Reading the riots
Interpretations of disorder in the United Kingdom since 1980
Université de Paris 8
Police and thieves in the street
Scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition
Police and thieves in the street
Fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition
(Police & Thieves, Junior Murvin, Lee Perry)
Introduction
The following essay is in two parts ; in the first I will lay out my theoretical tools. These are drawn from three domains : first, from the writings of the historians Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Muchembled and the ethnologist Bertrand Hell, I have taken the idea of a supernatural battle between the forces of good and evil. Then, from the sociology of deviance I have taken Stanley Cohen's concepts of demonization and 'moral panic', ideas which I shall use to link the historical and sociological approaches. Finally, I call on two opposed approaches to collective phenomena ; on the one hand the tradition that one can trace from Gustave Le Bon down to Michel Maffesoli, which sees the crowd as an expression of the collective psyche, and on the other, the conceptions of theoreticians such as Couch, McPhail or Tilly, for whom, as we shall see, there is nothing particularly out-of-the ordinary about the behaviour of people in crowds, which can be analyzed in terms of the interests of the individuals and networks of individuals involved.
In the second part , I will examine reactions to an incident which occurred in England in 1985. To this end, I have examined the English newspapers published around this date (above all, The Sun and The Daily Mirror. I have also looked at The Times so as to be able to compare the popular press with that of the élite). I looked at each daily edition for June of that year, concentrating particularly on the week from Monday the 3rd to Saturday the 8th, immediately subsequent to the "Battle of the Beanfield".
This 'battle' took place within the context of the annual celebration of the summer solstice at Stonehenge. Since the 70s, a regular festival, featuring 'alternative' rock bands, had been organized each year at this time. In 1985, the organization in charge of maintenance of the monument, judging that the festival-goers caused considerable damage to the monument, decided to ban the event. A certain number of 'travellers', allied to a group of 'Druids', made it clear that they intended to go ahead with what they claimed to be 'religious celebrations'. Thus it was that this group found themselves face-to-face with the forces of order on Saturday the 1st of June. This confrontation was quickly named 'The Battle of the Beanfield', an evocative title which puts us quite naturally on the path leading back to the 16th Century villagers whose night-time battles against evil have been brought to our notice by Carlo Ginzburg.
A : The Theoretical Tools
1. The Armies of the Night
Ginzburg tells the story of the benandanti, men and women of Friuli who lived most intensely during certain nights :
These persons, denounced by their fellow-villagers in about 1570, told the inquisitors that during the year, when the Ember Days came round, they fell into a sort of trance. Some of them, mostly men, said that they then went fighting in far-off places, 'in the spirit' or in a dream, armed with stalks of fennel; their adversaries were witches and wizards, armed with sorghum stalks, and they were fighting for the fertility of the fields. Others, mostly women, said that, either 'in the spirit' or in a dream, they witnessed processions of the dead. ... The nocturnal excursions of the benandanti were preceded by a kind of trance which left the body as if dead, after which the spirit left it in the form of an animal (a mouse or butterfly) or riding on an animal (a hare, dog, pig, or the like).1
In his key-work, 'Ecstasies', Ginzburg follows the beliefs that he found among the benandanti across continents and centuries, placing them in a long-range historical context :
(In the original work) I pointed out that in the case of witches as well as of benandanti, 'that state of lethargy - provoked by the use of sleep-inducing ointments or by a catalepsis of an unknown nature - was sought after as the ideal way to reach the mysterious and otherwise unattainable world of the dead, of those spirits that wandered over the face of the earth without hope of peace'. In my opinion it is here that we should seek the underlying unity of the myth of the benandanti, looking beyond the agrarian and the funeral versions. The sorcerers who are enemies of the fertility of the fields reflect the ancient notion of the unappeased dead; the processions of the dead are already a partially Christian image, similar to that of the souls in Purgatory. In either case, the benandanti, men or women, appear as professional intermediaries between the community and the realm of the dead.2
Ginzburg links these beliefs to those of Siberian shamanism ; the night battles of these Italian peasants are thus attached to an exceedingly ancient construct of the human imagination - a schema which is one of the very oldest properties of human culture.
