ICFFS-Cultural Memory Program

An anthropology of rural France involves complex relations between multiple texts, audiences, networks of power, and access to archives. I begin by invoking dilemmas faced by Laurence Wylie and Jeanne Favret-Saada as a prelude to my research on local popular memories of World War Two collaborationism. Following the tile of Caroline Brettell’s volume (When They Read What We Write), these dilemmas, experienced by many anthropologists, include mistranslations across literary and social fields (Wylie and Favret-Saada), and epistemological crises in representing subjectivity and social taboo (Favret-Saada’s study of rural witchcraft).

My research on individual memory of collaborationism, conducted in a rural department in Gascony for twenty years, has involved similar dilemmas and significant struggles about historical representation. This leads us to the metaphor of the three monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil), as a way to reconcile intertextually visual, spoken and print versions of a difficult French political past, Here I draw from my research based on the private writings of a cobbler imprisoned for collaborationism, from state archival sources of this man’s trial and subsequent rehabilitation, and from ethnographic participant-observation in his home community, a small town west of Toulouse, before and after his death.

In this paper, I analyze the tensions over publishing on the spoken versus the written word, on meshing the individual life experience with the records of state legal archives. This project involves complex negotiations on subjective representations between family, region and state: whose story/history? I evoke lawsuits faced by certain French historians of the collaboration, as I navigate between how and what to publish, in light of the French legal system’s protection of “atteinte à la vie privée”.




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