Entre lieu-dit et monde : cultures de l’habitat écologique dans la chanson poétique occitane et française des années 1960 aux années 1980

Abstract

This article focuses on a moment in history that is a precursor to contemporary ecological questions: the relationship between human vitality, ecosystem viability, and cultural resistance to the standardization of sensitivity and to the predation of the lieu habitable and the common habitat. From the sixties to the eighties, influenced by the folk wave and the hippie counterculture as well as by the distant echo of collecting activities initiated in the 19th century, minority cultures become aware of themselves. From this awareness, a new kind of popular song will emerge, which carries the banner of an ecological culture in the full sense of the word culture. In the context of French centralism, this goes along with the renaissance of songs in regional languages, in our case the “renaissance of the Occitan song”. With the internationalisation of pop, this awareness finds expression in the French poetic song, which unsurprisingly is particularly active in Quebec. Thus, a conception of the terrestrial habitat as ecosystem is opposed to the mainstream environmentalist conception of ecology (considered as a pure alibi for a type of organization of reality that consists in dominating, exploiting, and destroying biodiversity). In this new conception, the renewal of local vitality is the opposite of its folkloric ‘freezing’, and it is the precondition, and not the reverse, of the viability of the presence in the world and of our common humanity. This results in a critical articulation of the themes of the local habitat du lieu and the global habitat du monde, which refutes a narrow  territorialism just as it refutes an abstract universalism reminding of Hölderlin’s famous thought “[Y]et poetically, man
dwells on this earth”.