Vous consultezLa sociologie rurale et la question territoriale : de l’évitement à la réhabilitation

Rural sociology and the territorial question: from avoidance to rehabilitation
During the formation of rural sociology, it was important to examine the concepts for staking out this new disciplinary field. Among them, the concept of "territory" was "repressed" because it referred to a paradigm of rural life too close to the idea of a "community" with its implications of a homology between a social group and a spatial unit. This review of a seminar devoted to "space" in the late 1970s shows how the reluctance to use this concept by researchers who, laying a claim to Marxism, were critical of the Mendrasian approach amounted to a rejection of it, the "territory" being synonymous with a closed "rural object". Nonetheless, the concept of "space" enabled these same social scientists to raise the question of nature, while starting a new research program on questions related to the environment. Confronted with this new approach, rural sociology has rehabilitated the concept of "territory", but of a territory with groups of action and no longer tainted by the idea of a "social totality".