What was identity? And what comes next?

An ethnographic exploration of belonging, knowledge and materiality in Corsica, which is also a reflection on how anthropologists might take difference seriously without losing sight of the uncertain and openended contours of identities, communities and collectives.

Publisher’s website | read the prologue

‘It is hard to let go of this book, if only because its structure will lead many readers from the very last page back to the beginning again to contemplate anew what they have just read.’ H-France

‘[A] stimulating and eloquently written book that highlights, with subtle examples, the complex interplay between fixity and fluidity in discourses and practices of identification.’ Anthropos

‘A book of extraordinary brilliance, compelling honesty and logic, and rich insight.’ Michael Herzfeld

Prologue: Roadmap

The theoretical conclusions will then be found to be implicit in an exact and detailed description. —Evans-Pritchard 1976

I’d say that if your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description, that’s all. —Latour 2005

There is a venerable tradition in British social anthropology which requires that theoretical argument be woven implicitly into descriptive writing. This does not boil down merely to the rhetorical pursuit of an “empirical style”: instead, an argument emerges slowly at the pace at which one reads a careful description and gets infused with the complexity of detail through which it is filtered. Somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps, this rather unfashionable tradition dovetails with some influential recent pronouncements on social scientific method. These have tended to emphasize the slow unfolding of connections and tracing of flows, at the expense of the powerful shortcuts of theory, which so suddenly and effortlessly zoom out to reveal “the whole picture.”

This book partakes of these sensibilities. It is an account of society, language, and the power of place on the island of Corsica from the profoundly limited perspective of one—fairly young and initially quite inexperienced—ethnographer who spent over a year there in 2002–2003. Corsica, which first became a part of France in 1769, has long been a popular destination for travelers in search of the European exotic. Since the late eighteenth century, it has also been a prime locus of French concerns about the meaning of “Frenchness” and about national unity, compounded by the revival of regionalism in 1960s France and the appearance of armed Corsican nationalist groups in the 1970s. But Corsica was also caught up, in complex ways, in the French colonial project and is now intricately enmeshed in a vibrant and contested Franco-Mediterranean assemblage of histories, peoples, and tensions. The lives of Corsican pastoralists and engaged intellectuals, Moroccan labor migrants, continental French holiday makers, and civil servants inter- weave, mingle, and intersect, claiming space between rootedness and disconnection, between stillness and flow.

Many books on Corsica have attempted a panoramic survey, identified “problems” and offered “solutions.” By contrast, this book suggests that insight into the themes which exercise Corsicans and non-Corsicans, such as place, identity, difference, and society, can be garnered not so much despite ethnography’s necessary limitations but through them. By tracking the gradual and progressive “enfielding” of one anthropologist, with all its attendant blunders and awkwardness, the book suggests that this process can mirror and yield valuable insights into the similar predicaments of others who are only ever partially “local.” As a result, while each chapter is in some measure thematically focused, the book as a whole is not structured like a reference work, with chapters on history, identity, language, and so forth building up a total composite picture. Rather, the argument proceeds primarily by means of a narrative traced and shaped through a sequence of partial positions which do not add up to a whole but to a journey. The rest of the prologue breaks with this commitment to implicit argument in order to provide a synthetic roadmap to the chapters.

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At the heart of this book is a question about the place of difference in Corsica and in anthropological analysis. Anthropologists working in Europe, and particularly those working in the Mediterranean, have often found difficulties with the widely held conviction that anthropology is, at heart, a science of difference or, to quote Adams, “the systematic study of the Other, whereas all of the other social disciplines are, in one sense or another, studies of the self ” (Adams 1998, p. 1). In this particular division of labor, the Mediterranean, as Michael Herzfeld once noted, adapting Douglas, is matter out of place: neither quite Other, nor quite self (Herzfeld 1989, p. 7), and the same goes for Europe, that constantly shifting terrain of differences and similarities, which can in no straightforward sense play the role of a stable “us” against which the anthropological account of a “them” can be deployed.

