Paper short abstract:

What are the temporalities surrounding 'back to the land' projects in France and Italy? Producing an ethnography of incoherence is necessary to grasp contemporary dialectics and the possibilities of social change but also to enable epistemological debates on the anthropology of time.

Paper long abstract:

What are the temporalities surrounding 'back to the land' projects in France and Italy? Faced with the anguish generated by the climate, democratic and economic crisis, these people have chosen not only to practice an agricultural or pastoral activity, but have also chosen to mutualise life spaces and production tools. On the basis of an anthropological participant observation carried out between 2015 and 2022, I intend to test the paradigm of the multiplicity of temporalities in order to improve the understanding of the relationship to the future among these populations and the effect that these representations have on their social practices. Focusing on how individuals relate to the future and how it shapes emotional states (whether individual or collective) is of undeniable heuristic interest for grasping contemporary dialectics and the possibilities of social change.

I wish to demonstrate that producing an ethnography of instability (of populations within collectives, of ideas, of affects, of power relations) and ideological incoherence is necessary to enable epistemological debates on the anthropology of time. The fact that people mobilise antinomic visions of the future, both utopian and dystopian, would indeed imply a critique of the bias of homogenisation and ontologisation of the representation of time in anthropology, embracing the idea of disorder, disruption and the perpetual movement of future possibilities.