Robert Darnton and The Great Cat Massacre: history as anthropology
[ppt]
The quote on the board is from L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, but is also referred
to in the title of David Lowenthal’s famous study of history-writing. I won’t comment on
it but I’d like you to keep this phrase in mind: the past as ‘another country’. The
significance of this thought for the subject I’m going to talk about – history and
anthropology, and in particular the work of the American cultural historian of
eighteenth-century France, Robert Darnton – will become clear as we go on.
[ppt]
I’m going to begin in a slightly roundabout way. I’m going to start off by narrating to you
one of the stories Darnton writes about in his 1984 essay collection The Great Cat
Massacre. Your main seminar reading for today is the first essay in that book, which is a
comparative study of European folk and fairy tales between the 15th and the 18th century.
But that’s for the seminar: I’m going to talk, instead, about the second essay, which is also
the title essay: the strange and uncanny tale of a massacre of cats by printing apprentices,
some time around the turn of the 1740s. I will then go on to try and situate the kind of
historical perspective introduced by Darnton within the broad changes of twentiethcentury historiography – so I will briefly go over the shifts in historical thinking you’re
already familiar with, but relate them to the new theme of culture which began to
become so important from around the end of the 1960s. Following this, I will briefly
outline the way in which, beginning in this period, some historians, Darnton among the
most prominent, began borrowing from and integrating their work with disciplines
which had previously been rather distant from history: in this case, social and cultural
anthropology.
[ppt]
The very weird story Darnton tells us needs a bit of context. It takes place in Paris before
the take-off of modern industrialization, and some fifty years before the French
Revolution. The printing trade was at the time one of the city’s major industries,
organized on an artisanal basis, with master-printers running workshops which employed
journeymen or regular workers, apprentices and casual hires – all of them often living
under the master’s roof, sharing his food and broadly inhabiting the same culture. At least
this is what is supposed to have been the traditional organization of pre-industrial work:
in his account of the 1730s and 1740s, however, Darnton shows us that things were
actually changing quite rapidly. Printing was becoming a bigger business, with bigger
employers driving small workshops out of business. The master printers were becoming
more like classical capitalist employers. Unlike earlier, they often no longer worked in
the workshops themselves, but acted more purely as owners of businesses. This also
involved aspiring to full-fledged ‘bourgeois’ status, and acquiring new tastes: one of the
peculiar new practices adopted by printers, which we’ll see the consequences of shortly,
was keeping cats, sometimes in very large numbers, as pets. Working conditions were at
the same time becoming rather worse for workers and apprentices in the workshop: they
worked longer hours, and often experienced more hostile relations with their masters.
This very broadly is the immediate context in which Darnton’s story is situated.
One of the apprentices in a Paris print-shop, a man named Nicholas Contat, wrote an
account of his days as an apprentice, which was published in 1762. Print-workers, who
worked with words, were among the few sections of Parisian workers who could – and
frequently did – leave written accounts behind. Contat, in this memoir, where he used
the pseudonym ‘Jerome’, wrote some pages about an incident which took place at his
master’s print-shop twenty-odd years ago. This was a clearly a painful and harsh time for
workers at this particular workshop. Apprentices laboured from early morning, around 4,
till well into the evening. Their master only occasionally came into the workshop, mainly
to yell at them. They were not allowed to eat at their master’s table, but were fed scraps
of food from his leftovers. They often didn’t even get these: the cook, instead, gave them
rotten cat food, rancid meat which cats themselves wouldn’t eat. The cat theme continues
in all sorts of ways. The two apprentice workers, Jerome (or Contat) and Leveille, were
often unable to sleep at night because of the howling and fighting of neighbourhood alley
cats. Further: their master’s wife owned a cat, nicknamed la grise (‘the grey’), which was
much-valued in the household.
So one day the two apprentices decided to turn the tables, in the form of an exceptionally
cruel practical joke. One of them spent all night outside the master’s window imitating a
cat: he was apparently an exceptionally skilled mimic. This kept the master and his wife
up all night: they then instructed the apprentices to get rid of the alley cats, but to make
sure that they left the wife’s cat alone. Jerome and Leveille, of course, had planned just
the opposite. Beginning with the household favourite, la grise, whose spine they smashed
with a crowbar, they began rounding up, killing and torturing all the neighbourhood cats,
away from their boss’s gaze. They trapped cats in sackcloths, tortured them, and then
held a mock trial and sentenced them to death by hanging – a sentence which they then
carried out. The master’s wife caught wind of what was going on, and was horrified to see
what she rightly thought was her own cat’s body hanging from a noose in the yard – but
the workers denied they could have done such a thing, and protested in loud terms that
they had too much respect for their employment for that. For days afterwards, it seems,
the two apprentices dined out on the story of their massacre of cats, and how they’d
turned the tables on their master. Leveille, the worker whose brain-child the enterprise
had been, apparently imitated the whole proceedings for his fellow-workers on multiple
occasions. This produced great laughter and hilarity: the joke was shared by all the
workers with tremendous enthusiasm.
