Activism, strategies, and social structures The paradoxical future temporalities of neo-peasant community projects. For an anthropology of incoherence

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Studying people's relationships to the future and how these shape emotional states (individual or collective) is useful for understanding what motivates social practices (Appadurai, 2013; Persoon and van Est, 2000; Pels, 2015; Bryant and Knight, 2019). In this paper, I propose to study how the collapse theories feed the imagination of some protagonists of the "back to the land" phenomenon. Based on long-term fieldwork among a dozen neo-farming collectives in the Massif Central (France), I will mobilise the paradigm of multiple temporalities and attempt to qualify the effects of this catastrophic and dystopian projection on the daily lives of its members. I will argue that the projects aiming at rural withdrawal and food autonomy are part of a paradoxical “presentist” (Hartog, 2015) temporality that manifests itself in the existence of antinomic “temporal horizons” (Koselleck, 2016), both pessimistic and optimistic with regard to the future and the social struggle. Their refusal of great, coherent and linear narratives about social transformation and strategic universal struggle allow me to feed the reflections on human action and the relationship to the social and environmental crisis.