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Writing One’s Life: The French School of the Anthropology of Writing

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Approaches to the History of Written Culture

Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History ((NDBH))

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Abstract

The French anthropological school of writing has centred its reflections around two social worlds: on the one hand, people ‘without quality’ (workers, marginal groups, the poor), for whom writing was ‘difficult’; on the other hand, the ‘over-qualified’ (scientists, intellectuals), for whom writing is not just a communications medium but a domain in its own right. In both these worlds, the same questions apply: how does (self-)writing happen? What effect does such writing have on the individual and the representation of his or her personal existence? This chapter investigates these issues in two specific fields: firstly, French artisans (‘men without quality’), who practised the rites of initiation associated with the Compagnons of the Tour de France, and secondly, life writing among intellectuals (the ‘over-qualified’).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Annie Ernaux, Écrire la vie, Paris (Gallimard-Quarto), 2011.(Ernaux 2011).

  2. 2.

    Béatrice Fraenkel, La signature. Genèse d’un signe, Paris (Gallimard), 1992.(Fraenkel 1992).

  3. 3.

    Roger Chartier, La main de l’auteur et l’esprit de l’imprimeur (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), Paris (Gallimard-Folio), 2015 (Chartier 2015); in English The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Cambridge, UK (Polity), 2014. (Chartier 2014).

  4. 4.

    François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et écrire: L’Alphabétisation des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, Paris (Editions de Minuit), 2 vols., 1977 (Furet and Ozouf 1977); in English Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry, Cambridge, UK (Cambridge University Press), 1982. (Furet and Ozouf 1982).

  5. 5.

    Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, UK (Cambridge University Press), 1977. (Goody 1977).

  6. 6.

    Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, Paris (Seuil), 1983–5, 3 vols., and his Soi-même comme un autre, Paris (Seuil), 1990. (Ricoeur 1990).

  7. 7.

    In English a compagnon is a journeyman, but I retain the French name because this is how the compagnons are usually known and how they knew each other. The compagnons’ ‘Tour de France’ was the obligatory two- to eight-year journey they made from town to town in search of work as part of their training. The English equivalent is going ‘on the tramp’ (editors’ and translator’s note).

  8. 8.

    Daniel Fabre, ed., Écritures ordinaires, Paris (POL/Centre Pompidou), 1993. (Fabre 1993).

  9. 9.

    Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris (Stock), 1964. (Mandrou 1964).

  10. 10.

    Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, Harmondsworth, UK (Penguin), 1957. (Hoggart 1957).

  11. 11.

    Michel de Certeau, La culture du pluriel, Paris (Union générale d’éditions), 1974, and his L’invention du quotidien, Paris (Union générale d’éditions), 2 vols., 1980. (Michel de Certeau 1980).

  12. 12.

    Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, London (Routledge-Kegan Paul), 1981; Alain Corbin, Le monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot. Sur les traces d’un inconnu, 1798–1876, Paris (Flammarion), 1998. (Ginzburg 1981).

  13. 13.

    Jacques Revel and Claude Passeron, eds., Penser par cas, Paris (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), 2005. (Revel and Passeron 2005).

  14. 14.

    Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario’ in Aldo Gardani, ed., Crisi della Ragione, Turin (Einaudi), 1979, pp. 59–106. (Ginzburg 1979).

  15. 15.

    Jack Goody, La Raison graphique. La domestication de la pensée sauvage, Paris (Editions de Minuit), 1979. (Goody 1979).

  16. 16.

    Nicolas Adell, Anthropologie des savoirs, Paris (Armand Colin), 2011, pp. 265–276. (Adell 2011).

  17. 17.

    Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Le bruissement de la langue, Paris (Seuil), 1984, pp. 61–67; (Barthes 1984). Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ?’, in Dits et écrits – 1. 1954–1975, Paris (Gallimard-Quarto), 2001, pp. 817–849 (Foucault 2001); Michel Foucault, ‘L’écriture de soi’ in Dits et écrits – 2. 1976–1988, Paris (Gallimard-Quarto), 2001, pp. 1234–1249; (Foucault 2001). Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France, 1981–2, Paris (Gallimard/Seuil-Hautes Études), 2001 (Foucault 2001); Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris (Seuil), 1975 (Lejeune 1975); Ricoeur, Temps et récit, and his Soi-même comme un autre..

  18. 18.