His arguments are vigourously countered by the French historian, Robert Muchembled. Building on the work of Norman Cohn, Muchembled declares that :
... the sabbath - a nocturnal, demoniac meeting of witches and warlocks - is simply and solely a figment created by theologians, whose ideas governed the imagination of the élite classes of Europe in the late Middle Ages ... the theologians revived stereotypes that had no popular basis, in order to demonstrate the existence and progress of a huge satanic plot designed to make the powers of evil triumph upon earth. 3
Muchembled completely rejects Ginzburg's shamanistic version :
... like Carlo Ginzburg, they postulate the existence of a ritual based on a highly composite mythical structure inferred from various descriptions of the sabbath. This latter procedure is the most subtle, but is methodologically flawed, depending as it does on arbitrary associations, with no reference to chronology or, above all, to the social structure of the groups who are supposed to have preserved the ritual in the myths of which they inform the judges. When the history of ideas is studied in this completely abstract fashion, there is a grave risk that the investigator will describe his own mental processes rather than the subject of his research ...4
Nevertheless, the two historians agree that the procession of the dead is a central image in European beliefs - whether élite or popular. In a version widespread in Europe, the dead who gather together in this way have a specific identity, and a specific set of tasks. Bertrand Hell, professor of Ethnology at the University of France-Comté places the phenomenon thus :
Dans le mythe de la Chasse Sauvage, le motif du sang occupe une place centrale. Il faut en premier lieu se remémorer l'information apportée par le prédicateur strasbourgeois du XVIe siècle: la meute volante rassemble tous les hommes décédés de mort violente. D'autres sources sont encore plus précises et indiquent, à l'exemple des Annales Svevici de la même époque, que ces morts errants sont surtout des guerriers tombés au combat, c'est-à-dire des hommes dont le sang a giclé ... Toutes les traditions orales modernes se rejoignent en affirmant que les chevauchées surnaturelles sèment des choses abominables sur leur passage ... des morceaux encore sanguinolents d'une jambe d'homme, voire d'enfant, s'abattent sur les témoins terrorisés ... ces membres (peuvent porter) encore un reste de chaussette ou de chaussure ...5
According to Hell, any man who does not hide his eyes from the sight of the wild ride passing over his head is condemned to join them. We may note here that the benandanti are not seen as heroes by their neighbours : are they, as they claim, the guarantors of good harvest, or are they not, quite simply, members of the procession of the dead? When all is said and done, those who see themselves as the defenders of the community have an ambiguous status, and are the object of popular suspicion6. To oppose the horde of wild riders is, in the end, nothing but another way of joining them.
2. Devils and Panic.
While Ginzburg delves into the mythological extension of the night rides, Muchembled is more interested in the pragmatic or functional side of things. He believes that the accusations of witchcraft served to diabolize the practices of the people, and to impose a hegemonic order :
In 1613 a young man of Récourt in the castellany of Oisy in Artois was accused of frequenting a sabbath 'with a yellow pipe, whereon he whistled'. Need we see in this anything more than a frolicsome band of youths and musicians' The more so as an archducal ordinance forbidding young people to dance in villages was in force from 1609 to 1610 in that region ... heavy fines for infringing it were inflicted in the governorship of Arras, to which Récourt belonged. Here we have trials for sorcery buttressing legislation that was much disobeyed, populating the night-time with demons so as to deter young folk and others from what had been their accustomed pleasures.7
Muchembled also makes the point that the 'notables', the clerics and the judges were caught in their own trap :
Any myth, in fact, is subject to precise sociological forms and does not exist as a mere category of the mind. This is true of the sabbath myth, which creates realities and chains of events which may affect its own consequences. Being a liturgy of fear, it leads, domino fashion, to a multiplicity of trials: a witch denounces her fellow-participants in the alleged sabbath, and one after another is burnt at the stake. But more important than this, a wave of fear spreads throughout the countryside, arousing feelings of dread and even panic, with consequences of two kinds: an exterminating fury against witches, expressed within the bounds of law, and an upsurge of social antagonism, brutality, and private vengeance, directed especially against supposed witches, but also against other persons.8