In turn, this has left Europeanist anthropology itself somewhat “out of place,” as the embattled 1980s debates around “anthropology at home” testify. In the best cases, this liminality has been an asset, forcing Europeanist anthropologists, more urgently perhaps than others, not to take difference for granted—which in turn has led to some extremely sophisticated analyses of the processes whereby difference is socially constructed, an outcome of certain processes, rather than the starting point of the anthropological account (Chapman 1978; Herzfeld 1989; McDonald 1989). This interest in the construction of difference, however, came under serious critical fire from those who felt that “anti-essentialism had gone too far” (Werbner 1997) in disregarding people’s affective investment in their own identities, or in disempowering members of dominated communities which relied on identity politics (Briggs 1996). In the twenty-first century, there was a powerful return toward taking dif- ference seriously in anthropology, as Said’s (1979) and Fabian’s (1983) critiques of Othering lost some of their impact and the whole 1980s “crisis of representation” (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986) increasingly came to seem somewhat old-fashioned and overblown. The mark of this return to difference has been a shift away from postmodernism in what has been called an “ontological turn” (Viveiros de Castro 2003; Henare et al. 2006), marked by calls to move beyond mere cultural difference (which still implies natural sameness) into real ontological alterity (Henare et al. 2006). For one of the main theorists of this new turn, anthro- pology’s vocation is to become “the science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples” (Viveiros de Castro 2003, p. 18).

This is not just a story about theoretical trends. We have here a dilemma which goes to the very core of the anthropological endeavor: is difference or sameness the ground against which analysis should proceed? If traditional anthropology was taken to task for “Othering” its object (cf. Said 1979), is social constructivism in danger of “saming” it (Viveiros de Castro 2003)? Corsica in and of itself forces the analyst to reconsider this alternative, for the foremost issue in debates around Corsica, ethnographically speaking, is precisely the question of Corsican difference from the French: to what extent does it obtain, and of what kind is it? Thus, one is likely to write past much of the action if one begins either with the assumption that this difference is the basic datum from which the analysis should proceed, or with the assumption that this difference is a mere social construct. Somehow, we must keep in view two seemingly incompatible realities. In the first, entities whole and meaningful are an explanatory asset, a starting point, as when the political scientist Bernabéu-Casanova states: “we consider that there is a Corsican people, which shares a language, a culture, a territory. To say this is already to take a position” (Bernabéu-Casanova 1997, p. 13). In the second, such entities (people, language, culture, territory) are an effect, a contingent selection from a teeming multiplicity of other possibilities for contextualization. In order to address these apparently incompatible realities, the book proposes a double theoretical move.

First, it aims to introduce a disturbance into debates about the social construction of identity. Theorists working in the field of science and technology studies have repeatedly claimed that the distinction between essence and social construction is something of a red herring. Construction, after all, is key to actually bringing things into being—as long as we drop the qualifying word “social” (Latour 2005, pp. 88–93). To claim that things are constructed is not to somehow negate their reality, any more than seeing a building site negates the reality of the building which later comes to stand there. Applied to the subject of this book, this real constructivism would not insist condescendingly upon the emotional importance of identities to participants, nor would it praise them as a fake but politically useful “strategic essentialism,” nor even insist that their being socially constructed is fine because everything is socially constructed (i.e., unreal). Rather, it would take seriously the ways in which the solidity of (id)entities emerges not through the magic of social fiat, nor from the collective imagination of people, but from real, historical, traceable assemblages of people, things, places, and ideas held together by links and relations of different kinds. In this vein, the questions I will be asking of the entities which undergird people’s accounts of difference—such as the village community, the French nation, or Corsican culture—are not “are they real?” or “are they made up?” but rather “have they been realized?” and “of what are they made up”?

Second, the book aims to counterbalance the previous move by tempering the recent push to ground alterity in ontology. Indeed the particular field of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism presents some tricky terrains to navigate for the would-be real constructivist. In a context in which the French state has gone so far as to decree that legal mention of the notion of “the Corsican people” is in and of itself anticonstitutional, I cannot but share Viveiros de Castro’s concern for the dangers of saming. However, as an ethnographer working in Europe at a time of increasingly virulent neo-nationalisms, which turn on grounding difference in being (Stolcke 1995; Holmes 2000), I am also slightly worried about the thought of anthropology as “the science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples.” This proposal, by an Amazonianist anthropologist, is premised on a distinction between Euro-American mono-naturalism and Amazonian multi-naturalism. The thought is perhaps that non-Euro-American ontologies, unlike Euro-American ones, inherently obviate the mirage of holism and ethnicized closure. But in that view, what are ethnographers of Europe or America supposed to do? Either we take the implication that anthropology has no place studying Euro-American ontologies(which would seem a rather problematic step backward, to say the least), or we risk extending the program of ontological self-determination to precisely the kinds of ontological projects of mono-naturalist ethnicizing closure of which everyone in this anthropological debate is equally wary. As Viveiros de Castro points out:

