Abstract EN:

This work focuses on the relations between societies and their environment. The ubiquity of a disconcerting exoticism within scientific analysis, as well as the simplifying tendency to conceive the oasis as an easy to seize 'fertile spot in the desert', defined exclusively by the laws of its live-sustaining element water, encouraged my interest in a more complex oasian model. My biological background incites me to dedicate my work especially to palm-groves of oases (mostly in Jerid, south of Tunisia, but also in Djanet, south of Algeria, and in Zagora, Morocco). In the quest for the relation between oasian society and its environment, i have tried to avoid the eternal dispute on the prevalence of either nature or culture. Instead i attempted to fuse them in favour of a non-dual explanation, fostering the ambitious aim to establish an oasian socio-ecology. My insights on oasian nature are based on its three levels spatial structure, ranging from the sxpansive (oasis in general) to the confined (the garden). According to its location in space, three levels of possibility of oasian praxes determined by corresponding levels of temporalities can be distinguished. It is illusive to define an "oasian norm" for the socio-ecological process. Praxes vary according to the different actors performing them. Put another way, the categories of actors of the oasian world find theirs co-ordinates between ideals-types of the relation societyenvironment: "autochthonous", "orientalism", "paternalism". For all that, the ideal-type "autochthonous" is not a norm with a praxis solely determined by either the environment or the society. There is no precedence of neither one nor the other as determining factor, but a combining of both whose relative influences can be evaluated according to the oasian web of space and time. These circumspect approaches account for the equivocal relations of the researcher to his object, of the individual to its society, of the society to its environment.