Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork

3 Place

Place This then, may be a way out of the dichotomy between the knowing subject and the objects-that-are-known: to spread the activity of knowing widely. To spread it out over tables, knives, records, microscopes, buildings, and other things or habits in which it is embedded. Instead of talking about subjects knowing objects we may then, as a next step, come to talk about enacting reality in practice. —Mol 2002 [Fire is] an aerothermochemical phenomenon whose properties depend on the scale on which it deploys itself. —Physical Sciences of the Environment Department, University of Corte, 2009 Metaphorical and Real Connections I had been living in Crucetta for ten months when, on the afternoon of 29 June 2003, my upstairs neighbor Marie-Paule hailed me from her window as I wandered homeward. Marie-Paule is a tall, thin woman in her mid-forties, always impeccably dressed, with a keen sense of humor, and she was one of the first people to welcome me to the neighborhood in which I spent a year. She lived on the second floor of 70 | Corsican Fragments the tall stone house in the basement of which I was renting a flat, and she would often be seen sitting at her window, staring at the world outside, and often engaging in a running commentary in Corsican with her equally high-perched neighbor Mimi in the house opposite. What Marie-Paule had caught sight of this time, however, was not a neighborhood dispute nor a gang of schoolchildren throwing stones at the cats, but an ugly black column of smoke rising from the direction of the nearby village of Murettu. The fire had started in the past hour or so, MariePaule told me, but judging by the thickness of the smoke, it had swiftly grown into a serious blaze. The movement of the smoke suggested that the flames were progressing up the far side of the next large hill, toward us. Marie-Paule sounded alarmed at this prospect, but only mildly: this was far from being the first fire she had witnessed. Not so I. Pausing by my flat to pick up a notebook and pen, I ran down to the Place de la Mairie, the square outside the tiny town hall. As usual, the flat, tarmac-covered expanse was filled with parked cars, the Place de la Mairie being the deepest one could penetrate into the old village on four wheels. But I had not come here to pick up my battered Renault: I knew that, whereas MariePaule ’s window pointed southeastward, the Place de la Mairie surveyed a broad west-north-northeastern panorama, affording astounding views of the coastline and the surrounding hills—and today, an unbeatable vantage point on the approaching menace. As I had expected, a group of elderly male villagers sat on the stone wall, watching the progress of the fire. The usual jocularity had fallen out of their greetings as they quietly nodded to me to sit by them. Shoulders were tense, eyes fixed. I joined them, and together we watched the fire. • The link between people and land is central to the kinds of discourses about the unity of Corsica examined in the previous chapter. Over and over again, one comes across the intimation that Corsicans have a privileged and essential link with the island as a physical object. This claim can take many forms. As we saw in the previous chapter, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French reports essentialized the link between the Corsican people and land in calls to cultivate both. Such tropes persist today in the somewhat related genre of tourist literature aimed at the continental French. These often portray the land and the people as an elemental unit, to be discovered together; as the main French guidebook Le Guide du Routard puts it: [Corsica is] a world filled with very uncommon places, a little rock, poised in a universe which is cut in two. Above, the past and its memories (vendetta, maquis, tragedy and mourning black), below, a sea for all seasons. The gods of the Mediterranean could have come here on holiday. If Corsica were a place of mythology, Place | 71 it would be a kind of in-between world, empty and peaceful, inhabited by the gods and the smells of the maquis. But this island is no myth: see the staggering jumble of mountains and jagged coastlines, of clear bays and dreamlike...