Chandra Mukerji-Historical Sociology of Culture of Cultural Sociology of History

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DOI: 10.1177/1749975507073919 2007; 1; 49 Cultural Sociology

Chandra Mukerji Cultural Sociology of History

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Cultural Genealogy: Method for a HistoricalSociology of Culture or Cultural Sociologyof History

■■ Chandra MukerjiUniversity of California, USA

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the value of genealogical analysis for doing historical researchin cultural sociology, using Nietzsche’s definition of genealogy.The point is to resus-citate a method that has often been rejected by sociologists, and demonstrate itsvalue for analyzing forms of culture that have become tacit or unarticulated overtime.To make the case for the method, the article follows a historical example: theuse of indigenous hydraulics with Roman provenance on the Canal du Midi in17th-century France. Women labourers brought hydraulics techniques derivedfrom Roman principles to the canal, but their work was not considered classical.Ironically, the Canal du Midi was promoted in propaganda campaigns, definingFrance as the New Rome, but the peasant women who actually carried Romanculture in their eyes and hands were not socially elevated enough to be NewRomans, so they were written out of this story.

KEY WORDS

cultural genealogy / historical methods / Nietzsche / Rome / tacit knowledge /women

Introduction

There are two ways to view and tinker with the foundations of a (sub)field:one theoretical, the other methodological. The cultural turn in sociologyseems so successful that theoretical arguments for taking some new area of

culture seriously do not seem particularly useful at this point. There is no need

49

Cultural SociologyCopyright © 2007

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Volume 1(1): 49–71DOI: 10.1177/1749975507073919



to call attention to the power of language, the political importance of media, thestratifying possibilities of taste, the social character of objects, the creative nodesin networks, cultural forms of violence, patterns and practices of ‘activism,’ theclassificatory underpinnings of race, gender, and sexuality, or the culturaldynamics and patterns of decorum that characterize and shape history. I couldadd to the list of potentially revealing subjects to study by doing theoretical lob-bying, but I think the more pressing issue is how to do research well or better.

More precisely, I think we need to reflect on our epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), the links between knowledge claims and practices that underlieour studies, particularly in relation to history. We know that culture has distinc-tive ways of oozing through time, but we have few ways of approaching the prob-lem systematically. We need an epistemic culture to warrant our research thatgives full sociological attention to time itself as a cultural form and a tool of col-lective identity that meddles in our attempts to write sociologically about the past.

Historical sociology has always been a productive site of theoretical devel-opment, and a subfield with high epistemic legitimacy, but one that has hadlimited interest in time itself, periodicity, or the negotiations of past and presentthat give cultural depth to social processes. Cultural sociologists, on the otherhand, take seriously both time and periodicity as subject-matter for research(Wagner-Pacifici, 2005; Zeruvabel, 1985), so we are in a privileged position toconsider the epistemic problems of doing historical work. And we would bene-fit, I think, by considering how we look ‘into history’, what time-marking activ-ities we find there, and how we participate (or not) in on-going efforts tonarrate the past.

Anthropologists treat methodological practices as interesting socioculturalprocesses in themselves, and I take my warrant for these reflections from them.I ask myself how would I write a counterpart to Rabinow’s (1977) book onfieldwork in Morocco to describe historical research? What is the relationshipof a cultural sociologist to the author of a document or book on history? Whatcan we say about the others who we see as ‘inhabiting’ the places in the past wevisit vicariously? How do we think about the textual and other bases of ourstudies? And how do we give voice in our writing to those whose words we reador practices we study? Better, how do we place their voices in relation to eachother to see inter-subjectivity in the face of archives and histories organizedaround autonomous actors? And what kind of past do we write as sociologistsand hold against canonical works in history and sociology?

Analyses in cultural sociology are often based on ethnography. The methodhelps distinguish this type of cultural analysis from the more textual approachesof the humanities. Fieldwork data has made it easier for sociologists to borrowideas from cultural studies without abandoning their disciplinary training andidentities, and to contribute to humanistic studies in a useful and distinctiveway. Historical work in cultural sociology, on the other hand, has not had thebenefit of such an identifiable set of methods. The comparative methods fromhistorical sociology were never designed to answer questions of culture. Thishas left practitioners in this subfield (including me) mucking around with his-torical, art historical, feminist and literary methods to try to write something

50 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 1 ■ March 2007



empirically grounded with a theoretical focus appropriate for a historical soci-ology of culture. The purpose of this article is to consider one methodologicaloption for this type of work: genealogical analysis. In spite of the criticism oftenleveled at it by sociologists, this method from cultural studies can be useful forsociologists interested in patterns of cultural inheritance and the historicalsocial practices that have shaped them.

To make the point, this article will draw on Nietzsche’s ideas about geneal-ogy to reconceptualize cultural descent in more sociological terms. Then it willapply genealogical methods to a particular case: construction of the Canal duMidi in 17th-century France. The Canal du Midi was not just a piece of infras-tructural engineering, but also a demonstration of cultural intelligence and partof a propaganda effort to define France as the New Rome. Descriptions of thecanal explained its importance as evidence that ‘moderns’ in France could sur-pass the ‘ancients’ in the ‘art’ of engineering. Unknown to the political archi-tects of the New Rome, however, there was more than political rhetoric linkingthe French present to the ancient past. The military engineers, surveyors, labor-ers and artisans who built the canal actually used ancient engineering tech-niques for the work – some of which had become part of vernacular culture.The New Rome was really built on the foundations of the old empire, but thiscultural heritage was buried. Some ancient knowledge was exercised withoutany sense of its provenance. Peasants who employed Roman methods toimprove their towns with canals did not see their skills as Roman. In addition,their contributions to the canal that had engineering value in the eyes of learnedmen were attributed to others. To carriers of formal knowledge, the contribu-tions of low-status people to the engineering had no standing. Carriers of clas-sical technique were erased from the historical record to give these engineeringachievements the political value desired for building the New Rome.

