12

Urban society seems to have penetrated every corner of France, reducing the object of rural sociology and ethnology to nothing. These disciplines are built on a sharp rural/urban split, reserving the canonical vocabulary of sociology, such as the analysis of social class, for urban settings. Rural studies were founded on an ad hoc conceptualization borrowed from anthropology (peasant society, community, village collectivity, village interconnaissance or everyone knowing each other, notables). The radical development of contemporary rural worlds has swept this conception away. But are today’s contemporary rural worlds the exact equivalents of urban worlds? In this paper we defend the idea that the social morphology of contemporary rural worlds corresponds neither to a “reduced average France” nor to “local specificities.” In contemporary rural worlds, we repeatedly observe an overrepresentation of the working classes, especially laborers, and an under-representation of the cultural fringes of the higher classes. Likewise, the phenomenon of secondary or multiple residences contributes to differential degrees of belonging to observed social spaces. We propose constructing a new sociology of rural worlds, understood as a sociology situating social groups at the macrosocial scale and a sociology of localized social space, products of the differentiated placement of social groups over space.