Village In The Vaucluse, Third Edition Book

A classic study still worth reading

When I was a graduate student, many years ago, I read this ethnography as I prepared to do my own anthropology field work in India. Wylie's study of a French town impressed me deeply as detailed, well-organized, and excellently-written. I particularly liked the way he allowed many people to speak and I appreciated the sympathy with which he viewed their lives. He underlined the variations found within the community, not trying to create a false picture of some generalized French culture. Unusually for the period, he didn't hide behind "academic objectivity" and so put himself in the picture a number of times. VILLAGE IN THE VAUCLUSE, along with Blythe's "Akenfield", Whyte's "Street Corner Society", Kozol's "Death at an Early Age" and the several works of Oscar Lewis inspired me to try to write "readable" anthropology. I have not been entirely successful measured by these excellent works. Nevertheless, even though the research for
VitV was done in the early 1950s (with a little updating at periods since) and France, like every other part of the world, has changed immeasurably since then (Rousillon, the village concerned, has doubled in population and is now dependent wholly on tourism while it used to be supported by agriculture and ochre mining, though young people already had to leave town to find any other line of work), I strongly recommend this book as 1) an example of how powerful good anthropology can be, 2) a work on the social history of France, and 3) an example or guide to doing field work without cluttering it up with jargon that will fade and die in a few years, leaving your book to shrivel on the deserted beach of academic fads.
VILLAGE IN THE VAUCLUSE is one of the classic works of European anthropology and should be on your reading list if you are interested in that area.