The peasant and his body

Abstract

Based on a study of his childhood village of Béarn in southwestern France in the 1960s combining social history, statistics, and ethnography, the author shows how economic and social standing influence the rising rates of bachelorhood in a peasant society based on primogeniture through the mediation of the embodied consciousness that men acquire of this standing. The scene of a local ball on the margins of which bachelors gather serves to highlight and dissect the cultural clash between country and city and the resulting devaluation of the young men from the hamlet as urban categories of judgment penetrate the rural world. Because their upbringing and social position lead them to be sensitive to ‘ tenue’ (appearance, clothing, bearing, conduct) as well as open to the ideals of the town, young women assimilate the cultural patterns issued from the city more quickly than the men, which condemns the latter to be gauged against yardsticks that make them worthless in the eyes of potential marriage partners. As the peasant internalizes in turn the devalued image that others form of him through the prism of urban categories, he comes to perceive his own body as an ‘em-peasanted’ body, burdened with the traces of the activities and attitudes associated with agricultural life. The wretched consciousness that he gains of his body leads him to break solidarity with it and to adopt an introverted attitude that amplifies the shyness and gaucheness produced by social relations marked by the extreme segregation of the sexes and the repression of the sharing of emotions.