Sociologies (May 2017)
Les arènes publiques identitaires : des Antillais de Paris aux Quilombos de Rio de Janeiro, une comparaison France/Brésil
Abstract
Starting from an analysis that considers how the actors are investing conventional forms to gradually give a sense of identity to their world, we will focus on situations of disputes, conflicts and controversies. It is from them that may emerge categories of collective nature and identity (as quilombo). But then they emerge, not as a given structure, finally unveiled by the independent scientific operation of the actors, but as the result of an investment made by the actors themselves to find their place in the conflict, in terms of a common space. This arrangement will always be linked to specific and immanent conditions of emergence, and invested categories will be made more or less solid and questionable in different situations. But be noted, this form of investment is initially recorded in response to the qualifying events imposed over him by necessity, sometimes urgent, having to prove a membership and thereby to assert and define the ties that bind beings together, supporting their "common commitment" and allowing the outline of a membership community. What we will now put into play, as the ethnographic description reveals, is the symbolic repertoires of confrontation and ways of acting which are based, in a practical way, on profoundly different cosmologies. The confrontation will be played in a specific polemical context where the coexistence of these directories will take different forms depending on the nature and symbolic feature of public space in which it is embedded. This nature of public space will be questioned in terms of its direction as a "liberal public grammar" or a "republican public grammar".