Now it might be very useful and interesting to speculate about what the historians you’ve
read so far in the course might have had to say about an event of this sort. How would
Ginzburg, Thompson, or Lucien Febvre have dealt with it? I’m not going to discuss this
here, it would be a digression – but it’s worth thinking about in your seminars perhaps. It
is perhaps possible to make a couple of broad points. First, for most ‘traditional’ histories
this would not have been an event worth considering except as some sort of stray
illustration of popular unrest. For various post-war social history traditions, Marxist and
non-Marxist, we can maybe imagine various sorts of treatments of this episode. We can
imagine it being handled in terms of popular protest, as a precursor to the class conflicts
of the French Revolution, as an insight into class relations during the Old Regime in
France. In most forms of social history, however, what would be of interest in the great
cat massacre is the sequence of events themselves – what happened, who made it happen,
why it happened, and what the consequences were. Further, it’s not hard to imagine the
massacre of cats being part of a broader narrative of French social history, perhaps in the
mode of ‘history from below’, but nonetheless to be principally studied in terms of how it
fits into an overall narrative of social and political transformation. Beyond this, it is also
possible to picture a post-structuralist rendering of this event: this would involve very
careful, literary-critical attention to the text by Contat the apprentice printer, which is
our source for this event. Rather than an account of events, a post-structuralist analysis
would give us a deconstruction of the text, the source, an analysis of its internal tensions
and ambiguities. So, in theory, an event of this sort certainly can be handled as a piece of
either social history or textual analysis. But Darnton offers another way of dealing with it.
In a nutshell: Darnton does not seek to understand the cat massacre in terms of its
underlying causes and what it led to. He is not principally concerned with the events in
themselves, and is disinterested in their consequences. Instead, he focuses on the element
in the events which, to our sensibilities, is bound to be the most unsettling and puzzling
bit: the laughter of the men. What was so funny about this brutal and cruel episode of
random slaughter? Darnton argues that precisely because this element is most opaque to
us, most distant from the way we organize the world in our heads, it must be placed at
the centre of analysis. Here is how he puts it: [ppt]
Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance which separates us from
the workers of preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the
starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of
entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most
opaque. When you realize that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a
ceremony – that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a
foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat
massacre, it may be possible to “get” a basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old
Regime.
So the element of surprise is crucial to Darnton’s historical methodology. Indeed, the
entire book is full of reiterations of this principle. At the very beginning, in the preface,
Darnton writes pretty much the same thing: “When we cannot get a joke, or a ritual, or a
poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most
opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning.” And a page before this,
he has already written: [ppt]
…other people are other. They do not think the way we do. And if we want to understand
their way of thinking, we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness. […] nothing
is easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans thought and felt two
centuries ago just as we do today – allowing for the wigs and wooden shoes. We constantly
need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses
of culture shock.
I’m not going to outline Darnton’s own thoughts about how this particular episode, the
cat massacre, should be interpreted, and what it teaches us. For that you have to read the
essay itself. But we’re concerned here with questions of methodology, and Darnton sums
up his methodology in very clear terms here. The emphasis is constantly on an
insurmountable, radical difference which separates the researcher of social life and the
subjects he or she is researching. What is important is that for Darnton this apparent
obstacle is actually the very thing which makes substantial interpretation possible. To
truly understand the past, for him, is to understand what truly makes it different from the
time we live in and are familiar with.
The theme runs through the essays in Darnton’s book. To take just one example, in the
text you have for today’s seminar, he begins with the same technique of defamiliarization.
He takes something which on the surface should be familiar enough to us – the story of
Red Riding Hood – and then shows us how it actually contains the deposits of a mental
universe completely of its own time, and not of ours – of a world different from ours in
every sense. He consults existing interpretations – mainly psychoanalytic – of fairy tales,
and finds them defective because the elements they analyse didn’t exist at the time these
stories were conceived and composed. This very historical distance from our familiar
landmarks, far from being a disadvantage, is both the condition of research and its chief
objective. In other words, rather than trying to make the cat massacre or French folktales
available to us, in terms that we would use, Darnton wants to acquaint us with the terms
they use, which are nothing more or less than the terms on which the past existed.
In order to make further sense of this, it might be useful to take a brief glance backwards,
at other forms of historiography which you’re now familiar with, and compare them with
Darnton’s method. If we do this it becomes possible to see both how Darnton is part of
the broad direction, or trajectory, of changes in historical thinking in the twentieth
century, as well as the way in which the approach he represents is different from those
which preceded it.
[ppt]
For most forms of traditional history-writing till the early-to-mid twentieth century, an
event like the great cat massacre would simply not have existed as a piece of usable
historical evidence. Histories that focused on great men, political elites and big public
events were not inclined to consider ‘minor’ incidents like this, with no measurable
impact upon the course of history, as serious sources for historical analysis. The rapid rise
of social history after the Second World War did of course make historians more sensitive
to these sorts of sources. For Marxist social historians, for instance, accounts of such social
turbulence could be fitted into an evolving pattern of forms of class politics. The Annales
historians, from the 1970s, went a step further, and introduced the studies of mentalities.
This involved a study of what would come to be called ‘the collective mind’ – the overall
belief systems and attitudes of a culture or civilization or nation. If you recall that the
1950s to the 1970s represented the great age of quantitative history, however, you can see
the difference between that and the orientation towards cultural history which I have
tried to show in Darnton’s work. For French historians between the 50s and the 70s,
counting became a preferred mode for figuring out popular attitudes and dispositions.
Historians like Pierre Chaunu, Michel Vovelle, Daniel Roche and Roger Chartier,
counted masses for the dead, printed titles of books, crimes in police records, invocations
of the Virgin Mary in wills, in order to arrive at an understanding of people’s changing
orientations towards the world, their religious beliefs and attitudes, and so on. Overall,
there continued to be a commitment, in both Marxist and Annales traditions, to tend to
derive cultural facts from social structures, demography and economics. Darnton and the
‘new cultural history’, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, would question this,
pointing out that culture could not be treated as a derivative, since it dealt with the realm
of human meanings.
If we turn to the various forms of history from below from the 1960s onwards, beginning
with the work of Thompson, we can see a radically altered attitude to popular culture,
belief, rituals, etc. Thompson, especially in work published after The Making of the
English Working Class, turned to the study of popular customs in the eighteenth century,
often drawing heavily upon anthropological perspectives – I’ll come to the significance of
this in a moment. As various scholars have pointed out, Thompson’s work was crucial:
with his practice of history from below, he opened up the path for a new kind of cultural
history, which ironically ended up displacing the concept of class from the centre-stage of
historical research, much against Thompson’s own strictures. He still, however, tended to
situate these cultural forms within a long-term perspective of historical transformation:
the point was both to describe what plebeian and peasant communities made of their own
worlds, and how this was a part of processes of historical change. With micro-history and
the work of Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis, we find an even further expanded
attention to questions of culture and belief. Ginzburg of course tried to outline the mental
world of an obscure miller in 16th century Italy, and Zemon Davis, in her classic 1973
work, Rites of Violence, interpreted the 16th century European wars of religion in terms
of the way people expressed their beliefs. But if we look at Ginzburg’s text, for instance, a
little closely, we do find a gap between the sort of micro-history he practised, and that
practised by Darnton. Recall that Ginzburg writes, with sadness, of the fact that
Menocchio’s world is in large degree lost to us: he describes this, in moving and striking
tones, as ‘a historical mutilation of which we are, in a sense, the victims’. Compare this
with Darnton’s emphasis on the fact that it is actually our very distance from this world
which opens up the possibility for studying the history of an unfamiliar people.
The post-modernist or textual turn in history-writing embodies another way in which
historians began taking matters of culture and belief seriously in their work. One can
easily imagine a post-structuralist reading of the printer’s memoir which Darnton uses in
his essay on the cat massacre, or of the folktales which he uses in his ‘Peasants Tell Tales’.
