Germaine Tillion: the facts of her life and "double apprenticeship"
A draft excerpt from Chapter 7 of my book on Mauss
This a draft excerpt from Chapter 7, “Ethnography: reader, teacher, a student, auto-ethnography,” of a book in prepation:
At first, Marcel Mauss read the ethnography of his day voraciously; it was a major part of his work with Henri Hubert on comparative religion. From the mid-1920s, he became the main teacher of France’s first ethnographers. I consider his teaching style and public performances, both featuring orality; Mauss held that “speech is the unity of thought and action”. A student, Denise Paulme published his Manual of Ethnography from notes. Of his many distinguished students, I single out Germain Tillion (1907-2008), an ethnographer of Algerian peasants, activist in two wars, and later a public intellectual who was admitted to the Pantheon. She was a pioneer of reflexive anthropology; her life and work inform my speculative reconstruction of Mauss as an auto-ethnographer. He did no “fieldwork” as such, but he was no armchair anthropologist. Apart from political activism and journalism , his four years in the First World War’s trenches as a translator for British and Australian troops were transformative, just as her war experience later fed Tillion’s anthropology, feminism and passion for understanding, truth, and justice.
First, the facts of Germaine Tillion’s life, then the evolution of her self-knowledge.
Germaine Tillion grew up in Clermont Ferrand, a city in the Auvergne, South-Central France; she was raised as a Catholic. Her father was a magistrate, her mother Emilie came from an old wealthy family and was an art historian. Her parents collaborated in writing among the first Guide Bleu tourist guidebooks. Her father died when Germaine was 18. Their mother and her two daughters lived alone in Paris afterwards.
Tillion studied ethnology with Marcel Mauss and Louis Massignon, a pioneer of Catholic-Muslim mutual understanding. She made four fieldwork trips between 1934 and 1940 to Aurès, a hilly Mediterranean region in northeast Algeria, to study a Berber tribe, the Chaoui. This had been a kingdom since 300 BCE and took part in the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage before joining the Numidian kingdom which was annexed as a Roman province and later stretched along the North African coast from Mauretania to Libya. Aurès was a Christian enclave from the fifth century CE before becoming Muslim with the Arab conquest. In 1954, it was the center of the first uprising in the Algerian war for independence.
Germaine Tillion always preferred action to ideology in the first half of her long life and did not renounce it in the second, when she had more time to reflect and write. She and her mother joined the Resistance network of more than fifty people based in the Musée de l’homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris which supported de Gaulle after his famous declaration in the Second World War. In 1940-42, she helped prisoners to escape and was an intelligence liaison with the allied forces; her mother, also a Resistance fighter in her late sixties, liaised with artists and writers.
A defector betrayed them both, and she was transported soon after her mother to a women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück, Germany. Old prisoners were killed there, and her mother was gassed at 69 in March 1945 because of her white hair, despite her daughter having forged papers listing her age as under 60. Tillion was freed, rejoined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the department of modern history, and took part in war trials in Hamburg 1946-47.
She participated in a collection, Ravensbrück: In search of the truth. “In 1973, she published Ravensbrück: An eyewitness account of a women's concentration camp, detailing both her own personal experiences as an inmate as well as her remarkable contemporary and postwar research into the functioning of the camps, movements of prisoners, administrative operations, and covert and overt crimes committed by the SS. She reported the presence of a gas chamber there when other scholars had written that none existed in the Western camps. She also affirmed that executions escalated during the waning days of the war” (Wikipedia). Her war experience led Germaine Tillion to become a pioneer of reflexive anthropology in response to more than one political, intellectual and spiritual crisis.
The French government sent Tillion, a fierce anti-German patriot from the age of seven in 1914, to Algeria in 1954, which she visited often until 1962. I return to this episode below as a turning point when she was entering her fifties, since she had to confront French brutality in a genocidal war where a million Algerians died. She became a vocal critic, reported atrocities, and tried to save people, especially those she knew. This was an even more drastic crisis for her than the Second World War.
She died just short of her 101st birthday. In the second half of her life, the evolution of her personal perspective as a public intellectual, anthropologist, and prolific writer was extremely fertile. She entered the Pantheon in 2015, one of very few women there. So much for the facts. Next, as an example of her outlook and writing, I offer my translation of a piece used as the Introduction to a collection of her writings assembled and presented by Tzvetan Todorov, Germaine Tillion: Fragments de vie (2009).
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My double apprenticeship (Todorov 2009:43-50)
“Until one has seen all and their contrary, one has not lived” (Talleyrand).
Following two sets of separate circumstances, I found myself becoming a “specialist” in the Algerian drama before it exploded, before the time of blindness and passion—in some ways, doubly a specialist. First, I studied Algeria employing all the techniques of scientific research that I could, not only relying on book knowledge, but observing the realities of everyday life with the aim of deciphering and understanding them. Then some years later and in circumstances not of my choosing, I had to investigate the situations and attitudes of a lawless war of Resistance and hostage-taking while confronting a cruel enemy without weapons.
