VILLAGE STUDY JOUR 3 - AND THE FIRST PROBLEM IS ...
So I’m doing this village study thing and this whole studying annoter culture thing does not work when people are white and come from. The same socioéconomique class as you. I dont know how I never real time how exploitation anthropologie can be.
So I’m in this village and the gens here are all wonderful but but the tiniest bit spacy - that is, everyone here is assez newagey mystical but at the same time still more or less down to earth - that is to say, meeting anyone for the first time you wouldn’t necessarily know right away that they were anything more far out than leftists.
No one is religious but everyone seems to have a kind of adaptive/ synchretic personal spirituality akin perhaps to Shapero’s (and yours too, aaron, though I can’t exactly see you living in a forest, there isn’t enough jazz) and it expresses itself in a bunch of more or less subtle ways (the drum ceremony the other night being one of the less subtle, the dogs named sakti and rasta being one of the more) but no one is at all proselytizing or dogmatic. What’s interesting is that its this personal spirituality that has brought a lot of them here - that is, no one who lives here was born here, sauf Thierry and Olivia, and the one’s I’ve talked to about why they chose to come here all said things about feeling a kind of attachment or draw to the region, and more specifically to the Pyrenees - some also talked (not avidly, though, kind of understatedly; everyone here seemsconscious that most people think shamanism and things like that are weird) to a sort of energy that emmenates from the Pyrenees. Two people even told me they’d dreamed about the Pyrenees before they came here.
Anyway, this kind of stuff interests me. And I just got back from India, so I have all kinds of perspective about religious syncretism and shamanism and alternative medicine and crap like that, so if I actually were to try to do a project on this subject, I would already have some foreknowledge to put the subject in context. But what’s more, there’s a tradition of noncoformist religious practices (aka ‘heresy’ if you want to get roman catholic about it) in the region - that is, the midi-Pyrenees area used to be full of cathars, end ever since I’ve arrived here (here being france) it seems like people have been talking about them, and I’m all interested in them and spent this morning reading books in French about cathar philosophie, and it all sounds really bizarre and interesting. The cathars believed that the devil (well, le Mal) made the physical world and the physical body of man, and god (ou le Bien) made the spirit (or rather, partitioned off parts of his own spirit) and placed it in the body of man. So there’s a sort of battle going on constantly within every person between these two opposite principals, and someone can give themselves up completely to one or the other, or rest somewhere in the middle, which is what people usually do. If you want to go for the Bien, though, you need to renounce everything that has to do with the Mal, which means renounce all physical comforts/ wants/ desires/ etc and be an ascetic. The word ‘cathar’ apparently comes from the the greek for ‘pure’ because the goal is to purify yourself by renouncing everything that has to do with the physical world; the guys who had more or less done this were called ‘bonshommes’ or ‘parfaits’ and would travel town to town to beg, give sermons, and lay on hands. Apparenly they would also retreat souvent to les grottes to meditate and learn things from the terre.
The sect formed in a christian context so they believed in jesus but they didn’t believe he was the son of god - they thought he was some immaterial spirit being who came here to teach us how to disconnect from the material world. They also didn’t believe in the church or Christian ritual in general because they thought it was all materialistic and designed to keep man from realizing his divine nature.
So this was heresy, obviously, but it was tolerated in the region for a long time because the people were more or less spread out and things were peaceful and the local religious officials didn’t want to start problems where there weren’t any (this is more or less my interpretation, though my Toulouse homestay dad was telling me something to that effect) but after a while I guess they were becoming a little too noticeable and rome decided to launch a crusade against them and came in a killed a bunch of people, including the montsegnior whose chateau I saw my first weekend here, and now there are no more cathars.
Anyway, the reason this is interesting is, my little village is full of modern day cathars (by which I mean, antiestablishment mystical types) and I think I could write an interesting paper discussing what about the region makes it appealing to these types of people in general. I asked Patrick about this in reference to the cathars and he said basically that at the time , all the money and power (and by extension the church) were concentrated in paris, in the north, and the deep south, who were poorer and had less of a say (it seems) in national politics, therefore felt alienated from that locus power, and started finding less and less reason that it should have anything to do with them, which of course breeds antiestablishment … ism. And this could sort of persist and flourish in the region at the time because (it seems) their politics were more or less live and let live, which again is something one would expect to find where people are spread out and live in small groups that are more or less self sufficient and basically govern themselves.
