Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork

4 Things

Things The difference between ambiguity (continual and contingent indeterminacy) and clarity (ontological knowledge) is not as enormous as the literature implied, at least in terms of what generates the sense of there being authoritative accounts. —Green 2005 The Phone Book Mimi, a woman in her late seventies, is sitting on a white plastic chair outside her house, in the shade of an overgrown vine. This spot of shade outside Mimi’s house is just off the main expanse of my local square in the center of the old village, Piazza à O,1 a convenient place for the elderly and not so elderly women of the neighborhood to sit and chat of an afternoon—comfortably within eyesight and out of earshot of the men sitting on Piazza à O proper. Today, the necessities of the anthropological interview intrude upon this gendered pattern, but Mimi is bearing my intrusion with good grace. Mimi is a widow who has spent her whole life in Crucetta, and I am asking her to tell me about her experiences as a pupil in the 86 | Corsican Fragments village school. Her son Pierre, a tall, balding baby-boomer with square shoulders and a strong jaw, has been doing most of the talking. His fluent French, upon which a Corsican accent draws swirling patterns, intertwines with Mimi’s mostly Corsican speech. He, too, went to school in Crucetta, although he now works as a postman on the French mainland. He returns every summer and most holidays to visit his mother and the many friends and relatives he still has around Piazza à O. His most salient memory of school was the daily lighting of the stove, for which each child had to bring his own portion of wood. That, and the blinding blow Mr. Fiorelli once landed him, which sent him flying and knocked his temple into the corner of the wooden desk. The flimsy plastic chair trembles under him as he mimics the savage swipe. He grins broadly and recalls how later, during a break, the teacher asked him if he was all right, and he answered yes, he was. This turns out to be a story about a fond moment of rapport, then, rather than a grudge. Mimi recites, in French and in a slightly incantatory voice, the list of obligatory school items (le matériel d’école) which she claims parents had to buy their children—although it is not clear whether she is thinking of her school days or her son’s. Then, mother and son compete to recall the names of successive schoolmasters and -mistresses and the various places in which classes were held: the one down by the church, the other one up at L’Olmu, you know, by the monument . . . no, by Savini’s house . . . This inexperienced interviewer, however, is getting a little restless. I take profuse notes to hide my discomfort, but I just can’t escape the niggling feeling that this is somehow beside the point, not great data, in a word, banal. I haven’t been an ethnographer for very long by this point and have not yet learned to be ethnographic about that feeling itself. As it happens, I am missing the most important: the real, crucial stuff, the fabric of locality and “interknowledge ” which forms the focus of a large part of this book. But that realization will only come much, much later. For now, I attempt to prod the discussion in another direction. Regionalist historiographies in Corsica, as in other parts of France, are filled with the specter of the systematic eradication of the local language by militantly French-speaking schoolmasters (Jaffe 1999; McDonald 1989). The absolute ban on speaking anything but French in school, the pernicious punishment of the symbole, a visible marker of shame which a child caught speaking a dialect or patois would have to wear until he could pass it on by discovering another culprit—these had become the stuff of regionalist legend. Perhaps I could elicit some examples, some counterexamples? So I ask if, in their experience, children were ever punished for speaking Corsican in school. No, they weren’t: “in fact we spoke Corsican more than French,” Mimi’s son notes, his mother repeating the statement in Corsican: “Parliamu piu Corsu chi Francese.” Well, she corrects after a while, in the playground, that is. But sometimes in the classroom, too. And the teachers were all Corsican, Things | 87 Pierre...