Hope Against Hope

Extract

Poor ethnology, never where it should be! One could almost believe that in the intellectual comedy it is always condemned to play the role of the incorrigible blundering fool.

Take a different view. Thirty years ago it was used for any job going, the indispensable commodity of the cultured milieux of the period. The opinion-shapers perfidiously reduced it to structuralism, which was then running out of steam and scarcely intimidated them any longer. Encouraged by this decline, they affected to believe that ‘structures’ had an empirical existence in society, indeed absolutely anywhere their limitations had made themselves felt for far too long, and that ethnology finally won its freedom at the same time as the various changes in custom and social practice which took place as a result of the huge emancipation movement of May 1968. At once ethnology, the sacred instrument of access — or a smattering of it — was to be found in the media, in the professional training of nurses, the therapies of Bonneuil, the fashion for water-bath deliveries, the electoral campaigns of informed politicians, the ‘spin-offs’ of the Second Vatican Council, and so on. Today, on the other hand, it is to be found nowhere at all, not even among ethnologists, who appear with any intellectual label whatever, but above all not as practitioners of a science. They are the new romantics, the new adventurers, the incredible travellers, all having to do no more than produce a strictly personal experience, or at least states of mind. In short, ethnology passed itself off the first time as a kind of panacea, and the next it was declared no use for anything whatsoever, being at best a pretext for narcissistic effusions and at worst a snare for the naive. The more they would have us believe it can do everything, the more nothing can be done for it.