1 - Introduction: journey to Lavialle

Summary

Before moving to Lavialle, the French farming community that would be my fieldwork site, I spent one month in an international student residence in Paris. Most of the graduate and post-doctoral students staying at the residence were from francophone Africa, and, like myself, had a grant from the French Ministry of Culture. My contacts with these students were rich and varied, as were their cultural backgrounds. One friend, with whom I developed the closest ties, was from Tanzania. She cooked native foods for me, introduced me to her uncle (a former ambassador), and took me to a wedding reception for some African student friends of hers, in which tribal dances and songs were self-consciously and politically performed as a way of asserting indigenous “culture.” It was this young woman who drove with me to the train station when I left for fieldwork in rural Lavialle, six hours away.

In a departure from standard anthropological practice, in which peoples from non-Western countries become the subject of research, I was leaving what was to me a fairly “exotic” and “multi-cultural” atmosphere on the boulevard Montparnasse to live among inhabitants of “la France profonde” – the very heart of French culture, and, in many ways, of Europe. Ironically, I found my relationships with the foreign students in Paris much less fraught with cultural misunderstandings than my initial contacts with the Auvergnats of Lavialle. I was aware that my African friend had lived a very different life from mine, especially when she told me stories of her experiences as a schoolgirl during her country's struggle for independence.