Rural areas for difficult times / Rural homes for hard times

Rural areas for difficult times / Rural homes for hard times
Call for papers in Ethnologie française

Coordinators : Maxime Bello (Université Paris Cité, Philépol, mbmaximebello@gmail.com), Cyprien Tasset (VetAgro Sup, UMR Territoires, cyprien.tasset@vetagro-sup.fr), Jérôme Tournadre (CNRS, ISP, jetournadre@gmail.com)

“It’s going to crack…”
“The Earth has become unlivable”.
“It has reached breaking point everything will tip over”.
“What are we waiting for? For everything to collapse… And it won’t be long now”.
“If we don’t do something if we don’t raise the alarm, we’re all going to die, that’s for sure”.
“We’ve reached the limit. We’re heading for disaster”.
“The bell is tolling for industrial society’s death”. (Léger and Hervieu, 1983, p. 19)

“It was early 2018 when I suddenly realized we were heading for disaster – it was a shock! Pablo Servigne’s books, the Thinkerwiew interviews and many other sources made it clear that everything overlaps and is intertwined]. We started looking for a place where we could start a new, safer life for ourselves.
We used to live in an apartment in Lyon. In Corrèze, we searched and found a cottage on three hectares with a pond and a fishery.
We started a vegetable garden and this is the third year. There’s so much I have to tell you!”
(Post on a Facebook group dedicated to collapsology in 2022)
….

The post-2020 tendency among urban dwellers in France to leave their city homes and settle in rural, less populated areas is well documented. The new settler’s concern for the planet’s exacerbated state is noted in recent surveys by organisations like Ademe (Ademe, Daniel Boy, Opinionway, 2023, on “Social perceptions of climate change”). These surveys show that climate pessimism has become commonplace as a growing number of French people voice their fears about the impossibility of checking climate change within “reasonable limits” and expectations that conditions of life will become challenging. Online forums hosting popularised environmental science attract passionate followers, especially around themes such as natural catastrophes, the danger of logistic collapse and the ensuing suffering of populations (Tasset, 2022). Most popular among the proposed answers deal with private access to elementary means of subsistence, that is, biomass and water supply, which can only be possible in rural areas. Hence, the popularity of “risk maps”, which calculate and compare the resilience of given territories (areas) around the country. The real estate agent quoted above is a case in point. Speaking in 2022 from her new home in the country, she declared, “What I anticipated is already here; people are calling from all over France and abroad. What they’re looking for? A sizeable land with water on it”.
The second reason people mention when discussing their wish to leave the city is the pandemic, sometimes described as the “revenge” of rural territories. Once abandoned after urban migration and the modernisation of farming, rural communities now seemed a refuge for those fleeing the pandemic, attractive havens of authenticity and well-being. These movements are far from massive, impacting large metropolitan areas to benefit peri-urban zones (Bouvart & Bouba-Olga, 2023). Yet, even in rural territories where new settlers are trying to put into practice their ideas about a sober mode of living, there seems to be an awareness that the old ways of life will never return (Collet, Delage & Rousseau, 2023 : 41).
These phenomena partake of what sociologists define as “néo-ruralité” (neo-rurality). At the same time, the media identify these as part of a new “back-to-the-land” trend associated with memories from post-1968 ideas. The term has been used since the early 1980s when analysing relations between the local population (“autochthones”) and newcomers to rural territories (Hervieu Léger, 1983; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1983), sometimes mentioned as “neos” in more recent literature on emic perceptions (Stuppia, 2016; Dubertrand, 2021; Berthomière, Imbert et Michalon, 2021). Sociological analysis shows that the term neo-rurality does not correspond to a stable social category, as it refers to a large spectrum of experiences of re-settlement of the urban population.
The press and media attention to these phenomena has shaped narratives of urban dwellers willing to switch career paths and adopt a different lifestyle in the country. Neo-rural population studies have gained popularity in recent years (Pruvost, 2015; Stuppia, 2016; Morel, 2019; Leblay, 2020; Dubertrand, 2021; Dolci, 2021) and new research focuses on themes such as “collapsologie”, survivalist movements and theories of catastrophes (Gaborit, 2022, Barker, 2020 ; Hugues, 2021 et 2023). While climate anxiety seems to be related to neo-rural phenomena, ethnographies of neo-rural populations contribute to document the territorial dimensions of radical forms of climate activism.
This issue of Éthnologie Française aims to address the relation between the attractivity of rural territories and growing climate anxiety among urban populations. We welcome contributions grounded in solid ethnographies situated in specific territories, focusing on specific areas, practices, or networks of mutual acquaintance, along the directions described below. Proposals related to fieldwork carried out outside France are also welcome.

