Research fields
PhD thesis (2015-2020)
Within the scope of environmental humanities, my own research revolves around the relatively recent emergence (since the eighties) of new forms of "ecologized" agriculture practices, in response to agro-environemental issues caused by the currentagricultural and economic systems.
I opted for a socio-anthropological approach, based on an ethnographical study of permaculture stakeholders, in two différent milieus (as defined by the geographer and philosopher Augustin Berque): Swiss Romandie and Japan. As the permaculture movement is enjoying nowadays a veritable international infatuation, it is a fertile ground for a socio-anthropological research. The dialectic between a global, international movement and its always idiosyncratic, localized implementation is interesting to capture through the lens of what the anthropologist Yoann Moreau calls a mesography (studying a specific milieu and analysing it by navigating through multiple scales from macro to micro).
One of the objectives of this research is to mobilize Berque's mesology to understand the emergence of permaculture as not only a more ecological way of practicing agriculture, but also as another ontology. By changing the way it cultivates the earth, is permaculture also sketching out another vision of human's role on earth, and another vision on earth's role on humans?