By approaching incest as a practice rather than as a founding prohibition, would anthropology have more chance of understanding it? This is what L. Le Caisne’s investigation into a village in the Paris region, the scene of an “ordinary” incest, known to all and yet hidden, suggests. This is how violence is socially organized.
A village story
Between 1971 and 1999, Nelly G., born in the early 1960s, was regularly abused and raped by her adoptive father, Lucien G. From these rapes six boys were born, who lived with the stepmother of Nelly G., her half. -brother and half-sister. In the 1980s, Pauline, a 15-year-old girl who had broken away from her family and whom Nelly met in a parking lot, joined the Gs. She was also raped. In this village in the Paris suburbs, Lucien G., a violent and litigious traveling printer, is not unknown. Rumors spread, no one is unaware that “the old man is having children with his daughter”, but neither the neighborhood nor the social services intervene. Lucien G. died in 1999. Pauline, Nelly, the mother-in-law and the children then lived together in the house.
In 2000, Sébastien, a village mechanic, met Nelly, with whom he has two children. He pushes her to take legal action: Lucien G.’s crimes being prescribed, it is the mother-in-law who is accused. His conviction for failure to report a crime was reported in the press and aroused indignation. Nelly tells her story in a book and is a guest in the media. In 2012, Nelly’s lawyer obtained compensation for acts of barbarism, violence and rape. She receives more than a million euros.
Between 2008 and 2009, the anthropologist Léonore Le Caisne investigated this village that the media are talking about. It is not only the facts that interest him, but “the absence of action by the inhabitants” which seems strange to him in this “climate of public indignation” (p. 24). Far from sensationalist descriptions, the terrain is “dull” (p. 5): the administrations concerned are reluctant to speak, the inhabitants of the village do not feel concerned. She knocks on doors, goes to the café, meets Nelly and Sébastien. On the one hand, she hears very general comments about incest, with residents often talking to her about something completely different. It is also not easy to distinguish what they knew at the time of the events and what they know after the media revelations. On the other hand, Nelly, caught up in the media coverage of her story, is quick to tell her story. The investigation therefore allows the anthropologist to define his object:
It is therefore less a question, here, of knowing the facts and of looking “if the inhabitants knew” and what they knew, that is to say questioning the information itself and its holders, as do journalists, police officers or magistrates, to see how information and those who circulate it fit into social life as it goes. (p. 26).
The ethnography of incest becomes that of a village “caught” in this story.
Léonore Le Caisne’s investigation thus joins recent work which does not approach incest as a founding prohibition, but as a practice – Dorothée Dussy underlined how this aspect had remained unthought in an anthropology which nevertheless made incest one of his favorite objects. Second trip, the investigation does not focus on the acts of violence but on their contexts (local, institutional, media) and on what is said about them. This is what gives the impression of always missing the facts. The ethnologist thus recounts the disappointments, a field which seems to lead nowhere – and which she pursues despite her doubts. It is precisely by putting aside the expectation of the sensational, by settling into this ordinary that something of incest can be grasped.
From this point of view, the work sheds light on the issues of an ethnography of violence. This is often the subject of general reflections. And without a look armed with theories, observation remains in vain. However, it is undoubtedly more comfortable to comment on Foucault or Arendt than to impose one’s presence and one’s questions on people who asked for nothing, sometimes ending up between a closed door and a cedar hedge. But this is perhaps the price to pay to understand what constitutes an act of violence, in its banality and its dissemination beyond the people directly concerned.
How to know?
If the book seems to miss the facts it takes up, without being encumbered with theoretical discussions, certain findings from studies on gender violence: these are less a fact than an event which far exceeds time and space of aggression. It is then a question of questioning individuals about events suffered, the origins and consequences of the conflict, the reactions of those around them; to insert acts of violence into a broader social context, gender relations in the first place, but also the way in which violence is perceived in social or professional groups, and its institutional and judicial treatment. Léonore Le Caisne also shows the determining place of media treatment, which acts here as a denunciator.
