Rites of the Republic: Citizens' Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Southern France

Ingram's study artfully demonstrates how the practices and 'rites' of state cultural policy are incorporated and negotiated at quotidian, embodied levels, even as European integration and globalization expand the scales at which individuals think and live. French Studies

Drawing on research spanning two decades, [Ingram] is well positioned to address how these cultural producers creatively respond to a perceived crisis of postcolonial French identity and to processes of Europeanization and globalization. The result is a widely accessible ethnography that will appeal to scholars of contemporary France both inside and outside the field of anthropology. American Anthropologist

[...] this work of contemporary scholarship celebrating the role of the arts in promoting dialogue and community-building, with its ample maps, images, background information, and rich ethnographic detail will be appropriate for undergraduates as well as scholars of France and beyond. It provides a welcome new perspective on French cultural policy and challenges to republican universalism. It also offers a clear, on-the-ground account of local impacts of EU cultural initiatives, and the consequences for artists of neoliberalization moves by the French state. It will be very useful for courses on theatre, the media and the arts; globalization, neoliberalism, and the state; contemporary French society; and the anthropology of Europe. French Politics, Culture and Society

Ingram has produced an ethnographically rich, theoretically informed, and engaging study that speaks in a novel way to that most French of concerns and illuminates trends in cultural politics in France and throughout the European Union. Jeffrey Cole, Connecticut College

Based on long-term ethnographic research, and richly textured in the telling, Rites of the Republic is a highly original and vivid exploration of the tensions between the arts, popular culture, and national ideologies as they play out on stage in two citizens' theatre troupes in southern France. Susan Terrio, Georgetown University

A powerful and enlightening piece of contemporary ethnographic work, this book gives us a deep and intelligent analysis of, and reflection on, the evolution of state cultural policy in France, and the Avignon Festival, one of the most popular theatre festivals in Europe. Marc Abeles, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris