Dubertrand Benjamin

A fourth year doctoral researcher in social anthropology (Laboratory LISST-CAS) and lecturer at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Toulouse II Jean-Jaurès, my work focuses on the new forms of neo-rurality in the Pyrenees Mountains and the development of alternatives lifestyles.

This research is based on fieldwork primarily conducted in the Massat valley, an archetypical mountain valley reinvested by the “neos” in the 1970s. This valley is located in the Couserans, a mountainous periphery of the department of Ariège, itself considered one of France’s most marginalized areas since the nineteenth century. This fieldwork focuses more specifically on the hosts of the wwoofing network in Ariège, a network whose goal is to bring together small scale farmers and people wishing to volunteer in this sector in exchange for room and board.

The people I met, mostly couples, most characteristically think their project in terms of a lifestyle, namely, as a global project in which all realms of everyday life are related and intertwined. They come to rethink their journey by simultaneously questioning their relation to work, consumerism, the environment... Although, unlike the 1970s neo-rurals, these new alter-rurals do not seek a radical break from society nor to create counter-culture communities but rather to develop space and times of various degrees of freedom within the community.

This research work therefore provides an opportunity to study both the constitutive aspects of these alternative lifestyles, i.e. the way the people I met reinvent the content of these aspects as well as how they organize their mutual interlinking in a life project devised collectively. This reflexion falls within an anthropology of knowledge perspective with the twofold proposition that not only is this specific knowledge developed within the scope of these alternative endeavors, said knowledge, or parts of it at least, is also mobilized by the actors as resources to help them overcome a number of constraints and contradictions induced by these life projects that deviate from the norm.