Contenu du sommaire : Pays

Pays, paysans, campagnes

• Carte, désignations territoriales, sens commun géographique : les "noms de pays" selon Lucien Gallois - Jean-Claude Chamboredon p. 5-54
  Map, Territorial Terms, and Commonsensical Geography : The 'Names of Lands' On the basis of Lucien Gallois' Régions naturelles et noms de pays... (1908) and of the initial results of a survey, the author, a sociologist, argues that : - Gallois' work, ignored by sociologists and seldom quoted by geographers, has not been read by the former and has been too quickly by the latter ; - the careful reader will discover not only a criticism of the regionalizations constructed by geographers but also the elements of a theory of "territorial membership" and of a "spontaneous", collective geographical consciousness (with its mistaken ideas, lability and truth) ; - "old-fashioned" historical geography is not very different from political geography or even modern geopolitics ; - Gallois, Vidal de la Blache's disciple and colleague, is doser to Reclus (a student of Ritter) and Ratzel than is supposed.
• Mensonge romanesque et vérité des romanciers. Une relecture du Village romanesque - Rose-Marie Lagrave p. 55-73
  A Fictional Lie and the Truth of Fiction: Rereading Le village romanesque The author criticizes the approach she used in a 1980 study entitled Le village romanesque on two main points : the proof of the "fictional lie" and the use of literature as evidence of a novelist's social position. Attributing fictional lie down to the difference between village monographs and literary creation has resulted in underestimating the force of currents of thought that, in the 1950s, united the social sciences and literature through a nostalgic relationship to the rural world. The way this nostalgia is put into words depends both on an author's distance from the rural world and on his position in the world of literature. What remains to be done is a sociology of nostalgia that would analyze "dwelled" spaces in cities as well as in the countryside.
• Permanence et perversion de la ruralité - Bernard Kayser p. 75-108
  The Permanence and Perversion of Rurality Rurality is not what it used to be ; rural is no longer a simple opposite of urban. Since the "rural does exist", the author proposes drawing up a positive conception of rurality that will satisfy researchers in need of a theory and field workers in need of an analysis. To this end. he revises and brings up to date the dichotomy/continuum debate about the town-country relationship ; studies the results of interactions between officials definitions and statistical implications ; and both interprets and assesses the differential indicators of what is urban and rural. Beyond this description, he argues that rurality, a form of a society's relationship with space, is. above all, characterized by a local "inscription" that represents relationships with both the locality and environment.

• Chronique scientifique

  • Campagnes de l'Europe. XlVe colloque de l'Association des ruralistes français, Lyon 28-30 septembre 1988 - Marie-Christine Zelem, Marie-Claude Pingaud p. 109-123
• Les pratiques des agriculteurs. Point de vue sur un courant nouveau de la recherche agronomique - Jean-Pierre Deffontaines, Etienne Landais p. 125-158
  Farmers' Practices : A View of a New Current in Agronomic Research This article's introduction recounts the changes that have gradually led researchers from the Agrarian Systems and Development Department of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, who were working on various questions about the conditions and types of agricultural development, to be more and more interested, as they were adopting a systemic approach, in farmers' practices. The first part of this article provides the methodological and conceptual reference marks necessary for analyzing these practices. This analysis is placed within the broader framework of building a simple model of how farms function. An approach is proposed in three complementary parts centered, respectively, on the type, efficiency and opportunity of agricultural practices. Various considerations about the study of these practices in time and space close this presentation. In the second part, devoted to the study of combinations of farmers' actual practices, the foregoing principles are used to reinterpret the various approaches aimed at assessing the technical efficiency of these combinations. These principles are then used to present the concept of a system of practices and to show its typological interest. The authors emphasize both the complementary fo these approaches and their operational interest for development and especially for the technical and economic advice given to farmers.