Society

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.

Laurent Gayer’s book, Karachi. Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, tells the story of a city described seven decades ago as the “city of lights”, but now often portrayed as one of the world’s most chaotic and dangerous metropolises.

A new essay collection considers the relevance and stakes of a contemporary re-reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction, which was first published in 1979. The result is a critical discussion that is particularly vibrant, as much in terms of the positions the authors take vis-à-vis Bourdieu, as in terms of the themes and origins of the scholars who appropriate his arguments.

Before we start to lament the triumph of celebrity culture over the most basic civic literacy, we might ask if things were truly better in the past. Antoine Lilti’s brilliant book shows that modern celebrity culture had its origins in the age of revolutions, when selfhood and personal authenticity emerged as new notions.

Starting with a discussion of three related but distinct ideas – sex, gender and sexuality – Elsa Dorlin summarizes forty years of feminist theories. She also traces these three categories back to practices that are inseparable from a context of domination.

For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.

At a time when the issue of intellectual property dominates the Internet, the struggle for control of the digital universe is increasingly known as the “second enclosure movement” - a misleading moniker, argues Allan Greer.

Was Max Weber a champion of modern capitalism and the triumph of Western rationality? Two recent books reply with a resounding “no,” as they seek to correct, on very different grounds, exaggerated interpretations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

In this virtual roundtable published in partnership with Public Books, four participants from France, Germany and the US re-visit the inequalities debate sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital, comparing perceptions of income, economic equality and political economy.

What’s in an individual once under the public gaze? Building on recent academic trends, two books – one in English, one in French – explore the historical construct of the self in the context of eighteenth-century France.

A selection of four essays recently published on Books & Ideas offers new perspectives on the definition, historiography and potential applications of environmental theory.

Winner of the 2013 David Pinkney Book Prize, Alice L. Conklin’s most recent book takes us on a journey leading to the establishment of ethnology in France and its colonies. Through a biographical approach, she shows how the “general science of man” evolved in the 19^th century from the obsessive search for universal laws.

Through a comparative study of France, India and the United States, Jules Naudet’s book shows how certain “instituted ideologies” specific to each country are either a barrier or a resource when it comes to moving from a dominated social situation to a dominant occupational position.

Focusing on the massive increase in socio-economic inequality of the last few decades, Mettler’s book shows that much activity financed by the American federal government have obscured its role, making the real actors appear to be private organizations. Instead of lessening inequality, she shows how the policies of the “submerged state” have promoted the upward distribution of riches.

While women are first and foremost seen as victims of violence, C. Cardi and G. Pruvost show that they can also perpetrate it. Women’s violence tends to be sidelined, downplayed or made invisible, and is inextricably linked to their image, testifying to the sexual dimension of the notion of violence itself.

Enlargement of the sphere of social disadvantage, conversion of some of the higher social categories to a culture of measuring performance, and opposition in some low-income categories to policies that are too focused on the poorest ones; in Olivier Schwartz’s view, those are three of the main factors that make for difficulties in reconstructing a city of fellow creatures. In this picture, France is both less and more a class society than it was forty years ago.

With the exception of kilts, the skirt symbolises a woman: scatterbrained, seductive or “feminine”, the wearer is well and truly a member of the weaker sex. The historian Christine Bard analyses the introduction of a “Skirt Day”, which would aim to make the skirt an acceptable garment once more. Could this be a new liberation, following the liberation of trousers for women?

Located in the heart of Bombay, the mega-slum of Dharavi is one of the largest in Asia. In a book combining various approaches, Saglio-Yatzimirsky analyzes the way Dharavi functions both spatially and economically, focusing on an unexpected paradox: characterized by an informal economy, this mega-slum is however well-connected to the national and international economic circuits.

When the social mobility of black citizens disturbs the dominant racial and spatial order, the members of the minority are sometimes abruptly put back to their place. An article by Elijah Anderson shows how the black ghetto, in its social and symbolic dimensions, contributes to the exclusion of African-Americans. What would be the American ghetto’s French equivalent?

Past outbreaks of unrest in the French banlieues have confirmed that libraries were a favourite target during riots. Sociologists Denis Merklen and Numa Murard have investigated the conflicted relationship that some young people have with written culture. They are sharing their results with us in this article.