Nietzsche and the Problem of Cultural Inheritance

There are a number of terms used in sociology referring to cultural descent orpatterns of inheritance of traditions, all suggesting the importance of theseconcepts: cultural reproduction, collective memory, tacit knowledge, culturaltoolkits, habits, discourses, and cognitive frames (Alexander, 2003; Bellahet al.,1988; Bourdieu, 1984; Collins, 1985; Schudson, 1992; Schwartz, 2000; Swidler,1986; Wuthnow, 2003). There are even a number of fine books in cultural soci-ology that use versions of genealogical methods (Patterson, 1998; Schudson,1998; Wagner-Pacifici, 2005). They suggest the relevance of genealogical analy-sis to sociological theory, and provide reasons for more careful consideration ofmethods for tracing and explaining cultural descent.

The term ‘cultural genealogy’ as I use it here is derived from Nietzsche (1956)although it was used by Foucault (1965, 1970, 1977) and is often understood inhis terms. Both Nietzsche and Foucault focus on the social roots and politicalconsequences of on-going cultural forms, and approach the problem in somesense semiotically. But Foucault uses structuralist and later poststructuralist

51Cultural Genealogy Mukerji



modes of analysis that foreground classificatory politics, and the power of nam-ing in cultural descent. Nietzsche, in contrast, is more concerned with memoryand self-consciousness – the loss of the past entailed in the construction of his-torical narratives that allows traditions to carry unnamed and hence unchal-lenged powers into the present. Nietzsche’s genealogy treats temporal change insocial life as more complex and problematic; what is left unsaid and yet done overtime both evades and still shapes discourse through practice.

Nietzsche’s object of study is Western morality. He is interested in ‘the good’not as an absolute, but a historical formation. It changes shape over time, but itsdifferent iterations embody family resemblances that make the concept seemcoherent and stable. Nietzsche attributes these continuities in morality not to eth-ical necessity, but rather to social relations that depend on notions of virtue fortheir legitimacy. His genealogical method is to culture what etymology is to words:a practice of locating sources of cultural meaning and tracing shifts in usage overtime. This is a semiotic method with powerful debts to the humanities. But a cul-tural genealogy is also to Nietzsche a tool for understanding the amnesia andmemory embedded in the inheritance of traditions that affect the reproduction ofhierarchies. He suggests that historical patterns of social domination exist in theinterplay of social and cultural lineages. As such, genealogical analysis should inprinciple be an effective method for doing cultural sociology of history.

In the Genealogy of Morals (1956), the philosophical problem for Nietzscheis that people approach ethics without recognizing the social nature of their ownvalues. As a result, they do not know (in some deep sense) either the object oftheir study or the constraints on their thinking about it: ‘We knowers areunknown to ourselves … honey gatherers of the mind’ (1956: 149). Thinkers mayimagine themselves as isolated individuals, acting on their own experiences andintuitions, but they are drawn to some ideas rather than others because of theirsocial formation. They are honey-gatherers, attracted by things that seem sweet.But, Nietzsche argues, ‘We have no right to isolated thoughts, whether truthfulor erroneous. Our thoughts should grow out of our values with the same neces-sity as the fruit out of a tree’ (1956: 150). In other words, we should recognizenot only the social nature of our experience, but also the cultural necessity of howwe think. We can do this with genealogical analysis, uncovering the provenanceof our thoughts, values, opinions, tastes, or in his case, ‘the provenance of ournotions of good and evil’ (1956: 151). Nietzsche proceeds sociologically:

The judgment good does not originate with those to whom the good has been done.Rather it was the ‘good’ themselves, that is to say the noble, mighty, highly placedand high-minded who decreed themselves and their action to be good, i.e., belong-ing to the highest rank, in contradistinction to all that was base, low-minded andplebian. (1956: 160)

The term ‘provenance’ is at the heart of Nietzsche’s method. It assumes thatcultural forms have deep roots, and that we ourselves are by necessity carriersof those traditions. We enter a pre-existing world that seems natural to us, andwhose culture we pick up intuitively. We mimic what we see in others, learn to




act as members of our communities, and take on predispositions that we do notrecognize in ourselves.

There are many examples of this pattern. Recently, the Harvard under-graduate, Kaavya Viswanathan, was accused of copying writings by MeganMcCafferty. Viswanathan argued that Megan McCafferty was her favoriteauthor, and she must have memorized passages from her books as a teenager,and come to see the words as her own (Rich, 2006). Her account may have beena rationalization, but it was a plausible one because it referenced a form ofhuman learning that is familiar – and also illustrated Nietzsche’s point.Socialization teaches us to be like our predecessors, but without teaching us theprovenance of our thoughts, tastes, and practices.

Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals (1956), then, is his technique for doing asociology of knowledge. In his words:

The object is to explore the huge, distant, and thoroughly hidden country of moral-ity, morality as it has actually existed and actually been lived. …utility, forgetful-ness, habit, and, finally, error [can be] seen as lying at the root of that value system[morality] which civilized man had hitherto regarded with pride as the prerogativeof all men. (1956: 154–5)

To study morality as it has actually been lived is to study techniques of thoughtand forgetting, not just ideas. Cultural learning and memory practices are bothtechniques for shaping thought that are designed to serve forms of life; they arenot natural attributes of human beings, although they make use of our inherentability to learn and remember. It is this social work to shape passive learningand articulate memory that produces cultural lines of descent. And this kind ofexercise of authority over thought is something that cultural sociologists look-ing at historical records can easily study, adding to our understanding of thesocial bases of cultural descent.

Nietzsche (1956) provides concrete suggestions about what needs to bestudied to understand better the social mechanisms of cultural inheritance. Henames utility, habit, forgetfulness, and error. Each of these mechanisms isdeeply cultural and social in itself, and suggests possible research questions.How is a cultural form useful in a given historical moment? With what widerforms of habitual behavior does it fit? In what ways is it remembered for its util-ity, but forgotten in other regards? In what ways is cultural understanding inany given time and place a product of socialization, narrative, or experience? Ifthere are social rules governing collective memory and cultural understandingsof provenance, we can see empirically how ‘forgetfulness, habit, and finallyerror’ enter into the social dynamics of cultural reproduction and change.

Family Inheritance as a Model of Cultural Genealogy

If Nietzsche defines the problem of cultural genealogy, and what needs to beknown in order to analyze it, he does not elaborate the method for studying it.