What Muchembled describes here is a process which the theoreticians of deviance have analyzed, first as the 'theory of amplification' and then, in extension, by using the twin concepts of 'folk devils and moral panics'. Stanley Cohen, one of the leading names in the 'New Criminology' which appeared in the UK at the beginning of the 1970s, attempted to decipher the series of riots which occurred in the sea-side towns of the South-East of England in the middle of the 60s9. The concept of the 'moral panic', taken up by a number of other sociologists - see, for example, Goode & Ben-Yahuda - has since become a stand-by of the analysis of mass phenomena. Here is how Cohen himself characterized it :
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way society conceives itself.10
In fact, the concept is fuzzy and unsatisfying ; while it is true that the media and assorted dignitaries - magistrates, police chiefs and politicians - in their interpretations of the events and of the actors of the social spectacle of the summer of 1964, manipulated symbols which they believed to be collective in nature, it cannot be said with any certainty that there was a 'panic', either among the rulers themselves, or among the readers of the newspapers or even among those who were eye-witnesses to or participants in the incidents which provided the raw material out of which the journalists fashioned their front-page stories. In a secular society such as ours, it may be that social reactions are not as immediate and facile to manipulate as were those of the country-people at the time of the Witch Hunt which interests Muchembled.
Cohen advances, then, an interesting set of theoretical tools, but these need refining. We cannot jump from the apparent indignation of the editorialists in the Sun or the Daily Mirror to the conclusion that the majority of the English people feel the same violent disapproval of this or that group of demonstrators or rioters. During the summer of 1964, for example, a fair number of people took the trouble to go along and watch the show, which they apparently found quaint or amusing.
I will return to the capacity that readers, the public, have to play with and distance themselves from the categories and schemas employed by the media. But for the moment, let us look at what Cohen means by the term 'Folk Devils'. He writes :
One of the most recurrent types of moral panic in Britain since the war has been associated with the emergence of various forms of youth culture (originally almost exclusively working class, but often recently middle class or student based) whose behaviour is deviant or delinquent. To a greater or lesser degree, these cultures have been associated with violence. The Teddy Boys, the Mods and Rockers, the Hells Angels, the Skinheads and the Hippies have all been phenomena of this kind. There have been parallel reactions to the drug problem, student militancy, political demonstrations, football hooliganism, vandalism of various kinds and crime and violence in general. But groups such as the Teddy Boys and Mods and Rockers have been distinctive in being identified not just in terms of particular events (such as demonstrations) but as distinguishable social types. In the gallery of types that society erects to show its members which roles should be avoided and which should be emulated, these groups have occupied a constant position as folk devils: visible reminders of what we should not be. The identities of such social types are public property and these particular adolescent groups have symbolized - both in what they were and how they were reacted to - much of the social change which has taken place in Britain over the last twenty years.11
Unfortunately, in his book Cohen is more interested in the 'Moral Panic' than in the Devils themselves, and does not analyze the process of Diabolization in depth12. He leaves the reader with the feeling that the term 'Devil' is a dead metaphor. However, our voyage through time, and our encounter with the Night Riders give us reasons to believe that the newspapers and other official tale-tellers are exploiting an extremely powerful narrative schema which is part of our deep culture.
