Urbanité et sentiment de nature: ethnographies comparées de la randonnée pédestre Corse – Chapada Diamantina (Brésil)

Abstract

This research is articulated around a founding hypothesis: the feeling of nature that motivates the hikers is an urban feeling. Loving the nature, searching for a physical contact with it, spending energy and money to go through it and experience extraordinary feelings are all elements of the modern cultural weft. Tourists at the GR20 (Corsica) and at the Chapada Diamantina (Bahia, Brazil) inherited from the history of the idea of nature, from the history of the individual and from the history of free time in western civilization. They are moved by the desire of nature, which is worked out in the urban routine, and which emergence conditions are similar in both countries. However, the features of the « hiking ritual » in each of these places change according to their social structures and their « national myths ». In one hand, we can see how French tourists in Corsica experience and act the « myth of the individual » (Miguel Benasayag), fulfilled by equality and autonomy values. On the other hand, Brazilian tourists perform a hierarchical social scene, which places them between the guide who serves them and the natural divinity that overwhelms them. In both cases, a political question can be asked: does the feeling of nature hide and legitimate a « selective democracy » (Jessé Souza) that is connected to a depoliticization of nature as raw material ?