L'expérience subjective de la « nature »: réflexions méthodologiques

Abstract

Getting city dwellers to speak about their relation with "nature" is in our experience not that easy. When asked to elaborate on that topic during semi-structured interviews conducted in public urban green spaces in three cities in the West of France (Angers, Nantes and Rennes), many interviewees had little to say. However strange this may seem, we believe this may compare with what is observed in the domain of chronic pain. In some instances of chronic pain, for example, the pain is so strong that the patient is unable to say anything other than "It hurts" or "I feel pain". Pain which, like nature, is a biological process, often seems inexpressible. In both cases- subjective experience of "nature", subjective experience of pain- feelings are difficult to verbalize. But we also observed that, when encouraged to so, people try to overcome the inexpressible part of these experiences and attempt to verbalize them. The present paper seeks to draw some methodological and phenomenological lessons from such attempts to overcome the inexpressible in these experiences. We show that the analysis of descriptions by patients of their pain undertaken by two colleagues can help sociologists, ethnologists and anthropologists to differentiate various factors involved in the descriptions by people of their subjective experiences of "nature". © NSS-Dialogues, EDP Sciences 2013.