Contenu du sommaire : Sauvage et domestique

The Concept of Climax : A Wilderness Model If all human interventions were to cease in the Aigoual area (Cévennes), what would be the climax of the "natural" forest growing there between 700 and 1300 meters in altitude ? Would it become a thickset, monotonous, impenetrable beech wood that, lacking a variety of plant and animal life, would be regenerated only through catastrophes (storms, fires, invasions of parasites), as foresters claim ? Would it become a mosaic of stable forms of plant life offering an open landscape for a variety of wildlife, as Park ecologists claim ? Given the current state of knowledge, the most likely scenario cannot be predicted. Images of nature have wormed their way into the "rational fiction" of a climax, images that, living like parasites on ecologists' and foresters' scientific discourses, lead them to diverging conclusions. According to foresters, silviculture, besides producing timber, also creates diversity in fauna and flora. According to ecologists, logging causes a trauma, and silviculture impoverishes the environment by homogenizing species for productive purposes.

Wild. Keep Wild A description of the centers for saving wildlife and an analysis of the practices for doing this entails thinking about combining these two terms into a single phrase : wildlife conservation. For a long time, there was little likelihood of bringing together two terms referring to worlds of meaning located on different sides of the social divide between nature and culture. But this has happened. This event is not just a matter of words. It also involves practices, about which it has raised problems. In fact, this new phrase lies at the juncture between, on the one hand, the effects of a way of life that bars whatever is wild and, on the other, aspirations to restore wildlife. It is one of the enigmas of modernity.

From the Bestiary to the Landscape. (Re) introducing Animal Species In social practices, (re)introducing animal species does not simply correspond to the intention to manage the environment rationally. It is conditioned by the cultural context. This study of the current interest in animals is based on : bestiaries, relations with idealized landscapes and genetic manipulations for "reconstituting" extinct species.

No Status, No Salvation. Bears and Wolves in Spain Following a minor event, questions have been raised in Spain about how changing the legal status of two beasts of prey (bears and wolves) will affect collective representations and practices in rural communities. Enforcing the new legislation will not suffice to supplant local, age-old, practices. Relationships with animals are thought out in terms of territory. Despite compensation for damages, killing the animal trespasser is still, for local people, a useful, legitimate act. It is also a way to hit back at tists, administrators and ecologists. The event in question clearly shows that the newly acquired legal status has not put an end to traditional perceptions.

The Cultural Construction of Game. Wild Sheep and Wild Boars in Languedoc As indicated by changes and ambiguities in legal categories of game animals, a painstaking cultural process underlies the construction of this wildlife category. In Languedoc, local hunters assign differing statuses to wild sheep and wild boars. Whereas they manage wild sheep populations in cooperation with officials so as to sell hunting rights to foreigners, they reserve wild boars for themselves. Two case studies in the Cévennes and Caroux areas show how complex hunting practices and animal-related techniques are.

Getting Rid of So-Called Pests There is less and less agreement about the category of "pests". Pests used to be condemned because they were accused of committing damage. Nowadays, they are to be "regulated". Two processes whereby this change in a wild category has been brought about are examined : rehabilitation changes the social image of animals in this category ; and reproblematization provides the legitimate grounds for managing the problems still caused by pests. As can be seen in the legal wrangling over trapping, this "ecologization" of wildlife is still controversial.

Rabbits, Domesticated Hare Mankind did not start manipulating wildlife today : in the Middle Ages, people spread rabbits across Europe. This new species thus came face to face with hare ; the two were destined by nature to form a bipartite whole. Hare were kept down in the role of wildlife, whereas rabbits have been brought up among small household animals, either directly through domestication (already advanced during the Middle Ages) or indirectly because wild rabbits presented a strong "homebody" image (owing, in particular, to their burrows) and were kept in warrens. "Wild" rabbits are, allegorically but nonetheless effectively, taken to be domestic animals. Overall, rabbits, given their history, are domesticated, diminutive hare ; at the same time, they are the latter' s double. This sheds new light on the etymologies of lapin and cuniculus.

