Entre lieu-dit et monde : cultures de l’habitat écosophique dans la chanson poétique occitane et française des années 1960 aux années 1980

Abstract

This article focuses on a historic moment that is a precursor to contemporary ecological questions: the relationship between human vitality, ecosystem viability and cultural resistance to the standardization of sensitivity and to the predation of the common habitat. From the sixties to the eighties, minor cultures become aware of themselves in the neighborhood of the protest-song and the hippie counterculture, and in the distant heritage of collections initiated in the 19th century. A new kind of politically committed popular song emerges from this awareness, which goes hand in hand with an ecological culture in every meaning of the word culture. In the cultural context of centralized State in France, it deals with the renaissance of songs in regional languages, including, for the one that concerns us here, the “renaissance of Occitan song”. In the context of the international “pop” moulding, this awareness works on poetic songs in french, which it is hardly surprising that it is particularly active in Quebec. Thus, a conception of the terrestrial habitat as ecosystem is opposed to the mainstream environmentalist conception of ecology (considered as a pure alibi for a type of organization of reality that consists in dominating, exploiting and destroying the biodiversity). In those works and in this way of thinking, the renewal of local vitality is the opposite of its folkloric freezing, and this is why some sort of degrowthing creation in tune with localized dynamism is the condition, and not the reverse, of the viability of the presence in the world and of common humanity. This results in a critical articulation of the themes of the local habitation and the world’s habitat, as hostile to a narrow territorialism as to an abstract universalism and reminding Hölderlin’s famous thought « yet poetically, we dwell
on this earth ».