Les Rencontres du Mesopolhis #3 | Geneviève Pruvost, "La subsistance au quotidien. Telling what matters".
Details
Friday 17 January 2025 | 14h-16h30 | MMSH (salle Duby)
La third session of the 2024-2025 MESOPOLHIS MEETINGS will be held on Friday 17 January 2025, from 2pm to 4.30pm, at the MMSH (salle Duby).
We look forward to welcoming Geneviève PruvostDirector of Research at the Centre for the Study of Social Movements (EHESS), who will be presenting her book Daily sustenance. Telling what matters (La Découverte, 2024).
The discussion will be led by Jean Lagane (MESOPOLHIS) and Béatrice Mésini (TELEMMe).
Book summary:
"In the consumer-production societies in which we live, subsistence work has become invisible, and with it all the globalised circuits on which we depend. Yet other forms of life are flourishing, focusing on the flow of materials, mutual aid and short circuits, and building ecological autonomy step by step. There's nothing utopian about these ways of existing, but they do represent a wholehearted, considered commitment, and it's important today, in the face of obvious environmental disaster, to pinpoint as closely as possible the conditions that make them possible.
To do this, he had to invent a new form of observation, by becoming a graphomaniac of daily labour. Against a backdrop of ten years' research into rural alternatives, this book zooms in on a household in a bocage populated by light dwellings: baker-peasants work there to re-start cycles of abundance, with their hands in the earth, in synergy with a biotope and a whole network of sedentary and nomadic people. Who does what, on how many square metres, with what techniques, what financial resources, what training, how many people, animals, plants, tools? All the exchanges in money, kind and words were recorded, pen and watch in hand, to tell the story of what counts.
This is the breathtaking story of a muted struggle that politicises the smallest gesture. Because that's what's at stake: to give flesh and reality to a world whose radicalism is little known; to show that alternatives to 'capitalist modernity' are resisting and that they can gain ground."
Hybrid format : contact peroline.rouillard@sciencespo-aix.fr to obtain the invitation link.
Mesopolhis 2024-2025 programme of meetings
Download the Mesopolhis programme for this academic year 2024-2025.
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