After several decades of desertification, some countryside areas benefit today from an increasing reinvestment by urban populations. The restructuration of rural societies is also questioning. The social landscape is changing, turning above all the rural into a social world. Does the village make still sense for its inhabitants ? The field of this research deals with evolution and the relational transformation of the French rural space, with a special emphasis on townships (in the north-american sense) of less than 500 inhabitants and their singular identity. The village of Gigouzac (Lot), of 239 inhabitants, is my fieldwork since more than 10 years. This choice is not without reasons and without consequences, as I live my fieldwork and my research topic, personally, with my family, and scientifically.The essential property of this research lies in its longitudinal character, implying a distance to take as well as constant and participating observation. These various « in situ » postures are combining sociology and audiovisual techniques with a psychosocial approach. The concept of identity have to be defined by its meaning. This Ph-D thesis is trying to understand the township identity. In order to observe the effects the new inhabitants of urban culture could have on the township identity, I choiced to consider it under an angle of social psychology and its representation dynamics. The different methods used in the data collection, being quantitative, comparative, qualitative and audiovisual, show the permanencies and the dynamics of the rurality. The village is evolving, is modernizing, is reinventing itself, but it remains a pertinent and a coherent territory, a reply to the increasing individualism of the modern society.
