Suchergebnisse

Do children perceive the world they are living in as a social order? At the end of the nineties, Bernard Zarca investigates what he called the "social sense" of children, defined as an individual ability to rank diverse occupations. The study reported here relies on the same kind of task methodology assumed by this author (we also asked children to rank several occupations), but our framework is a collective one -- what allows us to observe classifications as actions embedded in children interactions. Rather than focusing statistically on products of the practice (how children have classified), we pay much ethnographic attention to the design of practice itself (how children are classifying). We show that the children's relationship to social order can't be understood without taking into consideration: 1) the means that children can use to express that kind of relationship; 2) the concrete situation in which this relationship is expressed. Our study suggests that the cultural possibility of classifying should be distinguished from the dispositions and the interests to actually classify. In fact, in the context of real interactions, personal social situation is always involved, and because it is so, ranking always means self-ranking. Adapted from the source document.

The paper examines the ways in which the historical dimension of the institutions appears to social actors, outside the special case of the narratives that explicitly aim. Building on the case of the classification category "blind and deaf" studied in previous works, the article proposes to go beyond the obvious contrast between the historicity of the objectified state institutions and the historicity of hidden institutions incorporated in the state. It examines the conditions that allow players to receive the historicity of institutions (crisis of an institution, competition between institutions or otherness of an institution) as well as the modalities of production incident of historicity in the course of the activity of those producing institutions. Adapted from the source document.

Based on a survey of former May-68 activists who enrolled their children in two experimental schools, this article examines the choice of appropriate methods to analyse the forms of participation to the events of May 68. A factorial analysis followed by classification reveals that the category of so-called "sixty-eighters" encompasses a heterogeneous spectrum of profiles for participants who took part, in different ways, in "the same" event. In a second stage, we confront the statistical approach to the qualitative data in order not only to enrich the former but also to highlight the limits of the statistical classification. Indeed, it cannot dissociate the dispositional variables relative to the life trajectories before May 68 from the situational variables relative to the political event itself. The articulation of statistical data and life-story interviews makes it possible to propose, as a conclusion, a classification that reintroduces the temporality of the events into that of life trajectories. In addition, the latter is more attentive to the forms of political socialization generated by the event. Adapted from the source document.

In France, the nomenclature of the social & occupational groups occupied for a long time a central place in the representation of the world conveyed by the National Institute of Statistics & Economic Studies. From an exhaustive study of two French statistical publications, the authors show that the uses of the social category decline for some years for the benefit of two other variables, the diploma & the income. Such an evolution is due to the rise of econometric models but also by the transformation of the conditions of recruitment & training of statisticians. In a country where the public statistics constitute an obvious reference, a social blind representation of the world tends to lead. Graphs. Adapted from the source document.

The various regimes that have marked the contemporary political history of Laos -- the French colonial state (1893-1953), the Independent Kingdom of Laos (1953-1975) and, since 1975, the Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR) -- have all carried out ethnic censuses. The classifications that have been used over the course of these three political periods highlight the rulers' desire to define the community they seek to dominate. For this reason, the census has performed a variety of different functions: helping to collect taxes under the French administration; an instrument in the service of the young Laotian state's nationalist project following independence; and, under the present regime, a dual purpose tool for promoting cultural diversity & monitoring ethnic groups. At the same time, postwar census campaigns have created a space in which a number of so-called "minority" ethnic groups have been able to express their identity. The study of ethnic classification -- whether as an instrument of power or a vector of identity -- is essential to understanding the politics of identity in contemporary Laos. Adapted from the source document.