From Spontaneous to Contaminating. Cattle Left Wild in the French Pyrénées The social dimension of the process whereby cattle have been left to go wild in the Ariège area of the French Pyrénées is studied. Locally, this recent phenomenon is thought to be of minor importance. But throughout France, there are many cases of feral cattle, cases linked to practices and changes in local societies. Unlike bullfighting, which justifies rearing "wild" bulls in an extensive system, the new technical rationality implemented by a group of stockbreeders turns out to be in contradiction with this wild herd's existence.

Insects with an Uncertain Status : Bees Bees are special in that they have a changing, easily reversible status in our society. From being wild, they are brought into the domesticated realm of culture. From being domesticated, they instantly go wild. This hard to control, "alternating" status is linked to their social behavior. It affects the nature of relations between bees and human societies. Beekeeping practices, collective representations and attitudes, and legal formulations about beehive ownership rights, all this can be interpreted in the light of the wild/domesticated opposition.

Violent Grass. Ethnobotanic Survey in the Brionne Area With its bocages and verdant hills, the Brionne area in Eure Department has been designated as a "natural agricultural region". This ethnological survey was motivated by an odd local phrase, pré violent (violent meadow). How can "violent" qualify an apparently gentle pastoral landscape with quite regular patterns ? In this area, inhabitants fatten up for the slaughterhouse Charolais cattle bred and raised elsewhere. This very special occupation is performed by emboucheurs. The latter' s social and occupational strategy, which takes the most advantage of variations in local soils, is based on the "violent meadows". This vernacular phrase refers to something other than a piece of land which serves as the economic basis for this activity. It synthesizes the occupational culture and expresses the elite social status of a group that came into existence during the 19th century. Nowadays, this group of specialists at the end of the stockbreeding process is undergoing a crisis.

Breeding Fish In the breeding of carp and trout for restocking, behaviors can be observed having to do with collective representations about these fish, which alternate between plant and animal life, between wild and domesticated. Paradoxes thus come to light. In the man-made pond, the fish are bred : they are likened to plant life, but their behavior is more like that of wildlife. In contrast, the stream environment, wild by essence, contains more and more fish that, though intensively bred in fish farms, are usually considered to be "wildlife".

"Wild Children of the Wild Woods" In one of Kipling's Just So Stories, the wild is "something that, though not belonging to the household, lives there". Since "everywhere is the same for him", the Cat-who-leaves-alone takes us for a walk through Man's special home space, where the biggest experiment of the century is being conducted on life : the domestication of maritime species for productive purposes. But what are the "Wild Children of the Wild Woods" who haunt the domus doing ? And what are all these solitary vagabonds, who seem to flout Man's law and order for ever and always, trying to tell us ? The savage or the obstinate return of a living being that has been manifestly subjected to human beings' productive order ?

The New Denatured Animals There are not distinct, domestic and wild, animal species. But there are animals on which mankind can act in one way or another. Two opposite categories of animals are now in favor among Western peoples : pets and so-called wild animals. For people fond of pets, only anthropomorphized animals are good : a kind of substitute for children or teddy bears. People who like wild animals think that the only true animals are those living in nature where they are separated from (and protected by) mankind. But animals of both sorts have been "denatured" : such categories come out of a social reworking of the boundary with the animal kingdom. In some cases, this boundary has been abolished ; in others, it has been restored or more clearly marked. But the issue remains the same : establish a new "social contract" with certain (wild, pet) animals in order to redeem the misdeeds we guiltily commit against other animals as we eat (game, fowl and livestock).

Reducing the Wild From a philosophical and axiological perspective, anything withstanding the advance of civilization can be defined as "wild". Accordingly, our identity as cultural beings is nothing other than the repeated effort to save ourselves from our own animal nature by constituting an order to be imposed on non- human living beings too. The antagonism between the anarchy of a state of nature and a necessarily anthropocentric world is discussed ; and the various processes for ever further reducing the realm of wildlife are examined.