Miriam Goldstein

October 10, 2012

To Uproot a Tree: Globalizations Effects on Village Life

The year 1825 saw the birth of railroad transportation (George Stephenson). With it
came the ability to traverse continents with astounding speed. Then, in 1837, the electric
telegraph came into existence, allowing for the most efficient form of communication up to that
point (Telegraph). These technological marvels connected humans like never before, but at a
price: For every period has always preferred the new to the old, at least up until the nineteenth
century (Hlias 335, emphasis added). In the past, families kept their old hand-me-down
furniture, their same run-down houses, out of necessity, not because they held some significant
historical value for them (Hlias 335). What happened in the nineteenth century that caused
people to start putting greater stock in the past? Globalization, the assimilation of various small
peoples into the greater mosh pit of the world, reached even the tiniest of villages for the first
time. Therefore, it is no surprise that Pierre-Jakez Hliass own pays bigouden began to witness
the effects of this mass movement, especially by the time of his birth near the start of the Great
War, a conflict then unprecedented itself in global involvement (Hlias 31). When Hlias reflects
on his lost village, he does not mourn it alone but all those like it. In The Horse of Pride, the
majority of the details he documents those features of village life that he wants his readers to
become aware of likely existed in almost all of the villages of Brittany, in most of those in
France, and in many others around the world. Hlias, whether consciously or unconsciously,
longs not for his own pays but all that it symbolized, all that globalization killed.
When the phenomenon of globalization moved in on the small villages of the
countryside, it robbed them of a crucial human element: the community. Within the tiny world of
the pays bigouden, Hlias and his family knew about every birth, every death, and all of the
events in between (Hlias 37). They even knew how much meat a woman bought each month a
symbol of prestige (Hlias 254). Their world was so compact as to allow almost everyone to
know each other to such a degree that, on New Years, when the children of Hliass village
would go from house to house well-wishing and collecting sous, Hliass mother advised him to
visit only those who could tell from his face to which parents he belonged (Hlias 118). In this
society, each person had a place and people to look out for him. Whenever a death occurred, the
women of the village would take over the house, completing all the necessary chores, thereby
allowing the family to grieve (Hlias 108). This great community had originated in the fields,
where all of the villagers threshed and harvested together (Hlias 286). In this regard, teamwork
had evolved out of necessity, to complete tasks that individuals could not possibly have handled
alone. Before the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of agriculture, the
same need for collaboration had preserved the community. When the new machines caused this
bonding factor to disappear, the community began faltering, only to collapse completely by the
time universal military service, public education, and mass culture reached the pays bigouden
(Hlias xv). After globalization invaded the Breton countryside, people became both too
different from another and too homogeneous. Those students who had left to study in the larger
towns had learned so much more than their neighbors as to make it almost impossible for them to
feel connected any longer (Hlias 310). At the same time, people had become too alike.
Individuals from across the country had come together to serve in World War I or to attend the
city schools, meeting people they never would have otherwise. They swapped bits of each
others personalities, their customs, and other attributes, until they all became more or less the
same people. That is what globalization does. It takes away individuality until the distinctions
that separate communities and individuals die out, and people can no longer tell one human
being from the other. A closed door in Hliass village used to insult those who passed by
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Miriam Goldstein

