Contenu du sommaire

Rice Culture and Water Control in Democratic Kampuchea. In Democratic Kampuchea, agriculture is the main topic for the leaders. They set up collectivism in two different ways : 1) the cooperatives where the very young children, the married people and the old ones work on a sedentary basis ; 2) the mobile teams of young workers who go throughout the country. From three years on, everybody is a producer. Work is divided according to the age and the strength of individuals. The major changes and new realizations concern, on the one hand the modifications in the parcels and the transplanting ;on the other hand the construction of irrigation masterpieces which are erected all over the country : their quality is variable though improving. The production is likely to the one before, but exportations have grown ; this fact might explain the starvation of the people, at least partially.

The Conquest of the Marshes in Rwanda and the Dynamic of People Settlement. The author establishes a typology of the marshes in Rwanda and raises then the problem of the high densities of population. Hydromorphic valleys' bottoms are more and more viewed as a solution to the lack of balance resulting from excessive demographic pressure. For the years to come, «governmental strategies», sometimes competing with the initiatives taken by the peasants, tend to increase systematically the use of the marshes which traditionaly were not much cultivated. However this should not dissimulate a complex logic of migration which, finaly, lessens the importance of the marshes in the peasants' perception and practice of space.

Village Meeting Houses in Traditional Anniviers Valley (Switzerland). This study points out the advantage of a global interpretation of rural architecture which invokes sociology and history as well as folklore, contrary to the common typological approach. The evolution of the settlement in this lateral valley of the upper-Rhone, whose inhabitants lived in total isolation until the end of the nineteenth century, reflects the history of the valley's village communities : emancipation, the golden age, fixedness, and disintegration. A dynamic and symbolic interpretation of the valley's various sites and of the diverse elements of its dwellings permits the reconstruction of the Anniviers Valley's cosmology and the identification of its principal centers.

Emergence and Development of a Leisure for City Dwellers : the Forest of Fontainebleau The analysis of the social uses of forest spaces in the urban periphery constitutes a new field of study for sociologists. In the Paris region, the forest is supposed to serve as a leisure space for city dwellers «hungry» for pure air and silence ; but since when, how and for whom does the forest serve this purpose ? The case of Fontainebleau shows that in order to understand the means of penetration of the forest, it is necessary to decipher the social codes which are expressed in representations shared by certain groups, in art, or in the language and practices of forest managers. The forest then appears no longer as the antithesis of the city, but just as the other side of the urban system, its mirror : for the intellectual elite, the forest provides one opportunity among others to put into practice their cultivated attitudes, and to distinguish themselves from the masses ; for the middle class, it is experienced as a mean of access to a lifestyle oriented toward comfort and modernity ; as for the working classes, they paradoxically find not a single element familiar or compatible with their lifestyle.