3. The Crowd and Collective Psychology
The argument between Ginzburg and Muchembled has its parallel in the domain of crowd analysis. On the one side are to be found those who keep alight the flame lit by Gustave Le Bon. Michel Mafessoli, even though he recognizes that Le Bon is no longer taken altogether seriously, quotes him with approbation and holds to a collectivist account of the 'mass', founded on his use of Durkheim's conception of the General Will. Rejecting those analyses which he dismisses as 'cold' or 'individualizing', he writes :
Qu'est-ce à dire sinon que l'Histoire, ou les grands événements politiques, sont avant tout le fait de la masse ... Il peut y avoir des processus d'accélération, des personnalités qui peuvent être considérées comme des vecteurs nécessaires, il y a bien sûr des causes objectives qui ne manquent pas d'agir, mais rien de tout cela n'est suffisant. Ce ne sont que des ingrédients qui ont besoin pour s'assembler d'une énergie spécifique ... Ce n'est que par après que l'on pourra disséquer la raison objective de telle ou telle action, qui dès lors paraîtra bien frigide, trop prévue, tout à fait inéluctable, alors qu'on le sait elle dépend avant tout, au propre comme au figuré, d'une masse en chaleur.13
On the other side in this debate are those like Clark McPhail who, citing the work of Carl Couch, rejects Le Bon completely. He writes :
... members of the crowd are at least as rational as the authorities against whom they protest. Observation and examination of complex protest actions establishes that rather than spontaneous emergence, such collective efforts are frequently the result of prior planning and organizing by rational actors ... crowd members have not lost their self control; neither are they controlling themselves in terms of the same purposes as the authorities against whom they are protesting. Crowd members may have diminished vision or hearing due to noise and light limitations, or restricted ability to move where and when they want to within the crowd by virtue of its density, but there is no evidence that crowd members are operating with crippled cognition even in the most extraordinary and dangerous circumstances.14
McPhail, along with Couch and Charles Tilly, sees the members of the crowd as rational actors. The crowd itself - McPhail avoids the word, for he sees the concept as devoid of sense - has no existence beyond that of the small groupings - Tilly speaks of 'networks' - of which it is composed.
Our understanding of the realities of social processes is deformed, argues Tilly, by our tendency to tell stories. We see complex and ambiguous movements and events in simple terms ; we individualize that which is collective, and we see as given conditions and contexts that we should subject to questioning. So it is that when reality does not conform to the rules of normal story-telling, we need to bring it back into an ordered and predictable form.
One may think of life as being regulated by the conventions of the story-teller ; when the realities transgress the rules, we do our best to bend them into a recognizable shape. That may be the reason why those moments which we indicate by such terms as 'riot' or 'disorder', and which seem to break with the accountable schema of the every-day world, call for interpretations which normalize them, and deny or neutralize the transgressions. Thus it was that one moment in a slow and complex process was brought up into the air, and baptized - made recognizable - with the name 'The Battle of the Beanfield', so making it possible to blind even those who are seen as the 'troublemakers' to the contradictions and social fissures which, if they were fully visible, might put in question the existing distribution of power in the United Kingdom.
Tilly suggests that the collective model of social movements is by far the easiest one to tell : the crowd becomes one of the actors in the story. Motives, goals and even calculation may be attributed to it, so that it becomes a character. Moreover, social actors themselves behave as if to underline the idea of a collective will : the English police always look for institutional spokespersons among the rioters or demonstrators so as to be able to organize events with them - and usually they find such people. But when the participants refuse, for one reason or another, to conform to the expected norms - Tilly tells us that it was during the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries that these schema were put in place in England, from whence they were later generalized around the world - then order breaks down and violence occurs15.
B : The Battle of the Beanfield
All commentators agree : the battle was exceptionally violent. Usually, both rioters and police know the rules and follow them. The demonstration, as a social institution, is highly ordered - a ritualized combat. In England, as in other 'modern' nations, each year sees its ration of normal protests, which come and go with little notice being taken of them, passing virtually without comment. But from time to time, one or another of these small occasions takes on diabolical proportions. In 1985, as we have seen, the English Heritage committee charged with overlooking the site decided to ban the annual rock concert that had taken place at the summer solstice since 1972, and which some participants claimed to be a religious celebration. Of these, a number had opted for a nomadic existence, living in old motor-cars, vans or buses. Today, the label 'New Age Travellers' is used, but at the time, the newspapers referred simply to 'hippies'.
