« A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity »William James, « What is an Emotion? », Mind, 9, 1884, p. 194 « La passion de l’individu s’avive de se sentir ainsi attenante à des milliers de passions semblables à elle »Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs, Paris, Grasset, 1975, p. 108 Nous, êtres humains, pouvons-nous partager des affects et, dans l’affirmative, comment? Voilà une double question qui intéresse non seulement l’anthropologie – qui a pour objet d’étude les formes du (...) parta... (shrink)

t. 1. La vida fenomenológica.--t. 2. El ser y la metafísica.

Collective memory, social memory, professional memory: although these notions are in current use when we name the shared (or assumed to be shared) representations of the past, they are very ambiguous. The point at issue is to show how memories can become common to some or to all members of a group . In this paper, I shall base my arguments on the simplest situation imaginable: The sharing of a memory of an olfactory experience by two individuals, namely one of (...) my informants – a gravedigger – and myself. We can try to explain this shared olfactory memory, or the imagination of this sharing, by taking two facets into consideration. First of all, we must learn to take seriously those few seconds when a shared experience of the sensory world took shape between the anthropologist and his informant. Secondly, we must attempt to answer both of the following questions: what is the nature of this sharing? And what conditions make it possible? In the first part of this text, I examine the issue of the nature of sharing by weighing up its aspects as I consider protomemory, memory and metamemory. In the second part, I outline one of the essential conditions of sharing: the existence of what I call sociotransmitters. For the most part, my attention remains focused on that particular moment when the gravedigger said, “Smell this!” , and when what was at stake was to save the interaction. (shrink)

Je ne suis pas philosophe, hélas, mais anthropologue, et à ce titre je suis peu à l’aise quand je me risque à une pensée fortement spéculative, sans pouvoir enraciner ma réflexion dans une enquête de terrain comme on le fait ordinairement dans ma discipline. Si, malgré tout, j’ai accepté la proposition amicale qui m’a été faite de contribuer à ce volume, c’est parce que la question qui fonde le projet anthropologique induit inévitablement l’hypothèse barbare. Nous, êtres humains, que partageo...

In Europe, an increasing share of public subsidies for food production is being transferred towards the production of goods and environmental services. Today, farmers hesitate between the quest for technical and economic performance, which has been the paradigm of their professional activities since the 1960s, on one hand, and taking account of the environmental concerns that have been imposed since the middle of the 80s, on the other. Is it possible for farmers to continue to work according to the paradigm (...) of the producer of agri-food goods, and how do they react to the ecologization of their activities? In this paper, we will see the difficulties and sources of tension induced by landscape maintenance in the daily professional practice of the farmers. We will see that the professional identity of the farmers is profoundly brought into question by these changes (substitution of strictly “agricultural issues” by more general concerns such as “rural issues,” substitution of the farmer by the “ecologized” peasant...). The topic of landscape reveals social strains between farmers. It also raises the question of the legitimacy of farmers to define the sense of their activities by themselves. Finally we will see that environmental orientations do not systematically open up new prospects for all farmers; they sometimes contribute to increase the inequalities between farmers (financial support proportional to land property, marginalization of farmers who are less socially integrated...). (shrink)