Les luttes sociales à Tananarive en 1972

G. Althabe — Social Struggle in Antananarivo, 1972. An attempt at reconstructing and understanding the chain of events which, in April-October 1972, brought over the fall of the neo-colonial regime installed in 1957-1960, and resulted in the assumption of power by nationalist—in some cases populist—military ofncers. The starting point was a strike of the pupils in second-ary schools where the urban petty bourgeoisie built up opposition to the regime. This crisis led to a week-long insurrection (13-20 May 1972) with the Antananarivo crowd fighting the political police and gaining control of the street. Tsiranana's downfall was followed by a situation of double power: on the one hand the military who were able to rally together on a nationalistic position the Churches, trade unions and political parties; on the other hand, a radical fraction of the people's movement which, while it succeeded in setting up original power structures, failed in its attempt to question internai exploitation. A term was put to this confrontation by the 8 October referendum which consecrated the constitution of the new regime.Althabe Gérard. Les luttes sociales à Tananarive en 1972.. In: Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 20, n°80, 1980. pp. 407-447

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Discovery Of Childhood In Puritan England\u3c/i\u3e, by C. John Sommerville.

John Sommerville has written a fascinating book that scholars from a number of interests and backgrounds will find valuable. His work is an intersection of the history of childhood and of religious history in early modern England. In this study, Sommerville is arguing for a much more sympathetic and positive view of Puritanism, especially in terms of how the Puritans thought about children and how they in practice related to their children. Sommerville\u27s work is an interesting counterpoint to Linda Pollock\u27s Forgotten Children: Parent-child Relations from 1500-1900 (1983). Pollock argued for a very harsh attitude toward, and treatment of, children in early modern England. Sommerville counters that there is less change from the early modern period to the modern age.The change Sommerville does perceive is not necessarily the actual treatment, but the greater guilt over bad treatment, and this he traces to Puritan influence

Anthropologie du contemporain

Gérard Althabe, directeur d’études Les conditions épistémologiques de la démarche ethnologique dans le présent Durant la première partie de l’année, avec la collaboration de Valéria Hernandez, je me suis interrogé sur les modalités à travers lesquelles l’ethnologie peut être introduite dans des situations locales relevant du professionnel : il s’agit de champs sociaux et symboliques qui se donnent à voir comme entièrement déterminés du dehors, ils se modèlent sur le fonctionnement de systèmes..

Une rue quelconque de Bucarest

L’ouvrage signé par Irina Nicolau et Ioana Popescu est le résultat d’une enquête de terrain menée au début des années 1990 dans une rue ancienne de Bucarest : la rue Oraţiu, située dans le centre‑ville, à proximité de la gare du Nord et du marché Matache. Les hypothèses qui ont guidé ce travail ont été tracées dans le cadre d’un atelier franco‑roumain d’ethnologie de la ville dirigé par Gérard Althabe. L’ouvrage est l’un des premiers à exprimer une conception de l’ethnologie qui peine à s’in..

Construction de l’étranger dans les échanges quotidiens

During the last 15 years, French society has been the setting for the development of two cross-cutting phenomena : the settlement of an important non-native population (particularly, more than 3 million from Maghreb) and a severe economic and social crisis (massive unemployment and erosion of social protections). The crisis shatters former certitudes and destroys the symbolic devices constructed during some thirty years of exceptional development and modernization. The coïncidence of the two phenomena brings about a rise of xenophobia. The foreigner, being the principal carrier of the social « negative », thus becomes the central reference for natives who attempt to expel poverty and dependency, both of which have become omnipresent while people had imagined they had been eradicated. The paper tries to define this process as it takes place in the everyday life of urban peripheries

Le Centre civique de Bucarest

La destruction et la reconstruction du centre-ville de Bucarest durant les années quatre-vingt sont un exemple du lien entre le despotisme, l’urbanisme et l’architecture. Alors que s’accumulent, à Varsovie et à Moscou en particulier, les signes du crépuscule des régimes communistes d’Europe, cette tentative folle d’assurer une pérennité de plus en plus aléatoire montre comment un urbanisme qui, à travers ses formes, rompt avec le passé est une des modalités de la mise en œuvre du projet totalitaire dont le régime caucescite était le porteur. Il doit alors affronter une contradiction fondamentale entre un projet totalitaire visant à la création d’une société nouvelle, libérée du passé et un pouvoir contraint de forger sa légitimité dans un nationalisme qui l’amène à manifester sa continuité avec le passé et son enracinement dans une culture roumaine exclusivement rurale.The destruction and reconstruction of the city centre during the 1980’s is an example of the link between despotism, urbanisation and architecture. As signs of the twilight of Europe’s communist regimes gather, particularly in Warsaw and Moscow, the crazy attempt to ensure an increasingly uncertain perpetuity demonstrates how a town planning which breaks with the past in its forms is one of the ways of the application of a totalitarian project led by Ceaucescu’s regime. The latter then has to affront a fundamental contradiction between a totalitarian project aiming at the creation of a new society liberated from the past and a power forced to forge its legitimacy in a nationalism. This leads the regime to manifest its continuity with the past and its roots in an exclusively rural roumanian culture