Why did you decide to study the rural working class? What are their characteristics?

Fanny Hugues: In my previous research project, I followed the day-to-day life of a forager for wild medicinal and aromatic plants in the Drôme [a department in southeast France]. I focused on her household but came to realise it was interdependent with others in the area. A single parent with three children to support, she lived on little money, with just the RSA [revenu de solidarité active – a welfare benefit for people on low incomes] topping up her modest earnings. She had relatively little access to legitimate cultural capital. By her social characteristics, she was working class. It was her case that made me want to keep working on these informal rural economies. And then came the Yellow Vests protests, which began in November 2018. While I was writing the draft for my thesis, the movement was in full swing and many voices were speaking up, particularly in the countryside. Voices of people who said they were struggling in the shadows. Which made me wonder: how do you survive with little money in the countryside? I wanted to look at the question through the lens of lifestyles and domestic settings.

Three-quarters of the people I’ve met in my current study are working class. They have little income and are characterised by their low social status and a disconnection from legitimate culture. The other quarter are lower middle class, because they possess cultural capital that is for the most part uncertified. I chose the label “modest thrifty” for the people I met. It speaks to their limited means and frugal habits. And it also points to people who don’t try to draw attention to themselves, who quietly get on with their lives, without trying to be noticed outside of their social circle. I met 44 people aged between 34 and 88 living in 31 different households. Half were women, half men. Half were in heterosexual relationships, half were single. Many had no children to support, or no children at all. These households live on or below the poverty line, defined as an income of 1120 euros a month in 2020. Their median income is 880 euros a month. That’s not much at all, but they have very little debt and the vast majority own their own homes. But these aren’t sumptuous properties: they’re often old buildings, sometimes inherited, that need serious work. They’ve been renovated to differing degrees by the modest thrifty, so they’re in various states of repair. They also include plots of land on which lightweight housing has been erected. These are mostly occupied by women who are not homeowners and who rent accommodation in the private or public markets. What characterises the modest thrifty, even those who don’t own their homes, is stable housing. They share one certainty: that they won’t be made homeless overnight. For example, tenants in the private market know their landlords, who are often their neighbours and aren’t going to just kick them out.

Among the modest thrifty, I identify four subgroups. There are the “precarious women”, the “retired farmers”, the “workers and smallholders” and the “little middles”. To meet them, I carried out a multisite ethnographic study in six French departments: Ariège, Tarn, Haute-Vienne, Finistère, Sarthe and Moselle. This gave me access to a number of mutual aid and mutual acquaintance networks – as well as different strategies for getting by in a rural environment – while also broadening the social diversity of the people interviewed.

For this work, you also conducted an ethno-accounting study. What does this methodology involve and how did it help you understand the modest thrifty’s attitudes towards environmentalism? 

Ethno-accounting was brought to France by Alain Cottereau and Moktar Mohatar Marzok in their work Une famille andalouse (“An Andalusian Family”), published in 2012. They were interested in what counts for people, how they assess the value of the things around them and how they make arbitrages. They took a highly precarious heterosexual household as a case study. A few years later, in 2016, the EHESS working group on this methodology led to the publication of a special issue of the Revue des politiques sociales et familiales entitled “Joindre les deux bouts” (“Making Ends Meet”). Still very active today, this working group is a forum for discussing ongoing ethno-accounting studies.

While the modest thrifty live on little money, they nevertheless draw on an abundance of non-monetary resources. By creating a series of charts, ethno-accounting lets us look at what we could call their “informal economy” from a statistical standpoint. For example, I studied a couple who survive on a single salary and unemployment benefits. Simon and Nelly have dependent children, but don’t drive and don’t own a car. To get around, they depend on Nelly’s father, who lives nearby. He takes them shopping and brings them wood and vegetables. In return, Nelly helps him with certain things: she cooks him meals and takes care of his paperwork. The couple can also get lifts from friends, and there’s also a bus that passes metres from their house. That’s why Simon and Nelly say they don’t really need a car and that having one would be worse because of the running costs. To understand the value of these practices and networks, I tried to calculate what mutual aid accounts for in their budget. I recorded time spent and money saved to factor in everything that falls outside of monetary exchanges and get a picture of what falls under the informal economy.

In my survey, I looked at donations, loans, salvage, DIY, home production (especially of food and firewood), as well as foraging and hunting, all of which are part of rural resourcefulness. This means frugal lifestyles characterised by low incomes and a significant reliance on the subsistence economy. For instance, home food production is a subsistence activity that includes growing a vegetable garden or orchard and keeping livestock, as well as cooking food and preserving it in jars and tins. In writing my thesis, ethno-accounting helped me get a sense of what sustains rural resourcefulness in the long term. It’s a genuine way of life defined by a set of practices rooted in socialisation processes and based on available resources – that supports household economies.

Ethno-accounting shows that time to oneself, at home, is crucial in this lifestyle. Because without time to do up one’s house, to salvage or repair things, to learn and watch demonstrations of skill, there is no rural resourcefulness. And having no spare time often means having to buy things instead. Strikingly, the time that the modest thrifty set aside for subsistence work takes priority over the time devoted to paid work. From a strictly economic point of view, I noted that it isn’t necessarily more cost-effective to produce one’s own firewood than it is to buy it. But the men who make firewood offer a folk reasoning for doing so that is not based solely on economic rationale, but also includes the practical (learning new skills or keeping fit), the moral (the value of work) and the symbolic (the local recognition that this activity brings).