    Nicolas Adell, Des hommes de Devoir. Les compagnons du Tour de France, XVIIIe–XXe siècle, Paris (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme), 2008; (Adell 2008). Nicolas Adell, ‘Total Writing: The Writing Practices of Compagnons on the Tour de France’, in Martyn Lyons, ed., Ordinary Writings, Personal Narratives: Writing Practices in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-century Europe, Bern (Peter Lang), 2007, pp. 33–49; (Lyons 2007). Nicolas Adell, ‘Le conteur, le scribe, le chansonnier. Formes et raisons de l’autobiographie chez les compagnons du Tour de France’, L’Homme 195–196, 2010, pp. 193–224. (Adell 2010).

  19. 19.

    Nicolas Adell, ‘Compagnonnage ancien’ and ‘compagnonnage moderne’, in Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, ed., Dictionnaire de la Franc-Maçonnerie, Paris (Armand Colin), 2014, pp. 47–53 and 53–57.(Beaurepaire 2014).

  20. 20.

    Letter from compagnon Bastard, a tanner from Tours, to compagnons in Paris, circa 1830 – from the personal archive of Laurent Bastard, Curator of the Museum of Compagnonnage.

  21. 21.

    Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe. Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press), 2010. (Hunt et.al. 2010).

  22. 22.

    The best-known being the glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal de ma vie, edited and introduced by Daniel Roche, Paris (Albin Michel), 1998 (Ménétra 1988), written between 1764 and 1802, and the joiner Agricol Perdiguier, Mémoires d’un compagnon, Paris (Imprimerie nationale), 1992 (Perdiguier 1992), composed 1844–1855.

  23. 23.

    Adell, ‘Le conteur’.

  24. 24.

    Georges Gusdorf, Lignes de vie – 2. Auto-bio-graphie, Paris (Odile Jacob), 1992 (Gusdorf 1992); Roger Laporte, Une vie, Paris (POL), 1986. (Laporte 1986).

  25. 25.

    Nicolas Adell, ‘Un Tour sur soi. Les bons usages de la nostalgie en compagnonnage’, Ethnologie française 43:1, 2013, pp. 85–96. (Adell 2013).

  26. 26.

    Nicolas Adell, ed., Joseph Bouas. Saint-Lys la Fidélité, compagnon charpentier, with commentary by Nicolas Adell, Laurent Bastard and Colette Berthès, Carcassonne (Garae Hésiode), 2014. (Adell 2014).

  27. 27.

    Anon., L’Arrivée du brave Toulousain, Troyes (Garnier), 1731 (Anon 1731). This passage is full of esoteric absurdities: ‘Twisted Foot’ has no doubt acquired his deformity from too much walking on his Tour de France. The awls, used by cobblers to perforate leather, are useless without blades, and it is absurd that humble tools should have silver fittings. The birdcage story is a play on the phrase tête de linotte, which means someone very forgetful or ‘birdbrained’. The introduction of the Wandering Jew is gratuitous, but recalls the itinerant life of the compagnon, etc. (editors’ and translator’s note)..

  28. 28.

    Perdiguier, Mémoires, pp. 161 and 241.

  29. 29.

    Christian Wilhelm Bechstedt, Meine Handwerkburschenzeit, 1805–1810, Berlin (Aufbau Taschenbuch), 1991, p. 398. (Bechstedt 1991).

  30. 30.

    Julie Hyvert, Le chant à l’oeuvre. La pratique chansonnière des compagnons du Tour de France, XIXe–XXIe siècle, Rennes (Presses universitaires de Rennes), 2015 (Hyvert 2015); Nicolas Adell and Julie Hyvert, ‘Défis et chansons en compagnonnage’, L’Homme 21:5–6, 2015, pp. 26–52. (Adell and Hyvert 2015).

  31. 31.

    Philippe Lejeune, Les brouillons de soi, Paris (Seuil), 1998.(Lejeune 1988).

  32. 32.

    Joseph Voisin, Histoire de ma vie ou Cinquante Ans de compagnonnage, Tours (Imprimerie du Progrès), 1931, p. 98. (Voisin 1931).

  33. 33.

    Françoise Waquet, L’ordre materiel du savoir. Comment les savants travaillent (XVIe-XXIe siècles), Paris (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), 2015; (Waquet 2015). Christian Jacob, ed., Lieux de savoir – 2. Les mains de l’intellect, Paris (Albin Michel), 2011, see especially the contributions of Béatrice Fraenkel and Rafael Mandressi.(Jacob 2011).