It’s different now, though, because, for one thing, the people who live in my village didn’t grow up here, so the conditions of the region couldn’t have been expected to nurture their mentality comme ca - they were drawn to the region (one would assume) because they had a certain mentality. But maybe in the end that ends up being more or less the same thing - that is, I image if you grow up in a region whose mentality you don’t like, you leave.
Anyway, its all very muddled now, but forgetting that, I feel like by the end of the week I could write a nice little paper about it that I would enjoy thinking about, but there’s one goddamn problem; normal people don’t like their religious beliefs put on display. Its really belittling to have someone analyze and classify something like that, which is easy to ignore when you’re the anthropologist and the people who’s beliefs and customs are being analysed and classified speak a different language, live in a different country, and are never going to see your research, but here, I have to present my ‘findings’ at the end of the week, and there’s no was I can treat this topic without everyone being uncomfortable.
This fact is whats making me feel weird about anthropology in general, and makes me understand much more clearly all that stuff I read in my anthro-religion class about how in the very act of noting and writing down something about another culture, the anthropologist drives a wedge between himself and his ‘subjects’ that marks himself as one thing and them as another. In life in general, people want to be taken as normal, but this type of analasys makes it impossible for them to be displayed that way, because the anthropolgist comes onto the scene (whether he means to or not, enfin, rhetorically) as the bearer of normal, and anything he marks he marks as out of the ordinary.
Anyway, I don’t think the people here are weird - I think they’re all intelligent, friendly, talented individuals who have somehow maintained this great easygoing youthful mentality (the dorm-room style drop ins, the group hikes, etc) and remind me of my friends, and what I’d like my friends and myself to be like when we’re older - but the problem is, there’s no way I can write about them without making them sound weird. Which must be a problem every anthropologist has, but they ignore it somehow … the idea of which makes me feel weird. I feel like they must either convince themselves their subjects don’t mind being put under a microscope, or that it doesn’t matter because they’ll never see it, and it won’t change their lives at all … either way, that makes me feel weird.
Anyway, I need to choose another subject. But I don’t know what - maybe how the landscape has changed over the years - Patrick suggested that. Maybe I could work out some sort of photo essay … I was thinking maybe I could some sort of marks in the landscape that indicated the way something had been different autrefois than it is now, or in the buildings, like some sort of ancient barn that had been transformed into something else … but I don’t immediately know where I’d find that, and either way, it would have to be outside the exact boundaries of my village … blargh. Anyway, I should go, we’re getting ready to have dinner.
So I’m in this village and the gens here are all wonderful but but the tiniest bit spacy - that is, everyone here is assez newagey mystical but at the same time still more or less down to earth - that is to say, meeting anyone for the first time you wouldn’t necessarily know right away that they were anything more far out than leftists.
No one is religious but everyone seems to have a kind of adaptive/ synchretic personal spirituality akin perhaps to Shapero’s (and yours too, aaron, though I can’t exactly see you living in a forest, there isn’t enough jazz) and it expresses itself in a bunch of more or less subtle ways (the drum ceremony the other night being one of the less subtle, the dogs named sakti and rasta being one of the more) but no one is at all proselytizing or dogmatic. What’s interesting is that its this personal spirituality that has brought a lot of them here - that is, no one who lives here was born here, sauf Thierry and Olivia, and the one’s I’ve talked to about why they chose to come here all said things about feeling a kind of attachment or draw to the region, and more specifically to the Pyrenees - some also talked (not avidly, though, kind of understatedly; everyone here seemsconscious that most people think shamanism and things like that are weird) to a sort of energy that emmenates from the Pyrenees. Two people even told me they’d dreamed about the Pyrenees before they came here.
Anyway, this kind of stuff interests me. And I just got back from India, so I have all kinds of perspective about religious syncretism and shamanism and alternative medicine and crap like that, so if I actually were to try to do a project on this subject, I would already have some foreknowledge to put the subject in context. But what’s more, there’s a tradition of noncoformist religious practices (aka ‘heresy’ if you want to get roman catholic about it) in the region - that is, the midi-Pyrenees area used to be full of cathars, end ever since I’ve arrived here (here being france) it seems like people have been talking about them, and I’m all interested in them and spent this morning reading books in French about cathar philosophie, and it all sounds really bizarre and interesting. The cathars believed that the devil (well, le Mal) made the physical world and the physical body of man, and god (ou le Bien) made the spirit (or rather, partitioned off parts of his own spirit) and placed it in the body of man. So there’s a sort of battle going on constantly within every person between these two opposite principals, and someone can give themselves up completely to one or the other, or rest somewhere in the middle, which is what people usually do. If you want to go for the Bien, though, you need to renounce everything that has to do with the Mal, which means renounce all physical comforts/ wants/ desires/ etc and be an ascetic. The word ‘cathar’ apparently comes from the the greek for ‘pure’ because the goal is to purify yourself by renouncing everything that has to do with the physical world; the guys who had more or less done this were called ‘bonshommes’ or ‘parfaits’ and would travel town to town to beg, give sermons, and lay on hands. Apparenly they would also retreat souvent to les grottes to meditate and learn things from the terre.
