Analysis Of The Great Cat Massacre

Audrey Chapman

HIST 297

March 14, 2017

The Great Cat Massacre Debate

History is a discipline based on textual accounts of the past however it became necessary to look closer. A group of French historians watched as countless historians drew the same conclusions from the same experiences time after time, divorcing themselves from the “new social scientist adventuring among the economies and societies of the present.” The Annales school is interested in a science of humanity, human activities. “The function of the historian is not to declare that such a thought is objectively right or wrong but to state, or to suggest, what circumstances, in a particular time, made it thinkable.” The scholars of the Annales school used non-historians as much

The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History contain essays in historical anthropology or an “anthropological mode of history going beyond the history of mentalites. When applying anthropological techniques to texts, it is important to remember the differences between the two disciplines. Anthropology uses more than texts when analyzing cultures. It uses immersion in the culture; it observes living people and communities but also using the recent history. It does not depend on one source for its interpretation. To understand culture is to trace the significance of symbols within the culture, by comparing the uses of the symbol that lends its meaning. This is different than the Annales tradition, “which consists essentially in a historical treatment of anthropological objects.” Just referencing anthropology does not provide a concept of culture. A debate between historian along these concerns arose following the publishing of Darnton’s

Chartier is an affiliate of the Annales school and his own assumptions about the nature of research, while Darnton has “been perceived as a primary mediator of the ‘message’ of the Annales.” LaCapra adds his critique to the reading of texts in history as too narrow. Darnton draws too much from his material. They do not dispute the connection drawn between text and social reality as such, but rather his way of connecting them. Chartier’s analysis is:

My interpretation of the text should lead us to raise questions concerning the discursive function attributed to each anecdote or episode and to avoid hasty conclusions concerning their reality. The cat massacre is one of the exempla to illustrate the tricks the weak play on the strong and the revenge of the wily on those who torment them. In this it resembles the plot of French folk tales celebrating ruse and the ingenuousness of the lowly turned against the