Ecovillages, ecohamlets, ecolieux… There are many banners today to name experiments in community life which, if they do not necessarily display the same values, are part of forms of contestation of the consumer society.
Maxime Cordellier, sociologist at the University of Caen Normandy-Center for studies and research on risks and vulnerabilities (Cerrev), and author of a thesis entitled “Search for autonomy and architecture of the common in community lifestyles” (2018), paints a picture of these “ concrete utopias » .
To what imagination does the word “community” refer?
In the Anglo-Saxon language, the term “community” is not pejoratively connoted. It is a term that translates a form of free association between individuals. The Ccommunity studies are studies that relate to both the life of a neighborhood, a local microcosm to demonstrate that it is a question of sharing geographical and social proximity and having interests or actions to carry out together.
France does not make the same use of this term. On the ground, everyone rather strives to speak of “collective”. In the 2010s, a certain number of collectives re-examined the notion of community, based on the notion of “common”. Two observations emerged. Some of the collectives tended to reject the term, which they associated with the movements resulting from May-68, saying: “ We are not cool babes, we did not come back to earth to escape the world but because it is another way of looking at politics today, in a pragmatic way, on the ground, and collectively. » The community referred, according to them, to the imaginary “ hippie ».
The second observation is related to the French institutions, which created, in 2002, the Interministerial Mission for vigilance and the fight against sectarian aberrations (Miviludes). A certain number of communities, which were not at all connected with sectarian aberrations, feared being taken on board in this movement of characterization, and rejected the term. We see it even more in the public debate: France massively rejects communitarianism which would undermine republican universalism. To appear in a community would be a way of registering in false against this universalism, and thus to fear a repression of the State.
Can we identify values common to all these movements?
These movements are characterized by a great diversity of values and motivations. Each collective is the result of a meeting of people who decide to come together around militant aspirations and daily life. The common denominator is nevertheless a bundle of questions about the forms of exchange linked to capitalism, the way of organizing society and the neoliberal way of orchestrating relations between political and economic power and civil society. These questions are very often found in varying degrees of radicality.
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