{"word_count": 807, "character_count": 5029}
Résumé de la communication de Frédérique CHLOUS (Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris) donnée à l’occasion du séminaire Les constructions en milieu marin / Constructions in marine environment du 14 au 19 mars 2016The choice to invite an anthropologist might look strange: neither population live under the sea, even there are some utopian project Firstly, what interest the anthropologists is to identify the practices of the individuals (farming, fishing, the industries; the housng environment...). These techniques vary according to the cultures and are social productions. These are related to knowledges, know-how and in relationships to the world. Secondly, our studies carry on the representations. They are a shape of social knowledge, socially elaborate and shared by the members of the same social or cultural group. It is a way of thinking, to appropriate, to interpret our daily reality. The visions of the world were studied by the anthropologists in various companies. This fast presentation illustrates that relationship to the world which surrounds us are not identical in the whole of societies and the uniformisante vision of the biodiversity masks these cultural realities.In various periods, on five continents, every people built a specific relation with the sea; either that he "turn the back", or that he considers it as the original matrix of any life. The sea was perceived for a long time as a terrible, even unhealthy social and cultural space: a "threatening relic of the deluge", to paraphrase the historian Alain Corbin. In the Judeo-Christian religions, the earth and the sky and the sea were separately created and the men are conceived to live on earth. The sea is the place of the savagery, the disorder, of the mystery, the primitive and cannot be controlled. The faculty to live on the earth and on the sea is reserved for a category of population " among which the place and the status remain particular during centuries: to the civilized countryman is brought into conflict the "wild and heathen" sailor. The inhabitants of seas often have then monstrous characteristics by their size, their horrifying aspect or still because of their hybridization half-men / woman, and half-fish.In the XIXth century, romantic writers, as François René de Chateaubriand, translate another vision of the sea. Violent, grand, wild, it becomes a mirror of the soul and allows to reveal the sensibility. The power and the mystery partners in this liquid element become qualities which arouse the admiration and authorize to describe it in all its majesty. At the end of the XIXth century, the advent of the railroad allows the conquest of the ground space and the emergence of sea resorts, invention of the coast, the beginning of the "yachting" carried by the social elites, as well as the new esthetics. The sea, seen down from headlands, becomes then an esthetic space, a landscape which contemplates the aristocracy. Elites come to take benefits of swimming and the pure air. This end of century also carries a sanitary revival: the open air and the reinvigorating water will be from the beginning of the XXth century the bases of "natural gymnastics" . Beaches, to there considered as without interest, are a new place to be.Of "empty territories", as wrote it the historian Alain Corbin in 1988, the littoral become territories of "too full", as proposed the geograph Paskoff, in 2005. But the sea itself, in spite of fearless swimmers some sailors, or still the divers, remains however more dreamed than practized.« Inhabit » in marine environment, is a concept which exceed habitat. It reflect relationship between humans and the environment an have many dimensions: personal (identity, be in the world), social (social groups share the same living space, social structure, social representations), physical (spatial and materiality).P. Pétrequin (archaeologist) show that there is a variety of purposes to inhabit the sea : fishing, defence of villages, storage protection of cereals againts rodents. There are also variety of shapes : houses on stills on backfilled base, on rafts, on floating islands, on docks , development of artificial islands, floor on wet ground. Study of Moken (Archipel Mergui, Taïlande-Myanmar) show that there is links between technical and symbolic field: « The monoxyle ship's hull is a human body, the indentations symbolise the human condition therefore miserable emerge » (Ivanoff).Only one category on humans live under the sea, Aliette Geistdoerfer (1987) study the life in submarines. The nuclear submarine increased the time spent under the sea and the in-depth possibilities and to navigate, countries created an elite corps: Interest of the volunteers for an exceptional jocrb. The sea is not in question, it would have been able to be the sky or the space. Under the sea, they live in the 5th dimension (depth, uranium, weapons) in a closed space (white light in the daytime, reddish at night) and they don't see the sea contrary in Captain Nemo!Summary