Contenu du sommaire : Inde du sud tradition et modernité.

Retail Selling at a Weekly Rural Market in Southern India : the Example of Pollachi. The sale of local agricultural produce is one of the main activities of Pollachi. Until 1987, the weekly market was held on Thursday. That year, following an incident, a wholesale market was held each week from Monday to Saturday. Since then, however, the sandai (weekly market ) is devoted only to retail selling. The sandai must now compete with the daily markets and the stores of the town. Its activity has fallen sharply ; the merchants who go to it are experiencing a weakened economic situation. The new direction that the sàndai has taken raises questions about the future of it. Its disappearance would create countless problems ; for it is the source of both direct and indirect employment, and many rural folk come to Pollachi because of it.

Temporary migrants in an urban setting. The case of construction workers in the work site of Coimbatore, Southern India. The building industry in India is a highly important business sector for the employment of surplus rural manual labor. It hires in the main village folk on a temporary basis The men are recruited by a work contractor and come to the city in groups from a same village, to work on the construction of one to two buildings. These village folk live on the work site, work hard and are better paid than in a rural environment. Periods of unemployment, however, may be relatively long. The workers therefore do not hesitate to resume their former activities at their place of birth. In the last analysis, these groups of rural folk do not at all manage to integrate into an urban environment ; the city is simply a place of work and of shopping. In the work site, the life the men lead is not at all similar to what they knew in their native village. The new geographical space causes the creation of codes and of new behavior ; activities forbidden in the villages disappear and give way to new rites, which prevail during the period of building construction and vanish as soon as the men have returned to the village where they were born.

Plants and their Combinations in the Cooking of Rural Forest Communities in the Western Ghats -The forest communities in the Western Ghats do not form a society of abundance in the mercantile sense of the word. Still, as far as cooking is concerned, the villagers are the possessors of a remarkable wealth. Their food, far from being bland, has an astonishing range of flavors, smells, colors and consistencies. The diversity of their diet is not only remarkable for the resources which they avail themselves (wild plants, those found locally as well as those grown in gardens) but is also impressive for their knowledge of these plants as well as the ability to use them. This diversity in their nutrition is therefore not a by-product of availability of a market place, but is rather closely linked to the forest environment, to subsistence farming, and to the cultural context of their society. This in turn provides the villagers with autonomy, quality, security -in a word, with abundance.

Summary : Hopes and Paradoxes in the Modernization of Fishing in India : the Example of the Coromandel Coast. In spite of considerable effort made by many national and international officials, the rapid growth of the fishing industry in India, and especially on the Coromandel Coast, today presents some very serious problems to the community of traditional fishermen. For some years now, an economic dichotomy has been observed in this activity : on the one hand, an acceleration in international trade along with an expansion in domestic markets, and on the other hand, a bypassing of the traditionnal fishermen, who therefore do not benefit from the modern production and distribution system. Field studies carried out in Pondicherry in 1992 and 1993 reveal how the traditional system works ; they have also pointed out the difficulties the traditional fishermen have in adapting to the process of modernization, which has been going on for some years now and which doesn't cease to expand. Notwithstanding the opening up of the national market, even though it still doesn't function smoothly, the "small" fishermen of the Coromandel Coast do not benefit from the manna that this new activity now means. The men are not at all trained to work with modern equipment, while the women, in charge of marketing, are seriously at a disavantage to compete with middlemen who are far better organized.