Contenu du sommaire : Est-ce bien naturel ?

Through the career of athlete María José Martínez Patiño, who failed a gender verification test in 1985 and who subsequently fought to be requalified as an athlete and as a woman, of the article will examine how the notion of “physical advantage” is used by the sporting movement in its policies and regulations governing the performance of female and intersex athletes. The rules covering “female hyperandrogenism” have resulted in a naturalizing of bodies that are defined by their limitations.

On the basis of ethnographic observation and a questionnaire survey conducted at a French zoo, the author discusses the notion of biophilia and the idea that children naturally love animals. Using a strictly sociological perspective, the article aims to demonstrate that, contrary to the hypothesis of innate biophilia, children's interest in zoo animals is both socially differentiated and produced, encouraged and reinforced by various institutional and interactional processes.

By retracing the history of the creation of the Awash, Omo and Simien wildlife parks, this article looks at the relationships that exist between international experts, Ethiopian leaders and local inhabitants of the parks. It highlights the way in which a transition between the colonial representations of African nature and global post-colonial governance was instigated in the period between 1965 and 1970 by a group of international heritage makers. This governance is marked by violence rooted in a simultaneous vision of nature as having been virginal and luxuriant in the past and as being overpopulated and degraded today.

In this second installment of the triptych dealing with the evaluation of public officials in France in the nineteenth century, we will explore the internal economy of evaluation sheets. In the first part of the article we analyze the categories of these sheets and note that the information being asked for varies little from one branch of the State to another. We then go on to examine two interpretive hypotheses, both partly valid, in order to understand the purpose of this evaluation: the “disciplinarization” of the agents and the rationalization of their management. Finally, we demonstrate that these sheets, by indicating to civil servants their expected, constituted a vital tool of State-building in nineteenth century France.

The 1947 referendum to ratify the transfer of Italian mountain villages to France reveals the political impacts of how the electorate is defined. The systematic comparison of local and national archives, both French and Italian, shows that the legal criteria of residency and place of birth contributed to a selection of eligible voters dictated by the expected national loyalty of different migrant groups. In order to obtain a favorable result, France recognized emigrants as legitimate political actors within the village.

The ethnography of mobilizations often runs headlong into the problem of researchers' identification as engaged actors, thereby hampering access to less mobilized individuals and thus limiting the ability to understand the role of ordinary relationships in conflicts. After a discussion of this obstacle, the article shows the value of affirming an investigative posture by using directive survey procedures (questionnaires and genealogical investigations) within the framework of an ethnographic approach. These procedures allow researchers neutralize their position, which is conducive to the study of relationships to political dissent, in all their ambivalence, by placing them within ordinary sociabilities which escape the logic of militant action.