Contenu du sommaire : Terrains érudits, territoires savants

In an 1874 pamphlet, former missionary to China Paul Perny accused the marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, professor of Chinese at the Collège de France, and his predecessor Stanislas Julien of being imposters. Perny's Charlatanisme littéraire dévoilé (Literary Charlatanism Revealed) ultimately got him convicted of libel. The complexity of the affair, mixing the practices of learned controversies, the struggle between two rival branches of Sinology, and recourse to the influence of public opinion, allows us to review a century of the conflictual institutionalization of Sinology in France.

Material traces of the past are not immediately revealed to the researchers conducting a dig. While ruins may sometimes be apparent and more or less invested with meaning tying them to history, they are only transformed into vestiges through mental operations that create the site while simultaneously adjusting investigatory methods. This article concerns Sijilmasa, a medieval Islamic city in Morocco, and reviews the last 150 years of the oft-disappointed quest for material traces at the archeological site of the once-glorious city. This quest gradually progressed from stumbling exploration to stratigraphic excavation, and through it can be read the history of Orientalism, political and institutional conditions, research, and methods of the discipline of archeology.

The Cerisy registre de l'officialité is among the oldest on the European continent, and in active use for a century and a half. Begun in 1314 by the official (ecclesiastical judge) of Cerisy-la-Forêt in Normandy, it is an exceptional document providing rich material. Dozens of jurists and historians have taken recourse to it, and it is the only such register published in a complete and unabridged form since the nineteenth century. The original register was destroyed in 1944, and so historians have all based their work on the published version, despite the fact that its methodological provisions have never been questioned. This article studies how this published edition was made, situating it in the social history of practices of erudition in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It discusses problems of fidelity to the text and potential misreadings, but above all highlights the deformation of meaning resulting from deliberate choices in the initial publication process that were overlooked by historians, who saw deviant practices in situations where in fact the official himself was producing the deviance.

This article examines the development of statistically oriented school administration in the early-twentieth-century United States. It analyzes the work of its specialists through their studies of students' falling behind and dropping out of school. These issues first emerged in the “Progressive Era,” which was characterized by the professionalization and universitarization of school administration and debates over social inequality and the effectiveness of public institutions. Using these specialists' surveys to appreciate their work, we contribute to the social history of school statistics by identifying the scientific, political and administrative issues that affect the production of statistics. As early as the 1900s, these groundbreaking surveys raised questions that would have a lasting impact on the sociology of education.

This article examines the connection between the material conditions for young scholars' work and the development of research topics in a context of increasingly internationalized and insecure university careers. The author re-examines the various dissertation proposals and grant applications that he wrote as a doctoral student, putting them in relation with the conditions of their production and moments of rupture in his career. The article is intended to identify the real and variable effects of graduate students' material situations and their institutional and disciplinary contexts on the production of knowledge.

In October 1910 Maurice Halbwachs received a newly established travel grant from the Université de Paris (funded by the philanthropist David David-Weill) to go to Berlin and Vienna. Until today, this trip has only been known for his expulsion from Berlin that December, but it is re-examined in this article in light of the previously unseen report that Halbwachs made to educational authorities and the philanthropist. Reprinted in full, this document allows us to shed light on the conditions of his trip, the genesis of his thesis on “the working class and its living standards,” as well as the influence of Germany and its learned men on his intellectual development.

This article takes a second look at a study conducted in a military academy. The researcher, daughter of an officer and a doctoral student at the time, quite successfully lived up to her informants' expectations of her status as a “daughter of.” This article re-examines research conditions, how the researcher's military connection and gender were put to use, and most of all how dominant members of the officer corps mobilized the student sociologist's family, educational, and “military” resources to fuel the strategies of distinction and implicit hierarchies characteristic of the corps.