Les puissances de l’absence.

Projets personnels et/ou projet de société.

The survey carried out on explicit representations of the future among the inhabitants of Geneva’s metropolitan area shows three major groups. The most substantial encompasses individuals that speak little about society as a whole but a lot about their own projects. However, they clearly connect their personal itineraries to the context of their agency. The second group includes people that draw a dark image of the future, which is underpinned by a cyclic model of history and a condemnation [...]

Pour une anthropologie du poor to poor apparenté au peer to peer.

International poor migrants have understood that they are not welcome in rich countries. Most of them — around 200 000 a year in France and 600 000 in Europe (OCDE 2013) — are therefore coming as « transmigrants » instead of emigrants or immigrants. The world’s largest firms take advantage of their situation and integrate them into modern trade capitalism. Transmigrants are thus involved in international economic networks, more specifically in the “poor to poor” trade. This system, outside [...]

De la nécessité de ne pas s’ignorer. Vers une linguistique mésologique.

Chomsky, Noam. 2011. Sur la nature et le langage. Marseille : Agone.

L’effervescence de la linguistique contemporaine doit beaucoup aux travaux de Noam Chomsky. Les postulats de ce penseur n’en demeurent pas moins de simples réductionnismes, niant la complexité ayant induit tant la genèse que l’évolution du langage et des diverses langues. Une bonne compréhension des phénomènes langagiers doit être recherchée dans la concrescence humain-milieu, écartant par là même toute forme de déterminisme. Cette analyse mésologique du langage, tout à fait caractéristique de ce que pourrait être une pensée complexe, est [...]

Écologie : litanie du futur ou pouvoir négligé ?

Far away from the promises of a better future, the ecological question provokes fears that are widely shared. It contributes to a negative form of a common future that remains nevertheless quite detached from the everyday experience. Indeed, in opposition to other concerns for the future, the ecological threat appears to be more rooted in an abstract construction than on situated affordances. Fear appears here as the lowest common denominator of our relation with future. [...]

Traversées cinématographiques en Bordelais.

Fiction films and television series shot in the Bordeaux area are the corpus of study of this article. Their study provides a crossing of the urban area rooted in history. The tradition of shooting in Bordeaux is a player in the local economic dynamics. Through fiction, the geographer observes a recomposition of urban transects which highlights the identity elements of the city. These elements contribute to give the town its heritage and its roots in history, its bourgeois character [...]

Mobilités numériques. De l’usage à l’expérience utilisateur (UX) du monde.

Mobility issues do not only involve the act of moving nowadays. The concept itself evolves continuously thanks to technological and social innovations. The main stakes do not focus anymore on improving speed, but on enriching the experience of travelling, even in the case of short trips. One of the main factors that fosters this evolution is the progressive adoption of information and communication technologies that help to reshape the issues of contemporary cities. For example, the quality of travel [...]

Traverser les paysages : le plateau de l’Aubrac sur les chemins de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle.

The crossing of the Aubrac plateau is very much appreciated by all hikers/pilgrims going to Santiago de Compostela. This paper uses a collection of pictures as scientific material to study the landscape on offer along this route. Landscapes are described and then compared in order to identify the specificities of the crossing of the Aubrac and beyond and, more generally, to understand how cultural routes transcend landscapes and vice versa. In this original spatial experience, various walking rhythms are [...]

Virtualités.

Régimes d’historicité et individus contemporains.

Among the interviews conducted in Geneva, general and abstract speeches on the future are rare. This does not prove that the future is absent from discourses and imaginations ; it could mean that the tools we use do not enable us to detect it. The “No future !” motto only informs us that historicist myths have collapsed. Meanwhile, projects have taken place. By and large, this can be explained by the increase of lifespan time scale degrees of freedom [...]

L’artiste passe-muraille ?

À partir d’œuvres d’art contemporain produites autour du mur construit par les Israéliens face à la Cisjordanie, le texte traite à la fois de la question de la traversée de la frontière et des normes qu’il faut affronter pour passer la ligne, ainsi que du processus de résistance active que ce passage implique. Par son rapport très particulier au lieu, le « border art », ou « art de la frontière », questionne les processus de spatialité à travers [...]

À la santé de qui ?

Une ethnographie des discours professionnels sur le risque orphelin lié à l’alcool et à la grossesse.

This article analyses professional discourse on the associated risk of alcohol consumption and pregnancy. If health and prevention actors define this risk as a fetal risk, it however does not have a clinical existence, as nearly no caregiver has seen a mother at risk or a child victim of alcohol in utero. Looking at this paradox, we suggest defining this risk as an orphan risk. In the first part of this article, using Dorothy E. Smith’s sociology, we will [...]