The Mediterranean region is facing major challenges for soil conservation and sustainable agriculture. Conservation agriculture (CA), including reduced soil disturbance, can help conserve soils and improve soil fertility, but its adoption in the Mediterranean region is limited. Examining farmers’ perceptions of soil and underlying sociocultural factors can help shed light on adoption of soil management practices. In this paper, we conducted a survey with 590 farmers across Morocco, Spain and Tunisia to explore concepts that are cognitively associated with soil and (...) perceptions of tillage. We also evaluated differences in perceptions of innovation, community, adaptive capacity, and responsibility for soil. We found that farmers’ cognitive associations with soil show awareness of soil as a living resource, go beyond agriculture and livelihoods to reveal cultural ties, and link to multiple levels of human needs. Beliefs about the benefits of tillage for water availability and yield persist among the surveyed farmers. We found that openness towards innovation, perceived adaptive capacity and responsibility for soil were associated with minimum tillage, whereas community integration was not. Education, age and farm lifestyle were also associated with differences in these perceptions. CA promotion in the Mediterranean should emphasize the multiple values of soil, should demonstrate how sufficient yields may be achieved alongside resilience to drought, and be tailored to differing levels of environmental awareness and economic needs across north and south. (shrink)

This paper attempts to highlight the intellectual role of women in Islamic social history through its various eras and to measure the extent of their awareness of the issues brought about by modernity and urbanization. The paper also shows the constructive and active role of women at the same time, which the values of globalization today try to obscure by assimilating women into the concepts of globalization and modernity.

Cet article questionne l’étendue, la variété, la complexité, parfois la paradoxalité des effets de l’infiltration du virtuel dans les aires intersubjectives du couple et de la famille hypermodernes globalisés. L’approche retenue croise approche psychanalytique du lien et de la psychologie interculturelle et s’appuie sur la clinique et les recherches de l’auteure en contexte tunisien socialement et culturellement mutant. Sur la base de deux vignettes illustratives du phénomène du « bovarysme virtuel », elle met en évidence deux points concernant cet espace (...) du possible et du potentiel. D’une part, il contribue à exacerber les quiproquos entre des subcultures de genre sur fond de paysage sociétal bien engagé sur les voies de l’individualisme et de la dépatriarcalisation ; d’autre part, il contribue à simuler et stimuler le processus d’interculturation, potentielle voie de relance de subjectivités et liens en crise. (shrink)

In the present article we explore the possibilities of applying Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī's (549/1155 - 587/1191) epistemology of presence outside its own historical and systematic context. Indeed, we are convinced that Suhrawardī's ideas on temporality and modality are not only fruitful for analysing the work of his predecessors, but also offer new avenues for an epistemological understanding of logic – that is, a perspective in which logic is conceived as the theory and method of acquiring knowledge through demonstration. As noted (...) in the conclusion, the approach offers a new deontic logic that can be generalised for ethical and legal contexts beyond Islamic thought. (shrink)