again in printing workers’ circles – as a joke. Causes
great hilarity.
Darnton on his methodology
“Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the
distance which separates us from the workers of
preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance
may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for
anthropologists have found that the best points of entry
in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those
where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize
that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a
ceremony – that is particularly meaningful to the
natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of
meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the
great cat massacre, it may be possible to “get” a basic
ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.”
Darnton on his methodology (contd.)
“…other people are other. They do not think the
way we do. And if we want to understand their
way of thinking, we should set out with the idea of
capturing otherness. […] nothing is easier than to
slip into the comfortable assumption that
Europeans thought and felt two centuries ago just
as we do today – allowing for the wigs and
wooden shoes. We constantly need to be shaken
out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to
be administered doses of culture shock.”
Situating Darnton (and his
methodology): changes in 20th
century historiography
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Traditional histories: ignored such events, or purely illustrative uses.
Social history traditions (Marxism, Annales, etc): part of bigger narratives of
social change and class conflict.
Later Annales historians : study of mentalites. Popular attitudes, collective
beliefs.
Importance of quantitative methods: counting.
Culture derived from economics, demography, social structure
History from below; microhistory – pioneering new attention to popular culture:
customs, beliefs, in terms of the experiences of peasants, workers. Thompson’s
turn towards study of 18th century plebeian customs and their historical role.
Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis (Rites of Violence, 1973): study of 16th century
beliefs, symbolically charged actions, and the role they played in religious
conflict.
Post-structuralist approaches: ‘linguistic’ or ‘textual’ turn. Focus on internal
coherence/tensions within texts. Heavily inflected the history-from-below
tradition from the 1980s on.
Darnton: history as anthropology
“…it might simply be called cultural history; for
it treats our own civilization in the same way
that anthropologists study alien cultures. It is
history in the ethnographic grain.”
Parallel developments in
social/cultural anthropology:
• In its origins as a modern discipline: closely associated with
colonialism, racial supremacism. Study of ‘backward’, ‘primitive’
or ‘savage’ civilizations – untouched by modernity. Elements of
this persist in post-war world, but are critiqued heavily within the
discipline.
• 1950s, 1960s: rise of structural anthropology. Along with
linguistics and psychoanalysis, anthropology one of the biggest
‘frontiers’ of structuralism. Major figure: Claude Levi-Strauss.
Deep structures of social life and behaviour.
• 1970s on: Clifford Geertz the dominant figure in US cultural
anthropology. Most famous work: The Interpretation of Cultures
(1973). Use of ‘thick description’ (borrowed from Oxford
philosopher Gilbert Ryle). Symbolic dimension of human
behaviour: culture understood as a matter of public practice.
Geertz on the definition of culture - I
“The concept of culture I espouse […] is essentially
a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that
man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to
be those webs, and the analysis of it to be
therefore not an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”
(Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures)
Geertz on the definition of culture - II
“Culture, this acted document, thus is
public...Though ideational, it does not exist in
someone’s head; though unphysical, it is not an
occult entity.”
(Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures)