I use the collection of “carnal ethnographies” of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars to spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a “black box,” habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (2) the (...) distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments. (shrink)

Throughout his literary career Walker Percy read and studied the philosophical thought of Charles Sanders Peirce in an attempt to re-present in language the world as Percy knew it. Beginning in 1984 and ending in 1990, the year of his death, Percy corresponded with Kenneth Laine Ketner about the "semiotic" of Peirce. Their letters - honest, instructive, and often filled with down-home humor - record an epistolary friendship of two men both passionately interested in Peirce's theory of signs. This volume (...) of letters provides a rich philosophical perspective for better understanding the fiction and nonfiction of Walker Percy. (shrink)

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of public (...) (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

Both the physiological and the pathological morphogenetic processes that we can meet in embryogenesis, neogenesis and degenerative dysgenesis present common features: they are ruled by three different kinds of mechanisms, one related to cell migration, the second to cell differentiation and the third to cell proliferation. We deal here with an application to the cambial growth which essentially involves the third type of mechanism.Woody plants produce secondary tissue (secondary xylem and phloem) from a meristematic tissue called vascular cambium, responsible for (...) the radial growth of a tree. This paper focuses on the formation of secondary xylem, considered in two dimensions in a cross-section framework. A new discrete modelling approach is used, based on the cellular scale, in order to attain a more accurate understanding of how the elementary microscopic behaviour of each cell takes part in the macroscopic morphogenesis. The mathematical model essentially uses an occurrence method simulating the main features of radial growth with simple geometric rules, such as Thom's division rule (Thom,1972)to account for the cell proliferation. The study applies to concrete instances in which the changes made in the geometrical cellular patterns of the vascular cambium clearly affect the shape of the tree, as in Pinus radiata (D. Don.). (shrink)

We propose that interaction rules derived from polyamine exchange in connected cells may explain the spatio‐temporal organization of gap junctions observed during tissue regeneration and tumorigenesis. We also hypothesize that polyamine exchange can be considered as signal that allows cells to sense the proliferation status of their neighbors. Polyamines (putrescine, spermidine, and spermine) are indeed small aliphatic polycations that serve as fuels to sustain elevated proliferation rates of the order observed in cancer cells. Based on recent reports, we consider here (...) that polyamines can be exchanged through gap junction channels between mammalian cells. Such intercellular exchange of polyamines has critical consequences on the local control of growth. In line with this hypothesis, the complex protein network that keeps polyamine levels finely tuned in mammalian cells can translate polyamine efflux or influx into integrated signals controlling transcription, translation, and cell communications. (shrink)

L’installation et le développement de la discipline universitaire « Sciences et techniques des activités physiques et sportives » ne peuvent être pleinement compris que si l’on voit qu’ils résultent de l’action conjointe de facteurs cognitifs et sociaux. La perspective sociohistorique montre que ce qui est arrivé récemment a d’abord été préparé par un long processus non linéaire et complexe. Mais il a encore fallu sur le court terme un dynamisme cognitif interne et des effets sociaux multiples, enchevêtrés, voulus et non (...) voulus, afin que s’établissent l’instutionnalisation irréversible de cette nouvelle discipline universitaire, son « académisation », puis son expansion « démographique ».The setting-up and development of the « sport sciences » as an academic discipline can only be fully grasped by acknowledging that it results from the combined action of both cognitive and social factors. Viewed in a social and historical light, what has recently taken place proves to have come at the end of a long, complex and winding process. But, in the short run, internal cognitive dynamics as well as multiple and intertwined social effects – whether intended or not – were also necessary for the non-reversible institutionalization of this new academic discipline, its establishment as part of the academia and eventually its « demographic » expansion. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article présente l’analyse d’une expérience de construction de savoirs mathématiques en rapports avec les machines, dans les années 1950 et 1960, à une époque où le calcul analogique cohabitait avec le calcul digital (c’est-à-dire le futur « ordinateur », terme introduit dans la langue française pour désigner principalement les « digital computers »). Les mathématiques en jeu relèvent des théories des systèmes dynamiques, c’est-à-dire des outils mathématiques construits pour comprendre la dynamique de différents types de systèmes, qu’ils soient (...) mathématiques, physiques, biologiques, mécaniques, etc. L’objet du présent article est à la fois un groupe de chercheurs, leurs pratiques de « mathématiques pour l’ingénieur », leurs efforts pour construire des calculateurs analogiques (mécanique ou électronique) pour étudier la dynamique, le programme baptisé « Dynamique théorique » qu’ils se sont fixés, et l’épistémologie des mathématiques sous-tendant leur pratique. (shrink)