For this we need to turn to sociology. If we model cultural genealogy onfamily genealogy, we have a way to begin. We can take the rules of recognitionand sources of inherited traits that influence family resemblance, and treat themas a more general model of cultural descent. Lines of descent, viewed from thisperspective, have three obvious mechanisms: transmission of information(genetic and social), socialization into forms of life (roles, practices and identi-ties), and meta-narratives about that life to explain its meaning (context andself-consciousness). Family culture can be seen as a subset of culture in general,but importantly, one that treats inheritance very seriously.

The comparison of families to communities, nations or social worlds may seemcounter-intuitive since inheritance of family traits has a genetic base that does notnecessarily apply to cultural inheritance (although it has been used to definenations). But physical limits on descent have counterparts for other groups. Townsoften face constraints from environmental conditions that constrain and help repro-duce logics of life. They end up managing the environment and controlling naturalassets in just the way families do with sexuality. Social control of physical possibil-ities in both contexts shapes transmission of characteristics across generations.

There are also non-physical tools of cultural transmission: memory prac-tices, cultural toolkits, and codified forms of tacit knowledge. The informationconveyed in these forms may not be genetic, but it is crucial for cultural conti-nuity (Bechman, 1993; Carruthers, 1990, 1998; Long, 2001; Schwartz, 2000;Swidler, 1986).

Socialization is also key to cultural reproduction because it is an intentionaleffort to shape new recruits into good group members. Socialization includesteaching the skills that sustain social worlds and institutions. Having a culturaltoolkit is one thing; knowing what to do with it is another; and having reason touse it is a third. Recently I learned that a few companies in the Midwest continueto reline copper pots even though copper cooking pots have fallen out of generaluse. A few important customers, mainly beer makers, want copper vats for brew-ing. Because of this, the companies maintain the skills and materials for the work,and make it available to others who want to repair old cooking equipment. Theintersections of social worlds, then, can also be crucial to the reproduction of cul-tural skills. Faced with the expectations and demands of others, those who arebeing socialized learn how to make themselves recognizable and useful membersof their communities. They develop an identity as part of an on-going world.

In addition, people use stories of descent and character to define what traitscharacterize a family or community and the value of inheriting these attributes.They are often origin stories that make sense of on-going practices and ideas.They define what is possible or comprehensible in people and social relations,and in that sense, help define group life. They cover over illegitimacies, or revealthem as aberrations. Just as family character is often maintained by narrativeaccounts of predecessors and their lives, so national character is expressedthrough stories of the founding fathers and community identity is associatedwith the founding of a town. Stories can even attribute provenance to the localculture, tracing it back to the ‘old country’ or original aboriginals. Narrativesabout cities, neighborhoods, and ethnic groups all define how members of the




group should see themselves, and what standards of conduct they shouldembrace. As in Orwell’s 1984 (1950), they shape the future by defining the past.

All these mechanisms may seem impersonal and abstract, but all theireffects on cultural reproduction lie in human action. People socialize others,and tell each other stories. They make toolkits out of experience, and experi-ment with techniques of collective memory. So, we can find and follow the sub-jects who do the work of remembering and forgetting the cultural past. We cansee them assemble resources and disseminate techniques, or draw a cultural lineagainst others in order to secure an identity for themselves.

France as the New Rome

This article will focus on a set of women who brought vernacular forms ofancient Roman hydraulics to French engineering in the 17th century, but whosecontributions were never recognized. Like bastard children of Rome, theirgenealogical links to classical culture were buried. Their abilities were attributedto others, or simply overlooked. Theirs is a story of ‘utility, forgetfulness, habit,and finally error,’ and it illustrates the complicated layers of collective memoryand erasure that went into defining France in the period.

Disconnecting peasant women from the classical past was less a matter ofinjustice than a mechanism of cultural reproduction. The value of classical engi-neering lay in its association with Roman military power, not women’s work.Roman monuments like the Pont du Gard arches were built by soldiers duringtimes of peace. At Fréjus, soldiers from Caesar’s army built a thirty-eight kilo-meter water system to serve their growing town. The skills to make such grandstructures were assumed to be ‘lost’ with the fall of Rome because that was theend of the Roman army. It was unthinkable that tools of such enormous powercould have been quietly maintained by peasants. But of course, they were.

The classical past had enormous political value in the 17th century, whenFrance was celebrated in propaganda as the ‘New Rome.’ Louis XIV and hisminister, Colbert, hoped to build France into a great European empire, usingRoman engineering techniques, classical symbolism, social ritual, and narra-tives of greatness to claim this cultural line of descent (Apostolidès, 1981;Burke, 1992; Mukerji, 1997; Neraudau, 1986).

France was represented as Roman in literature and political writings, andwas marked with neo-classical residences, fortresses and sculptures to make thekingdom appear to be a direct heir of the classical tradition (Apostolidès, 1981;Neraudau, 1986). Engineering projects as well as architecture were meant todemonstrate the inherent (and inherited) ability of the French to exercise theintelligence of the ancients (Mukerji, 1997; Rosental, 2005). One of the mostcelebrated projects used for this purpose was the Canal des Deux Mers or Canaldu Midi. It was not only a piece of difficult infrastructural engineering; it wasalso explicitly represented in maps and writings as ‘Roman.’ And this is wherewomen from the Pyrenees, unknown to themselves, brought some Romanhydraulics to French engineering.




As a simulacrum of Roman Gaul, the Canal du Midi was a fine counterpartto Versailles, the king’s estate that was decked out as the palace of the sun, usingimagery from Ovid (Neraudau, 1986: 234–7). The canal stood for the classicaltools of power, but made their revival visible in the far reaches of the kingdom.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of the treasury, navy, and king’s properties,was the official in charge of this political campaign. The writers and scholarsthat he personally patronized in his petit academie made decisions about thesymbolism, and how it should be used (Mukerji, 1997: 142). As minister of theking’s properties, he made Versailles into the palace of the Sun King. As minis-ter of the treasury, in charge of France’s economic development, he supervisedthe construction of roads, bridges and manufactures to make this kingdompolitically integrated and financially powerful. As minister of the navy, he hadnew ports constructed following Roman models not only to protect his fleet,but also to serve trade, colonial expansion, and shipbuilding – all tools andtokens of the dreamed new empire. The Canal du Midi bridged these domainsof Colbert’s power, and served the propaganda of the period in a dramatic way.It was meant to carry both naval and commercial vessels. And it was designedto embellish the king’s lands with a powerful reminder of his glory and theeffectiveness of his will (Rolt, 1973: 38–51).

