|Translation| Being affected Jeanne FAVRET-SAADA, Ecole pratique des hautes études Translated from the French by Mylene

Between  1969 and 1972, I conducted fieldwork in rural North-West France, protecting it from media curiosity by vaguely referring to it as the ―Western French Bocage [Hedgerow region].‖ I gathered two types of material from this research: a field journal in which I recounted daily events in great detail, and a typed account of some thirty dewitching seances that I had tape-recorded. Two books were drafted from the material in my field journal: Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1977), and Corps pour corps. Enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1988). The first one progressively introduced the reader to a world that is, in theory, inconceivable for him—that of Bocage witchcraft. The text consists of, one the one hand, accounts of events, narrated by the ethnographer who engaged with them; and on the other hand, an ethnographic commentary that relates them to wider aspects of Bocage culture and so renders them intelligible. The dividing line between the different voices present in the text (those of Bocage peasants, the narrator, and the interpretercommentator) should be immediately clear to the reader: the ethnography endeavors to assign a particular form of discourse to each. In the second book, Corps pour corps, the narrator and the commentator become one, since it is a personal diary. The text describes my progressive entry into local witchcraft, the way bewitched peasants and their dewitchers gradually accepted my presence, and the difficulties I had in submitting to their demands. It ends on the day when, after eighteen months on the field, I made an appointment for myself with a dewitcher called Madame Flora.