This history is about rural France during the nineteenth century. But we might begin with a story of a Frenchman in a different place at a different time. In Brazil in 1935, the young anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss met his first non-European civilization, the Tibagy Indians. Lévi-Strauss was a product of French civilization and its educational institutions, someone who had, almost on a whim, headed off to study primitive civilizations. His description of the Tibagy brings out his appreciation of the value of the indigenous civilization as well as his disappointment in the contamination by Europeans of his objects of study. But he saw their culture through the paradigm of Europe and France: while conscious of himself as an observer of the Tibagy, he viewed that civilization through its relationship to his own. Reading his account half a century later, we can notice how difficult it was for Lévi-Strauss to fit the Tibagy into the categories he brought with him to Brazil – “primitive” and “civilized.” They were, he wrote, “former savages” on whom civilization had been abruptly forced.

Like ethnographers everywhere, Lévi-Strauss described himself as he searched for words to describe a foreign culture. These ambiguities of description and the construction of identities also run through past constructions of country dwellers in his own country. Educated, urban Frenchmen have typically placed country dwellers in the category of “peasants,” an ambivalent identity different from themselves, curious, and at times dangerous.