Environmental issues, tensions in kinship?

Coordination:

Pierre-Yves Wauthier, EHESS (CNE-LISST), pierre-yves.wauthier@ehess.fr

Florence Weber, École normale supérieure Paris (CMH), florence.weber@ens.psl.eu

 

 

Since scientific warning organizations (IPCC, IPBES, etc.) published measurements of global warming and the reduction in biodiversity, political bodies acting at macro and meso-social levels (from the UN to neighbourhood associations) are now newly aware that societies need to be mindful of both biological necessities and socially instituted constraints. The European "Green Pact" and national and regional "environmental policies" aim to "transform our economy and our societies" (Commission, online n.d.) to limit the impact of human activities on the environment and adapt our lifestyles to new environmental conditions (Guivarch, 2021). The policies envisaged concern the following sectors: energy, industry, agriculture, land management, buildings (residential and tertiary), mobility and consumption (goods and services). However, families depend to a large extent on these sectors of social life (Goody, 2001 [2000]; Segalen, 1980; Wauthier, 2022).

For many households, concern for the environment leads, depending on their social position, to adopting "eco-responsible" actions (Ginsburger, 2020; Grossetête, 2019). Others go further in their commitment. Some individuals are reluctant to have children (Dubus & Knibiehler, 2020; Iverson et al., 2020); others are preparing for a collapse (Allard et al., 2019; Roux, 2021); still others, driven by a more or less positive vision of the future, are coming together in small neo-rural communities (Pruvost, 2015) or in shared urban habitats (Clerc, 2007), redrawing gender or generational relationships at the micro level of life courses. In some areas, environmental change, by disturbing the conditions of agricultural land farming, is contributing to changes in uses and prices of land at the crossroads of land markets and urban planning policies (Baysse-Lainé, 2020; Gueringer et al., 2016), transforming the conditions of family transmission (Bessière, 2004) and settlement in rural areas (Lambert & Cayouette-Remblière, 2021; Pruvost, 2024).

Kinship relations reflect human reproduction issues and ways of building solidarity, establishing reciprocity and transmitting material and symbolic resources between people who think of themselves as families or act as families (Morgan, 2011; Weber, 2005, 2013). The contemporary terrain of the family has undergone significant changes in recent decades in terms of filiation and begetting (Porqueres I Gené, 2020; Sarcinelli et al., 2022), as well as in terms of alliances and gender relations, marked by the short-lived nature of couple relationships (Wauthier, 2022, pp. 64-69), "de-marriage" (Théry, 1993), the invention of the PacS, the opening up of marriage to same-sex couples (Courduriès & Fine, 2014) and a social transformation of sexual civility (Théry, 2022). It is not only kinship practices that are changing, but also the meaning socially attributed to the notion of the family (Segalen & Martial, 2019), which has led to a diversification of methodological approaches aimed at understanding it (e.g. Morgan, 2011; Weber, 2013; Widmer & La Farga, 2016).

Kinship plays a key role in both biological and social reproduction (Godelier, 2007), but it is also a site of ideological transformations and practical arrangements (Martial, 2003, 2021; Wauthier, 2022; Weber, 2013). On the scale of concrete cases observable or measurable in Western Europe today, have environmental phenomena, whether slow or spectacular and whatever their causes, contributed to the dissolution, modification or reactivation of kinship relations in all their diversity (filiation, residence, kinship, alliance)?

Expected contributions

In this volume, we propose to bring together ethnographic contributions exploring concrete, documented and observable situations where environmental issues and kinship are linked. Contributions are expected to address at least one of the following three questions. What does kinship have to do with the environment? What do environmental policies or territorial transformations have to do with kinship? Do transformations in kinship relations lead to readjustments of one or the other, and of what kind? We welcome contributions focusing either on new ways of doing family (in terms of gender, generation, subsistence, reproduction, or relationships to space or time) or on the resistance or persistence of family dynamics in the face of change. These may be situations that have been subjected to change in the face of territorial transformation or, environmental policies or situations organized by actors concerned with ecology. This concern may be associated with other mobilizations. Contributions basedon fieldwork should explicitly relate the questions raised (the relationship between environmental concerns and kinship relations) to local observations.

Although tensions between environmental change and the field of kinship can a priori be observed in any region of the globe occupied by human groups, this thematic issue intends to focus on phenomena observable today in France, without excluding peripheral countries, migration issues or transnational family situations. France offers a family landscape undergoing profound change, pro-environmental action plans and a variety of sub-climates known as 'oceanic', 'Mediterranean' and 'mountain', exposing its inhabitants to a diversity of problems (e.g. respectively, intensification of storms and floods, droughts, heatwaves and fires; melting ice). It engages a diversity of ethnographic situations about the two phenomena at work in this special issue: the metamorphosis of territories and the heterogeneity of family ways of life. The issue, therefore, hopes to bring together contributions highlighting different kinship issues linked to the environmental crisis (or even different environmental issues in the face of the kinship crisis).

