The Ecomusée, ca. 1975

The 1970s saw the birth in France of a new kind of museum: the so-called Ecomusée or ecomuseum. It did not consist of one single building, but encompassed an entire landscape or region. In contrast to more “classical” museums, it was not (mainly) made up of collections in one specific building, but of multiple historical buildings and sites. It was similar to open air museums insofar as it allowed visitors to stroll around outside, discovering cultural artefacts, handicraft, and architecture. But the ecomuseum did not aim to assemble different cultural types from different regions; instead, it showcased one specific region and its culture. Ecomuseums were also not limited to one single location, consisting instead of a series of abandoned sites—or “antennas”—distributed throughout the region. An ecomuseum thus encompassed an entire region, seeking to bring to light a historically shaped and unique culture.

The ecomuseum’s difference, in retrospect, can also be measured by its finances. While funds for museums provided by the Ministry of Culture had existed for some time, ecomuseums from the very beginning had a more mixed financing pool: contributions came not only from the Ministry of Culture but also from the Ministry of Environment (established in 1971), as well as from the development agency DATAR (Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale, founded in 1963 and part of the French administration). This was no coincidence: the anthropologists involved in establishing the first ecomuseums saw this as a way to address the question of how to develop regions encountering economic difficulties without industrializing them. From the outset, it was supposed to be an interventionist tool based on knowledge. But why did development and environmental agencies and ministries want to fund an invention in museology that had clear connections neither with industrial research and development nor with the environmental sciences?

A few examples might be helpful to set the stage: In the Parc Naturel Régional des Landes de Gascgone south of Bordeaux, for instance, an ecomuseum was founded in 1969. It consisted of newly refurbished houses, vegetable gardens, and crops; an old mill that was put back into action; and a small factory for resin products, “as witnesses of the tradition of the Landes for a renewal of the Landes of tomorrow.”Footnote ¹ But ecomuseums were not limited to agricultural landscapes. In the early 1970s an ecomuseum was created in the urban community of Le Creusot-Montceau les Mines in eastern France, and made up of industrial sites.Footnote ² Whether agricultural or industrial, all of these places showed signs of economic problems. In the industrial city of Le Creusot, the economy had been dominated by the steel industry, mainly run by the successor of the family company “Schneider et Cie,” which was facing turbulent times, partly due to the oil shocks of the 1970s (the Creusot-Loire site eventually closed in 1984). Rural areas faced continuing out-migration. Their respective ecomuseums were supposed to revive these landscapes by drawing on their past.

“An ecomuseum is an institution that a political entity and a population conceive, build, and exploit together. The political entity provides the experts, the facilities, and the resources. The direct participation of the population supplies the strength of all its generations, according to its aspirations, its knowledge, its faculties of approach.”Footnote ³ This definition of the ecomuseum, coined in 1977 by the well-known French museologist and anthropologist Georges-Henri Rivière, has since been cited repeatedly. But all of this demands explanation: how would an ecomuseum bring together a “pouvoir”—a political entity—with a “population,” and why was this important? The definition argues for the specificity of the population concerned, for example, of the several “générations” (generations) that constitute the available “savoirs” (knowledge) and “facultés” (assets). How would one know about these, and how would they be present in a museum or visible in a landscape? And how could such an ecomuseum help regions in economic distress?

To find out how the ecomuseum was conceptualized and institutionalized as a tool of alternative development, this article delves into ethnographic fieldwork that established a new Ethnologie de France in the postwar period, a time of intense contestation of “France” as a colonial power. The goal of this disciplinary transformation was to consolidate ethnological approaches inside “hexagonal” France, meaning the nation’s “mainland” without the overseas departments or colonies. Rivière, the originator of the oft-cited definition of the ecomuseum is one of the protagonists of this article, embodying the connections between Ethnologie de France and Ecomusée as well as academia and regional planning. As founder of the Musée national des Arts et Traditions populaires (MNATP) in Paris and director of the ICOM (International Council of Museums, founded in 1946 in cooperation with UNESCO), Rivière had a wide network of contacts in French and international museology. While Rivière and the ecomuseum are (in France at least) quite well known and serve as prominent examples of the very widespread phenomenon of heritage politics in Europe after WWII (S. Berger Reference Berger2020; Chiva Reference Chiva1985; Cousin Reference Cousin2008; Davis Reference Davis2011b; Gorgus Reference Gorgus2003), the role of knowledge in the creation of cultural development has so far been overlooked.

Only by looking at the anthropological knowledge involved in projects such as the ecomuseum can we understand how, at the time of deindustrialization, regional identities were created and maintained so as to serve economic development. Ethnographic research projects in the 1960s—just before the invention of the ecomuseum and during a profound reorientation of French anthropology—were particularly influential in creating knowledge about regional culture and new tools for its documentation and activation. As it turns out, both the concept of the ecomuseum and its implementation drew upon these tools and knowledge. Therefore, I analyze one such 1960s ethnographic fieldwork project, whose participants shaped the notion of culture which was later used in national development politics.