1 – Conditions of “departure”:
The aim is to study how people settle in rural areas in preparation for a more resilient (micro)world in the face of ecological disaster. First, we’ll look into the characteristics and identities of the new rural dwellers behind this intention. Who are they, and how does this rural settlement fit into their professional and personal trajectories? Is this rural settlement linked, as observers of the first wave of neo-ruralists thought, to a devaluation of their degrees or a difficulty in finding a suitable position on the job market? Does it resonate with elements of their personal history (childhood spent in the countryside, with grandparents, etc.)? Does the prospect of ecological collapse sometimes rekindle fears of “past collapses” inscribed in family memories, where the countryside may have been a resort? These different aspects are all opportunities to explore ethnographically the anxiety and uncertainty (Samimian-Darash and Rabinow, 2015) that inhabit these women and men. They offer an opportunity to grasp the diversity of the situations and actors involved insofar as the term “neo-rurality” can, at best, only be understood in the plural. Does the rise of critiques of the “metropolis”, or even the urban in general, play a role in some of these trajectories?

2 – Forms of “return”
We can then turn our attention to the return (to the land). What are the practical arrangements for moving to rural areas and the professional retraining that may accompany it in the absence of collective workplaces that would allow members of the “creative” and teleworking professions to maintain their activity (Flipo, 2020)? When there is a desire to live in a community or collective (eco-village, etc.), what are the modalities, and how do they fit in with private life? How do these individuals and/or groups fit into the local fabric, and what are their relationships with their neighbors and local authorities? How do these ties vary according to the more or less “alternative” nature of the territories (Dubertrand, 2020; Hakimi-Pradels, 2021), or the degree of mistrust of the State that may prevail (Barrault-Stella, 2023)? Finally, we might ask to what extent the more or less successful negotiations between the initial project of “returning” to the countryside and the territory refashion its original motives.

3 – Renewal of rural imaginaries
Ecological concern invests the countryside with positive meanings that renew the dominant imaginary surrounding rural worlds, often perceived as worlds in decline that all those with the means to do so would seek to flee, even if “those who remain” manage to define and sometimes achieve their forms of fulfilment (Coquard, 2019). Here, we’d like to look into how the ecological crisis is helping to change prevailing representations of the rural world, for example, by making it a space for “emancipation” (Gazo, 2017), a ‘”land of possibilities”, protective of what the economy otherwise threatens (nature, solidarity, work, family, etc.) (Snikersproge, 2022), or a space to try out an “autonomy” that would take on a different meaning from that which may derive from the struggles of urban work (Gazo, 2023). What contribution to this transformation of rural imaginaries is attributable to the development and professionalization of a fringe of intermediaries in the exfiltration of urban dwellers to the countryside?

4 – Adapting the countryside
Rural (and mountain) areas are faced with various facets of the ecological crisis (global warming, the collapse of biodiversity, rising sea levels, salinization, drying up of rivers, increasing scarcity of snow and melting glaciers, etc.). After a period of gentrification driven by the phenomena of patrimonialization and aestheticization (Pernoud, 2008; Boltanski and Esquerre, 2017), certain rural territories, which various simulations tend to show will be less exposed than others to climatic hazards, are currently the object of a commercial interest that puzzles elected officials accustomed to managing their unattractiveness. How are these profound transformations shaking up social relations locally? How are these spaces adapting to new residents’ arrival, often driven by ecological concerns and pioneering climatic gentrification (Richard, 2014)?

Timetable:
* Proposals for contributions (a title with a 5,000 to 6,000 characters abstract, in French or English) should be sent by December 10th, 2024, to the coordinators of this issue:
Jérôme Tournadre :jetournadre@gmail.com
Maxime Bello : mbmaximebello@gmail.com
Cyprien Tasset : cyprien.tasset@gmail.com
They should present the main lines of argument, the empirical materials mobilized and be accompanied by a bio-bibliographical note on the author.
* Final submissions (35,000 to 70,000 characters max., including spaces and bibliography) are expected by July 1st, 2025.
* Publication of this issue of Ethnologie française is scheduled for May 2026.

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