Entre locals et incomers : « Where is the community? » : appropriation collective d’une île écossaise et conflit social
The Scottish land tenure system is one of the most unequal in Europe. Most of the territory is owned by a minority of landowners. In the early 1990s, some rural communities in the Highlands and Islands created the first Community Land Trusts (CLT) and thus developed new forms of local governance based on direct democracy. These small local revolutions culminated in the consolidation of a national land reform in the early 2000s. At first glance, this contemporary legal upheaval fosters competition between two interest groups : landowners and crofters (Scottish peasants). The objective of this dissertation is to put this binary vision of social conflict into perspective. My ethnographic research carried out on the island of Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides was focused on intra-community conflict in this new political and legal context. My analysis concentrate on the contradictions of a model of democratic governance based on the principle of the Rule of Law with the constraints of the old local normative system characterized by relational, identity and cultural logics. I present the testimonies of a group of residents who consider themselves “locals” and who value cultural and genealogical criteria as founding principles of a community. This vision contradicts the point of view of foreigners (“incomers”) who, by the culmination of the project of collective appropriation of the island, hope for the realization of a political social community.
Buyout movement Scotland Communities Legal pluralism Land ownership Buyout movement Conflicts