One result of these ethnographic research projects was the identification of regional culture with its ‘just-disappearing’ economy. This shaped how early ecomuseums transformed specific sites into “patrimoine” (heritage), by adding anthropological value to built environments that were no longer being used for their original purpose (like old factory buildings or out-of-use farms). These ecomuseums were not merely meant to display regional culture (as a contribution to nation building, for example) but to be part of economic development.

The importance of anthropological knowledge for the process of “patrimonialisation” (heritage creation) has been highlighted by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, who see the emergence of an “enrichment economy” in the 1970s and 80s. The enrichment economy stands for increasing exploitation of resources such as history and culture: rather than creating new products, enrichment capitalism relies on a re-valuing of things that exist already. Challenged by the declining hope in unlimited industrial development, “progressivism” was newly filled with ideas of cultural development (Boltanski and Esquerre Reference Boltanski and Esquerre2020, 48–51). Crucially, they see the past and its narrated form, history, as key resources in the newly emerging enrichment economy. Heritage creation is, in their view, a process relying on practices of giving continuity to local specialties such as agricultural produce, cuisine, or handiwork. This explains the important role of the state in creating new institutions that assure the official recognition of “locality,” of the proper and scientific “mise en valeur,” etc. (Boltanski and Esquerre Reference Boltanski and Esquerre2020, 276–77). This article argues that the ecomuseum can be understood as such an institution.

Moreover, looking back to a crucial moment in the history of French anthropology in the 1960s allows us to better understand the actual process of how anthropological methods and knowledge came to inform and co-produce the enrichment economy, a process which remains unclear in Boltanski/Esquerre, who claim but do not document the importance of anthropology (Boltanski and Esquerre Reference Boltanski and Esquerre2020, 27, 305–306). In the case of the ecomuseum, knowledge produced in ethnographic research featured a new understanding of regional culture and a problematization of the interaction with the local population. The enriched regional culture as well as the emphasis on local participation met with a lot of interest by French planning and development institutions. By focusing on the questions that planners and anthropologists shared—how to engage with the local population, how to turn a region’s past into an economically productive factor in itself—I will explain how a certain kind of interventionist anthropology emerged in the middle of the economic and energy crises of the 1970s.Footnote ⁴

Modernizing fields

Heritage practices have a history, and in the case of the first French ecomuseums, we have to go back to regions in France that were undergoing economic difficulties in the 1960s to understand how and which cultural entities came to be featured in an enriched regional identity. It was during fieldwork projects in these areas that a new anthropology “at home” was taking shape: Many anthropologists pushed for the transformation of “folklore” studies or “arts et traditions populaires” (the investigations into folk and popular culture practiced since the nineteenth century) into Ethnologie de France that would allow the application of ethnographic approaches to fields in “hexagonal” France.Footnote ⁵ It was the knowledge produced in such ethnological research “at home” that the concept of the ecomuseum aimed to institutionalize. The identification of culture with the specific part of the economy thought of as dying or disappearing; its framing as a valuable natural-cultural milieu; and its very thick documentation, relying on a new participant observation “at home”—these aspects would in time be at the core of the heritage practices institutionalized in the ecomuseum.

Regions encountering economic difficulties in 1960s France were very often landscapes marked by desertion, by the disappearance of small farms and the abandonment of small villages. “Underdevelopment” was attributed to regions where agro-industrial production had not taken root.Footnote ⁶ With regards to the agricultural sector, France had, after the Second World War, followed a strategy of intensive re-alignment of agricultural land (called “remembrement”) so as to allow for the introduction of mechanized, machinery-heavy agriculture, which profoundly reshaped the countryside (Bivar Reference Bivar2018; Farmer Reference Farmer2020; Herment Reference Herment2016). French politicians were successful in creating comfortable conditions to reorient French agricultural production toward export, insisting on including agriculture in the Treaty of Rome (1957) that established the European Economic Community (France became the second largest exporter worldwide of agricultural products by 1970). But what to make of peripheries that faced continuing emigration of the local population and could not be industrialized in just the same way?

Such a periphery was the object of an ethnographic research project that shaped the post-war professionalization of Ethnologie de France. The “Aubrac”, a mountainous region in southern France, part of the Massif Central, consisting of villages, meadows, hills and especially an alpine plateau, was an area where agricultural production had not been industrialized due to its geography, which inhibited mechanization. Agriculture on this vast volcanic and granitic plateau featured, until the 1960s, small-scale alpine farming and the production of dairy products by shepherds. The increased competition with mechanized farming made this kind of agricultural activity unprofitable—a change that echoed through the region’s economy and social structure.

