ABSTRACT
Terroir' is a well-known term with a wide-ranging evocative power in France, and it is often used in the making of a persuasive case for the authenticity and uniqueness of a product coming from a particular part of the country. In this chapter, the author wants to recount his participation in a practice that explicitly mobilises this concept, and shows how visual and affective encounters with landscapes animated by particular practices allow the stories of a region to be narrated in persuasive ways. Though narratives of tradition and authenticity have today largely replaced the narratives of progress and innovation that worked to transform the economy and ecology of rural regions in centuries past, and most spectacularly in the 19th century, it is still possible to sense today's sustainability as being an achievement relative to an economy of struggle in the past.
