west of France whose political choices defied electoral geography, what makes the region is not space hut time and history (P. Bois. Paysans de COuest, Des structures ^conomiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l^poque r^volutionnaire (Paris and the Hague: Mouton, 1060), The same thing could he shown with regard to Berber-speaking regions' which, at the end of a different historical evolution, were sufficiently ‘different* from Arab-speaking ‘regions' to give rise, on the part of the colonizer, to treatment that was very different (as in the case of education, for instance), and thus bound to reinforce the differences that had served them as a pretext and to produce new ones (those differences which are linked to emigration to France, for example), and so on Even the landscapes* or 'native soil* so dear to geographers are tn fact inheritances, in other words, historical products of social determinants. (See C* Reboul, ‘Determinants sociaux de la fertility des sols’, Actes de la recherche en sciences societies < 17-18 (November 1977), pp 85-112. Following the same logic, and in opposition to the naively ‘naturalist* usage of the notion of landscape*, one would have to analyse (he contribution of social factors to the processes by which a region is turned into a desert. )
5 The adjective ‘Occitan' and. a fortiori, the noun 'Occitanie* are recent and scientific words (coined by Latinizing the langue d*oc into lingua occitana), designed to designate scientific realities which, for the time being al least, exist only on paper.
6 In fact, this language is itself a social artefact, invented at the cost of a decisive indifference to differences, which reproduces on the level of the ‘region* the arbitrary imposition of a unique norm against which regionalism rebels and which could become the real source of linguistic practices only at the price of a systematic inculcation similar to that which has imposed the generalized use of French or any other 'national* language.
7 The founders of the Republican school system explicity adopted the aim of inculcating, among other things, by the imposition of the ‘national’ language, the common system of categories of perception and evaluation capable of establishing a unified vision of the social world.
8 The link, everywhere attested, between regionalist movements and feminist (and also ecological) movements stems from the fact that, being directed against forms of symbolic domination, they presuppose ethical dispositions and cultural competences (visible in Ihe strategies employed) which tend to be encountered in the intelligentsia and in the new petite bourgeoisie (see P. Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. R. Nice (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1984), pp. 265-6, 357-63, 365-9).
9 How else can one understand, other than as so many compulsive assertions of the claim to the magical auctoritas ot the censor as described by DumdziL a claim which is part and parcel of (he
sociologist’s ambition: namely, the obligatory recitations of canonical texts on social classes (ritually contrasted with the statistical census) or. at a higher level of ambition and in a less classical style, the prophecies announcing ‘new classes" and 'new struggles* (or the inevitable decline of ‘old classes* and ‘old* struggles), two genres which occupy a large place in so-called sociological production?
10 The reasons for the spontaneous repugnance felt by ‘scientists* for ‘subjective’ criteria would deserve a long analysis: there is the naive realism which leads one to ignore everything that cannot be pointed to or touched; there is the economism which leads to a failure to recognize any determinants of social action other than those that are visibly an integral part of the material conditions of existence; there are the interests attached to the appearances of axiological neutrality* which, in more than one case, constitute all the difference between the ‘scientist* and the militant and which forbid questions and notions contrary to the proprieties from being introduced into 'scientific1 discourse; there is, last and by no means least, the scientific point of honour which leads observers - and this is probably all the more the case the less sure they are of their science and their status - to multiply the signs of a break from the representations of common sense and which condemns them to a reductive objectivism, which is perfectly incapable of including the reality of common representations in the scientific representation of reality*