It was during this socio-economic transformation that the Aubrac saw a particular kind of traffic. Starting in 1963, Parisian anthropologists regularly traveled to Laguiole, a commune that served as “base camp,” and after a couple of days, weeks or months of fieldwork in the surrounding landscapes went back to Paris. It began with just a few, including Georges-Henri Rivière (above-mentioned chief curator of the Parisian Folk Museum MNATP), Corneille Jest (an anthropologist at CNRS, Centre national de la recherche scientifique), and Charles Parain (an ethno-historian teaching at the Lycée Henri IV but without any university affiliation). A bit later, in 1964 and 1965, the traffic increased. Up to thirty scholars travelled repeatedly from central Paris to the peripheral Aubrac to do fieldwork. They were all part of the “RCP Aubrac” (“Recherche Cooperative sur Programme” was a new funding scheme by the CNRS for interdisciplinary projects), led by Rivière from 1963 to 1966 (Segalen Reference Segalen, Paillard, Simon and Le Gall2019; Chandivert Reference Chandivert2016).Footnote ⁷ The regular back-and-forth between fieldwork and metropolis meant that the researchers experienced the post-war transformation of the Parisian science landscape, provoked by the boom of the social sciences and structuralism, at first hand.Footnote ⁸

The RCP Aubrac was part of an effort to synthesize museology with research, a combination that would influence the concept of the ecomuseum. Parallel to the RCP Aubrac, Rivière pushed for the establishment of a new, large building to house the MNATP.Footnote ⁹ The combination of knowledge creation and exposition was condensed in the expression “musée-laboratoire.” In 1966, Rivière managed to establish a research laboratory within the museum, the Centre d’ethnologie française, and to attach it to the CNRS. The RCP Aubrac served as legitimatization and experimental ground for its creation (Segalen Reference Segalen2005). While the RCP Aubrac’s base was at Rivière’s MNATP, and the broader aim was to modernize folklore studies, the more academically established Ethnologie participated in the study, as did some sociologists and agronomic scientists.

The interdisciplinary setting points to the epistemological question that shines through the RCP Aubrac: what should ethnography “at home” look like, and what role would the supposedly “non-industrial” ways of life inside France play in the professionalized Ethnologie de France? Significantly, rather than merely representing a nostalgic look into the past, the “dying cultures” were now being investigated with regards to the region’s present and possible—modern—futures: “The evolutionary aspects will not be limited to what is old, they will be considered in a topicality that marks the decline and the dislocation of the traditional ways of life and, in the same way, the possibilities of modernization and conversion that the industrial civilization brings.”Footnote ¹⁰ It was a “global” understanding of the region, for which artefacts and testimonials of the “dying” culture were a means to an end, insofar as they were relevant only as part of their socio-cultural “context.”Footnote ¹¹

For the “post-folklorist”Footnote ¹² anthropologists in Paris, the Aubrac region was an interesting field because it was in full modernizing transformation, insofar as it was pushed to abandon agricultural practices that would not be competitive in a thoroughly modern France. As a peasant area, it was not a surprising choice for an ethnological project: such places had been a preferred field for folklorist investigations in the first half of the twentieth century (Christophe Reference Christophe, Boëll and Meyran2018; Sherman Reference Sherman2004). But crucially, the collection of artefacts of a dying, pre-industrial culture was not the main goal (even if collecting was still an important part of the project). Rather, the aim was to contribute to solving the problem of underdeveloped regions themselves, not just to salvage the remains. Such an Ethnologie de France represented a significant departure from French ethnologie in non-Western and often colonial contexts as well as from earlier folklore studies. The firm orientation towards the problem of the modernization of the countryside shaped the ethnographic account of the Aubrac.

Field research “at home” and practices of enrichment

When reading through the archives of the RCP Aubrac, it becomes clear that it was essentially an explorative endeavor aimed at constituting a new kind of ethnography. The definition of the Aubrac as scientific field; the methods to be employed; the conceptions that should guide the research process—all of these aspects were intensely discussed. The interdisciplinary group tested and developed different, and sometimes clashing, fieldwork practices and media, as well as extensive discussions about the shape and requirements of sociological versus ethnological fields (Rhyner Reference Rhyner2024a). Here I focus on those aspects that were particularly important for the later invention of the ecomuseum: the notion of a cultural region, enriched by its recent past.

Through archival as well as ethnographic research, the core group of the RCP Aubrac quickly identified the productive units (called “montagnes”), consisting of a cottage and pastures, as the determining socio-economic characteristic of the region. The “burons” (alpine cabins, see fig. 1), with their distinct architecture, as well as their inhabitants, the “buronniers” (shepherds), came to be the most visible component, or cultural signifier, of the region. This shepherd economy, “just now disappearing” as the researchers put it, had shaped the natural environment in a unique way. It was only in the work of the about thirty researchers, striving towards a descriptive analysis of their chosen field, that the Aubrac came to be defined as a cultural region: a region characterized by the shepherd economy and the associated landscape (see fig. 2).