À partir de textes officiels, de publications professionnelles et de représentations d’enseignantes d’EPS ayant vécu la mise en place de la mixité, cet article analyse la construction du genre en éducation physique durant les années 68. Si la mixité est d’abord évacuée au profit de l’officialisation sportive de l’éducation physique, les dissidences acquièrent une légitimité certaine durant la crise de mai-juin 68. Pourtant, l’organisation de l’EPS conserve une frontière et maintient les distinctions sexuées. Au terme des années 68, la mixité (...) n’est plus ignorée et les discriminations se sont déplacées. Elles sont paradoxalement le fruit des enseignantes elles-mêmes qui déconsidèrent la féminité au regard de leurs attentes sportives. (shrink)

The Business of a Flesh-Merchant : Passion, Power, Profit in the Economy of Professional Boxing. France has witnessed a significant rise in the recourse to sub-contracting over the last twenty years. The article is the result of an inquiry carried out by way of observation and participation in a boxing club located on the outskirts of Chicago’s «South Side », close to the University of Chicago. The paper focuses on the matchmaker as a particular figure in the world of boxing. (...) A close study of what is a crucial function in the world of boxing throws light on the way the milieu of boxing operates, in its recruitment of young underprivileged Afro-Americans with a view to turning them into competent boxers. In his role as an intermediary, the function of the matchmaker is to oversee the encounter between supply and demand in what, to a large extent, is the body market of boxing. As the individual around whom all the transactions revolve, the matchmaker is the figure on whom the milieu’s various tensions and oppositions are projected. Regarded as an exploiter and a body-trafficker by most of the young men whom he hires, his peers deem him “an honest businessman”. He thus epitomises the general economy of boxing, here understood as a system of exchange of bodies, incorporated within a system of social relations, requiring both the general collaboration of its subjects and the celebration of the success of certain individuals, at the expense of others. The article thus puts forward an empirically grounded economic anthropology, based on the exchange and the wearing-away of what is the most precious possession of those young candidates for success: their own bodies. (shrink)

Morphogenesis is a key process in developmental biology. An important issue is the understanding of the generation of shape and cellular organisation in tissues. Despite of their great diversity, morphogenetic processes share common features. This work is an attempt to describe this diversity using the same formalism based on a cellular description. Tissue is seen as a multi-cellular system whose behaviour is the result of all constitutive cells dynamics. Morphogenesis is then considered as a spatiotemporal organization of cells activities. We (...) show how this formalism relies on Reaction–Diffusion/Positional Information approach and how it permits to generalize its modelling possibilities. Three quite different applications for concrete morphogenetic processes are presented. The first one is a model for epithelial invagination, the second is a model of cellular differentiation by local cell–cell signalling. The last example is the secondary radial growth of conifer trees. From the mathematical point of view, different modelling tools are used according to the specificity of each process. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objet la conception de matériel pédagogique pour l’apprentissage endolingue de la relation entre le passé composé et l’imparfait dans le récit en FLE. Faut-il privilégier le choix d’une visée sur le procès ou bien montrer que la distribution des temps s’effectue à partir d’indices contextuels qu’il faut repérer? La première position a été représentée, par exemple, dans le manuel Libre Échange, mais délaissée par la suite. Notre propre analyse de 17 manuels publiés entre 2006 et 2016 (...) confirme la tendance. On constate en outre qu’il n’y a aucun exemple d’un même procès sous les deux aspects accompli et inaccompli, comme si cette option avait été bannie. Toutefois, l’approche aspectuelle n’est pas tout-à-fait absente : on considère le cas d’un manuel tendant à intégrer présence d’un sujet opérant des choix de visée et emplois normés des temps. Finalement, on propose un matériel qui exploite la syntaxe distincte des énoncés avec l’imparfait et le passé composé. Dans un cadre énactif, on envisage que l’énonciateur prend deux états différents, où il perçoit un présent imaginé, ou bien où il devient « possesseur » d’un accompli. On détaille la conception théorique, décrit des visuels extraits du matériel, et suggère une gestuelle pédagogique pour montrer comment cette approche peut soutenir l’apprentissage des temps du récit. (shrink)

Pourquoi les STAPS (Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives), discipline universitaire et de recherche sont-elles fragmentées en une multitude de programmes et de sous-programmes? Qui est-ce qui assure le succès général des sports comme contenus d'éducation physique scolaire et explique l'accueil extrêmement favorable qui leur est fait dans nos sociétés? Les STAPS peuvent-elles être une science?

