Neo-ruralism

Cet article revient sur la réalisation, il y a vingt ans, d’un documentaire consacré à plusieurs familles de néo-ruraux installées dans la Creuse. Allers-Retours à la Terre est un film qui traite de la transmission, à travers les trajectoires sociales des enfants de ces néo-ruraux qui accédaient alors à l’âge adulte. Vingt ans après, l’évolution du regard sur le legs idéologique des utopies inspirées par mai 68, ainsi que l’évolution de mon propre regard de chercheur, m'invitent à réexaminer ce film et l’enquête qui l’a nourri, guidé par les propositions stimulantes du concept de « revisite ethnographique ».

This article tells about the making of a documentary film dedicated to the « back to the land » phenomena in rural France (in Creuse, Limousin region). Allers-retours à la terre (« Back and Forth to the Land) is a film about familial transmission, and tells about the trajectories of the children of this movement from the 1970’s, who were then becoming adults. Twenty years later, our perception, but also the realities of this utopian movement fuled by May 68, have deeply changed. The article reexamines the film and the fieldwork which supported it, inspired by Michael Burawoy’s concept of «ethnographic revisits».

Este artículo tiene como propósito contribuir con la comprensión de los procesos de trans-formación de las periferias urbanas de Buenos Aires durante las últimas décadas. Para ello se analizará un caso de movilidad residencial hacia una localidad intermedia y periférica de la Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires por parte de individuos y familias de sectores medios desde la ciudad y desde los centros suburbanos. El artículo se organiza en dos partes. En pri-mer lugar, se identifican las características de este tipo de movilidad residencial en relación con otros desarrollados por estos mismos sectores sociales desde la década de 1980: neorruralismo, migración  por  amenidad  y  relocalización  en  urbanizaciones  cerradas.  En  segundo  lugar,  se  muestra la emergencia de una paradoja particular en las experiencias espaciales de estos nuevos habitantes, quienes experimentan vivir al mismo tiempo en un entorno rural y urbano. Los datos fueron construidos a través de entrevistas en profundidad realizadas en el marco de una investigación etnográfica realizada entre 2014 y 2018.

The new paradigms of management of a rural territory assume an integrated analysis that combines the personal ambitions of the people who live and seek to live in these rural areas, how to manage these spaces, the existing public policies for the management of the territory and how they are understood and experienced by farmers who are also managers of the land, and the impact of each activity on a territory, from an environmental, social, economic and spatial planning (understand mainly landscape) point of view.
This study set out to identify and assess types of farmers, associated to new forms of management of small property, which is related to the development of a type of agriculture Farming Lifestyle, oriented towards a rural lifestyle, close to the nature and habits of consumption and healthier life. The study focused on small-scale property on the outskirts of Montemor-o-Novo (in the area of Reguengo-Pash), 100 km from Lisbon, in the Alentejo region, increasingly occupied by new owners.
From the definition of types of farmers, was intended to discuss the important role that these actors have in space, how the membership of certain type, have greater or lesser impact within the community in terms of economic, environmental and social, looking this way and whenever possible to decipher paths to different agriculture that ideally would walk for sustainability.

In many European and Latin American countries, the gradual displacement of urban middle classes to small rural, “inland” locations has become a sui generis modality of internal migration in the past two decades. Rural studies call this migration phenomenon “neo-ruralism”. This article studies the neo-rural movement from a geopolitical perspective, understanding it as a process of spatial (re)inscription of class relations and historically shaped inequalities. The study is based on ethnographic research focused on the analysis of migration processes taking place in a highland region of the province of Córdoba, Argentina. By exploring the everyday dynamics of the relations of alterity between autochthonous populations (“born and raised”) and migrants (“arrived”), the study identifies the ways in which the structural conditions of inequality give rise to situations of spatial injustice and dispossession of space and of other socially significant goods. As a result, we assert the epistemological and political need of a research agenda aimed at questioning neo-rural migration from a class perspective, as well as of designing policies of difference and autochthony to mitigate or reverse the configuration and invisibilization of unjust geographies.