What role does stable housing play in these lifestyles?

It’s a crucial aspect. For example, DIY involves salvaging items and materials from the side of the road, from the dump and from friends, or things kept after parents have died. All this salvage must be stored somewhere, either somewhere on the property or in a space dedicated to DIY. Storage depends on stable housing – in other words, knowing that one won’t be evicted in the medium or long term. These items are a source of wealth, a form of embodied economic capital. This sets apart rural resourcefulness from urban resourcefulness, as studied by the Collectif Rosa Bonheur. Rural resourcefulness is characterised by spaces of one’s own, which are legally owned and often extensive.

The domestic spaces of the modest thrifty stretch to surrounding forests, fields and rivers, where they go to forage, hunt and fish. They also include local domestic spaces that make up their “inter-subsistence” economy, to borrow Geneviève Pruvost’s term, which is based on non-monetary exchanges like swaps, loans or donations. These lifestyles rely on technical knowledge and practical skills, which are not shared equally, especially between men and women. DIY is about “making do with what you’ve got”, to repeat a phrase heard on several occasions during the study. It’s not about heading to the shop to buy exactly what you need and bringing it home. It’s about making do with your material resources, as well as relying on mutual aid from others. The modest thrifty always try to ensure things last as long as possible by maintaining and repairing them. These people don’t DIY out of necessity alone, but also because they’re curious to understand and learn, they’re looking to have fun, or they want to create something.

The modest thrifty don’t DIY out of necessity alone, but also because they’re curious to understand and learn.

What attitude do the modest thrifty have towards environmentalism?

In my initial interviews, I asked people to give me an overview of their lifestyle. And I also wanted to dig into their attitude towards environmental issues. So I asked: “Would you call yourself green?” or, “What does being green mean to you?” Sometimes there was a pause, some people didn’t know what I meant, while others pushed back. I realised that this term didn’t resonate with them and that I couldn’t just drop it into the conversation. So I approached the subject through other aspects of their lifestyle, like food, heating, and transport. And in the end, I understood this as a finding in itself: the modest thrifty don’t call themselves green.

How do you explain this rejection of the term “green”?

The modest thrifty are not indifferent to environmental issues. The reason they don’t call themselves green, despite leading very environmentally frugal lifestyles, is that they don’t identify with the dominant environmental norms advocated by the urban upper classes. Based on their class, gender, and generation, I identified among the modest thrifty different types of “moral ecologies”, all characterised by environmental norms at odds with dominant ones. The term “moral ecologies”, coined by the historian Karl Jacoby, refers to the beliefs, practices and traditions that determine how people interact with the environment. I focused on the modest thrifty’s attitude towards environmental issues, rather than trying to define their environmentalism based on their degree of adherence to accepted environmental norms. I was also interested in the permeability of their practices and discourses to these norms: were they re-appropriated or resisted? For example, the anti-waste moral ecology of the precarious women in the study adopted, to a limited degree, the environmental norms around waste, rubbish and recycling. These women espouse their own anti-waste norms, guided by a strong moral sense and impermeable to dominant environmental norms. And while their moral ecology is permeable to exhortations to reduce waste, they do not see solutions to the climate crisis as their responsibility. Ultimately, it’s about quiet resistance against these dominant environmental norms, but, for various reasons, the modest thrifty don’t always frame their frugal practices in political terms.

The reason the modest thrifty don’t call themselves green is that they don’t identify with the dominant environmental norms advocated by the urban upper classes.

Yet these people do point to various signs of the environmental crisis that they see in their day-to-day lives. The piles of rubbish in their neighbourhoods; the fact that they have to water their vegetable patches far more due to drought and lose some crops; noticing that there are fewer insects in the garden, or fewer rabbits, when before they were easy to hunt. It’s what we could call an environmentalism of the near. The “little middles” in the study, who have the most cultural capital, also talk about the exploitation of people and natural resources on the other side of the world to satisfy the needs of a few rich people. We can liken this to a demand for environmental justice.

What might the political demands of the modest thrifty be?

The term “quiet resistance” is important, because it refers to the idea that these people are not passive. They notice policy measures hindering their lifestyles more and more. Things like the ban on salvaging items from skips at dumps or restrictive legislation on lightweight housing. Their demands would probably focus on easier access to welfare benefits. For example, continuing to receive the RSA without having to do unpaid work as a condition, which would reduce the amount of their spare time spent at home and threaten their rural resourcefulness.

I think there would also be demands around transport. In all the rural areas surveyed, the modest thrifty lamented the poor provision of public transport, with buses that only come at 7 am and 7 pm, or not at all. Some brought up the price of petrol, stricter roadworthiness regulations, and the fact that vehicles are becoming increasingly electronic. No longer being able to repair one’s own car is a major problem identified by the study, one which was also shared by rural Yellow Vests. Rural resourcefulness is based on repair. Not being able to fix one’s own means of transport is just one of many other structural obstacles that make this lifestyle harder.

This interview originally appeared in L’écologie depuis les ruralités (“Ecology from a Rural Perspective”), a publication by the Fondation de l’Écologie Politique.

Translated from the French by Kit Dawson.