Ritual of Reversion

Abstract

The voyage back to Haute Provence was harder than I had remembered.To begin with, there were the roads. One cannot yet pierce the Durance valley by autoroute; the high valleys of the upland French Mediterranean remain relatively inaccessible. Although the Durance river was canalized in the 1960s, and its floods pacified, the path into the backlands still winds along its torturous banks. Short distances required long stretches of time and memory to return. 1980 was my first working trip back to Montagnac, the village in which I did fieldwork in the summers of 1969, 1970, and in 1971-72.' I had returned once, briefly, in 1979 for a short visit hoping that people might remember a face, if not exactly a name. I was overwhelmed by the warmth of my reception during that brief return, and resolved to reclaim 'my' village. During the initial research, I had been a graduate student at the University of Michigan. My studying in Montagnac had allowed me to write a thesis which launched me on my academic path. The tension I experienced during fieldwork was continuous. No matter how unstintingly I answered their questions in return for the questions I posed, my exchanges with villagers always felt unequal. I knew that from our friendships would emerge my own career, the benefits of which could not be returned to the villagers who made them possible. Coming of age in the anthropological generation of the late 60s, I always felt socially, politically, culturally unaccountable while on French terrain, for nothing I gave to the villagers ever seemed as instrumentally useful as that which they gave me.2 2 These feelings were the central reason I had stayed away from Montagnac for so many years, blocked by the realities of lopsided friendships which fieldwork in a peasant community entails.