Translated with the support of The Florence Gould Foundation
Asylum applications on the grounds of sexual orientation, although uncommon, raise questions that are relevant to any asylum claim: according to what criteria and what level of persecution are “genuine” refugees distinguished from “bogus” ones? And what is meant by this policy of proof?
Can we define capitalism? By acknowledging the role played by economic and philosophical idea in its development, is there not a risk of ignoring the importance of material and technical conditions? The economists Clément Carbonnier and Geoffrey Hodgson discuss this issue.
The Kamasutra, written in the third century, is not only an erotic work: it is also a treatise on the art of living for comfortable city-dwellers, whatever their caste or sexuality—and whether they are stallions, bulls, or hares, elephants, mares, or does.
At a time when the French government has reignited the debate over a universal minimum income, Philippe Askenazy reconsiders the question of wealth redistribution. He maintains that intervention must occur at a much earlier stage, not through taxation or generalized access to property, but by making base incomes equal through a revalorization of work.
What distinguishes a blank canvas from an empty frame? A simple object from a readymade? What is this mysterious gap that art digs as it separates from life? Such are the questions posed by Arthur Danto, a major figure of contemporary art theory.
Based on the example of Toronto, the sociologist Guillaume Ethier reflects on the cultural and urban effects involved in contemporary architectural realizations referred to as “iconic.” This architecture—a sort of sculpture on a grand scale—derives its aura from starchitects who conceive it and maintain a complex relationship with its urban environment.
In the early modern period, Spain and Portugal carried out dramatic mass expulsions that affected more than half a million people of Jewish or Muslim faith. Revisiting the fate of these populations helps to put into perspective the refugee crisis that the world is currently facing.
The first two years of Bourdieu’s teaching at the Collège de France were less a general introduction to his concepts than a long immersion in his method, at the intersection of reflexivity, symbolics and structural analysis.
Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire in 27 BC, was a thoroughly ambiguous man: At once a republican and an autocrat, a conqueror and a peacemaker, he was the inventor of a tradition who governed like a sphinx. A biography has just come out that emphasizes the topicality of his reign.
In contrast to general theories that claim to explain sports practices, a recent book sheds light on the forms of socialization and the institutions that make sports an eminently social phenomenon.
Seven years have passed since the start of the economic and political crisis in Iceland in 2008. Attempts at reforming the country’s constitution, the heterodox positions it has taken in matters of finance, and the political dynamism of its civil society have certainly aroused curiosity; however, these astonishing facts have yet to draw the interest of political science.
In the United States, tenant evictions have become a mass phenomenon. The sociologist Matthew Desmond traces the fate of eight Milwaukee families in the grips of an extraordinarily violent housing market. This outstanding study concludes with a new conceptualization of poverty.
In three essays previously unpublished in French, Max Scheler describes the ethical revolution brought about by the capitalist mentality. Since the 19th century, consciousness has been shaped by the very idea of work, as embodied by the modern entrepreneur.
How should we analyse individual upward social mobility? How should we understand the move from one social class to another? Chantal Jaquet has created concepts that open up a new way for us to study the issue of social reproduction.
After the domination of French in the 18th Century, English is now the new world language. As a sociologist, Pascale Casanova shows that using the world language gives authority to those who master it. But what other solution is there, given that a world language is necessary for universal communication?
For the past five years, the population of Syria has been undergoing severe repression at the hands of a regime implementing a policy of mass destruction, forcing over half of all Syrians to leave their homes, and seriously threatening the future of a country that has had the strength drained out of it.
What if historians and cartoonists teamed up with each other? For such a partnership to work, one might choose to illustrate “great History.” Or, better yet, one can find inspiration in graphic investigations guided by a reasoning and based on new sources and original questions.
Michel Brunet, a paleontologist and paleoanthropologist at the Collège de France and the discoverer of the oldest pre-human remains yet to be found, describes to Books & Ideas the obsessive quest for the human family’s ancestors and the circumstances in which his field, situated at the crossroads between the natural and human sciences, is practiced.
Is the scale of the African AIDS epidemic tied to a specific type of sexual behavior? By considering different versions of this hypothesis, Julie Castro shows that it is not based on indisputable evidence and that it rests upon essentializing cultural representations, which help to obscure other forms of transmission.
