Anthropology and Ethnohistory Robert Darnton The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

Darntons work both on the fairy tales and the Cat Massacre focuses on the mentalites of French peasants and Parisian printers in the Ancien Regime. His analysis of the ways of thinking is inspired by both the Annales and anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz (3). Darnton opens the first chapter with the disturbing and somewhat sexualized (at least to modern audiences) story of Little Red Riding Hood and the second with the disturbing story of a massacre of cats which was the The funniest thing that ever happened in the printing shop of Jacques Vincent (75). Our inability to understand the moral or get the joke is exactly Darntons point since according to anthropologists the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be the most opaque (78). The analysis of the fairy tales is heavily contextualized by other sources and so less contested than his work on the massacre. Darnton goes through a wide variety of fairy tales and discusses the broad concerns of the peasants which are obvious in the stories: the prevalence of death, the obsession with food, the everyday vulgarity, etc. Darnton compares French fairy tales with German and (to a lesser extent) Italian ones as well as English nursery rhymes. He notes that each nations stories are somewhat different or feature differently characterized protagonists ie. the German ones are quite violent or English heroes are usually somewhat dim but lucky. French fairy tales are generally cautionary and feature heroes (or heroines) who get by on their cunning (53-4). Darnton stresses that only general things can be assumed from these fairy tales, but that they do exhibit a type of Frenchness consistent across the kingdom. Contats pseudo-autobiographical account of his apprenticeship in Paris in the 1730s contains the story of the cat massacre which Darnton interprets symbolically as a Workers Revolt (75). The symbolism of the cats and the attack on them, especially la grise, is contextualized with other violence against the animals during charivaris as well as their association with witchcraft and sexuality. First of all, the cats are associated with the master (and in general the bourgeois) who indulges the cats and treats them better than the apprentices and so the apprentices resent the masters treatment and imitate the howls of the cats to keep the master and mistress awake as they are kept awake. The association with witchcraft is made by the master and the apprentices are ordered to kill the cats. They first dispose of la grise and then the rest of the cats in a thorough and brutal manner, they even go so far as to stage a mock trial. The mistress comes along, screams and accuses them of killing la grise but the workers deny it to both her and the master and claim that they have too much respect for that house to do that (97). The association of the bourgeois with cats goes further than just the attack. The trial is a way of declaring them guilty for overworking the apprentices, but more than that it is an attack on the mistress. The murder of la grise is a metonymical rape (chatte is equivalent to pussy)

which is not only an assault on her but also on the master since his wife is his most precious possession (99). The husband has been cuckolded symbolically, but he does not grasp the insult or the actions of the workers and the mistress, apart from the sexual attack, is associated with witchcraft because her familiar has been killed. Darnton concludes that the massacre of the cats is a symbolic workers revolt but advises that the violence of it should not be seen as a prelude to the violence of the Revolution. Harold Mah Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darntons Great Cat Massacre Mah criticizes Darntons interpretation of symbols by reinterpreting Contats story using the rest of the text (the one Darnton suppressed) and discusses the pitfalls of a depoliticized study of history. Mah is heavily critical of Darntons assumption that symbols have fixed cultural meaning and the underlying assumption of a shared and unified culture (7). Mah argues that Darnton is not reading the text as he claims but instead reads the direct, untampered expressions of a unified communal mind (8). Darnton avoids the change in language and its complications by taking the symbols as obvious and easily read. Mah notes that although Darnton identifies the cats with various symbols he fails to connect the cat with the apprentice who imitates them. He also points out that Darntons use of only the first half of the text allows for the emphasis on the fact that the workers got away with their symbolic insubordination whereas they were punished subsequently. Mah argues that in the second part of the account the terms of the cat massacre are doubled and cancelled out and all the persons associated with the cats (except for the master and mistress) are expelled from the text (11). Hes also critical of ethnographic history, especially because when it is of a workingclass nature it tends to look for pockets of resistance (think cultural hegemony) which Mah finds rather romanticized (16). Darntons interpretation is as he says in the service of this utopian ideal (17). However, he emphasizes that the role of authority (the not-quite nation-state) is inescapable even if historians wish to study culture rather than Culture and that his reinterpretation of the massacre using the entire text supports that not even this supposed culture of otherness is exempt from existing relations of political authority (17).

Roger Chartier, Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness Chartier raises all sorts of problems with Darntons understanding of what text and symbols are and how they can be interpreted. Chartier has issues with the use of Contats work and the fairy tales as a text. First of all he wonders if it is legitimate to consider as texts actions carried out or tales told? Second of all, there is the problem of qualify[ing] as a text both the written document and [the] practice itself (685). In addition to that there are the issues that the fairy tales were meant to be spoken and that Contats text is already invested with its own specific ends (685).

He also questions whether one can interpret Frenchness from symbols or cultural ideas that owe nothing either to the centralized state or to a sense of homeland (687). Another issue with the idea of Frenchness is continuity, so either continuity exists, in which case the old ways of thinking are not so strange, or else those old ways were truly different from our own, in which case they could never be found in our present world (687). Chartier is also critical of the interpretation of symbols noting that they do change and evolve over time, but also that Although symbols are signs, however, not all signs are symbols (689). He also questions whether the workers would have been aware of the symbolism of their actions* and whether Contats writing is actually true and how that affects interpretation. He notes that although both a symbolic and an actual act can be considered an attack on the master it is not quite the same since the social effects of a collective act or an individuals invention are not the same (692). He concludes by saying that the interpretation of symbols (his example is charivari which he says Darnton does not associate correctly with the massacre) needs to be more rigorous, but also that texts need to be read as texts so that their intentions can be discerned, that one should avoid supposing a stable, full value in its lexical choices and to define the instances of behaviour and the rituals present in the text on the basis of the specific way in which they are assembled rather than to categorize them on the basis of folk culture (694).

*Im not sure thats actually in there, I mightve made it up. It definitely came up in discussion.