1. Robert Darnton and The Great Cat Massacre: history as anthropology

2. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
[L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)]

3. Structure of lecture:
Account of ‘the great cat massacre’ in 1730s France, and Robert Darnton’s investigation of it.
Broad contexts: changes in twentieth-century historiography; emergence of ‘culture’ as a key category of research.
Specific contexts: history and anthropology (in particular, the work of Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
Conclusions: history a changed field by the 1980s.

4. The Great Cat Massacre in Paris, late 1730s
Paris printing industry: organized on artisanal, largely pre-capitalist basis in 18th century. Hierarchy within workshops: master printers, journeymen printers, apprentices, casual hires. Changing patterns of control and authority: bigger master printers taking over; conditions of work squeezed. New social, cultural hierarchies between masters and workers.
Printing shop of Jacques Vincent: two workers, Nicolas Contat (‘Jerome’) and Leveille suffering fierce resentments: badly treated and paid, fed scraps from master’s table, unable to sleep at night because of caterwauling.
They decide to take revenge – with a practical joke. Imitate cats howling and fighting; instructed to get rid of alley cats. They torture/kill all cats in the vicinity (including one belonging to their master’s wife) – hold mock trials and hang dozens. This is related again and again in printing workers’ circles – as a joke. Causes great hilarity.

5. Darnton on his methodology
“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.”

6. Darnton on his methodology (contd.)
“…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.”

7. Situating Darnton (and his methodology): changes in 20th century historiography
Traditional histories: ignored such events, or purely illustrative uses.
Social history traditions (Marxism, Annales, etc): part of bigger narratives of social change and class conflict.
Later Annales historians : study of mentalites. Popular attitudes, collective beliefs.
Importance of quantitative methods: counting.
Culture derived from economics, demography, social structure
History from below; microhistory – pioneering new attention to popular culture: customs, beliefs, in terms of the experiences of peasants, workers. Thompson’s turn towards study of 18th century plebeian customs and their historical role. Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis (Rites of Violence, 1973): study of 16th century beliefs, symbolically charged actions, and the role they played in religious conflict.
Post-structuralist approaches: ‘linguistic’ or ‘textual’ turn. Focus on internal coherence/tensions within texts. Heavily inflected the history-from-below tradition from the 1980s on.

8. Darnton: history as anthropology
“…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.”

9. Parallel developments in social/cultural anthropology:
In its origins as a modern discipline: closely associated with colonialism, racial supremacism. Study of ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ civilizations – untouched by modernity. Elements of this persist in post-war world, but are critiqued heavily within the discipline.
1950s, 1960s: rise of structural anthropology. Along with linguistics and psychoanalysis, anthropology one of the biggest ‘frontiers’ of structuralism. Major figure: Claude Levi-Strauss. Deep structures of social life and behaviour.
1970s on: Clifford Geertz the dominant figure in US cultural anthropology. Most famous work: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Use of ‘thick description’ (borrowed from Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle). Symbolic dimension of human behaviour: culture understood as a matter of public practice.

10. Geertz on the definition of culture - I
“The concept of culture I espouse […] is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”
(Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures)

11. Geertz on the definition of culture - II
“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.” (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures)