Following the example of Germany and after 1870s, plaster casts of ancient art are subject to a “cultural transfer” in France and in Italy. This kind of process reflects the birth of archaeology as a science; it is aligned to a specific change in higher education and it allows a nation building / re-building (by referring to Italian and French examples). In addition, the consolidating nation process is based on a cultural mechanism caused by globalization, i.e. “inventing tradition”. The “myth of white Greece” or that of “Romanity” can be taken into account in order to justify the destruction of plaster casts of ancient art.
Considering the colonial heritage and the other forms of domination makes it necessary to take a critical approach to the positions of authority on which scientific discourse is based. What would be the conditions for the possibility of knowledge giving access to alternative forms of knowledge and discourse about the world? Does not every approach bring its own biases in the project of universal knowledge? The reflection is based on an ethnographic survey (Wallis) and the current debate on the restitution of African museum collections by former colonial countries.
Has the inauguration of the first Ainu National Museum in Japan in 2020, which follows the recognition of their indigenous status in 2019, redefined the actors at play in discussing Ainu history? The study of this new museum will serve as a case study to analyse the elaboration of discourses defining Self and Other, as well as the relationship between those who produce knowledge about the Ainu and the Ainu themselves.
The Venus of Milo is seen as a unique masterpiece of Greek art. However, to the great displeasure of the Greek authorities who are demanding its return, it has belonged to the French public collections since 1821. More generally, it is widely considered a European and Western heritage. And it goes without saying, its beauty is universal. But can it be Japanese? Through the examination of the reception of the Venus de Milo in Japan, the aim is to reflect on the conditions of a utopian appropriation of art works, given that, unlike texts that can be quoted, cut and mounted, paintings and statues are strongly dependant on their materiality. Against the current discourse on the dematerialization of art works, which goes hand in hand with an increasing fetishization of the originals, this article explores the path of an incorporation through practice and repetition.
While the actors of cultural renaissances in French Polynesia do not hesitate to mobilize historical, archeological or anthropological research work as means of knowing the precolonial past, the scientific field, especially the French-speaking researchers, continue to overlook and discredit this cultural enunciation. The historicity of the practices and the aims pursued within the framework of these renaissances are thus questioned, revealing the still decisive influence of a theory that has nevertheless been undermined elsewhere in the Pacific: the invention of tradition.
The comparative legal scholar authors, working a broad project mapping how law conceptualizes and operationalizes race, ethnicity and nationality, provide an assessment of the triadic relationship between law, identity (making and claims recognition) and science. The project focuses on race and ethnicity, excluding the discussion of gender identity, but the latter is used as a point of reference to demonstrate the transformative changes in the past years in how the meaning of the terms of identity are assigned and conceptualized in social sciences and humanities, and to a certain degree in politics and law. Yet, there is a debilitating lack of linguistic and conceptual resources, cultural tools, and a solid and proper vocabulary for thinking about racial identity, which is particularly stark in the field of law, especially international law, which habitually operates with the concepts of race, ethnicity, and nationality when setting forth standards for the recognition of collective rights or protection from discrimination, establishing criteria for asylum, labeling actions as genocide, or requiring a “genuine link” in citizenship law, without actually providing definitions for these groups or of membership criteria within these legal constructs. The paper provides an overview of the obstacles, challenges and controversies in the legal institutionalization. In technical terms, the operationalization of ethnic/racial/national group affiliation can follow several options: […]
Dark Emu (2014), a book written by Bruce Pascoe, argues for a drastic revision of the vision of Aboriginal peoples at the time of the colonisation of Australia. Traditionally presented as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they were in fact for the most part villagers who applied some forms of agriculture and fish farming, all of which were concealed by those who wanted to appropriate their lands, thus forging a false version perpetuated by anthropological tradition. This provocative thesis has had a huge impact in Australia, where it has been the subject of much controversy. Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s book is the first rebuttal by academic specialists–who are also deeply involved in the defence of the rights of Aboriginal communities.
Starting with a song denouncing anthropologists and prehistorians as disrespectful of the cultures they study, the article reflects on the relationship between lost cultures and their scientific study, drawing on the author’s personal experience. It then examines NAGPRA, the federal “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act”, which in 1990 gave Native American communities extensive rights over various cultural properties and archaeological sites. He highlights the paradoxical, if not perverse, effects of such legislation, which has not necessarily contributed to a better knowledge (and recognition) of pre-colonial societies in North America.
In Belgium, registration in the Population Register is a prerequisite for access to social rights, as well as an indicator of integration and social recognition. For homeless people, an administrative system has been set up: the reference address. Among other things, this allows the person to be registered in the population register and to obtain a legal and administrative existence. However, today, its application differs from one social welfare organization (called CPAS) to another, the controls being most of the time driven by the fight against social fraud, itself defined by a specific policy of each CPAS.
This article aims at studying the concrete conditions of integration of an undocumented person living in Bordeaux. It is essentially based on an ethnographic survey, interviews and a budget survey carried out with a recipient of the Secours Populaire support in Bordeaux.
In this article I show how, on the field of seasonal migration between the Maghreb and the Bouches‑du‑Rhône, the evolution of the links maintainedwith the “homeland,” the territory and social network in the country of origin and the meaning that migrants themselves give to this relationship can be understood through the intersection of a plurality of analytic levels and temporalities: the political and socio‑economic structural context of the host and origin country; the possibilities provided by migrants’ network; the individual and family strategies of the latter.
Are “Doctors Without Borders” (MSF) doctors without a homeland? Based on fifty interviews, statistical data and a participatory observation, this articledescribes humanitarian mission conditions limiting local integration and suggests three forms of attachment: home (“break expatriates”), elsewhere (“multi‑homeland expatriates”) or nowhere (“duty‑free expatriates”). For the latter, MSF plays, until their departure from the organization, the role of substitute homeland.
From 1994, the Afrikaner community members experience an ambiguous relationship with their cultural attributes, used as alibi by the Christian‑nationalist government to justify racial supremacy under apartheid time. Today, these characteristics are seen as deviant and lived as social stigmas. Some Afrikaners vividly criticize their past and try to recreate new patriotic frames which fit today liberal and democratic values, as shown in this article.
Based on a qualitative study conducted between 2016 and 2018 among thirty French people who migrated to Quebec, this article proposes to distinguish four types of migration projects: the exploration, settlement, circulation and return projects. The trajectories and narratives collected show that these projects are not mutually exclusive or fixed in time, but that there is a fluidity between them, which moreover do not always correspond to the administrative categories of migration statuses in Canadian immigration policy.
This article aims to highlight the way in which, in the Russian national context, public authorities erase the boundaries between return migration and asylum in order to support the repatriation of former Soviet citizens to Russia. This political phenomenon has its roots in the fall of the USSR when Russia has rapidly become a country of immigration. This resulted in the adoption of the Geneva Convention and the creation of the two socio‑legal categories of refugees in Russia: « forced migrants » and « refugees ».
This paper seeks to analyze expatriation in a phenomenological perspective. It aims to question the usual analytical tools of human displacements. Thedeconstruction of social class, racial and national identities, allows us to highlight the emancipation of the individual from the patria. Expatriation appears like a heuristic existential notion to look differently at international migrations. This perspective unifies migratory situations beyond the implicit cleavages between tradition and modernity.
1980s: Algerian immigrants since 1962, little visible on the public scene, developed transnational commercial initiatives to supply vast underground markets emerging in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, then in Spain, while strengthening their ties with the Maghreb. After 1990, the Algerians of Europe, who were suffering the aftershocks of the civil war in Algeria, withdrew to local micro markets at the same time as the great Moroccan migration was unfolding: more than a million people in the decade created all sorts of European networks for housing, work, ... took over the cross‑border commercial activities of the Algerians, with more flexible and diversified logistics. It was in the early 2000s that they met the Afghan, Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian cohorts of East Asian transmigrants working for Southeast Asian firms, negotiating “poor to poor”, i.e. “by the poor for the poor”, duty and quota‑free, electronic products. Goods sent from Hong Kong to the Persian Gulf Emirates, where they escape the control of the WTO in order to invade, through sales at half price, the huge market of the poor in Europe, who are solvent under these conditions. Taking the trans‑Balkan route, they merged in 2003 in Italy with the Moroccans: a major route of Globalization from below, or among the poor, was thus born from the Black Sea to Andalusia via Bulgaria, Albania, Italy, Southern France and the Spanish Levant. Informal notaries» ensure the ethics of […]
During the First World War, between 2 and 3 million people choose exile, chased away by the fights. In West of France, 150 000 evacuees, refugees or repatriates are in this way welcomed. From autumn 1914, their integration causes difficulties, minor at the beginning but which become more important from 1915. In a context of prolonged war which nobody has predicted, their sociocultural profile is quickly considered as incompatible with the expectations of native populations, mainly rural and unaccustomed to this “discovery of the difference.”
We follow from a socio-anthropological point of view the ins and outs of an experiment in neuroscience, showing a desire to increase the therapeutic effectiveness of a virtual reality device (VR) in the treatment of phobias. Patient participation, which is at the heart of therapeutic promise and the use of virtual reality technology, is partial and relatively unthinking. The actors prioritize research on the clinic and share the classic representation of the “good patient” (actionable, without social constraints, available), or even of a heroic patient, capable of an unusual endurance and adaptability. This representation goes hand in hand with the underestimation of the therapeutic tests inherent in the use of virtual reality and with the underestimation of the patient’s analytical capacities during the experiment itself.
This article describes the interactions among different social actors involved in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, focusing on their professional and community identities. It shows how the epidemic has contributed to create new identities, grouped into two different semantic fields: the “Ebola people” and the “communities”, but also new professional identities. In the theoretical framework of Olivier de Sardan’s socio-anthropology of development, the article tries to provide a better knowledge about the experts of the “Riposte,” belonging to different disciplinary fields and on their representations of local people.
I met people with Asperger syndrome to explore their relationship to nature by collecting their testimony and conducting ethnographic surveys at the homes of two of them. From these testimonies and observations, I articulate my remarks around two central axes: if the importance of the sensoriality in their relationship with nature and environment is highlighted, a second axis emerges: that of stigmatization and experience of rejection, which would lead the people I met to turn to nature as a space freed from social norms.
This article is the result of empirical research focused on the socio‑spatial drivers of the greening of ways of life and the diffusion‑reappropriation of ecocitizenship. It is based on a dozen semi‑directive interviews and 93 interviews by survey with residents of ecodistricts in Ile‑de‑France (Clichy‑Batignolles, Bel Air‑Grands Pêchers and Chandon‑République). The analysis of ways of life reveals the plurality of relationships with the ecodistrict, a pleasant place to live but also a catalyst for daily inconveniences that hinder the integration of residents into their local environment. Feedback from the inhabitants shows that ecogests are widespread in all representations related to ecology. However, they testify to the richness of subjective relationships to ecocitizenship, oscillating between defence and opposition to the standards of sustainable development. These vernacular discourses are at the origin of a semantic and pragmatic reappropriation of ecocitizenship, which will thus be shaped according to life constraints and personal values, all variables likely to have an effective influence on environmental awareness and sensitivity. The research results reveal plural expectations regarding the democratization of ecology, fluctuant according to personal social (dis)positions. The recognition of these determinants, which also explains the phenomena of inertia‑strengthening of pro‑environmental behaviour, renews the framework related to […]
In Yaounde, street posters carry hierarchical social dynamics and rivalries that characterize the struggle for the expression of rights to the city. As the city is divided into separate display areas, the street posters are then intended to reproduce the social hierarchies. At the same time, some posters fight against these logics through what are known as “counter-power” and “counter-space” strategies, synonymous of plural urbanism.
