Hodges, Matthew. 1999. What the past holds in store: an anthropological study of temporality in a southern French village. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis examines the diverse and conflicting ways in which the past is invoked in a village in the coastal area of the Aude department, in the Languedoc region of Southern France. The region of Languedoc has been undergoing turbulent, and unpredictable socio-economic change since the development of viticultural capitalism in the 19th century, and since the 1960s has also witnessed the development of a sizeable tourist industry. These factors, along with the proximity of the village to the city of Narbonne, have led over the past 150 years to the creation of a heterogeneous village population. The thesis details the plurality of ways in which the past was temporalised in the village during the fieldwork period (1996-7), taking account of the various social groups present in the village, and their economic activities and life worlds. It also illustrates the relationship between local temporalities and wider socio-economic developments in the region, in particular in relation to the development of a tourist industry that transforms the past into a commodity. The thesis is partly concerned to assess the relationship between these wider socio-economic developments, and the sociality of the village inhabitants.

Drawing on recent anthropological work on time, human temporality is viewed as the product of symbolic processes, through which agents make evident, and act upon, the inherently temporal character of existence. In this sense the apprehension and significance of the past is implicated in a dynamic with present action and future orientations, and interpreted accordingly. However, a 'culturalist' perspective is avoided in the thesis by foregrounding the importance of interpreting all human activity as both historically situated, and implicated in wider political economic processes. In this respect, the thesis also pays attention to issues of political economy, and attempts a partial synthesis of different anthropological approaches: the phenomenological, the symbolic, and the materialist.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00028928
Keywords:	Temporality, Southern France, Village, Languedoc
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Anthropology
Date:	1999
Item ID:	28928
Date Deposited:	01 Jul 2020 11:31
Last Modified:	08 Sep 2022 15:45
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28928

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