In the sixteenth century, Europe and India began to trade. Their connected history assumes multiple forms, touching on topics as diverse as vegetable cultivation, the spice trade, literature, and architecture.
Although the massacres in Rwanda did not take place in the context of a religious war, religion did play an important role: identifying the Tutsi with the devil caused violence to spread throughout society.
Starting from the experimentations of three European ensembles playing improvised music at the turn of the 1970s, Matthieu Saladin defines an aesthetics of free improvisation, whose genuine political dimension he brings to light.
How did the body come to play such a crucial part in the definition of contemporary identities? Relying on studies on transplants, childbirth or people’s relation to corpses, Dominique Memmi brings to light what is socially and politically at stake in the fact that the self is rooted in the body.
A book on the writings of author and trumpet player Ralph Ellison about jazz music offers an extensive and thought-provoking reflection on Ellison’s theory of the condition of African Americans.
The history of the vote reveals that election was not born with modern representative government, but that elections were held in the Middle Ages. It also reveals that designation by election is not the end of history in our democracies but that other methods may be considered.
By situating the birth of France’s national colors at the point where a prince meets a pig, Michel Pastoureau manages to reconcile cultural history and narrative history. As with any genealogical study, his hypothesis should be considered with a degree of caution.
Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitaï discusses the relationship between cinema and literature, memory, space, and language. In particular, he tells us about his screen adaptation of Jérôme Clément’s autobiographical novel, which portrays the story of a son’s quest in search of his Jewish mother’s painful past.
Thanks to his work on Greco-Roman antiquity, his intellectual curiosity, his pronounced taste for interdisciplinarity, his sense of humor, and the freedom that informs all his research, Paul Veyne is a twentieth-century historian whose work cannot be avoided. A loose cannon at the heart of the academic establishment, a deep thinker and a dilettante, Veyne invites us, through his work, to a festival of thought.
What are the effects of same-sex parenting on the kinship system of Western societies? A collection of international papers edited by two anthropologists of kinship lead them to reject the thesis of an anthropological break or the claim that the current kinship system has been disrupted. Instead, they emphasize the centrality of multiple parenting.
Let’s not tiptoe around it: this essay on excrement—a crucial agricultural, urban, and ecological issue—is fascinating. After all, it’s a hot topic: what are we going to do with all this shit? It leads us, moreover, to an important scientific and democratic debate.
Scenes of lynching, beheadings, corpses… Although easily accessible on the Internet, images of violence are often occulted in the French media. Why are some images shown while others are kept out of circulation? Are some forms of violence unfit to be seen?
In Christophe Guilluy’s view, there are two Frances: the urban France of towns and cities, where opportunities are considerable, and the peripheral France of villages, where populations feel ignored and abandoned by public policy. This contrast has caused a lot of ink to flow but is highly debatable and no doubt more ideological than scientific.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
In recent years there has been an increase in the number of studies by jurists, anthropologists and sociologists on the resurgence of the biological concept of race in medical research, the medico-legal field and genealogy. They have shown how DNA data that is seemingly of the utmost neutrality and technicality is in fact bringing into play a whole set of sociopolitical and economic values, choices and relationships.
How can it be legitimate for a judge to overturn a law passed by the people’s representatives? Isn’t that judge interfering with majority rule? The French jurist Dominique Rousseau shows that a constitution is not a barrier to democratic expression, but an opportunity for that expression to become richer and deeper.
The translation into French of Nicholas Evans’ book Dying Words. Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us is a timely reminder for Francophone readers of the magnitude and, particularly, the severity of a phenomenon on which very little has been written in the French language and of which there is still far too little awareness: the mass extinction of languages currently underway.
As publishing markets become increasingly international, sociology looks at the translation of work in the social sciences and humanities. Gisèle Sapiro shows the effects that the crossover between the academic and publishing spheres has on translation practices.
At a time when “Disability Studies”—a multidisciplinary approach to physical incapacities that blends scholarship and activism—were first establishing themselves, Robert Bogdan protested the reduction of individuals to purely medical definitions. The translation of his book may contribute to overcoming this position, which remains dominant in France.
During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men’s work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.
The Age of Enlightenment was not the fruit of European inspiration alone, and should also be considered in the context of a much wider space. A collection of articles reveals all the intensity of the French tradition of the critique of Orientalism.