Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork

Prologue: Roadmap

Prologue: Roadmap The theoretical conclusions will then be found to be implicit in an exact and detailed description. —Evans-Pritchard 1976 I’d say that if your description needs an explanation , it’s not a good description, that’s all. —Latour 2005 There is a venerable tradition in British social anthropology which requires that theoretical argument be woven implicitly into descriptive writing. This does not boil down merely to the rhetorical pursuit of an “empirical style”: instead, an argument emerges slowly at the pace at which one reads a careful description and gets infused with the complexity of detail through which it is filtered. Somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps, this rather unfashionable tradition dovetails with some influential recent pronouncements on social scientific method.1 These have tended to emphasize the slow unfolding of connections and tracing of flows, at the expense of the powerful shortcuts of theory, which so suddenly and effortlessly zoom out to reveal “the whole picture.” 2 | Corsican Fragments This book partakes of these sensibilities. It is an account of society, language, and the power of place on the island of Corsica from the profoundly limited perspective of one—fairly young and initially quite inexperienced—ethnographer who spent over a year there in 2002–2003. Corsica, which first became a part of France in 1769, has long been a popular destination for travelers in search of the European exotic. Since the late eighteenth century, it has also been a prime locus of French concerns about the meaning of “Frenchness” and about national unity, compounded by the revival of regionalism in 1960s France and the appearance of armed Corsican nationalist groups in the 1970s. But Corsica was also caught up, in complex ways, in the French colonial project and is now intricately enmeshed in a vibrant and contested Franco-Mediterranean assemblage of histories, peoples, and tensions. The lives of Corsican pastoralists and engaged intellectuals, Moroccan labor migrants, continental French holiday makers, and civil servants interweave , mingle, and intersect, claiming space between rootedness and disconnection, between stillness and flow. Many books on Corsica have attempted a panoramic survey, identified “problems ” and offered “solutions.” By contrast, this book suggests that insight into the themes which exercise Corsicans and non-Corsicans, such as place, identity, difference , and society, can be garnered not so much despite ethnography’s necessary limitations but through them. By tracking the gradual and progressive “enfielding” of one anthropologist, with all its attendant blunders and awkwardness, the book suggests that this process can mirror and yield valuable insights into the similar predicaments of others who are only ever partially “local.” As a result, while each chapter is in some measure thematically focused, the book as a whole is not structured like a reference work, with chapters on history, identity, language, and so forth building up a total composite picture. Rather, the argument proceeds primarily by means of a narrative traced and shaped through a sequence of partial positions which do not add up to a whole but to a journey. The rest of the prologue breaks with this commitment to implicit argument in order to provide a synthetic roadmap to the chapters. • At the heart of this book is a question about the place of difference in Corsica and in anthropological analysis. Anthropologists working in Europe, and particularly those working in the Mediterranean, have often found difficulties with the widely held conviction that anthropology is, at heart, a science of difference or, to quote Adams, “the systematic study of the Other, whereas all of the other social disciplines are, in one sense or another, studies of the self” (Adams 1998, p. 1). In this particular division of labor, the Mediterranean, as Michael Herzfeld once noted, adapting Prologue | 3 Douglas, is matter out of place: neither quite Other, nor quite self (Herzfeld 1989, p. 7), and the same goes for Europe, that constantly shifting terrain of differences and similarities, which can in no straightforward sense play the role of a stable “us” against which the anthropological account of a “them” can be deployed. In turn, this has left Europeanist anthropology itself somewhat “out of place,” as the embattled 1980s debates around “anthropology at home” testify. In the best cases, this liminality has been an asset, forcing Europeanist anthropologists, more urgently perhaps than others, not to take difference for granted—which in turn has led to some extremely sophisticated analyses of the processes whereby difference is socially constructed, an outcome...