Итог полностью

Nothing is less innocent than the question, which divides the scientific world, of knowing whether one has to include in the system of pertinent criteria not only the so-called ‘objective’ categories (such as ancestry, territory, language, refigion, economic activity, etc.), but also the so-called ‘subjective’ properties (such as the feeling of belonging), i.e. the representations through which social agents imagine the divisions of reality and which contribute to the reality of the divisions.¹*¹ When, as their education and their specific interests incline them, researchers try to set themselves up as judges of all judgements and as critics of all criteria, they prevent themselves from grasping the specific logic of a struggle in which the social force of representations is not necessarily proportional to their truth-value (measured by the degree to which they express the state of the relation of material forces al the moment under consideration). Indeed, as pre-dictions, these 'scientific' mythologies can produce their own verification, if they manage to impose themselves on collective belief and to create, by their mobilizing capacity, the conditions of their own realization. But they do no better when, giving up the distance of the observer, they adopt the representation of the agents and participants, in a discourse which, by failing to provide itself with the means of describing the game in which this representation is produced and the belief which underlies it, is nothing more than one contribution among many to the production of the belief whose foundations and social effects should be described.

it can be seen that, as long as they do not submit their practice to sociological criticism, sociologists are determined, in their orientation towards the objectivist or subjectivist pole of the universe of possible relations to the object, by social factors such as their position in the social hierarchy of their discipline (in other words, their level of certified competence which, in a socially hierarchized geographical space, often coincides with their central or local position, a particularly important factor when the matter at hand is

that of regionalism) and also their position in the technical hierarchy: •epistemological’ strategies which are at such opposite ends of the spectrum as the dogmatism of the guardians of theoretical orthodoxy and the spontaneism of the apostles of participation in the movement may have in common a way of avoiding the demands of scientific work without giving up their claims to auctoritas when they either will not or cannot satisfy these demands, or when they satisfy only the most superficial of them. But they may also swing, following their directly experienced relation to the object, between objectivism and subjectivism, blame and praise, mystified and mystificatory complicity and reductionist demystification, because they accept the objective problematic, in other words, the very structure of the field of struggle in which the region and regionalism are at stake, instead of objectifying it; because they enter into the debate on the criteria enabling one to state the meaning of the regionalist movement or to predict its future without asking themselves about the logic of a struggle which bears precisely on the determination of the meaning of the movement (is it regional or national, progressive or regressive, right-wing or left-wing, etc.) and on the criteria capable of determining this meaning.

Here as elsewhere, in sum, one must escape the alternative of the ‘demystifying’ recording of objective criteria and the mystified and mystificatory ratification of wills and representations in order to keep together what go together in reality: on the one hand, the objective classifications, whether incorporated or objectified, sometimes in institutional form (like legal boundaries), and, on the other hand, the practical relation to those classifications, whether acted out or represented, and in particular the individual and collective strategies (such as regionalist demands) by which agents seek to put these classifications at the service of their material or symbolic interests, or to conserve and transform them; or. in other words, the objective relations of material and symbolic power, and the practical schemes (implicit, confused and more or less contradictory) through which agents classify other agents and evaluate their position in these objective relations as well as the symbolic strategies of presentation and self-representation with which they oppose the classifications and representations (of themselves) that others impose on them.¹¹