Contenu du sommaire : Chemins de traverse

The Lebanese reception of the Annales Françaises, a generational phenomenon, has contributed, since the 1970s, to the advent of a new historiographic matrix in Lebanon, economic and social history has taken centre stage in the production of local historians for a long time and has taken various forms. This article intends to show how, in the context of a profession overdetermined by the war situation in Lebanon (1975-1990), historians have taken models and methods drawn from the Annales Françaises as resources in strategies found in history writing. In crossing these almost two decades of civil war, the dynamic appropriation of the Annales, initially supported by those who were highly politicised and driven by great ambitions of renovation, has progressively been redirected from its critical potential and has ended up leading to a political solution.

The disciplinary field of Ottoman and Turkish psychologies, such as that which spread between the 1860s and the end of the 1930s, constitutes an interesting laboratory to study the dynamics of reorganisation and scholarly sharing. The psychology taught during the ottoman nineteenth century, structured by theological taxonomies, is dominated by the religious psychology of the naves (soul). The plural configurations (psychophysiology, social psychology, pedagogy) and the institutional modifications (academic theology, experimental laboratories) are connected, being either in line with or separate from, this medium. Grouped in 1919 under the title ruhiyat—a general and integrative psychology combining all of the psyche approaches—psychological knowledge is invested by the university reform of 1933, which, in the context of a political recovery in the scholarly world initiated with the republican transition of 1923, is dedicated to the dissociation between experimental psychology and psychophilosophy. The latter, characterised by its resistance to the sharing of knowledge, will consequently contribute to the republican expectations of non-theologian spiritualism.

The history of Haiti has been gaining interest since the 1990s, particularly in the English-speaking world. These studies focus on the revolution and its consequences. They are little interested in the discourses produced by historians in post-colonial Haiti, the subject of this article, which explores an aspect of the conditions under which this historiography appeared. It emerges facing a huge colonial library by drawing the foundations of its main orientations in the political event (independence) that made it possible. It also inherits the paths opened up by the revolutionary controversies that put the colonial discourse in crisis and gave rise to a practice of action writing that aims to be narrative of the past: a kind of immediate history where the validity of these stories can be discussed.

What place does French sinology of the nineteenth century reserve for the Chinese in the study of their own language? The specificity of the Parisian Sinological territory, within which several competing conceptions of sinology come face to face, each one backed up by a specific definition of the Chinese language, prevents a clear answer. Neither an overall rejection of Chinese skills, nor unanimous recognition of their value, but rather several antagonistic creations of the Chinese language, attributing various roles to the Chinese, according to the situations and strategies. Where cabinet sinologists define an ancient Chinese person whose intelligence would have been lost in China and would be accessible only in Paris, sinologists in the field, eager to undermine the authority of the former, recognise the Celestial mastery of a language that is unchanged since the dawn of time, whereas the secular journals struggle to conceive that there can be a Chinese language specialist that is better than a Chinese person.

Aside from university, the Caisse nationale des sciences (later to become the CNRS), created in 1930, awards grants and allocations to junior or senior scientists. From 1931-1932 to 1938-1939, its humanities section saw 225 men and 29 women in five sub-sections: history and archaeology, philosophy, philology, legal sciences, social sciences. They represent 23% of the beneficiaries and share 15% of the Caisse's budget. The cohort of human sciences is in the minority: it is older, less feminised, more bourgeois, and at the same time a little more Parisian and cosmopolitan than that of mathematical and experimental sciences, for which the Caisse was known. The human sciences, the “poor parents” of the financing system, cannot appropriate the system enough to promote the new professional research figure in this field, as had been done for the “exact” sciences, at least in the case of men; the women of both sections share similar misfortunes.

Sport starts to take shape as a medical field of research organised from the 1920s. Academic institutions dedicated to this field of investigation are thus created in the majority of faculties (and schools) of medicine. Such innovation assumes the prior accumulation of minimal scientific and political capital. The purpose is not to return to the history of the successive ways of enforcing or reorganising the university system, which made it possible to launch these specialised teaching and research units, then to academically reconfigure them after the 1950s. It is rather, once in operation, about identifying the scientific productivity of these institutions without sacrificing to the metaphor of unequivocal and omnipotent medical power. If different evidence results in the revitalisation of the medical-sports research audience within the university sub-space of medical production throughout the observed period, the fact, nevertheless, that a laboratory research activity exists, tends to routinise the research and lead to the allocation of sought-after academic positions. Yet, the rare descriptions of these establishments have, until now, overlooked this aspect of reality, just as they fail to take into account the epistemic significance of this domain of in vivo experimentation that constitutes it in the field of transferable knowledge sampling. Hence also the firm stance of linking the characteristics as closely as possible to the known facts and generic producer profiles.

If we cast a retrospective look at the contemporary French intellectual field, certain elements tend to give philosophers a predisposition to transgress academic boundaries. A prestigious, panoramic field that was formerly established in the scholarly space, philosophy is a sector that has produced a significant number of intellectual “defectors” involved in the construction of new disciplines. This situation would lead to different common sense explanations that required an empirical inquiry. Starting from the specific case of the transition of philosophers to the practice of psychoanalysis, examined as part of the research on “intellectual redeployment” of philosophy graduates from the late 1960s, our survey shows that, during this period, psychoanalysis had a significant impact on the intellectual field and more specifically on philosophers.