Figure 1.

Claude Royer, MNATP. Recherches coopératives sur programme sur l’Aubrac (1964–1966): Le buron, 07/09/1964, Mucem, Ph.1965.137.441. Credit: Mucem/Claude Royer.

Figure 2.

This map was published in a separate printing, accompanying the publications of the RCP Aubrac as a guide for the reader. It showed all of the so-called “montagnes,” economic units consisting of alpine huts and pastures. It can be seen as a key result as it established the Aubrac as a field determined by a specific socio-economic structure. Source: Lajoux and Jest Reference Lajoux and Jest1970. Credit: CNRS.

This identification of the cultural region with its just-gone economy would be central to anthropological interventionist knowledge. The characterization of the Aubrac as a culturally specific region built on a change in the epistemic position of the anthropologist vis-à-vis the Aubrac’s inhabitants—a development that was important for the ecomuseum’s later claim to be a tool of local participation. This change rested on an acknowledgement of the disappearing economy as carrier of an admittedly outdated but essentially rational system. Even though the researchers took the need to modernize and industrialize as a given, they explicitly attributed other kinds of rationality and a kind of internal logic to the past socio-economic structures. As we will see, this was the very precondition for adding value—for enriching—a landscape with knowledge about past and outdated economies.

In the ethnographic encounter, the recognition that the pastoral economy was not in itself irrational was connected to the anthropologists’ consistently expressed desire to gain a holistic understanding and to be on a par with their counterparts in the field, the investigated local inhabitants. Upon examining their field notes and reports, it becomes apparent that how to talk to and to interact with locals was not an established routine, but was tested and reflected upon. At a time when conversation and interview techniques were intensively discussed in the social sciences,Footnote ¹³ the ethnological approach “at home” featured a striking emphasis on the imperative of establishing rapport with the shepherds; on becoming part of their milieu; on spending time with them and experiencing the hard work;Footnote ¹⁴ on having “open” conversations. One doctoral student reflected that this kind of “observation participante” (participant observation)Footnote ¹⁵ was “the opposite of the method that treats the informant as a lemon to be squeezed to the maximum in the minimum amount of time. It allows us to understand people.”Footnote ¹⁶

This kind of ethnography “at home” indeed involved the epistemic virtue of participation.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather than collecting facts and evidence of material culture in the field (mostly speaking to representative or authoritative members of rural communities, such as priests, teachers, or mayors), these researchers sought to work with the locals and establish a meaningful exchange and a trustful relationship, upon which the understanding of the local situation would depend (Rhyner Reference Rhyner2024a) (see fig. 3). These changes observable in the fieldwork practice were connected to a broader shift in French (and German) folklore studies. To describe a region in its ethnological and historical complexity was a significant departure from mainly distributional questions (e.g. for the production of atlases), that folklore studies had been asking previously.Footnote ¹⁸

Figure 3.

Jean-Dominique Lajoux, MNATP. Recherches coopératives sur programme sur l’Aubrac (1964-1966): Dans le buron. Monsieur Pelat et Claude Royer devant l’écrémeuse, 20/07/1964, Mucem, Ph.1965.109.233. Credit: Mucem/Jean-Dominique Lajoux.

The changes in the ethnographic encounter also shaped the visual techniques employed in the research. Ethno-filmer and RCP-Aubrac participant Jean-Dominique Lajoux mentioned repeatedly how important it was to establish a trustful relationship with residents, which necessitated a long immersion into what he called the “milieu humain” of the Aubrac.Footnote ¹⁹ He claimed to use his camera and the photographs to establish meaningful connections, for example by giving photographs back to the locals. Lajoux also organized film evenings in the villages so that the residents could watch the short movies he had produced. The significance of this gesture should not be underestimated, in light of the financial and logistical implications of transporting the necessary technical equipment to achieve it.

The cultural knowledge produced in the RCP Aubrac was formed not only by photographs but by a range of media, from texts to drawings, audio, and video, which aimed to fully grasp the human-natural milieu, corresponding to the epistemic shift in ethnographic work. Even if there was not a coherent final synthesis that would have brought the many participants of the field project to one ultimate conclusion, the variety of techniques and approaches—from sound recordings and analysis by ethno-linguistics to interviews and budgets of economic sociology—provided a dense picture of the Aubrac as a cultural region. With its more than 10,000 photographs, about fifteen films (between five and ninety minutes long), many architectural and other drawings, and nearly 4000 sound recordings, the production of audio and visual documents was immense. It provided more than enough material to fill exhibitions, publications, media reports, films, etc. The management of these materials involved a complex and very detailed handling system that was only possible because the fieldwork project could rely on the technical services provided by the MNATP.

