Итог полностью

The confusion surrounding debates concerning the notion of region and. more generally, of ‘ethnic group’ or ‘ethnicity’ (scientific euphemisms that have been substituted for the notion of ‘race’, which is none the less still present in actual practice) stems in part from the fact that the desire to submit to logical criticism the categories of common sense - emblems or stigmata - and to substitute for the practical principles of everyday judgement the logically controlled and empirically based criteria of science, leads one to forget that practical classifications are always subordinated to practical functions and oriented towards the production of social effects. One also tends to forget that the practical representations that are the most exposed to scientific criticism (for example. Ihe statements made by regionalist militants about the unity of the Occitan language) may contribute to producing what they apparently describe or designate, in other words, the objective reality to which the objectivist critique refers them in order to show their delusions or incoherence.

But on a deeper level, the quest for the ‘objective" criteria of ‘regional’ or ‘ethnic’ identity should not make one forget that, in social practice, these criteria (for example, language, dialect and accent) are the object of mental representations, that is, of acts of perception and appreciation, of cognition and recognition, in which agents invest their interests and their presuppositions, and of objectified representations, in things (emblems, flags, badges, etc.) or acts, self-interested strategies of symbolic manipulation which aim at determining the (mental) representation that other people may form

of these properties and their bearers. In other words, the characteristics and criteria noted by objectivist sociologists and anthropologists, once they are perceived and evaluated as they are in practice, function as signs, emblems or stigmata, and also as powers. Since this is the case, and since there is no social subject who can in practical terms be unaware of the fact, it follows that (objectively) symbolic properties, even the most negative, can be used strategically according to the material but also the symbolic interests of their bearer.¹

One can understand the particular form of struggle over classifications that is constituted by the struggle over the definition of ‘regional’ or ‘ethnic’ identity only if one transcends the opposition that science, in order to break away from the preconceptions of spontaneous sociology, must first establish between representation and reality, and only if one includes in reality the representation of reality, or, more precisely, the struggle over representations, in the sense of mental images, but also of social demonstrations whose aim it is to manipulate menial images (and even in the sense of delegations responsible for organizing the demonstrations that are necessary to modify mental representations).

Struggles over ethnic or regional identity - in other words, over the properties (stigmata or emblems) linked with the origin through the place of origin and its associated durable marks, such as accent -are a particular case of the different struggles over classifications, struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups. What is at stake here is the power of imposing a vision of the social world through principles of di-vision which, when they are imposed on a whole group, establish meaning and a consensus about meaning, and in particular about the identity and unity of the group, which creates the reality of the unity and the identity of the group. The etymology of the word region (regio), as described by Emile Benveniste. leads to the source of the di-vision: a magical and thus essentially social act of diacrisis which introduces by decree a decisive discontinuity in natural continuity (between the regions of space but also between ages, sexes, etc,). Regere fines, the act which consists in ‘tracing out the limits by straight lines', in delimiting ‘the interior and the exterior, the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane, the national territory and foreign territory', is a religious act performed by the person invested with the highest authority, the rex. whose responsibility it is to regeresacra, to fix the