Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork

1 Arbitrary Location

Arbitrary Location Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . . ); they study in villages. —Geertz 1973 The village is a thousand shards of broken mirrors. —Galibert 2004a Crucetta The house known as “the Englishwoman’s house” (la maison de l’anglaise) stands empty. “The Englishwoman,” l’anglaise, died two years before my arrival in the Corsican village I will call “Crucetta,” and the ocher house with blistered lightgreen shutters has recently acquired new owners: the Viltanés, a family from the Continent, who plan to spend their summer holidays here once they have “done the place up.” Next summer, the shutters will be painted bright blue, and the vines will 10 | Corsican Fragments be luxuriant and neat over the metal pergola. Two brothers and two sisters, holding nets for crabs and salt-encrusted snorkels, will be chasing each other up and down the stone staircase. But for now, the house is empty, save for the last remnants of a solitary life. L’anglaise, unlike the Viltanés, had lived in this house all year ‘round, for over twenty years. She had been a painter of some local fame, and when her son came to take away her canvases, some in the neighborhood felt that he was plundering the cultural heritage of Crucetta. His action certainly left people with no compunction when it came to claiming what he did discard. Which brings me to the reason for my visit. My neighbor Petru, who since my arrival in the neighborhood has taken me under his wing, has decided that I am doubly qualified, as a bookish type and one hailing from England, to take my pick of the leftover jumble of reading materials which has been unceremoniously dumped in a mildewed, shelf-less bookcase in what was once a living room. Petru is a young man of eighty-three, with twinkling eyes and wispy white hair escaping from under his trademark cloth cap. He is one of the last active shepherds in a village which was once a flourishing agricultural center at the heart of the lush Balagne region—“the granary of Corsica.” Petru is the last shepherd in Crucetta to use a donkey for travel and transport, day in, day out; others long ago abandoned the heavy wooden saddle for a pickup truck or the iconic Citroen C15 minivan. Increasingly, however, Petru’s donkeys’ primary use seems to be to give rides to the children of summer residents, among whom the shepherd is something of a celebrity . For those who have invested in a summer house at the heart of this Corsican village , Petru is the perfect mix of rugged authenticity and knowing humor. His body speaks of his trade: short, dense, and still surprisingly powerful, matured with age into a careful slowness which contrasts starkly with the fragile hesitancy of elderly city-dwellers. Petru’s hands are brown, coarse, and careful, hands that can still milk a ewe or dig a ditch at an age when others find it hard to hold a remote control. The middle finger of his left hand was bent out of shape by some unmentioned accident. When he stops to wipe the sweat from his brow, the skin of his forehead above the line of his ever-present cap is startlingly white. Petru’s voice, too, captivates the seekers of authenticity. Its peculiar timbre is noticeable first, deep like whispering gravel. And then the language itself—for Petru is one of the last old men whose French is clearly a somewhat forced second to his Corsican; his French grammar and pronunciation are like borrowed clothes stretched over an uncompliant body. Petru thus embodies a certain ideal of Corsican autochthony which pleases tourists no less than cultural activists. But real authenticity can be slightly dry fare when it is unseasoned by some ironic twist. And the holiday makers clearly enjoy the fact that Petru sees straight through their romantic foibles, the fact that he can, with one comically exaggerated expression of astonishment and admiration (slack jaw, raised eyebrows), pour gentle Arbitrary Location | 11 scorn on their keenness to hang rusty sheep shears on their whitewashed walls or rest their aperitifs on an old threshing stone. L’anglaise too, despite her long-term, full-time residence, seems to have gone in for this sort of thing, and her walls are decorated with traditional farming implements in various states of disrepair. And indeed, hearing Petru talk...