The conflicts in peasant society and the form in which they appear in the records of the bourgeois judicial system of the late nineteenth century have merged and become one. Only by analyzing the specific form of the actions, images, words, and gestures in these testimonies, by perceiving them as a text of cultural mediation and encounter, can we move beyond the individual case and the preformulated facts of each case and glimpse the face of the society about which they are speaking. By way of conclusion, I should like to link the anthropological and historical dimensions of my study, using these forms and symbols to give this face new, sensuous features, the traces of which emerge from the records.

The specific historical location of this society emerges more clearly from the symbols employed than from the individual criminal acts or any combination of them. It is only at this level that the temporally specific and archaic structures overlap. These symbols make it possible to embed a temporally limited conflict in a context of life and sense that transcends the moment or identifies it as temporary. But it may also turn out that historically new conflicts are experienced and processed in a more archaic way than might be supposed if taken separately, or that for a specific kind of conflict a mode of enactment is sought that is no longer capable of disclosing itself to the spirit of a new age. I should like to discuss this point in greater detail by comparing the cases of arson dealt with here with those that occurred in the England of the industrial revolution during the first half of the nineteenth century.