Arguably, this “media system” paved the way for the recognition of popular culture as a worthy representation of French heritage. In addition, the RCP Aubrac’s “thick documentation”Footnote ²⁰ would eventually fill the storage halls of the new MNATP.Footnote ²¹ Methodologically, the RCP Aubrac led to fieldwork practices that valued interactions “on a par” with locals and supported a revaluation of the region’s culture and economy. The acknowledgement that the ways of life of their research partners (the inhabitants of the Aubrac) were not irrational per se, but had their own, historical logic, was expressed in the epistemic virtue of participation. Conversely, this was the very precondition for ethnographic practices as means of enrichment. The Aubrac as a cultural region defined by the dying shepherd economy rested on this re-valuing of the anachronistic economic way of life. The complex “human-natural milieu” now had value in itself.Footnote ²² But why was this value also appreciated by actors in economic development, where value creation had been closely linked to industrial production?

A shift in perception: The economy of territoire

This thick documentation and description of the special, historically grown human-natural milieu of the Aubrac region served, in time, as the basis for a new, culture-based form of economic development. It also involved the translation of concepts and methods from the ethnographic field to political areas, an activity predicated on the researchers’ willingness to actively seek connections outside academia. Rivière, for one, was very much interested in getting involved with political institutions. One example is Rivière’s attempt to become involved in “Plan N° V” (1966–1970) of France’s planning strategy to shape its economy after WWII. In a report presented to one of the plan’s commissions in 1965, Rivière suggested the “mise en valeur” (enhancement) of particular, “typical” rural houses that would serve as museums,Footnote ²³ apparently inspired by a trip to Sweden’s open air museums.Footnote ²⁴ At this point, Rivière already saw open air museums as a measure to avoid rural depopulation (intensifying with the full effects of the Common Market) but presented the value of traditional houses more in architectural than in regional terms.Footnote ²⁵ This was soon to change.

In Rivière’s political work, the discovery of the complex milieu in the Aubrac translated into a very specific notion that designated a particular area, with its own ecology, culture, and agricultural produce, as a “territoire.” Fueled by new research on territories like the Aubrac, it was no longer single cultural aspects like architecture that Rivière put at the center of his interventions, but entire cultural regions. In the definition of the ecomuseum as well as in other writings from the 1970s, the term “territoire” is central for Rivière’s argument. It serves to designate the particular, one-of-a-kind region in its communicable and recognizable form—the region as historically enriched:

In translating the scientific “milieu” into the political “territoire,” Rivière chose a term that was already established in the political vocabulary of the time. One main French institution for regional planning carried “territoire” in its title. The Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’action régionale (DATAR) was founded in 1963 as a government institution. The first decade of DATAR was influenced by its leading officials, namely Oliver Guichard and Jérôme Monod. The latter in particular propagated development by means of decentralization of industries to the provinces.Footnote ²⁷

However, the industrial paradigm of regional development was disputed even in the offices of DATAR. For example, DATAR advocated for the state acquisition of land to create regional parks and founded a working group for this purpose in 1964. Its aim was to develop a new park label, similar to the already institutionalized national parks, but less demanding. Whereas national parks were mainly thought to preserve nature and needed huge territories, natural or regional parks would be a way to establish smaller areas for recreational and touristic purposes, all the while preserving supposedly traditional landscapes (similar initiatives, connected to regional development and the promotion of tourism, spread in other European countries at that time).Footnote ²⁸

The idea caught on but was quickly confronted with criticisms about its claim to locality and problems of financing. Overall, the stumbling block seemed to have been the question of for whom the parks would eventually be built: for visitors from elsewhere or for residents? In a provisional document on the politics of regional parks in the archival folder of the Conférence permanente des Parcs, the authors asked: “Are the Regional Nature Parks the expression of a ‘real local political choice’, an institution based on consensus and the assumption of responsibility by the local communities? Are they a test bed controlled by the Administration, tools of space management registered in a ministerial organization chart?”Footnote ²⁹ Rivière took an advisory role on several of the regional park projects, for example on ethnographic acquisitions,Footnote ³⁰ and hence was probably familiar with these problems.

Rivière’s activities in governmental as well as scientific settings probably influenced how and why he—and others—saw an opportunity to push for the ecomuseum as a solution to the problems of locality and participation that shine through the discussions about the regional parks. As already mentioned, in the beginning he suggested that open air museums could be connected to these parks. But with time, he stressed the importance of local participation. In an article written in 1973, he argued for the connection of development through heritage and the involvement of the local population: “What is important … is that the community which supports it should feel involved; that it be given an exposition of its historical heritage as a trampoline for its future development (Rivière 2001 [Reference Rivière1973], 37).

