In Situ (Jan 2018)
S’attacher/être attaché au biou
Abstract
In the year 2011 in the Arbois city of the Jura departement, the town council and the vine growers expressed their strong desire to apply for their vine and wine-growing celebration called the biou, to be registered on the representative list of humanity intangible cultural heritage. Under the close collaboration and supervision of the regional cultural Affairs management team of what was then called the Franche Comté, there followed an ethnological investigation, the making of a film, an active research was set up to build a solid and significant candidateship, an exhibition was organized, a companionship was created and a number of friendly relationships were activated. As a result, a complete file was sent to the Unesco world heritage site where it is now “waiting to be examined”. The purpose of this article is to deal with exposing the results of the first stage of the above mentioned enquiry, based on the observations of the preparations of the celebration and of the celebration itself, as well as the interviews with those directly involved in the making of it : all this in the context of making an event part of heritage which is the producer of reflexivity. This investigation focused on conditions and degree of attachment of the biou by those who actually practice it. On the one hand the construction of a giant cluster of grapes, itself called the biou and achieved by assembling real grapes from various Arbois vine-growing areas and the construction of a wreath also made from grapes, on the other hand the use made of each of them, i.e. the biou will be blessed during a religious ceremony whereas the wreath, will be hung at the war memorial monument and honoured there while the Mayor will remember those who contributed to create Arbois and will celebrate the Republic. So with these two objects, relations to time and a collective are actually created and shaped, or perhaps temporalities are established and collectives constructed. The biou works on time, just as it works and shapes a complex and differentiated collective, two of the criteria showing that heritage and common good can lean towards each other in a non-commercial event. Far from being a show as it may appear to be at first sight, the biou is in essence, what Arbois actually is. It falls within the province of “the moment of revelation” by which and in which a human group shows itself in both its tensions – here the religious and the civil - and its abilities to live alongside them.
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