Construction de l’étranger dans les échanges quotidiens

Abstract

During the last 15 years, French society has been the setting for the development of two cross-cutting phenomena : the settlement of an important non-native population (particularly, more than 3 million from Maghreb) and a severe economic and social crisis (massive unemployment and erosion of social protections). The crisis shatters former certitudes and destroys the symbolic devices constructed during some thirty years of exceptional development and modernization. The coïncidence of the two phenomena brings about a rise of xenophobia. The foreigner, being the principal carrier of the social « negative », thus becomes the central reference for natives who attempt to expel poverty and dependency, both of which have become omnipresent while people had imagined they had been eradicated. The paper tries to define this process as it takes place in the everyday life of urban peripheries.