Migration is a characteristic feature of Mozabites, a minority with strong identity values and a particular institutional organization. Wherever Mozabites settle, in Algeria or abroad, a traditional assembly is created [the jma’a] and real estate is acquired: community house, free school, mosque, cemetery, cultural centre, library, etc.—this at the scale of a city. At the country level, each region is managed by a Coordination [tansiqiyat] and the whole is headed by a Confederal Council located in Ghardaïa—the ‘Ammi Said Council. This article therefore aims to explain this institutional organization and to elucidate the mechanisms adopted by Mozabites in order to facilitate their organization and integration in a migratory context. At the end of this paper, we will be able to highlight the mobilization of the group’s solidarity as a driving force in this integration process. For our demonstration, in addition to the documentary research, we used a field survey (qualitative). Open, semi-directive and group interviews were conducted, mainly with the mozabite community living in a medium-sized city in eastern Algeria, the city of Bordj Bou Arreridj, during the years 2015 and 2016.
Since the 1990s, Rohingya have been seeking refuge in Malaysia. Once there, they do not hold any formal status as Malaysia does not recognize the status of refugees. Despite this non‑recognition, the imported category is omnipresent in the discourse of Rohingyas. This article shall analyze Rohingyas’ approach of this international status. It argues that cosmopolitanism, interiorized and routinized into an ordinary cosmopolitanism, constitutes a resource for the anchorage of undocumented exiles.
This article aims to critically analyse established integration models and look into how migrants/diasporas actively create practices of encounter, dialogue and mutual learning within host societies. This paper is based on fieldwork in a Swedish local space (Malmö) and explores the diversity of artistic activism of the Palestinians in Sweden in order to analyse its consequences on the concept of integration.
Sociability is a central concept in sociology. Applying it to new ways of creating social bounds questions the mere definition of the concept, particularly in its relationship with otherness. We suggest using the “passing through” sociability in order to better understand the tensions between likeness and otherness at the core of social relationships between strangers. Specifically, this paper aims to illustrate moments of intercultural openness between members of a hospitality exchange network.
The Principality of Monaco has the particularity of having instituted a system of hierarchical national preference favoring Monegasques first, then individuals who share more or less close ties with the Principality, particularly in the fields of employment and housing. The objective of the principality is to maintain the national citizens in the territory given its attractiveness and the pressure on the cost of real estate that results. This article proposes to discuss this system of national preference which, from a conceptual point of view certainly influences the identity-building process of the different categories of individuals residing in Monaco, thus shaping the relations between the different groups present in the country.
The ghunghat is a veiling practice of North India. Its peculiarity holds in the fact that it is not linked to a religion. It reveals the social and family organisation in India, is tightly linked with marriage practices and mirrors the representations of the self and of the body. An anthropological analysis of this practice reveals its multiple dimensions, especially a social, aesthetic and sacred dimension. A comparative study between the way the veil is conceived both in India and in France will allow to rethink the veil beyond the religious and political dimensions in which it is crystalized in the French context.
The article examines the evolution of the debate held in Quebec for more than ten years on the port of religious symbols by the representatives of the State by highlighting how it oscillated between agreement and disagreement. The analysis shows that the movements of the debate are determined by the introduction within it of infra‑debates on underlying questions which modify it outlines and, for lack of completely clarified beings, confuse it.
The production of political ideas goes beyond the organizational boundaries of the political parties and takes place through the mediation of collective actors ( foundations, clubs, think tanks, magazines, publishers, grandes écoles, research centers, universities,...) and individuals (political leaders, intellectuals, experts, translators, editors,...) coming from logics and heterogeneous social spaces. In this perspective, this article proposes to interrogate the topological concepts available to the social scientist (network, social world, field, epistemic community,...) to analyze these hybrid spaces by applying them to an empirical case : the socialiste intellectual space.
