No Future. Neo-farming communities and their relationship to the future: utopia, dystopia, and presentism
Sallustio, Madeleine
No Future. Neo-farming communities and their relationship to the future: utopia, dystopia, and presentism - 2023.
57
Focusing on people’s relationships to the future and how these shape individual or collective emotional states is useful for understanding what motivates social practices. This paper proposes to explore the future temporalities that feed the imagination of some protagonists of the ‘back to the land’ phenomenon. Based on long-term fieldwork among a dozen neo-farming communities in the Massif Central, I propose to mobilize the paradigm of multiple temporalities in an attempt to qualify the effects of collapse theories on the daily lives of its members. I argue that the projects aiming at rural withdrawal and food autonomy are part of a paradoxical presentist temporality that manifests itself in the existence of antinomic temporal horizons, both pessimistic and optimistic regarding the future and the social struggle. Refusal of the great linear narratives and of an organized and coherent mode of struggle with a universal aim will enable me here to feed reflections 1) on human action and the relationship to the social and environmental crisis and 2) on more general epistemological discussions, relating to the way of apprehending temporalities in social sciences.
No Future. Neo-farming communities and their relationship to the future: utopia, dystopia, and presentism - 2023.
57
Focusing on people’s relationships to the future and how these shape individual or collective emotional states is useful for understanding what motivates social practices. This paper proposes to explore the future temporalities that feed the imagination of some protagonists of the ‘back to the land’ phenomenon. Based on long-term fieldwork among a dozen neo-farming communities in the Massif Central, I propose to mobilize the paradigm of multiple temporalities in an attempt to qualify the effects of collapse theories on the daily lives of its members. I argue that the projects aiming at rural withdrawal and food autonomy are part of a paradoxical presentist temporality that manifests itself in the existence of antinomic temporal horizons, both pessimistic and optimistic regarding the future and the social struggle. Refusal of the great linear narratives and of an organized and coherent mode of struggle with a universal aim will enable me here to feed reflections 1) on human action and the relationship to the social and environmental crisis and 2) on more general epistemological discussions, relating to the way of apprehending temporalities in social sciences.
Réseaux sociaux