The image of Being is obviously a dangerous analogic soil for thinking about non-western conceptual imaginations, and the notion of ontology is not without its own risks. Perhaps Gabriel Tarde’s bold suggestion that we should abandon the irremediably solipsist concept of Being and relaunch metaphysics on the basis of Having (Avoir)—with the latter’s implication of intrinsic transitivity and an originary opening towards an exteriority—is a more enticing prospect in many cases. (2003, p. 17)

This book follows the trail of Viveiros de Castro’s “perhaps.” As a result, the analysis here remains always in media res, located in between purportedly different groups of people. It does not take one such group and its difference from others as the self-evident starting point of the account—as is common in much anthropological exegesis about the culture or ontology of the X. In this respect, it retains the central insight of 1970s and 1980s works on the construction of difference (Chapman 1978; Handler 1984; McDonald 1989): for better or worse, difference and sameness are only ever partial achievements.

In sum, the first argument is about the achieved reality of differences among people, places, languages, and so on: there is nothing “mere” about construction. The second argument is about the always contingent, partial, and incomplete nature of such differences and samenesses: whether ontologically or analytically, difference does not come before sameness, nor sameness before difference.

Luckily—and here I am giving away the ending—achieving this balance between alterity and a common world, between difference and open-endedness, is not just an anthropological concern, but also concerns many of the people with whom I lived and worked in Corsica. Thus, one solution to this theoretical prob- lem is already there, ethnographically, in Crucetta and in other such places where people deal with relationships and differences on a daily basis. The book’s narrative progresses from this theoretical problem to its ethnographic resolution.

The first chapter sets the scene of the account in the village of Crucetta, in which a number of people with diverse trajectories and backgrounds live in some respects together and in some respects past one another. The methodological figure of the field-site as an “arbitrary location” (Candea 2007) is introduced to argue that the distinctive value of ethnography might occasionally lie precisely in its limitations and incompleteness. Having thus shown where the account will take place and having reflected on what such “taking place” might involve, chapter 2 introduces Corsica. However, Corsica here is not, as one might initially expect, the broader context or background to our account of the village. Rather, the island is introduced as an object of concern and debate which inhabits, rather than frames, the daily lives of people in Crucetta. The chapter examines the mise en discours of Corsica over the past two centuries or so, as an inherently problematic object of knowledge, one which is ineffably mysterious and definitionally unknowable to outsiders. This detour through the genealogy of Corsica thus folds back into the ethnographic landscape painted in the first chapter, fleshing out the ways in which distinctions between Corsicans and non-Corsicans in Crucetta bring up assumptions about different kinds of knowledge and insight.

But there is more than one way of thinking about knowledge. With the help of theories of distributed cognition, chapter 3 examines the actual connections among different people, places, and objects which are mobilized when “locals” in Crucetta come together to watch, track, and attempt to fight a fire which creeps toward the village. Emplacement emerges in this chapter as the result of particular traceable relations, far more substantial than metaphor, far less fixed than essence. Tourists’ comparative distance from the phenomenon of fires is thus recast not as a difference in kind (indexing something profound about Corsicans or non-Corsicans as such), but rather as a difference in the quantity and nature of relations with other people, places, and things which the tourists are able to mobilize when the crisis of a fire hits. Chapter 3 thus introduces a theme which will become increasingly central to the account: there is a thick web of relations among people, places, and things, which gives substance and conviction to the kind of accounts of essence and mystery examined in chapter 2. These empirically traceable relations “fill up” with recognizable, real stuff, the otherwise abstract claims about the reality of Corsican difference from the continental French, or the patently romantic portrayals of the island and its people as an organic whole. At the same time, the chapter introduces a key paradox: these clear categories and these thick webs of relations in practice do not quite match up; after all, there are non-Corsican inhabitants of Crucetta who are profoundly connected in the above-mentioned sense, just as there are Corsicans who may just be passing through.

