Civilisation traditionnelle et genres de vie

The close interdependence of folklore, sociology, and the history of civilization hardly ever before has appeared as clearly as in this masterful study of the eminent folklorist and director of the famous Musée des Antiquités Nationales, in Paris. Together with a staff of local investigators he has collected, during sev- eral decades, an overwhelmingly rich thesaurus of popular beliefs, customs, and ceremonies which not so many years ago were still alive in many regions of his native land and, in this book, has subjected them to a careful and stimulating analysis and interpretation. Most likely, he has thus preserved for study an im- portant element of civilization which already may be lost irretrievably. For the folklore of the French peasantry, probably the most at- tractive survival of an archaic civilization, has steadily lost ground during the first decades of this century and, after the recent national catastrophe, has come near extinction. The reasons for this rapid decline are manifold. Military conscription, obligatory schooling, the press, the interruption of tradition through the extermination of entire male age-groups in re- cent wars, the covering of the country with an ever denser network of highways and rail- roads, have all contributed to a rationalization of the ways of life even in the most remote regions of the country. And most of all the introduction of machinism into agrarian com- munities has—the author rightly stresses this point — rendered ancient ceremonies meaning- less if not outright impossible. M. Varagnac defines folklore as a body of collective beliefs without a doctrine and of collective practices without a theory; that is, it embraces the totality of cultural elements which are accepted, actualized, and continually renewed without any intellectual elaboration, Perhaps this definition is somewhat too wide, since it may seem to fit also essential parts of artistic life, at least in certain epochs. How- ever, as presented in this book, the customs and ceremonies studied are characterized by the fact that, like primitive civilizations, they are culturally undifferentiated and do not be- long to any particular field of human endeavor. They are neither religious or magic perform- ances, nor economic, artistic or technical in- stitutions, but all these together, so that it becomes evident that no form of economic de- terminism or naturalistic interpretation can attain an adequate understanding of the ob- served folkloristic polymorphism. Nor is this form of life and work confined to “popular” or rural communities. There is a bourgeois folklore just as well, as the author points out, consisting in irrational, or at least not intel- lectualized, determinations of collective action, and perhaps we ought to start soon investigat- ing them before they in their turn have yielded to an impending “scientific” civilization — which doubtless will produce its own folklore, even though probably a much less attractive and humane one than that of the traditional French peasantry. It is a particular trait of the beliefs and practices studied by folklore that they are all transmitted by living traditions which, though tenacious and time-resistant in their core, leave a certain freedom for creative adaptation to changing collective and individual conditions. Once they become petrified and conventional imitations of patterns that are not understood any longer, they are doomed. Thus the decora- tion in domestic architecture which, as the author very subtly shows, has a prophylactic origin and a magic function degenerates into an arty surface phenomenon once it is severed from its source and isolated in the aesthetic sphere. M. Varagnac’s book is divided into three main parts, of which the first deals with the decline of rural ceremonies and its cause, the sociological aspect of the traditional festivals, particularly the seasonal fires, and the considera- tion of collective magics as a public service rendered to the community. It is amazing to state on the basis of the material here pre- sented how little influence the Christian doc- trine has had on the unintellectualized beliefs of rural populations even when they are as sincere and fervent Catholics as are, in general, French peasants. The second and main part is devoted to develop the principal thesis of this book, namely that the functional units of all traditional prac- tices are not the individuals nor the social classes but the age-groups, of which eight are distinguished and thoroughly analyzed as to their various functions in the collective cere- monies. They are, the first age from concep- tion to weaning, the children, the young peo- ple, the newly wed, the fathers and mothers, the widows and widowers, the ancient, and finally the deceased who continue to participate in the life of the community. Each one of these groups has a particular réle to play in all the collective magic performances and most frequently these performances are polyvalent with regard to their meaning and purpose for the several age groups. The third part attempts a socio-psychological analysis of the ways of life determined by the folkloristic traditions. ‘The author insists with good arguments upon the metaphysical foun- dation of the resulting social structure and upon the function of tradition as a controlling force with regard to the social empiricism which directs the individual acts of work. It is hardly possible within a short review to render justice to this unusually readable book in which the wealth of information and the subtlety and soundness of analysis and in-...