The sect formed in a christian context so they believed in jesus but they didn’t believe he was the son of god - they thought he was some immaterial spirit being who came here to teach us how to disconnect from the material world. They also didn’t believe in the church or Christian ritual in general because they thought it was all materialistic and designed to keep man from realizing his divine nature.
So this was heresy, obviously, but it was tolerated in the region for a long time because the people were more or less spread out and things were peaceful and the local religious officials didn’t want to start problems where there weren’t any (this is more or less my interpretation, though my Toulouse homestay dad was telling me something to that effect) but after a while I guess they were becoming a little too noticeable and rome decided to launch a crusade against them and came in a killed a bunch of people, including the montsegnior whose chateau I saw my first weekend here, and now there are no more cathars.
Anyway, the reason this is interesting is, my little village is full of modern day cathars (by which I mean, antiestablishment mystical types) and I think I could write an interesting paper discussing what about the region makes it appealing to these types of people in general. I asked Patrick about this in reference to the cathars and he said basically that at the time , all the money and power (and by extension the church) were concentrated in paris, in the north, and the deep south, who were poorer and had less of a say (it seems) in national politics, therefore felt alienated from that locus power, and started finding less and less reason that it should have anything to do with them, which of course breeds antiestablishment … ism. And this could sort of persist and flourish in the region at the time because (it seems) their politics were more or less live and let live, which again is something one would expect to find where people are spread out and live in small groups that are more or less self sufficient and basically govern themselves.
It’s different now, though, because, for one thing, the people who live in my village didn’t grow up here, so the conditions of the region couldn’t have been expected to nurture their mentality comme ca - they were drawn to the region (one would assume) because they had a certain mentality. But maybe in the end that ends up being more or less the same thing - that is, I image if you grow up in a region whose mentality you don’t like, you leave.
Anyway, its all very muddled now, but forgetting that, I feel like by the end of the week I could write a nice little paper about it that I would enjoy thinking about, but there’s one goddamn problem; normal people don’t like their religious beliefs put on display. Its really belittling to have someone analyze and classify something like that, which is easy to ignore when you’re the anthropologist and the people who’s beliefs and customs are being analysed and classified speak a different language, live in a different country, and are never going to see your research, but here, I have to present my ‘findings’ at the end of the week, and there’s no was I can treat this topic without everyone being uncomfortable.
This fact is whats making me feel weird about anthropology in general, and makes me understand much more clearly all that stuff I read in my anthro-religion class about how in the very act of noting and writing down something about another culture, the anthropologist drives a wedge between himself and his ‘subjects’ that marks himself as one thing and them as another. In life in general, people want to be taken as normal, but this type of analasys makes it impossible for them to be displayed that way, because the anthropolgist comes onto the scene (whether he means to or not, enfin, rhetorically) as the bearer of normal, and anything he marks he marks as out of the ordinary.
Anyway, I don’t think the people here are weird - I think they’re all intelligent, friendly, talented individuals who have somehow maintained this great easygoing youthful mentality (the dorm-room style drop ins, the group hikes, etc) and remind me of my friends, and what I’d like my friends and myself to be like when we’re older - but the problem is, there’s no way I can write about them without making them sound weird. Which must be a problem every anthropologist has, but they ignore it somehow … the idea of which makes me feel weird. I feel like they must either convince themselves their subjects don’t mind being put under a microscope, or that it doesn’t matter because they’ll never see it, and it won’t change their lives at all … either way, that makes me feel weird.
Anyway, I need to choose another subject. But I don’t know what - maybe how the landscape has changed over the years - Patrick suggested that. Maybe I could work out some sort of photo essay … I was thinking maybe I could some sort of marks in the landscape that indicated the way something had been different autrefois than it is now, or in the buildings, like some sort of ancient barn that had been transformed into something else … but I don’t immediately know where I’d find that, and either way, it would have to be outside the exact boundaries of my village … blargh. Anyway, I should go, we’re getting ready to have dinner.