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© Generalitat de Catalunya 2008

Using an ethnological approach, in conjunction with a meticulous ethnography of the terrain, this document aims to clarify a social process of transformation whose end is to perpetuate a collective identity in a defined territory at specifically internal limits: the Languedoc-Roussillon region. Whereas the majority of jousts were transformed into sports while being diffused from a territorial point of view, the tournaments preserved their local character while being rooted in the Pays d'Oc without ever having been transferred outside in order to survive. This process is directly related to the "technicisation" of the practice which made it possible to accept change without sacrificing identity.

Indeed, symptoms of change in the jousts' form of practice can be traced through the observation and analysis of the speeches of many witnesses and practitioners. The tournaments of old, as the old-timers call them, were associated with traditional sets of values: unrefined yet friendly, frank and loyal, beautiful and folkloric. From the vantage of today's overly technological and calculating times, such values are truly noteworthy. It is through the intervention of elitist values, representing the spirit of competitiveness that the technico-tactics of the sport developed. Such aspects of modernity question the viability of traditional games can continue to exist in the year 2000 and conserve space for its practise.

Indeed, by which of the processes set up by the tournament participants do they continue to belong to this same territory where they are exploited centuries later? How did they experience the changes related to the technicisation of their practice and what are the consequences?

These many questions find a response in a mechanism not revealed in the field of the sporting practices. This process is established in the space d'entre deux or "between two", between tradition and modernity, and enables the emergence of a perceived "ternary" mode which deconstructs traditional designs of opposition within which the social order has always been inscribed. For this reason, the road of interbreeding becomes a possible framework of understanding the system of games and sports.

While proposing a set of answers through this contribution, it also attempts to understand perspectives that could reveal the compromise that is inscribed within the space of entre deux.