Geertz's famous dictum that “anthropologists don't study villages … they study in villages” (1973:22) usefully orients our attention to cultural processes rather than to the administrative or geographic unit which is the “locus of study.” Places, like Lavialle, are not, however, irrelevant or redundant in social analysis. The important issue is to understand the ways in which villages (or towns or communes) are socially constructed, “imagined” (Anderson 1991), and used by social actors.

Definitions of “community” are numerous (Bell and Newby 1974), and I do not wish to reject emphatically any claims to the use of this term for Lavialle. It is, however, necessary to move beyond the usual dichotomy between school and community in order to understand schooling in Lavialle. The commune of Lavialle is not self-contained, has many internal divisions based on kinship and hamlet residence, and provides only one among many social spheres from which individuals living there gain a sense of “belonging” (Cohen 1982). In Lavialle, as in many French rural communities, it is the household and kin group, rather than the commune, which is most fundamental to social identity (Mendras 1991; Rogers 1991). As the authors of a recent overview of French ethnography caution, “the commune, administrative unit, is not necessarily a ‘community’ … bearer of a sentiment of collective identity” (Cuisinier and Segalen 1986:83; my translation).

Being French is at best a vague, general source of group identity for the people of Lavialle. They define their identity in terms of region in important ways.