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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2012

The Saharan Oasis under the Challenge of its Landscape, The Jerid as an Example

Résumé

The history and the structure themselves of oases recall us this obvious fact: the nature of gardens and palm groves is artificial; to be more precise, anthropic. Surrounded by the desert, oases are usually the combination of agricultural spaces and dwellings. Their existence itself is not necessary, but the quite common shape and structure of these ecosystems in Sahara are answers, to the severe desert pedoclimatic conditions, selected and implemented by generations of gardeners.

The result as it appears today can be seen and analyzed as an oasian landscape. These landscapes are shaped by history, local environment, and daily practices. Their primary purpose seems to be agricultural, but other kinds of practices contribute to their definition: gardens, even of a palm grove, are always more than a production of biomass: they produce social fabric, through everyday works, talks, evocations, or thoughts made around them. Oasian gardens are "spaces" qualified and so turned to "places", practiced, said, thought, with agricultural, aesthetic, social purposes... Therewith, do we circumnavigate the oasis landscape issue? Certainly, oasian landscapes are "built nature", but we maybe have to find out now by whom they were built... By "local practices", I do not restrain my analysis to the indigenous practices but I broaden it to the nowadays-effective actors of these spaces. If I illustrate my lecture with the case of Jerid in Tunisia, I have to convene in my analysis actors of tourism and actors of development. All, with local people, converge to define what is an oasis, what "it is for", how to read these spaces, and this polyphony is not without effect on the share of the resources: water, land, labor and even ideas of the relation to environment. If we focus on tourism, its impact is consequent on many daily local aspects, at first the use of the scarce water (to be used by hotels or to embellish the scenery), the labor (diverted from agriculture), but even on the definition of the oasis: a place to work or a place to stroll? The usual local definition of the garden manages a place for leisure and work unlike European tourists who underestimate the anthropic quality of a palm grove. An ethnoecology of the oasis landscape deals with the cross-actions of practices and narratives of various actors of this specific desert space.
L'oasis saharienne à l'épreuve de son paysage, Le Jérid pour exemple

Les oasis du Sahara peuvent être vues comme paysage, mais les paysages oasiens se résument-ils à ce que peut nous offrir le regard ? Je vais ici introduire la notion de paysage socioécologique pour insister sur la dimension double de ces paysages oasiens particuliers, productions et constructions sociales et écologiques. Cette approche pourra être élargie à la question du paysage en général, au delà des rives désertiques.

Pendant des millénaires, les oasis ont été des centres saupoudrés mais denses de présence humaine dans les immensités désertiques, les plus vastes qui soient, a priori lieux hostiles à toute humanité. Ces oasis sont des environnements construits, bâtis, clairement d'origine anthropique. Ils sont des paysages vivants, modelés par les populations locales, mais aussi déplus en plus aussi par le tourisme. Le tourisme, comme un dieu, modèle les lieux à son image...

La région du Jérid (Sud-Ouest tunisien) offre un exemple précieux du phénomène et l'oasis de Siwa (dans le Nord-Ouest de l'Égypte) viendra comme intéressant contrepoint.
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Dates et versions

hal-00569247 , version 1 (25-02-2011)
hal-00569247 , version 2 (28-03-2012)
hal-00569247 , version 3 (21-05-2012)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-00569247 , version 1

Citer

Vincent Battesti. The Saharan Oasis under the Challenge of its Landscape, The Jerid as an Example. Virginie Picon-Lefebvre, with Aziza Chaouni. Desert Tourism: Tracing the Fragile Edges of Development, Harvard University Press, pp.116, 2012, Aga Khan Program of the Graduate School of Design. ⟨hal-00569247v1⟩

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