But here too there is also a difference: a post-structuralist would, above all, be focused on
the text itself, on the tensions and ambiguities within Contat the printer’s representation
of the great cat massacre. As Dominick La Capra points out in a very critical review,
Darnton does not really do this – he simply acknowledges that he is using a textual
representation, and then moves on without considering it as a text or attending to its
literary construction. The point that emerges from all this is that by the 1970s and 1980s,
a more favourable climate certainly existed for the sort of study Darnton was engaged in,
but he was at the same time part of a new break in historical research, associated with a
form of cultural history without a clear precedent. Let me try to explain this in some
detail, by turning to perhaps the most important element in the historical methodology
used by Darnton – its associations with anthropology.
Consider again the way in which Darnton poses the problem for the historian – whether
it comes to French folktales or the cat massacre. I earlier said he focuses on the absolute
difference between the past and us: it is now time to put this in more precise terms. Let’s
go back to those quotes I showed you earlier: notice that he speaks of the need to ‘grasp a
foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it’. When it comes to past historical actors
– like the apprentices in the print-shop – he talks of needing to ‘understand their way of
thinking’. And he speaks of this as ‘culture shock’: quite literally, in discovering the past,
we are discovering an unfamiliar culture. This might seem transparent enough: we can
vaguely talk of ‘understanding’ people in the past ‘on their own terms’, and so on. But
Darnton is after something a great deal more precise here. He wants to investigate the
meanings which people in the past assigned to what they did, and from that he wants to
figure out the specificities of the culture they inhabited. And here we come to the key
intellectual influence upon Darnton: social and cultural anthropology. At the very
beginning of his book, he talks of the influence of anthropology upon his own historical
practice, and constructs the object of his own research in line with anthropological
insights. And he spells this out very clearly when he defines what he’s setting out to do
[ppt]: “it might simply be called cultural history; for it treats our own civilization in the
same way that anthropologists study alien cultures. It is history in the ethnographic grain.”
So what was so compelling about anthropology at the time Darnton wrote? [ppt} Why did
he seek to align the craft of the historian with that of the ethnographer? Prior to the late
1960s, anthropology and history had not really intermeshed very much. As you already
know, the major interdisciplinary exchanges that historians participated in took place
with economics, statistics, demography and sociology. The vast influence of quantitative
history till the 1960s made such an encounter between history and anthropology even
less likely. The Annales historians in particular often used quantification as a way of
getting at really large time-frames; in the case of Braudel, time-frames which ruled out
human agency. Anthropology, by contrast, focused on extremely minute data:
anthropologists set their studies among groups insulated from modern life, such as
Amazon tribes or Pacific islanders (there was an excessive and disturbing focus on what
were considered ‘primitive’ cultures); alternatively, they located their research in small
villages. So anthropology, in its subjects of research and in its methodology, seemed very
remote for history with its search for big patterns and changes. Anthropologists
concentrated on the particular; historians, till the 1960s, on the general.
Anthropology itself had been going through some major changes in the postwar period,
much like history itself. In the 1950s and 1960s, structural anthropology, especially in the
work of Claude Levi-Strauss, became extremely influential: along with linguistics and
psychoanalysis, anthropology became one of the big sources of the structuralist
movement. You have already studied some of this when you studied postmodernism and
post-structuralism. Levi-Strauss applied a structuralist model, partly inherited from
linguistics, to look for the binary oppositions of values and meanings which shaped
people’s lives in ‘primitive’ societies, and on that basis formulated a general theory of
social life, in terms of deep underlying structures beneath human behaviour, thought and
action. Patterns of kinship, and structures of myth and ritual became key to deciphering
what communities very distant from Western civilization were all about.
The most influential figure in anthropology from the 1970s onwards, however, was an
American scholar who radically transformed the discipline, and became known as the
foremost figure in the field of cultural anthropology. This was Clifford Geertz, whose
writings dealt with rituals, customs, religious life, and politics in Java, Bali, Sumatra and
Morocco. Interestingly, he combined these with studies of political changes in new
postcolonial states in the 1950s and 1960s: India, Indonesia, Malaya, Burma and so on.
This distinguished him from the main traditions of anthropology, where there remained
an exotic residue of ‘studying the native’ in societies untouched by Western civilization,
in a sense frozen from history. Geertz focused on local customs and rituals, but also
situated them within a wider historical narrative, thus making anthropological
approaches more accessible to historians. Geertz’s most famous work, The Interpretation
of Cultures, was published in 1973, and had a signal influence both within anthropology
and in other disciplines, including history.