I completed my scientific apprenticeship to the best of my knowledge. I later knew and lived through the defeat of our country France, followed by revolt, injustice, prison and near death—but it was my death and my imprisonment. I cannot avoid thinking about this overwhelming experience, but I must acknowledge two kinds of defeat: those suffered by others and the crushing humiliation, alienation, and torture inflicted on us, so that we bore grudges and inspired them.
Of the world’s dramas, understanding Algeria’s crisis required all the enlightenment of history along with the obscure ray of experience that cuts through the layers of matter—not just reason and passion alone, but combining their inadequate clarity to explore the chasm that separates us from the misfortunes of others. I don’t underestimate the achievements of my fieldwork years, but they provided an impoverished source of knowledge, lacking the true colors and contours of life without any of their own sparkling light—everything that allows us to glimpse what lies beyond the immediate present. On the other hand, those who suffer often cannot grasp the mosaic design—the tiny pebbles—of their situation. With their eyes closed, feelings and pain slowly harden into deep disgust, then waves of blind fury that swell up wordlessly in the dark night. These are the rocks and storms that can cause a great shipwreck.
The experts’ knowing assessments of events inevitably offer too little. I don’t look for parallels between Algeria in 1954 and France in 1940; but I do insist on the close sociological and psychological similarities between them, the shared characteristics of the human species—humiliation that binds body and soul to a present or future homeland in common danger, the thousand cherished secrets of a civilization that the enemy does not know and scorns. Suffering binds a people together through compassion for all their brothers and sisters. Finally, powerlessness engenders rage, revolt with no limit, embracing death if necessary. This knowledge did not disappear when I was freed in 1945. It stayed within me when I was confronted by the opposite of everything I knew and believed in.
Between 1954 and 1962, I found the same mechanisms outside myself, this time inflicted on the exact people—both the same and different from me, but to whom I belonged— that it had been my job to know. Before the challenges they now faced, it was my profession to visit their villages, to interview peasants, and to engage with the problems and events of their lives. I had trusted friends in every Aurès village and some in most other Algerian provinces. I could not claim not to know or doubt what was going on. I assured myself that I had done everything possible not to doubt what I knew. Respecting the truth of what one has seen is fundamental to anyone who chooses a “scientific career”.
I could not take refuge in the racist’s alibi that these men and women— hunted and chased from their fields, threatened, looted, tortured, these women sobbing, men clenching their fists when swearing to avenge their terrified and starving brothers and kids—belonged to an alien variety of human being. They had been my dear companions, and I knew directly all the hogwash conquerors spout to justify whatever crimes they commit when referring to a congenitally inferior people they have defeated. I heard and was ashamed to hear the same insults that the Germans used for the French Resistance in Ravensbruck ten years later from the mouths of those who supported another “war to the bitter end” in Algeria. Could I detach myself from my own country? That was impossible.
For as long as I could remember, I sought to identify and love what distinguishes us from other nations: what belongs to us as our own, our past, the oldest words in our language, the names of our rivers, what makes laughing polite, recognizing a local accent, how we do carpentry or bake a cake, their rhythms and flavors. All this later helped me to discern and respect the thousand original features that constitute a civilization. For essential ties bind me to a particular land, and precisely because of that I sense, understand, and admire them in other nations that are at once distant and close, the peoples of Africa.
A human life is short, too short for each of us to have the time before dying to liberate someone else from what we may call their “experience”. The ties that bind me to my country are strong enough to prevent the link from breaking.
In 1934, I knew that I had no local experience. For me to gain that experience, to decipher new facts that were in plain sight, I must collect a wealth of data. If you want to understand, you must first learn and, if possible, learn in the right order. Sociologists and historians are all in the same boat—they have the facts, that is, the effects. But the causes are what matter. When it comes to choosing or inventing causes for effects that have been collected over a long period of time, you must sort them out. And this sorting, let us call it understanding, is guided by nothing other than your own direct experience.
I had to learn later that each of us has only one valid experience, the one we feel in our own nerves and back. From the most banal experience that any human being knows (hunger) to its highest form—the tense conflicts that determine whether a personality asserts or destroys itself—absolutely nothing can be invented on the spot. To understand, imagine or guess something is to associate it in unfathomably different ways with feelings gained through experience. The whole mechanics of our hearing are like the written notes of a musical score; our experience as human beings is the sound range without which the score will remain dead. Many specialists in the study of humankind—historians, psychologists, and anthropologists—when they organize their files, resemble a person born deaf copying the sharps and flats of a sonata.
We just have full access to one human being, ourselves, and the only way we can make an inventory of others is through referring to that prime inventory inside us. If you do not know yourself, you will never know anyone else. I would go further: we can only know each other through habitual practice. This mutual learning process, which goes back to our birth, becomes intuition in rare individuals for whom every experience is instructive. I instinctively sensed the modesty typical of eating rituals in a country where famine is chronic, and naturally behaved likewise; but I didn't really understand them until, in the icy dawn, I saw staggering ghosts turn away, all at once, so as not to catch the gaze of another ghost who—isolated from the others—was nibbling in the darkness, while in total silence all one could hear was the tremendous sound of teeth grinding on something, of lips sucking something, of saliva wetting something, and of the glottis straining to swallow something.