While ancient Rome was generally understood as a past world inhabited bycultural giants, there were plenty of sites in France where classical techniqueswere sustained as living traditions by ordinary people into the 17th century.Locals in this part of France had not forgotten techniques of hydraulic engi-neering just because Rome had fallen. For example, they used a complicatedhydraulic system to drain the lake at Montady. Situated below an abandonedGreco-Roman settlement at Enserune (Schwaller, 1994: 24–30), the lake wasapparently emptied by the Visigoths, using Roman methods. They constructedan underground conduit from the bottom of the lake through a nearby moun-tain and into a lower valley beyond. They also cut drainage canals in radiatinglines on the floor of the drained lake to take accumulating water down to thedrain. The result was new, rich agricultural land that was easy to water. Withthe disappearance of the Roman army, they still had reason to sustain those ele-ments of classical technique that served their agrarian way of life.

Roman culture did not die with the army, but rather shattered into shards.Different pieces of it were maintained in separate communities of practice. Theyformed an unarticulated, background culture of classical engineering principlesscattered about the old empire, but not recognized by people of the times asRoman. Classical techniques were understood as ‘common sense,’ and repro-duced as tacit culture.

The Canal du Midi

The Canal du Midi that flowed near Montady was an extraordinary pieceof engineering for the late 17th century. Built in the 1660s–1690s, it was




approximately 168 kilometers long. It cut across the Pyrenees in the south ofLanguedoc from the Garonne River near Toulouse to the Mediterranean sea atSète (then Cette). It required roughly 100 locks to traverse the uneven topogra-phy of the region, and was built when locks were still a new invention. In fact,the locks had to be specially designed for the canal because their precedents inItaly and the Netherlands had never been so deep (Bergasse, 1985–1986;Conseil d’Architecture, 1992; Maistre, 1998; Rolt, 1973).

The Canal du Midi also had no natural terminus on the Mediterranean. Onthe Atlantic side, it connected to the Garonne River that was wide, usually nav-igable, and flowed past Bordeaux to the ocean. But on the eastern side of thecanal, there was no reliable waterway. The Aude River was large, but low inthe summer and flood-prone in the winter. And there were no natural harboursanywhere in Languedoc. The Mediterranean coast in this region was an unsta-ble area of shifting sands and shallow saltwater ponds (Degage, 1985, 1987;Konvitz, 1978).

If this were not enough, the canal also had to cross a divide between water-sheds. One end of the canal was built on the Mediterranean watershed, andtipped east. The other end drained in a westerly direction toward the Atlantic.The canal required a water supply system to feed the high point, or the waterwould have drained in two directions, leaving the center of the canal high anddry. Such a supply was built in the Montagne Noire, capturing water near thesources of four high rivers, and directing it to the divide where the main canalcrossed it. This was a technically complex job, using the contours of the moun-tain to shift watersheds (Mukerji, 2002).

Academics thought the canal was impossible to realize, and they were cor-rect, according to the formal engineering of the period (Gabolde, 1985a). Butworkers had embodied skills with a cultural provenance, Rome, that did notexactly reproduce, but fit easily with the more abstract knowledge of architec-ture acquired by gentlemen who were reading classical texts. The two groupshelped create a new form of engineering intelligence assembled from disparateshards of ancient culture. With their common inheritance reassembled, mathe-matically trained engineers, military engineers, artisans, and peasant laborersbecame collective ‘knowers’ of classical hydraulics and construction. They werepleased with the breath-taking effectiveness of the collaboration, but surprisedby it as well. In Nietzshe’s terms (1956), they remained ‘unknown to them-selves’ because they did not recognize the shared provenance of their disparateabilities; the ways they solved problems appeared to them as ‘common sense.’

The project for building the Canal du Midi was proposed to Colbert andLouis XIV by a regional tax farmer, Pierre-Paul Riquet. He was not an engineer,but in this regard, he was like other entrepreneurs for civil engineering schemesin the period. Riquet was rich, and an able administrator whose entrepreneurialstreak was clear to Colbert. He was well connected, too, in the patronage sys-tem of the period, and understood the political ambition of the administrationto replace the Hapsburg empire (centered in Spain) as the political heart ofCatholic Europe. Creating a glorious waterway in the Roman tradition above




the Pyrenees in France near Spain had practical as well as symbolic value(Mukerji, 2002). Riquet wrote:

When you think that the ease and assurance of this new navigation route will makeit so that the strait of Gibralter will cease to be a necessary passage point, that therevenues of the king of Spain will be diminished and those of our king will be aug-mented, I believe this plan will give you pleasure, [and] I will send it to you with fig-ures including the number of locks that it will be necessary to build, and acalculation of exactly the size of the canal, both its length and depth. (ACM, 20–2)

The canal was designed to demonstrate a French capacity for empire, andto undercut the Spanish king. The dream made sense; the vexing problem wasbuilding it. This entailed gathering groups with the requisite abilities to solvethe engineering problems as they arose. In such a novel enterprise, precedentswere important, but no single extant canal could serve as a fundamental guideto the whole. The task for Riquet and Colbert was to call upon collaboratorswho could collectively do the work. And without knowing it, what they assem-bled included different shards of the Roman tradition, carried by ‘knowers’whose heritage was unknown to themselves.

Reassembling the Heritage

The canal had two sections. The first ‘enterprise’ ran from the Garonne Rivernear Toulouse to the Aude River by Trèbes. It contained the water supply in theMontagne Noire. The second ‘enterprise’ flowed from Trèbes past Béziers, andto the new port at Cette. Both ‘enterprises’ required expertise from militaryengineers, artisans, academically trained engineers, and labourers, but eachdepended primarily on a collaboration between two of these groups (ACM,03–10; ACM, 07–12; l’Arrêt, 1666; Bazin, 1668).