In the field of NLP, “noise” is a notion with many different meanings. This is also true in fields of linguistics in which the analysis of ecological data is central.In studies involving corpus linguistic methods, noise management is an essential process for data collection, data structuration and data analysis. Paradoxically, this step is almost never developed, or completely ignored.In this paper, we propose to focus on the management of noise during the various stages classically defined in the processing of an (...) oral corpus: data structuration (including transcription), data enrichment (including annotation) and data analysis.We show that noise management is a cross-cutting issue: it needs to be taken into account during the phases of structuration, data enrichment and analysis of linguistic corpora. More specifically, the creation of corpora of children’s productions leads us to manage a particular type of noise: the variation regarding the so-called “standard” forms. For noise management, we show that there is no ideal methodology: noise management is specific to each project. Moreover, decisions taken at one stage necessarily influence the others: a noise generated during data structuration may cause a silence during automatic processing; a noise “cleaned up” during the processing phase may generate a silence during analysis. (shrink)

We have developed an approach to implementing a system for managing situated knowledge for complex instruments. Our aim is to develop a system that guides a user through the steps for operating complex scientific instruments. A user manual is often inadequate support for a community of users, so direct communication with an expert is often required. One reason for this is that not all of the author’s expert knowledge was included in the manual, thus limiting the contents to explicit knowledge. (...) This is a main concern of modern knowledge management practitioners who are attempting to design systems that consider both explicit and tacit knowledge. The key is to distribute explicit knowledge through interaction with the real world so that users can develop tacit knowledge as well as acquire explicit knowledge. We describe technical difficulties related to referencing the real world, which is required for interaction, and describe a novel approach to building a low-cost three-dimensional pointer for obtaining the required knowledge, which constitutes our preliminary result. (shrink)

The agronomist who wants to study the nutrient and water uptake of roots needs a quantitative three-dimensional dynamic model of the structure of root systems.The model presented takes into account current knowledge about the morphogenesis of root systems. It describes the root system as a set of root axes, characterised by their orders. The morphogenetic properties of root axes differ according to their order. The axes of order 1 are directly inserted on the stem, the axes of order 2 are (...) inserted on axes of order 1, and so on. They tend to be more plagiotropec and to have less vascular bundles as the order increases. (shrink)

Co-écrit par Chloé Galibert-Laîné et Guillaume Grandjean, l’essai vidéo GeoMarkr (22 minutes, 2022) explore différentes pratiques de l’enquête spatiale médiatisée, des explorations filmiques de Chris Marker au jeu vidéo GeoGuessr. Les deux auteurices ont proposé à Corentin Lê de se joindre, le temps d’un échange, à leurs déambulations théoriques.

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global (...) economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of `advanced marginality' — territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of `place', and the loss of a hinterland — and draws out their implications for the formation of the `precariat' in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

There is a longstanding debate in the stakeholder literature as to who and what really counts as the stakeholders of the firm. Likewise, there have been discussions on whether nature should be considered a stakeholder of the firm. However, one seldom encounters any definitions of the key concepts, that is of nature or the natural environment . We seek to contribute to the debate by taking a closer look at what this thing called nature actually is. In addition, we discuss (...) the implications of this conceptual refinement for the stakeholder model. In order to reinforce the status of the natural environment in the stakeholder model, we propose that any visualisation of a stakeholder network should be embedded in the natural environment. (shrink)

Republicanism is increasingly attracting more attention from political philosophy. However, a mere hermeneutical approach it is usually used, which tends to neglect the political, social and economic circumstances that shaped this tradition of thought. This article addresses the modern conception of republican freedom with the North American and the French case through the work of two of their most representative figures, Thomas Jefferson and Maximilien Robespierre. The article defends that the political, juridical and economic government – the republican political economy– (...) devised by both, keeps important similarities that the current political philosophy cannot ignore. To illustrate this relationship, it is shown that both thinkers received a deep and similar influence of natural law philosophy and of fiduciary theory when thinking and trying to implement their models of government and their idea of ownership. (shrink)

The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to—and a diversion from—the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare,” which ensnares the precarious fractions of (...) the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism. (shrink)

Drawing on the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, my book The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ draws a microhistory of the birth, diffusion, and demise of this racialized folk devil at the intersection of the academic field, the journalistic field, and the politics-policy-philanthropic field. This history illuminates the politics of knowledge about dispossessed and dishonored categories in the metropolis and suggests three notions that can help researchers parse the use and abuse of other social science (...) constructs and thus practice better conceptual hygiene: lemming effects (illustrated by the wild rush to deploy ‘diaspora’), conceptual speculative bubble (as with ‘racial capitalism’), and turnkey problematics (such as the ‘resilient city’ and the ‘creative city’). I discuss the factors that foster the development of epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys, and specify the criteria that make for a robust concept in terms of semantics (clarity and neutrality), logics (coherence and type-specificity), and heuristics (empirical adequacy and theoretical productivity). (shrink)