This paradox is further unpacked in the next three chapters, which together trace the powerful interplay of ambiguity and certainty at the heart of people’s everyday management of differences among things (chapter 4), people (chapter 5), and languages (chapter 6). Together, they articulate a broader argument about the interplay of freedom, definition, and ambiguity. Anthropologists have often contrasted the rigid, state-imposed ways of categorizing people with the generative multiplicity and fine contextuality of local ways of negotiating multiple identities. This contrast usually implies a distinction between an oppressive essentialist imposition of bounded categories and inherently critical, anti-essentialist local practices which give subjects more freedom. The situation in Crucetta is, on the face of it, quite the opposite. On the one hand, the French state’s official refusal to recognize the Corsican people is justified through an argument about the negation of essentialist, fixed categories of identity, in the name of an abstract citizenship which in principle allows each individual to juggle multiple forms of identity and belonging. In response, Corsican nationalists in Crucetta and elsewhere are engaged in a definitional battle over the nature of Corsicanness: can it be cast in the same terms in which the French state casts Frenchness, as an abstract, voluntary, non-essentialist framework for citizenship? Or must it rely, as French models themselves do (albeit in an often covert or disavowed way), on a more substantive account of cultural or ethnic rootedness? Thus, explicit political debate, precisely because it seeks to define and redefine clear-cut categories, is the space in which such categories can be challenged, manipulated, and remade. This is also the arena in which, painstakingly, entities such as the Corsican people or the Corsican language can be assembled, a project in which some people in Crucetta are engaged.

When we turn by contrast to the day-to-day ways in which people “do identity” in Crucetta, we move from abstract discussions of the nature of Frenchness and Corsicanness to the myriad ways in which people map minute differences in accents, looks, behaviors, and other such clues, in order to be able—often nearly instantly and almost always without asking—to “tell who is what.” What emerges is the paradoxical “thingness” of identity examined in the previous chapter: the fact that seemingly clear-cut distinctions among different “kinds of people” (Continentals, Corsicans, Arabs), while they are seldom explicitly defined and in practice trail off into infinitesimal micro-distinctions, nevertheless emerge as self-evident and binding aspects of reality. It is their very lack of (ultimate) definition which, paradoxically, makes such distinctions so irrevocable and non-negotiably real.

Chapter 7 ties together the discussion of knowledge and relationality and the discussion of difference, inclusion, and exclusion by examining a local idiom: knowing (connaître), which is used intransitively to denote an open-ended relationality which attaches persons to other persons, places, and things. Discussions of “knowing” and “being known” in Crucetta articulate a concern with the daily management of relationships and connections of various kinds. The polysemy of knowing allows it to shift situationally from being expansively inclusive to mapping an impenetrable interiority, something which binds Corsicans to one another and to the island in a way which Others can only contemplate from the outside. This chapter thus draws together a related set of questions which runs throughout the rest of the book: is there an insider’s view of Crucetta (chapter 1)? Can a Continental ever “really understand” Corsica (chapter 2)? Can someone become local (chapter 3)? What makes something Corsican (chapter 4)? Can someone become Corsican (chapter 5)? Can someone become a Corsican-speaker (chapter 6)? These questions now all emerge as refractions of the same question: can one become a part of the kind of assemblage delineated by the word connaître?

Finally, chapter 8 suggests that one partial answer to this question is already present, ethnographically, in Crucetta—if one only looks in the right way. It focuses on a tiny, evanescent bit of ethnographic imponderabilia: a tendency for people in Crucetta to avoid asking or giving each other’s names at a first meeting. One could add this “anonymous introduction” to the long list of instances of Corsican “reticence,” “secrecy,” or “closedness,” or one could find in it, paradoxically, the very principle of initial open-endedness which allows one to start knowing and becoming known, to enter into what otherwise seems an impenetrable interiority. This requires us to think beyond the familiar self/Other dualism which animates the anthropology of identity in order to ask questions about becoming, beginning to relate, and “introduction” in the sense of the entry of one object into another— here, of a person into an already existing relational assemblage. That this “way in” takes the form of a negativity, a question unasked, a holding-in-abeyance, is highly significant. In this way, the ethnographic occurrence of the anonymous introduc- tion parallels the methodological fiction of the arbitrary location, with which the account begins.