October 10, 2012

(Hlias 267). Now, such doors are commonplace. Someone can knock, but even then, he knows
not if the door will open (Hlias 311). The people behind it likely do not know him. He is just
another face on the street. The community provided a certain degree of belonging, a sense of
shelter an essential factor in life, just as much as food. Now, it is every man for himselfand
let the rest drop dead (Hlias 321).
Because of globalization, people also no longer understand one another. Not only does a
literal barrier in language now exist in Hliass village with the older generation speaking only
Breton while their grandchildren know nothing but French but even those who speak the same
language may express different sentiments in the same words. People need their mother tongue
to express precisely what they are what they want (Hlias 340). A language finds its basis in
the features of the society it comes from. An individual cannot completely convey all of his
emotions in a language rooted in a culture that lacks those emotions completely. Similarly,
Breton has no words for trenches, shells, and a seventy-five because World War I soldiers did
not respond to their commanders in that language (Hlias 45). The battlefield is so distant from
Breton life as to make such words unnecessary. This rule applies to other societies too. For
example, when native Chinese speakers complete personality tests, the results come up
differently when they take the test in Chinese than when they take it in English (Myers 320). In
these different languages, they are essentially different people. Such bipolarity is not healthy. It
causes confusion of ones identity, the same confusion that those Bretons of Hliass generation
suffer from. With the rapid coming of globalization, with the sudden push for all those under the
Third Republics control to learn the French language in school, those stuck in the middle of the
transition became lost (Hlias xii). They still feel in Breton, but they must speak in French.
Perhaps their elders still understand them, but how can their children? The new purely-Frenchspeaking generation grew up thinking in French. They simply cannot make sense of the Breton
life of their ancestors. Without the ability to grasp the livelihood of those who came before them,
how can they possibly find stable roots on which to grow in the modern world?
By doing away with the community and the language of the Breton villages,
globalization also destroyed the values that had preserved their societies for centuries. The
driving force of pride had propelled the Breton people in most of their pursuits. Pride took such
precedence in the pays bigouden, in fact, that Hlias included it in the title of his book. It came
from satisfaction with ones work and the assurance that one could provide for oneself and ones
family (Hlias 318, 320). The farmers, the workers of the land in other words, all that the
Breton villagers used to be had great power in the pre-globalization age. They alone could
work with life (Hlias 323). Only they knew the precise balance that preserved the natural
world and allowed life to continuously spring from it (Hlias 324). Globalization took the Breton
away from his land, forcing him into the cities and into the factories, into the menial jobs that
made him find little meaning in life and consequently lose his pride (Hlias 319). In a small
village, a man is the friendly shoemaker or the honest baker. He finds self-worth in the
knowledge that he alone can provide his village, his honorary family, with all that they require.
In the factory, he has no special significance; any other man could easily replace him. In addition
to confidence in ones individual capabilities, pride also derived from awareness and
appreciation of ones heritage. When the young people began to prefer the jazzier clarinet and
accordion to the traditional oboe and bagpipes, when they began to dance the new sensations, the
waltz and tangos that swept Europe, the older Bretons could already see their society crumbling
(Hlias 315). The new generation found no problem in following the cultural waves that flooded
their no-longer-secluded village, but in doing so they lost their pride in their own cultural legacy.
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Miriam Goldstein

October 10, 2012

As they became increasingly more obsessed with the modern era, as they began to move to the
mirage of the cities and find more value in one dreary room than in a thousand acres, they lost
their sense of human dignity (Hlias 322, xii). They had truly forgotten their Breton selves. By
leaving behind their homeland for some overblown metropolis, they forsook their community,
their language, and ultimately their pride.
Folklore, Hlias explains, is a defensive reaction against a future which, despite all of
its promises, cannot help but trouble the sons of man (330). The Horse of Pride, in the end, is a
work of folklore. In highlighting all that was right with the pays bigouden, Hlias reveals the
problems of the present day. In doing so, perhaps he means to save the future from any further
degradation at the hands of a still-hungry beast: globalization. It is not that globalization in of
itself is wrong, but the globalization that tore up the Breton countryside only did so because it
moved too quickly (Hlias 316). It did not have time stop and reflect on a cultures remnants
before it decided they had little value. A society should not remain stagnant, and Breton society
never has. However, change should not move in only one direction either. The Breton womens
headdress fluctuated in height over the years, yet it always still remained in some form or other
(Hlias 276). Globalization only causes problems when it wipes out completely those attributes a
society is not ready to give up. That is what leads to a loss of identity, when the people, like the
branches of a tree, no longer have a sturdy trunk to stabilize them. The misplaced people of a
destroyed society will look anywhere for a place to ground themselves, and some of them will
end up in the wrong one, falling prey to ideologies that do not represent what they truly believe.
Any disruption in order can be dangerous, but globalization causes it unnecessarily and to too
great a degree. If anything, at least globalization can find some salvation in the fact it has the
ability to help reverse itself. Without globalization, the many people who have read Hliass
book all those who have taken his message to heart would have never even heard his name.

Miriam Goldstein

October 10, 2012

Works Cited
"George Stephenson." Encyclopdia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopdia
Britannica Inc. Web. 6 Oct. 2012.
Hlias, Pierre-Jakez. The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village. Trans. June Guicharnaud.
New Haven: Yale University, 1978. Print.
Myers, David G. Myers' Psychology for AP. New York: Worth, 2011. Google Books. Google.
Web. 7 Oct. 2012.
"Telegraph." Encyclopdia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopdia Britannica Inc.
Web. 6 Oct. 2012.