Renowed historian E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) single-handedly changed the marxist understanding of class and class consciousness in his pivotal book The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson not only took issue with the economic and technological determinism that plagued marxist theory, he also took issue with philosophers — Althusser, Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc. — who variously described history as a process without a subject. Thompson was wary of philosophers. He nonetheless approvingly quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) in his polemical (...) essay The Poverty of Theory (1978). This surprising reference went unnoticed to this day. Following Thompson’s original reference to Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior (1942) leads one to a number of observations that the french philosopher made to history, social classes and class counsciousness in works such as Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and the Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Those various observations show that Thompson and Merleau-Ponty shared the same phenomenological understanding of class consciousness. (shrink)

Holding to the truth of death—death is al - ways most/just [one’s] own—shows an - other kind of cer tainty, more pri mor dial than any cer tainty re gard ing be ings en - coun tered within the world or for mal ob - jects;foritisthecertaintyof be ing-in-the-world.2 Mar tin Heidegger, Be ing and Time..

In this response to my critics, I amplify the conceptual clarification and methodological stipulation of habitus begun in ‘Homines in extremis’ to help us move from a sociology of the body as socially construc-ted object to a sociology from the body as socially construc-ting vector of knowledge, power, and practice. The specification of habitus by membership in collectives, attachment to institutions, and analytic purpose makes it a flexible multi-scalar notion with which to construct the epistemic individual and account for both (...) reproduction and change, conformity and creativity, as well as self-revision. For this, we must reject theological interpretations that rigidly lock habitus into Bourdieu’s framework; avoid conflating the formal properties of the notion with its concrete features in specific settings and cases; and distinguish between the rhetorical invocation of his concepts (‘speaking Bourdieuese’) and their effective deployment in the construction of the empirical object. As embodied and embedded capacity, habitus brings temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicenter. It reminds us that the social world is not transparent, open-ended, and instantaneous, but endowed with gravity, opacity, and asymmetry. Treating the sentient and skilled organism as fount of both social intelligence and sociological acumen can help historical social science connect with enactive psychology and recover the carnality of action that conventional accounts of social life routinely erase. (shrink)

Résumé Loin d’être un programme de recherche tourné uniquement vers l’abstraction, la physiocratie comporte une dimension empirique tout à fait centrale dans sa constitution et dans son développement. L’étude de cette dimension permet de mettre au jour les liens généalogiques et méthodologiques qui ont uni le mouvement physiocratique et les traditions anglaise et française de l’arithmétique politique. En outre, une attention portée à l’inventaire des différentes activités agricoles et à la mesure de leurs productions respectives témoigne d’une autre influence importante (...) dans la construction de l’économie politique de Quesnay, à savoir l’agronomie, alors en plein renouveau sous l’impulsion de Duhamel du Monceau. (shrink)

This article draws on 35 months of ethnographic fieldwork and apprenticeship in a boxing gym located in Chicago's black ghetto to explicate how prizefighters apperceive and express the fact of being live commodities of flesh and blood, and how they practically reconcile themselves to ruthless exploitation in ways that enable them to maintain a sense of personal integrity and moral purpose. The boxer's experience of corporeal exploitation is expressed in three kindred idioms, those of prostitution, slavery and animal husbandry. The (...) first likens the fighter-manager combo to the prostitute-pimp duo; the second depicts the ring as a plantation and promoters as latter-day slave masters; the third intimates that boxers are used in the manner of livestock. All three tropes simultaneously enounce and denounce the immoral marketing of disquiescent bodies. But this acute consciousness is neutralized by the doxic belief in the normalcy of exploitation, in the `agency' of corporeal entrepreneurship, and in the possibility of individual exceptionalism. This practical belief, inscribed in the bodily dispositions of the fighter, helps produce the collective misrecognition whereby boxers collude in their own commercialization. (shrink)

This paper intends to explore the topic of consciousness in relation to the domain of the contemporary dream, its narration and interpretation. "Consciousness" involves the experience and interplay of dream, fantasy and "reality." Hence an ethnography of the dreaming subject involves several interlinked domains: the cultural construction of dream symbolism, dream narration, and dream interpretation within and through a group setting. The paper is based on findings from a recent ethnographic study of dreamwork groups in the U.K. Examples from the (...) study will explore how personal identity and consciousness is represented and invented through the production of socially informed imaginative contents in both dreamwork and guided fantasy. Key words: dreamwork, anthropology, metaphor, group therapy. (shrink)