FACETS OF FRANCE: THE CAPITAL AND THE COUNTRYSIDE in Fall 2023 (FYE1099FB10)

This course asks how anthropology and literature can allow us to interpret and navigate French culture. It is structured around the first-year student’s encounter with France as an urban, cosmopolitan space (Paris) and as a rural country, full of local history and legend (Cevennes region). In the first semester, you will learn to write in specific anthropological and literary genres (field notes, prose poems etc.). You will then be “sent into the field” - the metro system, neighbourhoods and cafés – in order to produce ethnographic and literary writing about these spaces of cultural belonging and artistic creativity. The second semester shifts your focus from the urban geography of Paris to rural lifeworlds. A five-day field trip to a remote hamlet in the Cevennes will allow you to retrace Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous donkey travels, but also to learn about the past and present of this “terroir” – the fiery memories of Protestant revolt, the legacies of mining, enduring masonry traditions of dry stone, chestnut cultivation, and tourism. You will discover that being an enquiring ethnographer can allow you to become a better writer, just as being a sensitive writer can spark ethnographic insights. France thus becomes both a field of ethnographic investigation and a playground for critical and creative work.