Contenu du sommaire : Mondes ruraux

Is there a Suburban Vote? Electoral Behaviours and Social Status in a Changing Rural Context This paper aims to discuss the ideologizing interpretations which stigmatized the electoral behaviours in rural and suburban areas. Nowadays, to live in a suburban area is usually assimilated by the some social scientist to an antisocial behaviour, suburban housing as the result of individualistic attitude which can lead to social and political secession. Then, different theoretical approaches about context influence in electoral geography are exposed. Finally, those theoretical approaches are finally compared on the basis of empirical data collected in a French metropolitan area with different methodological approaches (ecological and individual) at two geographic scales (metropolitan and local). Whatever the approaches used, it appears that the socio-economic status of inhabitants are still linked with the electoral behaviours which takes places.

When Becoming a Political Elite Remains Under the Control of Another Politician: a Rural Mayor and a Professionalized Intercommunal Politician's Relationship (1971-1995) This paper focuses on the evolutions of the relationship between two local politicians representing the population of a rural industrialised territory between the 1970s and the mid 1990s. French institution policy has indeed led to the design of intercommunal governments on top of existing local governments. Thus, a new level of government and a new political space appeared, within which the relationship between a rural mayor and a professional politician turns out to be tight as well as unsteady. Coming from a poor social background who has risen in social status, the mayor of a rural area clearly appears to be in a lower position than the professional politician. By analysing the different entries to the communal and intercommunal political institutions and the different paths to becoming a legitimate politician within these levels of government, we aim at identifying the most “useful” social and political resources respectively linked to these different levels.

A Long Line of Employers Cum Mayors. The Rise and Decline of Personalised Domination (1850–1970) Analyses of “paternalism” often highlight a personalised type of domination between employers and their workers. This paper studies employers outside of their firms and uses the instruments of political anthropology (matrimonial strategies and kinship relations in respect of the composition of successive municipal councils) to analyse the way the nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial bourgeoisie became established in villages. It reveals that personalised domination really occurred only in the inter-war years, when a relative familiarity was instigated between the employer-mayor established among the region's industrial bourgeoisie and a fraction of the workers living in the village. Ahead of this period came the progressive embedding of economic and political power, that peaked when the employer-class held sway over the village, directing the local council and controlling the competing social groups. Post-war, personalised domination by employers had had its day and survived only in strands amid the web of village power politics.

Pro-Hunting and Industrial Activists. Contemporary Changes in Working Class Politics To understand contemporary changes in working class politics, we need to move from focusing exclusively on institutional politics to investigating social activities including leisure, the subject of this paper. In rural territories of France, waterfowl shooting is mainly a working class activity, and this activity is threatened by the growing impact of European Union directives on the conservation of wild migratory birds. Thanks to fieldwork conducted in a rural area near an industrial town, this research identifies certain repertoires of discourse and action mobilized by French shooters of water fowl during their struggle against the reduction of the hunting season. Ethnographic observation allows us to gain insight into working-class relations to politics. It appears that some aspects of traditional working-class protest remain but we also observe the salience of the issue related to the defence of rural territories. These findings lead us to question the assertions that working-class political mobilisation has massively decreased.

From Fish to Water Bodies: How the Militant Uses of Law Give a Voice to Beings Who Cannot Talk This article accounts for the efforts made by ANPER-TOS since 1958 to blow the whistle and get water pollution acts sanctioned. It shows how some fishermen, helped by legal professionals, became the spoke-persons for non-human entities which were until then excluded from representation. It discusses the problem of their political acknowledgement and management considering their singularities and the highly technical mediations they need to be heard. The article evokes particularly a trial concerning a pig factory farming located in Lozère, in France, and question the materiality and the number of entities that should taken into acount in the making of common rural worlds.

The Cultivation of Rooting: How Farmers' Movements re-appropriate Attachment in contemporary Jura This paper is about the way contemporary farmers value, in their public engagement, different conceptions of what a “(good) peasant” is. Focusing on how the actors emplot their activist engagement in semi-directive interviews, the paper shows that various forms of attachment are at stake. Focusing on the actors' narratives then provides us with new elements that help us understand the constitution of grassroots movements and the tensions between them. The hypothesis raised in this paper, through a case study among contemporary activist farmers in Jura (France), is that the enhancement of forms of attachment is constrained by the availability of a reactionary frame - a ghost the actors have different ways to keep away. How do the actors who try to enhance the figure of the “peasant” cultivate their “rooting”?

Noncompliance to European Policies as a Means of Local Success for Political Parties A Focus on Small Wine Growers in Romania Romanian smallholders are threatened by European Commission's blueprints. However, they do not protest against Brussels officials. In order to explain their behaviour, the emphasis is commonly laid on peasant's inability to understand where their difficulties originate. On the basis of an empirical inquiry focused on small wine growers, we take issue with that analysis and rather shed the light on peculiar mechanisms of political canvassing. Local leaders of Social democratic party and officials who are under their political control help the weakest wine growers to bypass the European norms. In the course of daily dealings, they present themselves as protectors of a social group, without inveighing directly against European policies.

Comparative Politics in France. A tentative Academic Autobiography The undergoing government-led reforms of the Higher Education and Research system in France may negatively affect those fields of historical sociology and comparative politics that have developed since the early 1970s, and are nowadays gaining grounds within the wider international scientific community. A fresh reading of the masterworks that provided its theoretical cornerstones (those of Weber, Gramsci, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu and historians like Michel de Certeau and Paul Veyne) reminds us of the main ambitions of the whole comparative exercise: crafting and sharing an analytical glossary, rooted in the confrontation of various research experiences without expecting it to become either a common denominator or the first step towards any linear causal explanation. To put it another way, its strategic goals could be listed as follows: instead of entities, comparing practices, processes, and therefore historical periods that by definition are contingent, ambivalent, and fragmentary. Gathering and sharing common questions without expecting common answers. Conveying those questions raised from the analysis of one peculiar society to the study of another one. Demonstrating that continuities, that lie at the roots of the historical and political sociology's approach of things political, are actually discontinuities. Reassessing in a creative manner the issue of the “autonomous historicity” of both European and non-Western societies, by recalling to mind the fact that their relationship to the Other and to the Elsewhere is one of its key constituents, and hence that it cannot be dissociated from their fundamental “extraversion”. Acknowledging that this “autonomous historicity” argument does not lead to assuming that the various trajectories of those political societies are parallel and never merge. In the same way, this acknowledgement should not mean the revival of the old idea of the incommensurability of “cultures” or “civilisations”. This latter point should therefore remind us that comparison should not be only a one way process, and that European societies' historicity should also be assessed by comparing it with African and Asian societies as much as the opposite. To put it in a nutshell, the whole exercise is to make comparisons to mark out, and to mark out to universalize. By doing so, we can deepen our understanding both of how democracy was transplanted in non-Western societies and of the paradoxes of this process on a “long duration” scale.