The first enterprise relied primarily on artisans and military engineers.Their main problem was designing prototypes for structures: deep oval-shapedlocks, bridges with towpaths for horses, and walls and gates to control the flowof water. They shared a common background in classical architecture thatallowed their ideas to be mutually interpretable.

Military engineers were schooled in Roman techniques derived from texts.There was already in this period a large literature on fortress engineering andmilitary architecture penned mainly by Italians working from classical prece-dents. Engineers from Italy had been brought to France in the previous centuryto rebuild the fortifications along border cities. They had carried this heritagewith them, and taught it to the French. Military engineers in 17th-centuryFrance were educated in these techniques and the texts on which they werebased (Blanchard, 1979: 48–9; Blanchard and Adgé, 1985: 181–94).

Artisans carried tacit knowledge of building practices with classical rootsthat had been passed down for generations as part of socialization into thebuilding trades. Many Roman construction techniques had been repeated in




Mediterranean France without interruption, but the provenance of the heritagewas not obvious because they were passed down as craft mysteries. Morrison(1974: 7–9) has argued that the Romans were such successful builders becausetheir construction methods were so efficient – easy and relatively inexpensive toexecute. Artisans in this area seemed to find no better ways to make corners,hold arches to the structures above them, or even to make cement. They con-tinued to make the famous hydraulic mortar that could harden under water.Educated Europeans assumed the technique had been lost until the 18th cen-tury, when it was formally rediscovered. But in fact, this technique was used tobuild the Canal du Midi (Adgé, 1992; Mukerji, 2006).

Military engineers and artisans in the building trades who came to work onthe canal unknowingly shared a common culture of civil engineering. They hadacquired it through different socialization, and different memory practices.They were unaware of their common heritage because they lived in differentnarrative traditions. The military recognized themselves as using Roman archi-tecture, while the artisans apparently did not. At least they did not associate themortar they used with classical culture. But still, what they built looked Roman,and served the propaganda program of the era while also at the material levelhelping to create a massive navigational canal through Languedoc.

Workers on the first enterprise were celebrated as (New) Romans at theopening ceremonies at Toulouse. Roman soldiers had been the labour force forclassical infrastructural engineering. Presenting labourers on the Canal du Midias soldiers helped to connect the two symbolically. Père Mourgues, a Jesuitmathematician who kept records of the canal’s construction, described theopening ceremonies at Toulouse in these terms:

On the 17th of November, the notables of the town, the ancient and new Capitouls[city fathers] dressed in red and black, the clergy and Parliament [state government]in grand attire with all the attributes of their rank, paraded to the walls of the cap-ital city of Languedoc. They met there the workers for the canal, without whomnothing would have been accomplished. (Mourgues, 1992: 206, emphasis added)

The workforce was organized into military units, and paraded like soldiers:

The chefs d’atelier [stood] in front of their brigades of workers; there were close tosix thousand terrassiers set out in battle order, drums beating. It was a powerfulsight: the [notables of the town were] lined up behind the cross [parading] along thestill-dry basin of the canal. (Mourgues, 1992: 206)

The ceremony was not only designed to present workers as soldiers; the eventwas also recounted in terms that referenced Roman greatness:

The procession of authorities …flowed like a current into the middle of the enthu-siastic crowd massed on the open banks of the channel, the people of Toulouse andworkers mixed together. They shouted out cries of joy, ‘Vive le Roy,’or in the wordsof the author of the Annales de Toulouse, ‘[they] formed a kind of amphitheater andprovided a sense of the spectacles of the ancient Romans. (Mourgues, 1992: 206,emphasis added)




The ceremony even concluded by laying stones commemorating the project inLatin. Here was an event commemorating the work of new Romans. The col-laboration between artisans and military engineers that dominated this part ofthe canal project could easily enter into the cultural symbolism used to promotethe king’s dreams of empire. It was part of the choreography of the event itself,and the narrative quoted here that recounted it.

The Second Enterprise and the Bastard Children of Rome

Another collaboration was needed for the second enterprise – one that was nevercelebrated in the terms described above. The problem was the increasing partici-pation of peasant women in the labour force, and the cultural impossibility ofassociating them with Rome (ACM, 13–14; Adgé, 1992; Memoire, n.d.).

The engineering became particularly difficult in the hills near theMediterranean coast, and different classical principles had to be employed inthe work. There were fewer structures to serve as monuments to the enterpriseso the resulting canal did not look quite as Roman. Neither did many of theworkers. Women labourers might have been praised and hired by educated gen-tlemen (ACM, 22–27; Letter, 1669), but this did not make them the culturalequivalent of Roman soldiers. No wonder their participation was not cele-brated in ceremonies or even noted significantly in histories of the canal. Thepractical problem was that workers needed to thread the canal through themountains. Mathematicians could measure inclines, but not over long distancesand in complex terrain. So, they could not plan the canal’s route, although theycould verify the inclines of the waterway as it was being constructed. Peasantwomen from the mountains, on the other hand, had experience building watersystems in rugged country, and could see how to thread the waterway aroundhills and valleys without formal measures. Peasant laborers and academic sur-veyors together had the knowledge to route the canal following contours, andcontrol the inclines to keep water moving (Mukerji, forthcoming). But educatedgentlemen and peasant women were not likely interlocutors, much less collab-orators. They were separated by differences of social rank, gender, and lan-guage. Mountain women were particularly suspect characters, often describedas aggressive and wild (Froidour, 1892; Soulet, 2004: 73–4). Chillingly, womenlaborers who worked on the canal were listed in account books as ‘femelles,’ aterm applied only to animals, not humans (ACM, 931, 1071, 1072; Gabolde,1985b: 235–7).

There was also a language barrier. Educated gentlemen spoke French; localpeasants spoke Occitan. But Riquet was an Occitan speaker, and he subcon-tracted much of the work to regional entrepreneurs who also spoke the locallanguage. With these possibilities for mediation and their common understand-ing of engineering, mathematically trained elites and peasant laborers were ableto cut the canal through the hills (Mukerji, forthcoming).