Since 1979, the British police forces had had to come to terms with new forms of social disorder. The extremely violent riots in Brixton and Toxteth 16had tested them, and found them wanting. After gaining further experience during the miners' strike, by the mid-80s, the police had some reason to believe that they had adapted successfully and had become far more efficient - even though, in the long run, as some senior officers predicted17, the transformation of the 'bobby' into a member of the SPG was to have high costs.
It was a police force that had become used to the idea that it was their role to put down dissent that confronted the so-called 'Peace Convoys', as the groups of motorized hippies in their ageing vehicles had named themselves, with the firm intention of preventing them from reaching Stonehenge. What actually happened is difficult to determine, as is so often the case. The best we can say is that there were clashes between the police and the travellers, that the latter's' vehicles were badly damaged during these clashes, and that the police succeeded in keeping the convoys from moving on to the monument. The 'battle' itself took place on Saturday ; by the time the Monday morning papers were published, the event was no longer of first importance, for the riot at Heysel, which put the whole world of football in disarray, had become the main event of the moment. Nevertheless, the Sun and the Mirror both gave over a few column inches to the 'hippies'. In the Sun, we read :
Hippy may face murder bid charges
A HIPPY leader is expected to be charged with attempted murder following the bloody battle of Stonehenge.
This story must have come from a police source. It was not taken up by the other newspapers, and the Sun said no more about it on subsequent days. This kind of reporting, in which a rumour, a suggestion or a supposition become, for one day, a fact, and then disappear from view, being neither taken up nor denied, is one of the regularities identified by Cohen18.. One may here underline the labeling of the man as a 'leader', which raises his act - if there ever was such an act - to the level at which it can be seen as incurring collective responsibility.
In practically all the articles in the Sun covering this episode, the 'hippies' are presented as potentially violent and delinquent, while the police are seen as an objective authority, whose words are always worthy of respect. The Mirror, on the other hand, is less predictable. This difference is apparent in the ways in which the two papers treat one of the follow-up stories ; some of the people whose vehicles had been damaged in the 'battle' took refuge on land belonging to a member of the aristocracy. At first, he was willing to succour them, despite warnings given to him by the police. Such a tale, with the owner of a title behaving in a way that could be characterized as 'eccentric', was too good to miss for the tabloid press. On Tuesday the 4th of June, three days after the 'battle', the Sun announced :
LORDY! HIPPIES GET A REFUGE
The Earl of Cardigan defied a police appeal yesterday, and gave sanctuary to 100 hippies recovering from the Battle of Stonehenge. The 33-year-old Earl let a so-called Peace convoy of 40 vehicles regroup in Savernake Forest, Wilts., which is owned by his stockbroker father the Marquess of Ailesbury. Earlier about 250 of more than 500 hippies in custody were bailed on assault charges following the weekend riot when police tried to stop them holding a pop festival.
There are several items of interest to us here. The headline, with its silly pun, announces the humourous tone that the paper will adopt whenever it refers to this story. 'Hippies' can be seen as a comic form of the diabolic - in folklore traditions the Devil is often more of a buffoon than a menace - and the young 'Earl' who is so generous with goods which do not actually belong to him, has a touch of Bertie Wooster about him - the typical 'upper-class twit' or 'Hooray Henry' so beloved of the English. This parody world - underlined by the nostalgia aroused by such terms as 'refuge' or 'sanctuary', in the aristocratic title, and in the proper names such as 'Savernake' (a forest from which one may expect the Horde of the Dead to ride forth19) and 'Stonehenge' itself - encounters the real world in the second sentence : the father is resolutely modern, for he is a stockbroker, even if he is also a 'Marquess'. Finally, the courts and magistrates bring the hippies firmly down to earth again in the third sentence.
In the Mirror, on the other hand, the story is rather different. Under the headline 'Earl makes hippies happy', and a photo of Lord Cardigan in the company of a woman and four children, the young man is allowed to explain the reasons behind his act of charity :
'I'm taking a lot of flak from some local residents who don't want these people here,' he said. 'But they didn't see pregnant women and children going through hell as I did.'
and the Mirror gives outlines the tale in a rather different way :
'The battle began when baton-wielding police stopped a 'peace' convoy heading for a banned pop festival at Stonehenge.'
