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Accepted Paper:

"Let the patois die their beautiful death": the purification of folk culture in Félix Arnaudin's writings, 1870-1920  
William Pooley (University of Bristol)

Paper short abstract:

Félix Arnaudin's (1844-1921) belief that the old patois folk culture was at war with the new culture of the modern state obscures the complexity of mixing cultures his informants engaged in. His dictionary notes provide ethnographic context for the most stylized folk genres: songs and tales.

Paper long abstract:

Félix Arnaudin was a native witness to the language and folkways of the Landes de Gascogne in southwestern France between the 1870s and 1921. Like many of his contemporaries, he tended to see local languages and folk culture as vestiges being swept away by the victory of standardized French. But this interpretative stance is - at least partially - analytically distinct from the extensive work he did to record folklore and dialect forms. Arnaudin bitterly lamented the efforts of revivalists to "defigure [the] traits [of the patois] in their hour of agony." He himself was more of a nostalgist, demanding that the patois should be allowed to "die their beautiful death."

The advantage of the manuscript collection of his fieldwork is that it presents a view from behind the scenes of this process of purification. This is clearest from his doomed attempts to create a definitive dictionary of the local dialect of Gascon. Being so strongly convinced of the battle between French and Gascon, Arnaudin struggled to deal with the ways that people around him mixed cultures and languages. If his surviving writings had been confined to the highly-elaborated and undoubtedly relatively rare Märchen, or the equally stylized, albeit more widely-known folksongs, there would be no way to replace these remarkable texts in a dynamic ethnographic context. His notes for a Gascon dictionary, shot through as they are with the contradictions of adaptation from below to social and linguistic change, provide the best way to reconstruct this ethnographic context.

Panel P07
Laography and lexicography, or finding folklore in the dictionaries
  Session 1