  34. 34.

    Thierry Wendling, ‘La fréquentation des textes. Une discussion entre Roger Chartier et Daniel Fabre’, ethnographiques.org, no. 30 ‘Mondes ethnographiques’, 2015, http://www.ethnographiques.org/2015/Chartier,Fabre,Wendling. (Wendling 2015).

  35. 35.

    Chartier, The Author’s Hand, p. viii.

  36. 36.

    Nicolas Adell and Jérôme Lamy, eds., Ce que la science fait à la vie, Paris (Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques), 2016. (Adell and Lamy 2016).

  37. 37.

    Thomas Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne, New Haven, CT (Yale University Press), 2003.(Söderqvist 2003).

  38. 38.

    Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d’ego-histoire, Paris (Gallimard), 1987. (Nora 1987).

  39. 39.

    René Loureau, Le journal de recherche, Paris (Klincksieck), 1988.(Loureau 1988).

  40. 40.

    George Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career, Oxford (Clarendon), 1998.(Hoffmann 1998).

  41. 41.

    George Foster, A Journey from Bengal to England: Through the Northern Part of India, Kashmire, Afghanistan, and Persia, and to Russia, by the Caspian-Sea, London (R. Faulder), 1798. (Foster 1798).

  42. 42.

    François-René Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Paris (Gallimard-Pléiade), 1951, tome 1, p. 1046 (first published 1848–50).(Chateaubriand 1951).

  43. 43.

    Edgar Morin, Journal, Paris (Seuil), 2 vols., 2012. (Morin 2012).

  44. 44.

    Émile Zola, La Fabrique des Rougon-Macquart, ed. Colette Becker, Paris (Honoré Champion), 5 vols., 2003–11. (Zola 2003).

  45. 45.

    Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, New York (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 2008; (Sontag 2008); Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964–1980, New York (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 2012. (Sontag 2012).

  46. 46.

    Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London (Athlone), 2nd ed., 1989. (Malinowski 1989).

  47. 47.

    Marc Fumaroli, ‘Des “Vies” à la biographie: le crépuscule du Parnasse’, Diogène 139, 1987, pp. 3–30. (Fumaroli 1987).

  48. 48.

    Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘A Life of Learning’, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper 42, 1983, p. vii. (Tuan 1983).

  49. 49.

    Dan Dana, Métamorphoses de Mirea Eliade. A partir du motif de Zalmoxis, Paris (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales-Vrin), 2012. (Dana 2012).

  50. 50.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, trans. Quintin Hoare, London (Verso), 1984. (Sartre 1984).

  51. 51.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots et autres écrits autobiographiques, Paris (Gallimard-Pléiade), 2010, pp. 190–191. (Sartre 2010).

  52. 52.

    Juliette Simont in Sartre, Les Mots, pp. 1363–1393.

  53. 53.

    Lettres au Castor, tome 2, pp. 1940–1963, cited by Juliette Simont in Sartre, Les Mots, p. 1373.

  54. 54.

    Philippe Artières, ‘Pour une histoire sociale de l’écriture. Histoire et génétique textuelle’, Genesis. Manuscrits, Recherche, Invention 30, 2010, pp. 185–189. (Artières 2010).

  55. 55.

    Ferdinand Brunetière, ‘La littérature personnelle’, La Revue des Deux Mondes 85, 1888, pp. 433–452.(Brunetière 1888).

  56. 56.

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Amsterdam (Marc-Michel Rey), 1761; (Rousseau 1761).Nathalie Ferrand, ‘Brouillons d’Héloïse’, Revue de la bibliothèque nationale 42, 2012, pp. 71–79.(Ferrand 2012).

  57. 57.

    Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, Paris (Seuil), 1967; Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le miroir qui revient, Paris (Éditions de Minuit), 1985.(Derrida 1967), (Robbe-Grillet 1985).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Nicolas Adell

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  1. University of New South Wales , Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Martyn Lyons

  2. Centro de Linguística, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Rita Marquilhas

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Adell, N. (2017). Writing One’s Life: The French School of the Anthropology of Writing. In: Lyons, M., Marquilhas, R. (eds) Approaches to the History of Written Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54136-5_6

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