Identity as a Complex Network

Abstract

“Berliners know they’re Berliners, Parisians know they’re Parisians, but who are we?” An apparently astonishing question, unless one is confronted with the history of the Lorraine coal basin. In the last hundred years, it has seen such historical and demographic upheavals that every generation experienced a specific historical situation that never repeated itself in the next: language and nationality changes took place five times in a century; frontiers were shifted seven times since 1815 (10,11); the rural, traditional way of life, changed into an industrial, semi-urban one.