There were two reasons to keep the canal as high as possible. One was thatthe Canal du Midi needed to be kept off the valley floor where the Aude Riverroutinely flooded and spread dangerous currents that could undermine the canalwalls from the outside. Secondly, Riquet wanted to route the canal more directlyto the sea, avoiding Narbonne, but to do this, he had to take it through themountains and penetrate a hill at Malpas. He just wanted to keep the canal ashigh as possible, so it would reach the mountain near its narrow top, reducingthe length of the tunnel. He knew Malpas had been pierced by the Visigoths fordraining Montady, so Riquet was sure it was possible to build a tunnel there.But to keep the canal high, it had to follow the complex contours of a ruggedlandscape (Conseil D’Architecture, 1992: 136; Mukerji, forthcoming). Peasantsfrom the Pyrenees were the ones who had the experience to do this type of work.

Women labourers also built the eight-step staircase lock at Fonseranes.This structure was a set of linked locks that descended in a step-wise progres-sion down a long hill. It was not the first of its kind. A similar staircase systemhad been used in the middle of the century near Paris on the Canal de Briare.But the change in elevation was significantly greater on the Canal du Midi, andso the locks had to be deeper, and the staircase steeper. Controlling all theforces on the walls so that they did not collapse was a severe problem in itself,but this was not the main difficulty. The trick was keeping the volume of waterconstant through all the locks, while keeping them both deep and wide enoughfor shipping. This was not easy because the hill was not a perfect incline plane,so the locks could not be exactly the same shape, but they had to be close tothat to hold the same vessels.

Surprisingly, the staircase at Fonseranes was one of the few lock systems onthe canal that was built effectively without redesign even though it was by farthe most complicated to construct. Because of its efficacy and beauty, theFonseranes staircase was celebrated as one of the great monuments along thecanal. It was represented as a great formal accomplishment, but it was a tri-umph of tacit knowledge. The lock system had been sub-contracted to twobrothers who were illiterate, and was built by a labour force mainly of womenlabourers, using indigenous knowledge. None of them had formal training forthe job, but they accomplished the task quickly and created a sturdy structurethat functioned well (ACM, 1098).

The engineering was not easy. The locks had to contain equal volumes ofwater, and were built on a hill that was not a perfect incline plane. They couldnot simply be made taller and shorter to fit the hillside, since that would changethe volume of water the lock could hold. Too little water, and boats would getstuck on the bottom of the lock. Too much water, and it would overflow. Bythis point in the construction, formal elevation studies had been tried and failedwith smaller sets of locks. So, the staircase was built without them. The lockstaircase was built ‘intuitively,’ and then purified of its provenance. The womenwho built it and the brothers who oversaw the work on the lock system all dis-appeared from history (ACM, 1098; Adgé, 1992; Rolt, 1973: 96).




Roman Hydraulics in the Pyrenees

Building water systems was routine in the Pyrenees. Peasants even used stair-cases of temporary dams to carry timber down shallow rivers. They put logs inthe reservoirs behind the dams, and waited for the rainy season. The swollenrivers would break the dams in sequence and carry the timber downstream todeeper water and lumber mills.

Roman practices were central to their repertoire of hydraulic techniques.Contour cutting had been used by the Romans for their aqueducts. The archesthey used to carry water over valleys may have been identified with Roman aque-ducts, but the conduits themselves ran mainly underground. And although theRomans sometimes tunnelled directly through mountains just as they crossedstraight across valleys with arches, more often they kept them close to surfacelevel. The keeper of Rome’s water supply in the first century AD, Sextus JuliusFrontinus (1913), noted that the conduits needed frequent repair, and this waseasier if the work did not entail a lot of digging. On the other hand, local estateowners often pierced aqueducts where they ran above ground to use the water forirrigation. So where it was possible, aqueduct designers kept the conduits under-ground, following contours, and meandering through the countryside to do it.

This was familiar to people in the Pyrenees who lived near former Romancolonies that had had baths. These were fed with water from springs that werecarried some distance into town. The baths themselves had been abandoned,but the captures and reservoirs at the sources had other uses. Peasants built newcanals, following contours to take water to their houses and towns. They alsodiverted river water, a practice that the Romans abhorred, and controlled itwith weirs, sluices, and settling ponds to clarify the water and take it where itwas needed (Froidour, 1892: 57–8; Mukerji, forthcoming; Soulet, 2004: 83–8).

Complex water systems existed across most of the mountain chain, butwere found in the greatest density near the former Roman colony of Bigorre.Louis de Froidour, Colbert’s most relied upon forest surveyor, fell ill nearBigorre doing his studies of the king’s woods. Staying in this town to recuper-ate, he noted how many ways they used water there: for domestic supplies, agri-cultural uses, town defenses, gardens, mills, and, public laundries. He said thatthe canals were maintained and perfected mostly during the summer months,when men took the flocks to highland meadows. This left the bulk of the labour(and expertise) to women and children. Significantly, the indigenous systemsbuilt with Roman methods were centered not on baths, but rather on domesticwater systems and public laundries. These design features served women, andalso evoked Pyrenean gender culture in a deep way (ACM, 21–2; ACM, 21–18;Froidour, 1892: 31–2; Soulet, 2004: 83–8).

Women were associated with water sources, and fairies with laundries. Menwere said to fall in love with fairies they would encounter in the woods doingtheir wash. Some lucky men even secretly married these magical creatures; thatwas the assumed source of truly happy marriages (Gratacos, 2003: 143–84;Marliave, 1996: 21, 150–70; Sahlins, 1994: 40–60). A famous intermittent




water source was also said to be run by fairies under the mountain. When theywere doing their laundry, they would turn the water on, and it would flow intothe valley. When they were done, they would turn off the water, and the streamwould go dry (Mukerji, forthcoming).

Springs were often marked as sacred sites associated with women. A Virginshrine was built where two rivers from the Gazost source met. The seeps in thisarea contained hot, warm and cold water, and were associated with the femalepowers of the mountains (Marliave, 1996: 13). The Virgin shrine was built onfoundations of stones arranged in circles and enclosed in a walled space likepre-Christian shrines in this area. For Pyrenean peasants who inhabited thisworld, hydraulics made sense as women’s work, since the miraculous powers ofwater were already assumed to be in female hands (Gratacos, 2003: 131–83;Marliave, 1996: 21, 150, 161, 170; Sahlins, 1994: 40–60).

