| Titre | Le soleil des limaçons | |
|---|---|---|
| Auteur | Claudine Fabre-Vassas | |
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Revue | Etudes rurales |
| Numéro | no 87, 1982 La chasse et la cueillette aujourd'hui | |
| Page | 63-93 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Snail's Sun
Depending on the location, snail gathering invariably brings a male way of hunting or a female way of picking or both to the scene. Thus the animal acquires its identity either as a wild prey or as a domestic fruit. The distinction between «escargots» and «escargotes» repeats this duality. Mainly it introduces several possible combinations according to whether the gatherers hunt or collect the male or the female. The evidence suggests that this diversity privileges the choice of the snail as a collective symbol -- a very common one in southern France.
But in the kitchen where it is purged, fattened and cooked by women the animal becomes charged with other pairs of meaning, and these enable one to situate the ambiguity of its classification. It can be fat or lean depending on how it is prepared, and is therefore neither flesh nor fish. Etiological accounts portray it as a mutilated, downgraded creature living out an expiation : hence the snail's association with death. Indeed the snail appears as the embodiment of a «larva», one of the wandering spirits or souls of Purgatory evoked in rituals which establish a «calendar» of relations between the Hying and the dead. If it can still shift as easily as in the past from one term to the other (male/ female, fat/lean, flesh/ fish, alive/dead), that is because it is neither one nor the other but is situated in between. Is not snail picking thus a way of giving oneself the power to explore the logical properties of its intermediary position ? Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/rural_0014-2182_1982_num_87_1_2872 |