We welcome contributions related to one or more of the following sub-themes, which may intersect with analyses focusing on gender or generational relations, such as :

Creating a family is a way for individuals and groups to envisage their relationship with the future. On the one hand, this is expressed through questions of procreation, primo-socialization and child protection. contributions could address, for example, eco-feminist neo-Malthusianism (Martinez-Alier, 2023); Green Inclinations, No Kids (Roux & Figeac, 2022); home-schooling, alternative eco-parenting initiatives or educational cooperation in eco-schools. On the other hand, our relationship with the future is also rooted in practical issues around retirement, ageing and old age.

Being a family also means living, sharing, dividing, and occupying living spaces. We invite authors to consider relations between environmental policies, territorial transformation or ecological inclinations and redevelopment projects, including tensions or resistances about what, in the built environment, is conceived as private or collective, intimate or open. Focus, for example, on shared, grouped housing situations but also on a wider scale such as ecovillages or situations involving 'green' urban planning or the fight against urban sprawl.

Being a family means moving around, moving away and being closer to loved ones. In the context of the transition to different modes of transport, we can expect effects on people's motility (Kaufmann et al., 2004; Kaufmann & Widmer, 2005). In particular (eco-)locations, examine how the switch to more frugal modes of transport had an impact on the choice of spouse or marital dynamics, moving sites, childcare, links with relatives, the (tele)work-family relationship, or even the opportunity to recreate family ties with close relatives.

In specific contexts, particularly in rural areas, the family is connected to the land, whether as an asset to be inherited, a land resource or a production method. Do geoclimatic changes, environmental policies or collective initiatives to protect the environment have an observable effect on kinship? We are looking here at contributions focusing on gender and generational relations in the face of the need to review modes of access to and use of land. This focus may involve analyzing cases of 'returning to the land' (Samak, 2020; Snikersproge, 2022) or young adults with or without land resources setting up independently or in groups. We also expect to see analyses of the (un)favourable effect of kinship ties on local networks of mutual aid and transmission (Ekers & Levkoe, 2016; Knight, 2018) and analyses of cases of ZADs (Pruvost, 2017) or collectivization of land use, as well as examples of the development of the sharing economy (Matschoss et al., 2021).

Articles based on ethnography and case studies :, authors are expected to mention conditions of their access to the field and keep a minimum distance from personal convictions and emotions.

 

 

Timetable:

* Proposals for contributions (title and abstract of 5,000 to 6,000 characters, in French or English) should be sent by 15 June 2024 to the coordinators of this issue:

Pierre-Yves Wauthier, pierre-yves.wauthier@ehess.fr

Florence Weber, florence.weber@ens.psl.eu

They should present the main lines of argument and the empirical material used and be accompanied by a bio-bibliographical note on the author.

Authors will be informed of the selection of contributions at the end of June or the beginning of July.

* The final texts (35,000 to 70,000 characters max., including spaces and bibliography) will be due by 30 January 2025.

* Publication of this issue of French Ethnology is scheduled for early 2026.

 

 

Presentation of the coordinators

Pierre-Yves WAUTHIER is a postdoctoral researcher at EHESS (CNE-LISST), has a PhD in sociology from the University of Geneva, a PhD in political and social sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain and a Masters in social anthropology (research-oriented). He wrote various contributions on contemporary European kinship, focusing on the ephemeralization and informalization of unions and the deconjugalization and heterogenization of family paths. A specialist in ethnographic and comparative approaches, her work lies at the crossroads of anthropology and sociology, building her questions on contributions from other disciplines (history, demography).

Main publication: peer-reviewed book Faire famille sans faire couple. Comprendre l'hétérogénéisation des parcours familiaux (Peter Lang, 2022); open-access electronic version funded by the SNSF.

ORCID : 0000-0003-1038-2885

Florence WEBER is professor in sociology and social anthropology at the École normale supérieure (Paris) and a researcher at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs. A specialist in the informal economy in the rural industrial world of France, she is currently working on the anthropology of kinship. She has also worked with historians of the economy and writing over the long term and with health economists (domestic production and the markets for accommodation institutions and health professionals). She has edited the 7-volume Mauss series in the Quadrige collection at Presses Universitaires de France. She is currently working on economic dynamics in areas close to a border that can be crossed in connection with changes in the environment and policies for the ecological transition of the economy.