Narrating the Classical Past

The Canal du Midi was celebrated in books on engineering from almost themoment of its completion, and its history told and retold along with descriptionsof the technical accomplishments (Belidor, 1753; Bouillet, 1693; La Lande, 1778;Vallancey, 1763). Starting at the turn of the 18th century, there was a prolifera-tion of books on engineering, so its fame spread. And in France, the canal wasused as a model of infrastructural engineering that entered pedagogy with theopening of the great French engineering school, the Ecole des Ponts et Chausées,in 1747. In the literature that served the formalization of engineering, the canalwas compared to the work of the Romans, and sometimes even presented as aRoman project that the ancients had failed to realize. The canal was representedas a set of structures, too, and less a conduit for controlling water flows.

The role of peasants and their contour cutting to control inclines wasminimized in these histories. Riquet was made the only indigenous hero of thestory – a natural genius. He had claimed many vernacular techniques as his owninventions in his letters to Colbert, and historians repeated these claims,attributing many types of local knowledge to a single mind (Rolt, 1973).

Technical achievement was equated with formal control. Books defined engi-neering as a literate tradition. It excluded tacit knowledge, knowledge of localmaterials, silting problems, and soils. It also excluded knowledge of local weatherand water problems, denying Roman heritage as a living tradition. Peasantwomen’s accomplishments were formalized and attributed to educated men.

Often the king was named the author of the canal; as an object of his willas sovereign, the canal was in a political sense ‘his.’ As Charles Vallancey, anti-quarian and founder of the Royal Irish Academy, put it:

Of all the great Works executed by Lewis XIV, there is none more useful, moremagnificent, nor that does more honour to that Reign than the Canal which joinsthe two Seas by Languedoc…M. Riquet has not less Merit for putting the Successof [the Canal du Midi] past all doubt…. M. Colbert, pleased at his great genius,




took [Riquet] into Protection, by which he surmounted those Obstacles whichpersonal Interest too often opposes to the Publick Good. (Vallancey, 1763: 109)

Oddly, the military engineer, Vauban, was given a great deal of credit for theCanal du Midi even though he did very little work on the project.

[T]hus Vauban had the honour of bringing this Canal to perfection. A Canal which allthe World acknowledges to be the greatest piece of Hydraulic Architecture, that everwas undertaken, and which is of infinite Consequence to the finest Princes in France,thro’ which a great Trade is carried on from Sea to Sea…. (Vallancey, 1763: 116–17)

In fact, Vauban had contempt for much of the engineering, made clear hewanted no part in it, and only agreed to fix problems with the waterway afterit had been in use, and Riquet was dead. And many techniques attributed tohim in engineering books were in fact common in Pyrenean water systems: backdrains, ditches, and settling ponds. Why was Vauban treated with suchoverblown reverence? Because he was the ideal New Roman. He was a militaryengineer who read classical literature.

Clear rules of cultural genealogy were exercised in this literature. Artisansand laborers were not thought to be lofty enough to be descendents of Rome. Aheritage of greatness could also not be explained in the engineering literature asa product of tacit knowledge, and peasant community life. Techniques had to beformalized to enter the literate culture that defined engineering as a lofty profes-sion. Success had to be attributed to genius. These rules were ways of managingprovenance – purifying the classical past and associating Rome with militaryvirtue. It included masculinizing and individualizing collective knowledge to asso-ciate it with genius, and dissociating it from practices that peasants could learn.

The irony was that the Canal du Midi was built with classical techniques.Ancient techniques were mobilized to build the New Rome. Ancient engineer-ing was the common heritage that allowed collaborative problem-solving tooccur. This was the ‘hidden country’ of the classical past, where Roman tech-nique was carried by peasants and artisans. Classical culture was actuallymasked by rules of cultural inheritance that defined those who were greatenough to carry ‘Tradition.’ France could use the legacy of Rome to claimgreatness, but only by erasing the work of peasants – mainly women – whotaught classical hydraulics to gentlemen at the Canal du Midi.

Conclusion: Historical Sociology of Culture and CulturalSociology of History

In spite of its distinctive value for studying historical patterns of culture, thereis still some strong reluctance to embrace cultural genealogy as a sociologicalmethod for historical analysis (Long, 1997; Steinmetz, 2005). Social and cul-tural history, in contrast, seem to provide much more attractive models fordoing historical sociology because they foreground people, institutions, andsocial actions.




Cultural historians themselves sometimes address questions of genealogy,memory, archiving practices, and translation, and can be as interested as anyethnographer in empirical details of social processes (Joyce, 1998, 1999; Smithand Findlen, 2002). There are historians who study memory practices, too,that explain the movement of cultural forms across time (Carruthers, 1990,1998; Long, 2001). Cultural historians are also interested in forms of materialculture, and study techniques and aesthetics that can reveal much about pastpractices of ordinary people that constitute and support forms of culturaldescent (Joyce, 2003; Smith and Findlen, 2002). They even use artifacts tocompare practices to ideas – just what sociologists do while conducting field-work (Smith, 2004).

But social historians are also often reluctant to embrace genealogical methodsor to focus on patterns of cultural continuity over time (Steinmetz, 2005). Theyare trained to think about change, not inheritance, and are explicitly cautionedin graduate school against using the past to explain the present rather thanappreciating earlier periods and ways of life in their own terms. So, historianshave an epistemic culture that is more appropriate for doing a historical soci-ology of culture than cultural sociology of history. For the latter, genealogicalmethods are more appropriate because they allow us to analyze how historyitself is formed through social practices.

Some cultural sociologists have used elements of genealogical analysis totry to understand cultural descent, but to many, cultural genealogy as it hasbeen practiced in the humanities seems abstract, unfounded, and almost ritual-istic compared to ethnography. Stories of cultural and technological inheritanceseem devoid of social agency – far from the complex social worlds researcherssee while doing fieldwork (for views on the subject, see Long, 1997). It is hardfor sociologists to treat cultural reproduction as a form of ‘usage’ of culturalforms through which practices are sustained but with changing meanings overtime. This impersonal and anti-institutional approach to culture appears todeny individual agency along with structural forms of power.

