Refusal as a critique of the order of things: Bifurcations and utopian longings in contemporary rural France

This text questions the ‘theoretical hegemony’ that seems to characterize the concept of resistance when it comes to assessing a challenge to the social organization or its guardians. Refusal, which is presented here as a form of constructive defiance, in fact proves to be just as relevant for this purpose, particularly when it comes to understanding collective actions that are non-confrontational but express a critique of the order of things. This is what the ethnography of utopian collectives established in the French countryside tends to show. The women and men who compose them, individually driven by the desire to ‘no longer play the game’, slip collectively, on certain occasions, into the interstices of the social order, acting together in order to refuse certain of its social, political and economic norms. Their ways of doing things and the social relationships they then form can prefigure certain features of a ‘different future’.