Abstract EN:

Grande Brenne (Indre) has more than 2,200 ponds organized in chains and distributed on approximately 80,000 hectares. These ponds are usually snuggled up in the heart of vast properties where owners, guards and the network of villagers devote to fishing and game activities. Water is everywhere in Grande Brenne, and it is thus around the complex river system that the brennouse society gets organized, looks for itself, forms itself. And these are the families who have been truly living and utterly anchored in in this territory for generations, who have known, and still know today, the privilege to control water. The control of water which engenders the control of the territory as well as various forms of social and symbolic domination. In Grande Brenne, water is an ecological and economic asset, but is also social logically and symbolically very important. In the sense that the agricultural and cynegetic management of the territory, as well as the fish, are under the responsability of the big property owners and their network, on a familial and intimate model as for the representations of the "nature". These representations are henceforth competed by a feeling of identity based on the patrimonial speech built by locally elected representatives, as well as the environmental friendly ethic carried by those whom we call "the Greens". So many "spatial ideologies" which are in confrontation within the brennouse society.