We discuss the relevance of the axial age concept of Eisenstadt in its application to Ancient Greece. According to Eisenstadt, Greece, despite its philosophers, had remained not idealistic enough to enter fully into the axial age. Recalling the diffusionist theory of A. Hocart and Levi‑Strauss’ structuralism, we show that the Oriental influences, both in the Hellenistic era and since the Greeks adapted the Phoenician writing, have always been subordinated by the Greeks to their own traditions.
This article aims to report on the way «diversity’s contemporary rhetoric» is considering the issue of social plurality and, doing so, reconfiguresthe ins and outs. Its recurrent uses in different sorts of public discourses (the one about «corporate social and environmental responsibility») allows us to examine «diversity» in terms of what that concept intends to focus on. Our analysis is a political one and is situated within the field of information and communication sciences insofar as it aims to approach the mediations of «diversity» as a social concept.Thus, our intention is to seize the contemporary social sayings about «diversity» and to characterize the concept within its discursive and visual existence. Conveyed by several institutional discourses via expressions such as «promote», «respect» or even «include diversity», this formulation seems ambiguous. It appears as a desire to gather the plurality of all «differences» and it aims to represent the plurality ofsociety while trying not to separate different members who compose it. It includes several themes which are, moreover, equivocal: it is used in heterogeneous contexts to talk about anti-discrimination, tolerance, parity, anti-homophobia, or anti-sexism, anti-racism, disability, secularism, etc. Nevertheless, all these evocations crystallize the idea of variety, plurality, dissimilarities, and non-identity between all. We willquestion discourses which aim to reflect an enchanted «diversity» […]
Focusing at its starting point at the emergence of the concept of (super-) diversity in policy and academia, the article challenges the alleged theoretical and epistemic changes introduced by this new paradigm (Vertovec 2007) in the studies of race and ethnicity, pluralistic democracies, and even « multiculture » (Back 1994 ; Hall 1999). First we critically examine the main innovations claimed by the model, replacing them in a broader context of a posited « return of assimilation » (Brubaker 2001). Second we examine other sources of criticism, based for instance on empirical scrutiny and evidence from public policies analysis. We consider in conclusion the hypothesis of « whitening » (Bilge 2013) diversity and question thepossibility to invest the concept not normatively but critically, namely through athorough articulation to the principle of nondiscrimination
This article associates discourses on the subject, the sociology of photography and Nan Goldin’s work, and argues that the photographer questions gender paradigms leading to the definition of « abject » identities. As she reinvests the snapshot aesthetic and family photography, Goldin reveals the plurality of gender identities. Her photography documents the dismantling of the heterosexual couple and claims the social viability of homosexuals, transgender people and drag queens, thus rising to the status of subaltern knowledge and counter-discourse on humanity.
The purpose of this article is to report the way in which the plural understandings of reality are inherent to the process of knowledge production. It alsoaims to show what it means that actors’ point of view are socially and materially situated. Relying on J.-P. Darré’s approach, Putnam’s pragmatism, as well as on linguists’ and psychologists’ works, it highlights how the relationship between reality and knowledge may be understood. It underlines that truth depends on the adequacy of knowledge to reality and emphasizes the interactional features of things. Then, it focuses on the social nature of understanding and discusses the social characterization of points of view, drawing on A. Schütz’s works.
This article focuses on the concept of « type » in Franz Boas’ work. Based on a close examination of his main anthropometrical texts, it sheds light onthe way Boas used statistical methods in order to criticize the taxonomic approach of physical anthropology. Instead, he developed a perspective where relations between types are put forward and emphasized the importance of variability and correlation phenomena. By using the plural “types”, Boas was able to consider human plasticity as a scene for borrowing and intermixture.
