Contenu du sommaire : Frontières d'humanité

The question of the “frontiers of humanity” is at the heart of the social sciences project. It is possible to distinguish two ways of addressing the issue. The first is normative: the aim is to draw a line between what is “peculiar to humans” and that what is not. The second way of considering the “frontiers of humanity” is descriptive: it is a form of reflection on the way in which any being can be humanized or dehumanized. From this point of view, humanity appears to be the result of processes that make it either appear or disappear. For twenty years now, the fields of biomedicine and of disability are both characterized by a particularly complex work concerning the “frontiers of humanity” understood in the second meaning: this issue tries to give a comprehensive overview of it. Beyond these two fields, a sociology of the “frontiers of humanity” is an invitation to investigate various settings, maybe more ordinary, in which the membership to a commune humanity is at stake.

This text is the translation, by Frédéric Keck, of Paul Rabinow's “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality”, published in 1996 in his Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, Princeton University Press). This translation makes available to the francophone readership an important contribution of Paul Rabinow, in which he develops, departing from an analysis of Human Genome Project, the concept of “biosociality”. This concept is central today for the research on issues related to biotechnology, life sciences and, more generally, to the “boundaries of the human”. The translation is completed by a presentation, by Frédéric Keck, of the background, the stakes and the perspectives opened by the text.

In this paper, the aim is to think together the transplantation of today, allo-transplantation, and the transplantation of the future, xeno-transplantation, that is to say the use of organ animals for human recipients. We focus on two controversies. The first controversy is about the harvesting of several organs on a young French man who died from a bike accident, and the second about an attempt of xenotransplantation on a dying American baby. If, at first sight, allo- and xeno-transplantation seem radically different practices, the detailed description of this two cases shows a quite different picture. Indeed, it becomes difficult to say who is the most “human”: the human being transformed in an objectivized corpse or the humanized and “sacrificed” animal? Through the practice of transplantation, an astonishing new scale of beings emerges.

In 2008-2009, an exhibition of corpses named Our Body took place in France. This article first analyses the controversy about this exhibition. Then, the article compares Our Body with the case of corpses exhibited in French public museums. At last, the article examines the arguments of the judges who forbade the exhibition. This case study proves that the corpses are an unusual category of objects which cannot be kept in private space except if they are allowed to. Even if corpses are in public spaces, they cannot be exhibited in a public space unless a pre-mortem written consent of the person. However, public institutions can exhibit corpses, without this consent, and transform these corpses into museum pieces.

This article is part of a series of research projects on the historical changes to the ways in which patients' complaints are treated. Cosmetic surgery has always given rise to lively debate as to its legitimacy on the fringes of the dominant curative model. The evaluation of people using cosmetic surgery and the consideration of their complaints have been the object of intense analysis. This is the work that we have been examining, basing our work on a corpus of television programmes broadcast between 1952 and 2008. From cosmetic surgery as a means of reducing social disabilities, to that of a means of self-accomplishment: the nature of what is defective in an individual, the identification of defects to be corrected and the ways in which they are objectivised have changed considerably. The article shows that it is the entire manner of contemplating the representation of victims “in” and then “of” cosmetic surgery and of constructing the cause which has thus been reorganised.

The author uses wheelchair mobility to examine the distinction (based on the historical opposition of two models of disability – an individual model and a social model) between the individual experience and the social experience of disability. In looking at the interaction between the person and the wheelchair, she demonstrates that there is continuity in people's experiences: their mobility (its form and extent) is the result of a process of reciprocal adaptation with their wheelchairs and their environment, which involves their bodies. In this process, the status of the wheelchair (as an incorporated or outside object) and of a person's space for movement (both social and physical) are correlatively and gradually defined. Analysis of these co-definition processes is important, because it allows us to identify the diversity of the resources – other people, objects, urban planning, services – upon which people rely in order to be able to move around and act in wheelchairs and in different public and private spaces.

In the beginning of 21th century, a man, who would have been characterized as infirm thirty years ago, questions the sport institution by claiming a participation in abled-bodies sport competitions. Oscar Pistorius who presents himself as “the fastest thing with no legs”, triggered since 2004 a controversy about his status involving international organisations of Olympic and Paralympic sports, as well as the scientific community. This controversy exceeds widely his individual case to open on the status of “technologized athletes” in general. The study of the debates shows that, more than the mere question of equity, the controversy about Oscar Pistorius links issues of doping, of the technological compensation of disabilities, and the biomedical reparation of impairments. Thus, the sports arena opens a political debate about what place should be given in the actual and future societies to the “technologically enhanced” and potentially hyper-successful human. This debate allows also understanding symbolic stakes of the contemporary spectacle of sports.

In August 2004, for the first time, France experienced a public health crisis triggered by the entry of a rabid dog within its border. In the past, similar events had remained confined within the professional community. To shed light on the onset of this first public rabies crisis, this paper shows how the transformation of a “business-as-usual” professional problem into a bona fide public health crisis may be interpreted as a sudden renegociation of the historical compromise which previously existed around the management of rabies. Public health changes and reorganizations which had occurred prior to this episode allowed human health authorities to reposition themselves at the centre of the rabies management programs, when they used to remain at their periphery. By reformating crisis perception and allowing the emergence of new specific rabies-related expertise, a series of health-related crises, from the 2003 heat wave to various rabies alerts, triggered the transformation of a rabies alert into a public health crisis. Furthermore, confronting various action frameworks played a part in modifying the perception and analysis of the August 2004 alert, thus contributing to the radicalization of implemented management decisions. Thus, to understand the August 2004 rabies crisis, it is necessary to consider it both within the history of rabies as a public concern, as well as within the larger moving landscape of health crisis management as a whole.

This article is dedicated to regulations writing by civil servants of the French ministry of environment. Precisely, it concerns the definition of the rules which allows the implementation of the technological risk prevention plan (TRPP) which is as a new land-use planning tool defined by a law of 2003. The analysis focuses on the concrete work of the rule-makers, the way they organize their actions, the difficulties they meet and the solutions they invent to solve the many problems linked to regulations writing. The diving in the “bureaucratic factory” of regulations put the accent on few characteristics of the regulations production. Especially it brings to light that this activity is not really planned and more or less random.