L’ethos collectif des guerrilla gardeners à Montréal : entre conflictualité et inclusion

The Guerrilla Gardening Movement is defined as “the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to utilize, such as an abandoned site, an area that is not being cared for, or private property” (Wikipedia). Born in New York in the Seventies, today this movement has spread everywhere in the world, mainly in North America, as illustrated by its two manifestos (Tracey 2007 and Reynolds 2008). We analyze here the question of collective ethos, be it auto- or hetero-attributed, of the Guerrilla Gardening Movement in its Montreal form. We have worked on an e-corpus (blogs, forums, web pages) made up of texts by and about Guerrilla Gardening activists. Our work draws from both Discourse Analysis and Urban Sociolinguistics. We show how the notions of collective identity and ethos can be compared to each other in the context of movements which have an anarchic character and we propose for them the notion of ethotic nebula.