It is this notion of participation that was supposed to set ecomuseums apart. It is important to highlight that even if tourism was one of the obvious economic sectors which could—and would—build upon ecomuseums, this institution was itself not primarily aimed at the commodification of culture, but at solving to the question of how to involve local residents in their own, local development. In other words, cultural development was suggested as a counter-measure to regional development focused on industrialization. The ecomuseum was part of a larger, global trend, critically brought forward in organizations such as UNESCO as well as ICOM (which, as mentioned, Rivière directed from 1948 to 1965), to rethink museums as part of global postwar development (Huber Reference Huber2021; Geering Reference Geering2019).

It was in the interventionist scientific work of Rivière and other anthropologists that the notion of territoire shifted from being the place where something was produced (and hence needed improvement of the soil, for example), to being itself the commercialized product or the economically productive object. In the RCP Aubrac, it was possible to see in detail how the region’s past, its boundaries and characteristics, were discovered, documented and visualized through the focus on the socio-economic system of transhumance.Footnote ³¹ This knowledge about a region’s culture became the basis for cultural development, as described by Boltanski and Esquerre in Enrichment. The ecomuseum can be seen as an instrument for development by means of cultural heritage.Footnote ³² It was the tool that sought to transform the “industrial basin”—an area shaped by the industrial and modernist development paradigm of the postwar period—into an “enrichment basin” (Boltanski and Esquerre Reference Boltanski and Esquerre2020, 16), that is to say, a region defined and refined by a culturalist understanding of its economic past.

Local participation as development: The example of Le Creusot

The presence of anthropologists who participated in the new Ethnologie de France inside the emerging cultural development can, on the one hand, be explained by their own drive towards governmental intervention—as seen in the case of Rivière. On the other hand, knowledge about a region’s culture, enriched by its historical, declining economies, as well as methodological development towards participant observation “on a par” were resources upon which they could draw to claim expertise about local participation. This turned out to be the key argument in political spheres, as a solution to the shortcomings of economic development “from above” during the postwar industrial politics.

One of the first ecomuseums was founded in Le Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines in 1974, relying not on an “outdated” pastoral but a “just-gone” industrial economy. Considering how cultural regions were identified with those aspects of the economy that were “just disappearing” explains why the ecomuseum was a tool of “self-recognition” (see Rivière’s quote at the beginning of this article) that was not limited to agricultural settings. The ecomuseum came to be a tool of alternative economic development for post-agrarian as well as post-industrial regions.Footnote ³³

Le Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines was a newly created “communauté urbaine” (urban community) consisting of sixteen communes in the eastern region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and shaped by its very successful steel industry with one dominant family-run company called Schneider et Cie (founded in 1836). After the Second World War, the company managed to get on its feet for a while (with help from the Marshall Plan and an expansion into nuclear industry), followed by changes in the organizational structure and the retreat of the Schneider family in the 1960s. After a decade of uncertainty in the European steel industry, related to the oil shock in the early 1970s, the company (by then called Creusot-Loire) eventually dissolved in the 1980s. The Schneider family had already sold its residence, the monumental Château de la Verriere, to the city of Le Creusot in 1969 (see fig. 4). This was the place where, in times of deindustrialization, one of the first ecomuseums would reside. The initiative came from three—non-local—museologists: Marcel Evrard (employee at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris), who served as director of the ecomuseum until 1985, along with Hughues de Varine (director of the International Council of Museums ICOM) and Rivière, whom Evrard recruited to join him in an advisory role (Corrias, Le Foll, and Moëllo Reference Corrias, Le Foll and Moëllo2020, 3).Footnote ³⁴

Figure 4.

The Château de la Verriere. Picture by the author, May 2022.

Local participation was at the core of the strategy of alternative development through regional culture, as represented in the creation of the ecomuseum in Le Creusot. In the very first article of the ecomuseum’s bylaws drafted in 1974, the goal of the association is described as the “involve[ment of] the entire population of the Urban Community in the knowledge creation, planning and development of this community, taking into account the originality of its components and the diversity of its interests.”Footnote ³⁵ In its first program, the ecomuseum is described as an institution that aims at “the constant contact with the real [réel], the participation of individuals and groups …; one single goal: development.”Footnote ³⁶ The ecomuseum’s legal structure also reflected its founders’ efforts to institutionalize local participation. The ecomuseum was an association led by three departments: the management committee, the scientific and technical committee, and the users’ committee (“comité d’usagers”), which consisted mostly of representatives of local associations of various kinds.

