Contenu du sommaire : Miscellanées

From a few fragments of Nuit obscure, Cantique spirituel and other poems by St. John of the Cross, with nostalgia for “punctum” type images specified by Roland Barthes in La chambre claire, our thinking is based on an understanding of the Instagram digital network and the contemporary body.

This paper focuses on the concepts of identity construction and ritualization of behaviors, considered through photo sharing on the social network Instagram. It relies on an ethnographic field survey made up of interviews and non-participant observations of online photographs and comments. The information from the field is presented together with quotations from interviews and photographs collected during the observations on Instagram, and is connected with relevant theoretical elements. The discussion highlights the main results: the affirmation of appearances and lifestyles and of the status of authentic photographer; the construction of an online identity; and, finally, photographs as reflections of ritualized behaviors.

Our article describes and analyzes the educational activities of a blogger dedicated to spreading classical opera. This analysis is an opportunity to show the similarities and differences between a blog and a discussion forum—two very popular social internet applications. They serve as points of crystallization for different kinds of virtual communities. The discussion forum is a platform for the creation of a democratic minicommunity, recalling the civil society, within which it is possible to cultivate civic virtues. However, the community formed around the blog no longer has a democratic character, but rather resembles a late eighteenth-century Parisian salon, dominated by the authority of a certain spiritual leader. The article presents the results of a mini-survey in which visitors of the blog participated.

This article is part of an extended study analyzing the uses of digital social networks in everyday life. In this text, we discuss the production of fake news based on the practice of “online reinformation,” showing how users' processes of influence and opinion can contribute to fomenting discourses of intolerance through the manifestation of catharsis in a complex circuit combining politics and emotions.

While their living conditions continue to deteriorate with the economic crisis, the young generation in Korea is focusing more on the value of the present than the value of the future. It is their style of consumption, highly nomadic, that shows this trend well. The desire to be seen, to be admired, is realized via immediate means with the search for “mises en scène” of images of their everyday lives. Due to the new visibility of “varied” and “renewed” life, a cult of perpetual novelties is created. Consumption based on presentism allows them to forget, even if only temporarily, their anxiety.

The consequences of globalization, the development of artificial intelligence, and new forms of violence pose novel challenges to the social sciences. Indeed, security is not an individual but a social problem. Therefore, sociology, through the paradigm of trust, can train professionals to be able to analyze and intervene by considering the relationship between reality and the perception of social facts concerning security and violence.

The aim of this paper is to report the results of an empirical study conducted among members of families caring for a relative with a severe mental illness. A poststructuralist theoretical framework was used, more precisely the works of Jacques Donzelot and Michel Foucault. The main findings of this qualitative research indicate that the government of families is carried out through complex mechanisms. Furthermore, family members at risk of violence, and in situations of vulnerability, must use the legal system to obtain formal psychiatric assistance. Finally, this research allowed us to analyze that a double mandate (caring for the relative and social control) is imposed upon families, considered both as an object and subject of power. In this context, the woman's role is often overinvested by the psychiatric and legal apparatuses. As a result, gender inequalities risk being produced.

For some years now, attention to the body as an object of research has become increasingly widespread in empirical research, but sociology has only slowly begun to deal with this field of study as a rather complex “object” of study. How was the body seen by the classical authors of sociology, and how is it considered today by contemporary scholars? This contribution wants to propose a state of the art on body studies, taking into account both the classical and contemporary theoretical approaches, as well as the most recent empirical developments. The reading ranges from the analysis of scholars such as Durkheim, Goffman, Simmel, and Bourdieu, to that of the most recent empirical contributions. Always considered the subject of certain disciplines such as medicine and aesthetics, in this case the interest of the scholars in question takes note of the sociocultural changes in place and examines the social role of the body through a rich reference literature. Body, identity, and social and cultural change are the three pillars of the article. The body is therefore studied in all respects as a social “object” inserted in a variegated container of life models, social bonds, and cultural diversities. What are the risks of the body today? In this regard, the relationship between the Ego and the Alter will be fundamental within well-defined and increasingly complex social processes, where adults and above all young people find and live and confront each other, as in the case of the young “Emo” whose body is the object of rituals that deserve to be studied in the age of technology and online aesthetic appearance.

After the persistent denial of beauty in the twentieth century, and faced with the multiplicity of expressive interventions in the contemporary period, the issue of beauty has resurfaced. The critique that denied it has led to the question of the new possibilities of acknowledgment of new beauty standards, redefining its role in the processes of creation and enjoyment in the present day. Based on this questioning, we reflect on the role of beauty in contemporary society, taking into account its specificities and the absorptive capacity of its forms in the present moment, based on its process of creation and the contemplative act of reception. We use the fashion world as a reference, considering, like Maffesoli (1996), that “‘beauty' shared with others is the basis for the organization of techne and polis” (p. 156).

This article examines three CDs by the African-American jazz flautist Nicole Mitchell, and uses them as a way of considering Afrofuturism. It will suggest that Afrofuturism should be seen as an imaginary rather than simply as a “genre” of artistic production. It will show the impact of Afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler on Mitchell, and will then draw out the different ways that Butler and Mitchell have expressed the Afrofuturist imaginary. It will suggest that we can find two apparently radically different orientations in Afrofuturist artistic productions: “space fantasy” on the one hand, and “realist” social criticism on the other. The paper will end by arguing that this shows that the Afrofuturist imaginary is best considered dialectically, and that these contradictory orientations can be seen as vital parts of a complex whole.