The subtitle of the book, “And Yet Everyone Knew,” seems like an easy phrase. However, the question is at the center of the book. As Léonore Le Caisne demonstrates, the revelation of incest by the victim and the media is not one for the village, there was no “law of silence”. The question is therefore not to determine whether the inhabitants knew or not, but to establish the modalities of this knowledge. We should not overestimate the importance of the case in the eyes of the respondents. They prefer to talk to the ethnographer about things that concern them more directly: municipal elections or the land use plan for example. The positions of the respondents determine their knowledge: those who are part of the neighborhood feel less concerned than the others; the “old” know more than the new. Moral judgments thus take on meaning in the local sharing and interests that they produce. The affair is part of a series of other stories that fuel gossip: “the ‘transvestite’ who one day showed up at the town hall with a gun on his shoulder to call himself Madame”, the mother who “stalked in the woods” (pp. 86-87).
The fetishism of the violent event ultimately allows the inhabitants to extract themselves from the event, either by noting that they did not know everything, and for example through torture; or by casting doubt on what they were not witnesses to: “it’s hearsay, because I wasn’t there!” » (p. 96). After the media coverage, the entire village finds itself guilty of not having denounced. The games of discredit do not stop there: Nelly’s compensation casts suspicion on her intentions and those of Sébastien. For certain anti-incest associations, highlighting housing conditions and the absence of food “did nothing” (p. 327), in any case nothing to build a collective cause: you must not only be a victim, you must be a “good victim”. Facts and individuals are therefore caught in logics of qualification which often result in denouncing Nelly’s denunciation.
The black box of violence
If the book describes in detail the social organization of violence, it revolves around the author of the facts like an enigma. This resistance is linked to the objective conditions of an investigation which often returns to the point of view of the victim whose attacker is dead. It is undoubtedly the consequence of the strategies of the aggressor himself, who kept part of his actions secret, and who worked to give a complex social image of himself. Indeed, far from being discreet, Lucien G. is a figure in the village, not hesitating to harm his neighbors or to demand compensation which he felt was due to him. When Nelly, then a child, was plunged by his stepmother into a bathtub of scalding water, he accused the office HLM for a hot water system malfunction and posts photos of the burns on his truck. How then can we make sense of violence?
By approaching the event through its fringes and its consequences, Léonore Le Caisne does not seek to explain G.’s violence, but shows how the inhabitants offer explanations and sometimes contribute to justifying incest. G. thus appears in several guises, that of the cantankerous neighbor, the merchant who provides a service, or even the elder of theOAS protected by the police. When the scandal has taken shape and the ordinary becomes improbable, it seems difficult to insert the violence into the daily fabric of things: resistance, which seems so many defense mechanisms, is put in place to minimize, to cast doubt on the credibility or extent of the violence. How can someone who is “always correct” be an incestuous father? “He stopped his car when he was leaving for work, he stopped, he took the potatoes, he paid and he left,” a shopkeeper said of him. In such extraordinary violence, each gesture is supposed to reveal evil: when no difference with an ordinary man appears, the victim’s words become doubtful, the incest becomes consensual and even “happy” for some of the victims. inhabitants (p. 188).
Moreover, if G. detaches himself from ordinary men, it is in an ambivalent way: father of many children, having several wives, his violence is the reverse of a force which explains and justifies all transgressions, and a certain fascination:
Men fail to hide some sort of attraction to the individual. (pg. 177)
Nelly is caught in these sexualized and sexual images, but at her expense: she is the one who takes advantage, who talks and who desires too much.
In what sense is this incest ordinary? Before denunciation, arrangements allow violence to become part of the fabric of everyday life, to become banal or almost; after the denunciation, it is justified to the point that the victim becomes guilty, or at least not entirely innocent. If Léonore Le Caisne shows, after others, that the classification of acts of violence is always an issue of struggle between people and groups, she returns to the violence suffered by Nelly in its inassimilable aspect. In this process, it is not necessarily a fixed division between perpetrators, witnesses and victims that is sought, but an uncertainty which allows everyone to be caught up in the situation without really being there – except for those and those who suffer violence.