The ecomuseum was partly financed by state funds dedicated to development. The first budget of the ecomuseum in Le Creusot in 1974 is mixed—with several smaller contributions by regional entities (for example, the municipality) and a large contribution by local industries (400,000f), all adding up to 900,000 francs. To this, the state added 350,000f via DATAR and 150,000f via the ministry for the environment.Footnote ³⁷ In the late 1970s, about thirty people worked at the ecomuseum, some of them employees, some of them visiting researchers (Corrias, Le Foll, and Moëllo Reference Corrias, Le Foll and Moëllo2020, 9). The ecomuseum was clearly successful in promising a significant contribution to the entire region’s future.

In the early stages of the ecomuseum, a large amount of resources and working hours were spent on knowledge-creation about the region: What was the region’s scope, what were its main characteristics, and how could one make them visible? The above-mentioned program claimed, under the very first segment called “la connaissance” (knowledge), that it was necessary to create, as a first step, a “database, accessible to all and usable for any subsequent action by each individual as well as by the group.”Footnote ³⁸ Establishing such a database was an interdisciplinary task, fulfilled by “experts of technology, of rural sociology, architecture, ecology, as well as two photographers and many volunteers” and resembles the thick documentation established by the practice of the musée-laboratoire and the RCP Aubrac.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, the ecomuseum’s structure also combined research with the collection of popular culture. And it included archival practices: From the beginning, the ecomuseum tried (with only partial success) to get hold of the archives of the local industries.Footnote ⁴⁰

Over the years, the focus on the ecomuseum as a tool to gain knowledge about the region’s identity did not cease. In a report directed at the museum’s scientific committee ca. 1980, the authors still claimed the necessity of investigating the regional culture. It highlighted that the museum’s task was the combination of scientific “experimentation” and “practice,” “involving in equal and reciprocal shares the researchers themselves and the population, ‘the milieu’ constituted by the Community, which remains the original reference point behind all this research”.Footnote ⁴¹ This original reference point was “the fact” of “TERRITORIALITY, on the existence of the Community and the sixteen communes concerned. The Community’s territory is a milieu that research must analyze from every possible point of view, but with a view to an essential convergence.”Footnote ⁴²

In this site-specific research, the industrial character of le Creusot was perceived as an advantage. Similar to the Aubrac, which was described as an exemplary rural and agricultural field, le Creusot was a privileged site for understanding industrial fields:

In line with the fascination with industry as a historical phenomenon, le Creusot became, for a brief moment, a hotspot for historians of technology and “culture technique.”Footnote ⁴⁴

As already visible in the quotes above, the research on the “eco-region” was linked rhetorically to the involvement of the local population. To take another example, Hughues de Varine exclaimed in 1973 that the ecomuseum was not to be identified with its main location, the Château, but that the entire community and its landscape should be a “living museum,” (Varine-Bohan Reference Varine-Bohan1973, 244) which did not have visitors, but inhabitants (indeed the museum did not charge entrance fees until 1986). But this was not only rhetoric. When the museum began to collect industrial heritage, it approached the local inhabitants through different channels. In 1979, for example, the museum prepared an exhibition about industrial patrimony. It sent out a letter to its users’ committee, highlighting that “every one of us can participate in the research work, the collecting of objects, the choice of documents.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It asked: “What remains of the industrial past in: the buildings (workplaces, habitat); the objects (techniques, everyday life); the pictures (photos, postcards, engravings); the ‘old papers’ (archives of industries and personal archives); the memory of those who have lived it (life histories, oral archives and audiovisuals)?”Footnote ⁴⁶

In practice, the ecomuseum followed two main strategies to institutionalize local participation. One was the already mentioned users’ committee (see fig. 5). It met regularly and was meant to contribute to the museum’s functioning, for example by giving its members the opportunity to create their own small exhibitions.Footnote ⁴⁷ The meetings were regularly featured in local newspapers, as were the well-attended organized excursions that would take some fifty to eighty locals to different sites in the entire region by bus.

Figure 5.

Unknown, Marcel Evrard during a meeting of the “comité des usagers de l’Écomusée,” 24.06.1979. Source: Photothèque Ecomusée Creusot-Montceau. © Ecomusée Creusot Montceau/reproduction D. Busseuil.