As we have seen, the festival marked the summer solstice. Hell tells us that although the main period of activity is around mid-winter, it can also be seen at mid-summer :
La chevauchée des chasseurs de l'au-delà s'effectue donc entre deux portes calendaires. La meute déferle sur la terre au moment du solstice d'hiver et quitte le monde des vivants lors du solstice d'été ...20
The hippies - in particular the women and children - had, according to Lord Cardigan, gone through hell. In Monday's Mirror, we see two photographs, the larger of which shows us the 'blood-spattered' face of a young man, whose expression of suffering is oddly Christ-like. The second shows us a moment in the 'battle' itself ; police and 'hippies' - both groups are armed with batons - face each other in front of a car. In the article accompanying these pictures, we read :
Baton-wielding riot police were accused of brutality yesterday after arresting 520 hippies in the Battle of Stonehenge ... Fighting broke out after the convoy of 250 rusting old ambulances and coaches was halted at Grateley, Hants, six miles from Stonehenge. Motorists who saw the battle claimed that police were showered with petrol bombs, stones and missiles fired by catapults.
The Mirror does not set up against the diabolized hippies of the Sun a simple counter-image of innocent victims. The police and their adversaries are treated practically in the same way. That the police could be put in doubt in this way may owe something to the fact that they had only just emerged from a dark period during which their public image had been greatly damaged : against a background of cock-ups, corruption, and accusations of racism, the institution, often ambiguously viewed by the public since its first conception, had been sorely tested. The men and women whose task it is supposed to be to mark the limits had often given the impression that they themselves passed easily from one side of the barrier to the other. Like the benandanti, or like Thiess, the old werewolf whose words were reported by Ginzburg21, the police are as much feared as admired, and it may have been with some satisfaction that the reader of the Mirror saw them saw them taken down to the same level as the more negatively marked folk devils.
It was not only the Mirror readers who shared this point of view. In a letter published in the Times on the 7th of June, Dr. Pamela Storey wrote:
Sir, those of us who watched the television news last Saturday evening would agree with your correspondent (June 3) that the forces of law and order prevailed at the Stonehenge debacle. It was fortunate that the opposing sides were dressed in their respective team strip, for otherwise I would have found it difficult to distinguish between those upholding the law and those flouting it.
The travellers remained on the site lent to them by Lord Cardigan for two weeks. Readers are left to conclude that Cardigan himself came to regret his action, and wanted to see the backs of them. On the 17th of June, the leave en masse - we are not told exactly how many people are involved, but estimates are in the hundreds. On the 18th, both the Sun and the Mirror are in accord - here is the way the Mirror tells the story :
HIPPIES IN SHOP-LIFT INVASION
HUNDREDS of hippies went on a theft rampage yesterday. Shops and pubs in Westbury, Wiltshire, closed down after they were stripped bare of beer and food worth hundreds of pounds. Earlier, hippies ransacked a filling station at Roundway near Devizes. They grabbed £600-worth of batteries, sweets and canned drinks, plus £100-worth of petrol.
I cannot resist quoting Bertrand Hell on the Night Riders at this point :
Les équipiers de la Chasse Sauvage sont assoiffés de bière. Les jeunes domestiques dont le chroniqueur allemand Praetorius rapporte la curieuse aventure survenue en 1663 peuvent en témoigner. Aux environs de Noël ils s'étaient rendus à la taverne du village pour remplir quelques cruchons de bière. Sur le chemin du retour, ils furent surpris par une chasse volante. Quelle frayeur! Plusieurs morts se jetèrent sur les cruches et, en un clin d'oeil, toute la bière fut engloutie ... Le motif du vol de la bière est présent dans les traditions orales contemporaines ... de l'Allemagne à la Suède, les croyances populaires recommandent de déposer une petite cruche de bière, la nuit, devant la porte des maisons, à l'époque du déferlement de la Chasse Sauvage. Les revenants, ayant pu se désaltérer, apportent bonheur et prospérité aux maisonnées.22
These ghosts also steal cattle : but the theft is often tolerated - the peasants leave their animals outside deliberately, for they believe that the gift will be reciprocated. To sacrifice in this way to the Wild Bunch is the guarantee of a good harvest and a growing herd. Richard Fruen, the Roundway garage-proprietor, and the shop-keepers of Westbury would certainly disagree : Fruen closed his garage and called the police, and the village shops also closed their doors. But then it is, after all, better not to watch the horde while it is at work.