Scholars in cultural studies have gained enormous insight into the power ofmeanings and their patterns by thinking genealogically (Haraway, 1990; Hall,1990; Lipsitz, 1990; Treichler, 1999). But they pay little attention to the socialmechanisms of cultural descent. On principle, some eschew mechanistic modelsfrom the social sciences along with totalizing systems as explanatory strategies.They see them as holdovers of modernism that have no real explanatory signif-icance. The best of these critics produce interesting models of domination thatsociologists can appreciate, such as Grewal and Kaplan’s notion of scatteredhegemonies (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). But by foregrounding classification byrace, class, gender, and sexuality, replacing social structures with linguisticones, they truncate the social in ways that make it hard for sociologists toembrace – even those in cultural sociology.

But cultural genealogy does not have to follow an etymological/usage for-mat. The social side of the connection between culture and social life can be mod-eled differently. Cultural genealogy can be compared to family genealogy, in




which lines of descent are managed by people with strong stakes in the outcomes.Insiders define what there is to inherit, and legislate the rules of descent that limitaccess to the resources of group membership. Not everyone born into a family isrecognized as a member of that group, and not all those recognized as familymembers are the genetic descendents of a limited set of forbears. Family trees arenot just documents of bloodlines, but patterns of collective memory and amnesiathat constitute a family as a cultural artifact.

In principle, family lines are just one case of cultural descent – perhaps withmore stakes, but similar mechanisms of control. The genealogical work of fami-lies reveals the power as well as patterns of inheritance, and demonstrates how‘utility, habit, forgetfulness and finally error’ contribute to social constructions ofthe past. It provides a model for doing cultural sociology of history – studying thecultural practices and consequences of constituting pasts.

We can use this technique to see how cultural practices, like bits of Romanhydraulics familiar in the Pyrenees, can be stripped of their localisms, and made‘common sense.’ We can analyze ‘common sense’ itself as both as a form of rea-soning, and as cultural inheritance that has been detached from any temporallocation. This kind of common sense is understood as intuitive and useful, butits effectiveness, like its provenance, is not questioned. It is thinking that is ‘sen-sitive’ and ‘sensible’ at the same time – a motherless child of social life that any-one can adopt.

To the extent that explaining common sense is one of the fundamentalunderlying problems of sociology, then genealogical analysis can and should bean important tool for social analysis. And to the extent that genealogical stud-ies can focus on the social practices of constituting and erasing the past, it canbecome a viable epistemic option for social research.

Cultural genealogies not only can serve sociologists who want to study his-torical cases of cultural inheritance, but also can be useful when sociologistswant to approach the problems of consciousness and self-consciousness in con-temporary cultural work. There are many instances when habits, sub-consciouspredispositions or under-articulated practices in social life do not show up as‘actors’ categories.’ Anyone doing fieldwork in the arts knows that artists oftendo not know or cannot say why they have particular ideas, tastes, techniques orimpulses. Artists often (and frustratingly) say they paint what looks good tothem. Animators who make cartoons for children similarly say that they designcharacters that kids will like, but they are hard pressed to say what kids mightlike about them. Both groups work intuitively, and are unable to provide anexplanation of what they do. Like morality, aesthetics and other intuitiveunderstandings can defy direct expression, but can still be approached, asNietzsche suggests, using genealogical analysis. By Nietzsche’s account, intu-ition is itself a form of memory and a mark of cultural descent.

The fieldwork currently being conducted on musical improvisation byHoward Becker and Rob Faulkner (2006) holds the promise of making bettersense of cultural innovation based on un(der)articulated memory. By playingwith musicians while interviewing them, Becker and Faulkner get at forms of




cultural intuition that are hard for subjects to articulate, but conceivable forthem to demonstrate. Still, there may be limits to what ‘memories’ can be recov-ered through fieldwork. Paul DiMaggio (1997) has written that fundamentalcultural predispositions seem to be (in the view of cognitive scientists) deeplyingrained in cognitive patterns, effecting how members of different culturesstore information in the brain. If this is really the case, people will never be ableto acknowledge or articulate the ones that they learn pre-verbally.

But cultural habits that have histories can be traced, and the erasures thathave obscured them in the present can be found in earlier acts of suppressionor social isolation. And cultural sociology can be the richer for seeing thesehabits as connected to ‘forgetfulness and error.’ While ethnographers look atthe social life of un(der)articulated cultural forms, cultural sociologists cantrace their genealogies. Then the social characters that we describe in our soci-ology will include not only the cunning but anomic actors of an ErvingGoffman (1959, 1963) or the pleasure-seeking creatures of a Randall Collins(2004), but also Nietzsche’s ‘knowers,’ unknown to themselves, carrying theburdens and powers of history in their hands.

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Le 14 octobre 1666, l’Arrêt d’adjudication des ouvrages à faire pour le canal decommunication des Mers en Languedoc est promulgué. Ce même jour, le Roi‘fait bail et délivrance à M. de Riquet des ouvrages contenues au Devis’ préal-ablement défini sous l’autorité du Chevalier de Clerville. Reprinted in ‘Edit duRoy pour la construction d’un canal du communication des deux mers, Océane& Méditerrannée. ACM 03–10.

Claude Bazin, ‘Bail et Adjudication des Ouvrages à Faire Pour la Continuation duCanal et du Port du Cette, 20 Août 1668’, 9, section x, Archives de Canal duMidi (ACM), folder 07, item12 (07–12).

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Chandra Mukerji

CChhaannddrraa MMuukkeerrjjii is Professor of Communication and Science Studies at the University

of California, San Diego. She is author of Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

(Cambridge, 1997), which won the ASA Culture Section Book Prize; Rethinking Popular

Culture (co-edited with Michael Schudson, California, 1991); A Fragile Power: Science and

the State (Princeton, 1989), which won the Robert K. Merton Award from SKAT; and

From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (Columbia, 1983). She is currently

writing a book on distributed cognition, indigenous knowledge, material memory, and

engineering of the Canal du Midi. She has also written articles on cartography, women

engineers, and the built environment in 16th–17th-century France.

Address: Department of Communication, 9500 Gilman Drive, #0503, University of

California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-050, USA.

E-mail: [email protected]




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Chandra Mukerji-Historical Sociology of Culture of Cultural Sociology of History

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