Cosmopolitanism has a long and cyclic history. Often referred to as ‘neo cosmopolitanism», its use in the current context raises a number of difficulties, both conceptual and methodological. However, by rephrasing ancient philosophical frames in sociological terms, this perspective offers a new evaluation grid for specific globalization processes, that avoids mere economistic views, providing insights regarding changes in the political, ethical, cultural and aesthetical dimensions of the link to otherness in a global world. Taking part in the «cosmopolitan turn» – which supposes new concepts and methodological tools – we propose a theoretical frame based on three scales of analysis: the dynamics of cosmopolitan culture, the institutions ofcosmopolitan governance, the processes of cosmopolitan socialization.
This article studies the production and the reception of a "non-event" by drawing on the Algerian presidential elections of 2014. It argues that a non-event must be understood as the product of a publicization, of the expectations of the observers and actors who anticipate a revolutionary or catastrophic future, and of social and political routine activities that also contribute to its appearance. While the non-event is not a clear break, it can still be interrogated in order to reveal the social structures and imaginaries that lead to its production. In the meantime, a certain distance from the "non event" is necessary to grasp less spectacular phenomena that it tends to obscure
Exceptional cases are at odds with the typical : they stand out as bizarre and rare. What then could justify their systematic analysis? Elaborating the analytical distinction between anomalies, exceptions and outliers, this paper outlines three potential epistemic contributions of exceptional cases. First, exceptional cases reveal the limits of standard classification categories. In so doing, they problematize usual classificatory grids. Their input is critical. Second, exceptional cases point to new classes of objects. They acquire paradigmatic status when they exemplify the characteristic features of these new classes with utmost clarity. Third, exceptional cases magnify relational patterns that in more mundane contexts lack visibility. Here their contribution is heuristic. These three contributions become possible when we put at bay normative expectations of what should happen, and specify cases by reference to an analytical space of constitutive dimensions. To underscore the general significance of these observations, I draw on examples borrowed from different quarters of the social sciences: the sociology of organizations, ethnomethodology, comparative historical sociology and the history of science
The first part of this article deals with a critical review of the notion of event. Instead of predefining social groups, the author uses events as entry points to the field. She shows how multiple belongings in the Lake Geneva region are celebrated during religious events: music is a central mode of expression of diversity in a translocal context.. The research process starts with a focus on events and the analysis of actors who put on stage their multiple belonging. These festive events are situated in a political, geographic and social context.
This paper offers to think about the problems faced by a society confronted with the presence - real or fantasized - of the « enemy within ». In this society, the identification of the other and the self-presentation do not only serve to protect the social honor but are matters of life and death. What are the skills mobilized for identifying the "suspects"? The wars of Religion (1562-1598) can help to think of a society confronted with sudden violence and, just like the terrorism, from the inside of the community.
“The institutions of stupor. Review of event sociologies”. This article argues that events, deemed to be defined through the scope of contingency and disruption, are actually tied to a strong institutional framework that greatly constrains what could be done and said during the event. A literature review shows that social sciences should take better account of historical and conventional dimensions of events. By putting forward proposals to study the infrastructure of events, the article’s goal is to specify a complementary analysis of the object "event", through the prism of historical sociology and sociology of institutions.
The event is a regular topic of history and sociology. Crossing historic field and social geography, we suggest the concept of « territorial event ». This article examines how the spatial approach could improve the concept of event, exceeding the time or media analysis approach. This study is focused on two specific housing projects for Roma, named « Village for social inclusion » and both located in Saint-Denis (93). Roma people live specific social difficulties, because of their migratory status. Characteristics of « territorial event » are in number of three: (1) the new territorial structure bring out surprise and a lack of comprehension; (2) the event is established as “event” for specific actors and specific scale: it depends of the context and it allows to detect several territorial and historical structures; (3) the shortage in the structure of territory: it will be different before and after the territorial event.
