Society

For France the 1970s marked a shift in political attitudes and intellectual trends. Surveying political changes over four decades, a new collection of essays seeks to find the proper vocabulary to capture France’s contemporary situation. From this collective work, readers may conclude that fracture could in fact be the first step to building something new.

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.

Proving his mastery of Weber’s oeuvre, Scaff’s new book considers the imprint left by various aspects of Weber’s work on the imagination and production of three generations of authors from Europe and North America. He shows that the confrontation between contemporary scholars and Weber’s legacy is a show that will run and run…

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.

Why can’t we control tuberculosis? With this fundamental question, Christian McMillen’s latest book shows how the flawed scientific response to the disease is tied to the Western world’s colonial past and its narratives of ‘sameness’ v. ‘othernerss’.

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 do the elites manage to commit crimes without being seen, or seeing themselves, as criminals? This overview by P. Lascoumes and C. Nagels shows the means deployed by the powerful to define, use, sidestep, or avoid criminal law according to their interests.

Does secularist rhetoric secretly lend itself to a discourse on social order and the exclusion of formerly colonized peoples? François Dubet argues that it is important to recognize French secularism’s rigid and conservative turn. But he also believes that we must qualify this claim if we are to find alternative secularities.

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.

Valérie Erlich’s analysis of academic mobility across Europe identifies higher education as a vehicle for greater European integration and indirectly sheds light on the relations amongst European states and between Europe and the rest of the world.

Why do people migrate? How can they live in several worlds and many nations at once? Tracing the history of the Lebanese migration to West Africa, Andrew Arsan offers a brilliant reappraisal of diaspora, nation and empire in the first half of the twentieth century.

At a time when gender is on the debating table, the Dictionnaire genre et science politique [Dictionary of gender and political science] does more than just summarise current knowledge in the field. The book reminds us that politics has always had gender-related divisions that define it, and that the recent inclusion of gender issues in the political arena raises new questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

In an unusual genre between fieldwork account and memoir, Sudhir Venkatesh proposes a sociological exploration of the informal economy of New York City. His ethnography of drug-dealers and sex-workers constitutes an occasion for him to reflect upon the limitations of “academic sociology”.

What is an American? By exploring the history of the loss of citizenship, Patrick Weil argues that being American means being a sovereign citizen endowed with inalienable rights. The history of denaturalization, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, provides fresh insight into the legal construction of citizenship as a fundamental right.

Urban philosopher Thierry Paquot’s synthetic work maps out the historical development of the notion of public space. It highlights the diverse representations and uses of the public which structure citizens’ lives, with a fair share of hesitations and conflicts.

The increasing marginalisation and ghettoisation of Indian Muslims is a hotly debated but poorly understood subject. Gayer and Jaffrelot’s edited collection presents rich empirical evidence from Muslim localities in eleven Indian cities, providing key insights into the complex nature of this supposed decline.

Jean-Claude Barbier presents us with a way of looking at the construction of Europe, concentrating on Europe’s social regime, which he reminds us is not really on a par with its economic regime. His recent book on this subject, now available in English, is a methodological reflection on comparison and on the role of cultures.

Almost two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa still displays high levels of racial segregation. Studying the South African Indian minority, Thomas Blom helps us understand why maintaining boundaries with other groups has become crucial to individuals’ attempts at reimagining themselves in a new free and uncertain society.

In his new work, François Singly continues to explore the transformations of marital bonds. This time, he approaches it from another angle—that of the “process of uncoupling” experienced by women who have recently separated from their partner. More than just a sociological study of the gender relations at play in a separation, this investigation explores the engagement and disengagement of the self within the ties of marriage.

Robert Sampson’s new book reiterates the importance of place-level characteristics as determinants of social conditions. While social patterns are not reducible to individual phenomena, the persistence of barriers faced by African American communities (segregation, isolation, incarceration) prevent social mobility.

The quality of an explanation depends much on the relationship between the sociologist and her informants. The more unequal it is, the more she will resort to “third person” explanations—a tendency most visible among the fathers of the discipline. Yet listening to the actors does not necessarily mean turning to a “soft” sociology—because actors are able to map and explain the social space in which they live.

Sociologists Jean-François Laé and Numa Murard have returned to the field where they previously conducted research on the poor and money. In contrast, their new book sheds light on the impact of processes of individualization and fragmentation on contemporary working classes.

When it comes to delinquency, the press, as well as political discourse, tends to emphasize the “crime angle” over the “sociological angle.” Moreover, when quantitative data is used in public debate, trust in statistics is low. Philippe Robert’s and Renée Zauberman’s new book may suggest a way out of this unfortunate situation.