The other strategy concerned the creation of tools, occasions, and media channels so as to increase the interaction with local inhabitants. For example, walking tours were created with information boards that were supposed to guide the strollers’ gaze and raise their awareness of the (industrial) richness of their surroundings.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1977, the ecomuseum started to publish a regular newsletter (“bulletin d’informations”) to connect the academic personnel to the inhabitants. A second publication—the revue Milieux—was devised to reach an even broader audience. In its conception phase, it was put forward as a medium that would link the museum to the surrounding population:

The approach to participant observation “on a par” with locals as part of a new Ethnologie de France as represented in the RCP Aubrac prefigured the ecomuseum’s insistence on its consciously created ethnographic encounters with the local community, as this statement in a preparatory document claimed: “Observer and observed, experimenter and experienced, must be able to exchange positions, dialogue, mutually enrich each other and ultimately participate in a collective and harmonious work.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Local participation was not unique to the ecomuseum in Le Creusot, but was central to the concept itself. It was the selling point that Rivière and others stressed when addressing political or public actors. Participation was clearly thought to be a promising solution for the economic problems of specific regions (and to the perils of industrialized society). Neither top-down industrialization nor a complete forfeiture of the hopes attached to industrial development, the ecomuseum was supposed to combine locality with a still universal concept of “aménagement” (development).

However, in the end, some of the ecomuseum’s expectations in terms of participation—that the locals would manage their own heritage through the ecomuseum—did not materialize. The users’ committee dissolved in 1985, and entry fees were introduced in 1986 (Corrias, Le Foll, and Moëllo Reference Corrias, Le Foll and Moëllo2020). Running an ecomuseum came to be a profession limited to trained personnel. But the notion of participation continued to shape the ecomuseum and the establishment of new training courses at the intersection of Ethnologie de France and cultural animation. In 1981, the ecomuseum in Le Creusot announced its plan to become a place for training museologists and curators of cultural heritage. Its project outline argued that ecomuseums should be seen as a tool of economic development based on cultural knowledge gained inside and with a local community. It noted that “balanced development cannot exist without being permeated by culture,” and that “cultural life and cultural action cannot be conceived and appreciated outside the precise framework of the immediate community.”Footnote ⁵¹ The result of acknowledging this, it concluded, “is interactions that require a profound knowledge of these communities and the full integration of cultural agents within them.”Footnote ⁵²

The enriched knowledge economy

In the same document outlining the aspects of a new cultural profession for ecomuseums, the idea that ecomuseums should be seen as “an instrument of development”Footnote ⁵³ is made explicit: “[I]t [the ecomuseum] contributes both to cultural development … and to the cultural dimension of global development. A data bank, a dynamic center of animation and education, of research and participation, speaking a language above languages, it is part of life and accompanies the continuous creation of the future.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In this paper, I argued that the ecomuseum as a tool of development has to be historically situated in the epistemic changes of the transformation of French folklore into an Ethnologie de France, which in turn was shaped by the questions of rural desertion and (im-)possible industrializations of agriculture in postwar France. As it turns out, the notion of culture as just-disappearing economies, and of the anthropologist as a participant in the local milieu, took shape in 1960s fieldwork projects.

The main aim of this paper was to show that there was an intimate link between the establishment of a professionalized Ethnologie de France in the 1960s and the creation of a new understanding of regional culture as something which had to be maintained and cared for by scholars in collaboration with local inhabitants. This ethnographic field research was the prerequisite to a new kind of value: the value of out-of-date but historically enriched working cultures, materialized in built environments (abandoned factories, out-of-use artefacts, practices, tools, machines, etc.). The anthropological knowledge and practices developed during the search for a modern Ethnologie de France were the very condition for something like the enrichment economy even to take shape. The ecomuseum, then, can be understood as an institutionalization of this new understanding of regional culture as well as an attempt to give continuity to practices of maintaining regional culture through participation and thick documentation.

The ecomuseum stands for a kind of intervention that was supposed to be generalizable (the concept should work for very different regions) but at the same time attuned to local conditions (the local setting as something that could not be known from afar but only through interaction with the inhabitants). The anthropological notions of immersion in a local setting and regional culture provided the basis for a kind of “soft” intervention. What was very specific to the ecomuseum was that it was part of a new understanding of “economy” insofar as it proposed cultural development instead of industrial development.

Today there are about 300 ecomuseums worldwide, 200 of which are located in Europe (120 in France alone). It might not be possible to measure the actual economic impact of one single ecomuseum; and one need not assume that all ecomuseums are (still) serving the same ideas and hopes as they were in the 1970s to see their spread as a thorough integration of ecomuseums in the tourism and enrichment economies. Further investigation would be required to analyze the ways in which the institutionalization of local participation for the creation of regional culture was, in some cases, a first step towards straightforward commodification of popular and local culture in terms of tourism or regional produce protected by labels such as “AOP” (Appellation d’Origine Protégée).Footnote ⁵⁵

The history of the ecomuseum elucidates the relationship between knowledge and economy in 1970s and 1980s France. The anthropologists’ interventionist project led not only to the creation of knowledge as a product to be applied, but to the creation of a new space for creating knowledge. The ecomuseum, I have argued, was not an “applied” result of “pure” research, but a space of knowledge production, where governmental and scientific aims, methods, and practices met. It institutionalized the revalorization of an entire region through its local culture, as part of an enriched knowledge economy.