There remained another task for the ghosts to fulfill - that of ploughing up the earth :
Car le vol des cruches et le rapt des animaux dans les étables ne sont pas les seuls gestes chargés d'efficacité que doivent accomplir les défunts-chasseurs au cours de leur chevauchée terrestre. Avant de s'en retourner dans la profondeur des forêts, il leur faut traverser et sillonner champs et prairies. Les terres ainsi 'labourées' seront particulièrement productives en raison de la force fertilisante attribuée à la Chasse Sauvage. Cette croyance est suffisamment répandue dans toute l'Europe, pour que S. Thompson la retienne comme l'un des motifs principaux du récit type.
And the 'hippies' carried out their duties to the letter. On the 25th of June, we read in the Sun :
HIPPIES HUNT TREASURE OF STONEHENGE
Criminals, hippies and police are all hunting a 'treasure' - a secret cache of drugs buried at Stonehenge. Pushers from London are believed to have hidden the drugs to sell to hippies at a huge midsummer festival planned there for last week. But hundreds of police and security guards, with dogs and razor sharp barbed wire, turned the ancient monument into a fortress, barring the 'customers'. Wiltshire Assistant Chief Constable, Roy Denning, said, 'We have dogs trained to sniff the drugs and we are using a helicopter to spot freshly dug holes in the fields.'
Conclusion
When Ginzburg suggests that we can trace across time and space a shamanist tradition centred on the relationships between the living and the dead, and the goal of which is to guarantee the fertility and the well-being of the living, we may be tempted to see instead a form or schema, a way of telling which remains available as the framework which enables us to render comprehensible and satisfying events which would otherwise remain opaque, complex and difficult to grasp. It is difficult to demonstrate the existence of a historic chain of practices and rites, passed on from one generation to another ; Muchembled's skepticism about this is perhaps justifiable. But that a narrative configuration such as this one could have travelled through time is less difficult to imagine. We know that there are tales and legends that have crossed immense spaces - both temporal and spatial. These tales, legends and myths furnish us with our schemas of understanding, and permit us to account for events or to determine those events that will enter the public domain.
When Cohen speaks of 'moral panics' or of 'folk devils', he shows us one of the pathways along which sociology might join hands with literary and cultural criticism. The idea of 'folk devil' needs to be taken very seriously ; the 'Mods and Rockers', the 'Hell's Angels' or the 'New Age Travellers' - these gangs of voyagers, of ghostly riders, are the stuff of which our nightmares have been woven across a vast cultural area, and across a history which has perhaps lasted for some thousands of years. .
However, as Tilly suggests, it may be that these tales, necessary as they are, veil the real complexities of a society such as our own, and prevent us from seeing the realities of our social life in ways that would foreground phenomena which are less easily grasped, less satisfying - but closer to the way things really work.
That the New Age Travellers, in their struggles with the representatives of the law, allow us to trace out the margins, to indicate the frontier between our lives and the social death to which they have been relegated, by the same token allows us to avoid more embarrassing questions. For it is perhaps the banality of the situation in which these young people find themselves which calls for attention. To see that for them, to take to the road, to spend their lives in broken-down buses, to pass a large part of their year in communities, is in no way strange, exotic or quaint, and that instead of signalling a break with modern society places them firmly within it, would render an analysis of our socio-political system rather uncomfortable.