Contenu du sommaire : Résistances populaires

In the small towns and villages of the South-West of France, where factories, stores and public services are closing down one after the next, young people are reinventing practices such as tuning, which usually trigger less interest than urban street cultures. As a target of police repression and of scorn in the media, this world of popular art car expresses a double pride of class and autochtony (coupled with national pride), often against the power cores of Brussels and Paris, the State and its agents, against those on top but even more against “social outcasts” and individuals perceived as “free-riding on the system”. By tuning their vehicles, and accessorizing them with more or less explicit symbols, these young men, and less often young women, vindicate through actions rather than words, their dignity as humiliated manual workers, their fierce determination for their agency to be acknowledged, their desire for equality, independence and freedom. In the process they may appear menacing or have recourse to irony or other non-conventional forms of political expression and action. Yet, these car tuners from the popular classes are confronted both to dynamics of hierarchy and conflicts among each other, as much as actors endowed with more powerful resources. While marginal, the practice of tuning has notably contributed, locally, to the emergence of certain collectives of the historic popular movement of the Gilets jaunes (Yellow vests).

In the context of the Columbian conflict, peasants are striving to remain on their land despite adverse socio-economic conditions and the pressure exercised by diverse armed actors on these territories. In this situation, how do they express and voice their subversion ? Ethnography of their daily life is a way to reposition their acts, attitudes and words in the context of violence-prone rural areas in Columbia and to capture the various forms of resistance deployed by local farming communities. In a context of extreme violence, “resisting” consists in remaining on one's land, continuing to cultivate it, and staying alive. Daily life thereby becomes political : local communities redefine their farming practices as modalities of resistance, and this spirit of insubordination is cultivated and reproduced across rural areas. Combining scholarship on popular resistance and collective action in constrained contexts can thereby help to analyse the relationship between action and inaction not as a shift from one to the other : it opens the possibility, rather, of inaction as a form, itself, of mobilization.

How does ownership of preventive public policies by school pupils – as their recipients – contribute to the doxic experience of the social world through the production and reproduction of related social hierarchies ? The analysis of interactions between implementers of these policies and pupils is a way to trace simultaneously different levels of domination while looking at the relationship between imposition and its effects. It provides, moreover, an entry-point to understand how social hierarchies are reproduced, in particular through the dynamics of ownership that transform these preventive measures. The demonstration proceeds in three parts, each focused on a specific and recurring modality of ownership of preventive measures : masculine contest on the basis of experience, academic good-will and volunteering in so-called “co-produced” actions. Focusing on dynamics of ownership underscores that social divisions are naturalized not only by public policies but also by the subversive attempts to which the latter are subjected.

This article seeks to relate the experience of subaltern female employees elected as union delegates in the retail sector and that of homes providing care for the dependent elderly (Établissements d'hébergement pour les personnes âgées dépendantes – EHPAD), encountered in the context of an ethnographic investigation within two local unions of the CGT. It purports to identify the resources that these women can mobilize autonomously as individuals who belong to the lower and precarious strata of the working class to hold positions of responsibility within the union, even though they are a priori deprived of an activist form of capital. The article underscores their laypeople's skills, which are based on the actualization of agonistic dispositions and disposition to care work. It thereby seeks to enlarge the notion of activist capital by going beyond a focus restricted to legitimate resources, which would risk falling into the trap of a misery stereotyping of popular classes.

This research, carried out with the stage hands of a world-famous Opera House, underscores the centrality of infrapolitics, in addition to union actions. As a subaltern workforce and stigmatized group within the institution but endowed with a high cultural capital, the stage hands draw on a working-class social image to keep “bearable” the situation of domination. This symbolic resource, which draws on values and representations that compete with those of the Opera, also provides meaning to a group of practices that contributes to protect them from some of the institution's calls to order. At the same time, it supports a reaffirmation of a collective sense of pride and dignity. This cultural autonomy still remains relative because, on the one hand, it cannot exist outside of the relation with the management and, on the other hand, the group becomes socially more and more heterogenous.