Geertz became particularly influential for his adaptation and use of the notion of ‘thick
description’, as developed by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle. This was, at the most
basic level, a new sort of attention to context. In order to understand the difference
between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ description, it is perhaps best to use the example which Ryle
himself gave. Consider two apparently similar cases. In one, my eye twitches
involuntarily. In the other, somebody winks at somebody. Now from an external
viewpoint, the two gestures are identical: the twitch and the wink are the same. But their
meanings differ radically: one is a reflex action, the other is a deliberate, conspiratorial
gesture made by one person towards another. We can multiply this: consider a third case,
where somebody decides to parody somebody else’s eyelid contracting in a twitch. Here,
once again, to a superficial glance all you have is someone twitching their eyelid. But in
reality, this is a wink which parodies a twitch. All this seems very whimsical, I know. But
Ryle was using this example to make a point about differences between different ways in
which we can describe the same event or situation. For a ‘thin’ description of this
situation, all you have is three people twitching their eyelids. But a thick description
would take account of all the meanings loaded into these apparently similar gestures –
therefore, while a ‘thin’ description merely observes ‘neutrally’, a thick description
deciphers meanings. Geertz insisted that this was what anthropologists, and by extension
all observers of social reality, were doing, whether they knew it or not. In his words,
‘what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of
what they and their compatriots are up to.’ This is in a sense the zero-level of analysis: it
is the point that all analysis of human behaviour has got to start from.
But where do these meanings come from? This, for Geertz, was where the concept of
culture was all-important. And culture, for Geertz, meant above all a set of shared
meanings. [ppt] It is necessary to note that this actually marked a very major break in the
theory of culture. For most anthropological approaches before Geertz, culture had been
located within the human mind. Geertz however was emphatic that this was not the case.
Based on his use of ‘thick description’ as an appropriate technique for the anthropologist,
Geertz made the crucial point that culture is a public thing. “Culture, this acted
document, thus is public...Though ideational, it does not exist in someone’s head; though
unphysical, it is not an occult entity.” [ppt] The point was that culture was the realm of
human activity as such – of that dimension of human activity which produced meanings.
Human action has a symbolic dimension: through the study of gestures, manners,
customs, rituals and daily practices, we can arrive at an understanding of people’s
understandings of themselves.
So all of this helps us understand what was new about the kind of history Darnton and
others began writing in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition to the linguistic turn, history
now took a decidedly ‘cultural’ turn – informed in differing degrees both by literary and
by anthropological perspectives. The rise of oral history after the 1960s can also be seen as
an instance of this: historians began supplementing or even replacing their archival world
with field research, based on interviews and conversations. Studies of subjects like
popular memory and representations of the past flourished. And undergirding all this was
a new attention to culture, conceived very much as the production of systems of meaning
shared by large numbers of people. If the 1960s and 1970s had been the great age of
historical studies of class, by the 1980s this had come in large measure to be displaced by
an attention to culture. Anthropology, psychology, anecdotes, myth, custom and ritual all
became new points of entry into the field of cultural history.
Let me end with a slightly speculative point about the new cultural history introduced by
figures like Darnton. Till the rise of interest in matters of culture and ethnographic
approaches to history, historians had mainly tried to track processes of change across
time. This could of course take various forms: for instance, one form for Eric Hobsbawm,
and a totally different one for EP Thompson. Yet ever since the rise of social history
under the twin influence of Marxism and the Annales school, and arguably even in older
traditional forms of history-writing, the idea of history as process, with questions of
continuity and change at its forefront, had remained central. Historians, especially after
the birth of history from below, could engage in detailed studies of social and cultural
contexts, but these studies were generally plotted as part of arguments about long-term
trends and processes. For Darnton, if you look at the texts in The Great Cat Massacre
closely, you find that the order is now reversed. He does not use an incident like the cat
massacre in order to illuminate an ongoing historical process. This does not mean that he
is inattentive to the changes it is part of: on the contrary, he writes about them
succinctly. However, now it is the long-term changes which supply a sort of broad
context. The cat massacre, however, is in itself and by itself the object of study. The point
of studying it is not to track a process of change, but to enter into the depths of cultural
meaning in a society which is frozen for the purposes of research. If I could use a
somewhat fanciful cinematic metaphor, this is not history as a series of tracking shots, but
as series of freeze-frames. Moments in the past could crystallize as objects of research in
themselves, and the historian could now, unlike before, afford to be less interested in the
change/continuity question. A riot, a book, a festival, an encounter: these sorts of
moments, under the influence of cultural history, were no longer simply ‘part’ of
historical processes. In the hands of historians like Darnton, they became the very object
of research. And here, once again, we find the centrality of the anthropological turn.