Starting from the hypothesis of a modernity crisis and a change in social relationship with time the article shows that acquisition of patrimonies in the French countryside is not a simple fashion phenomenon. We try to answer the political question of a durable « identity of various human collectives ». In a context of globalization founding a territory means articulating the local and the global dimensions. Ecology, on the one hand, and ethnology, on the other hand, these two sides of the natural and the cultural, appear as the privileged media for achieving this articulation.