Contenu du sommaire : Hiérarchie sociale des objets

The "couturier" and his "signature" : contribution to a theory of magic The field of luxury goods production in which high fashion has its place is structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy between consecrated art and avant-garde art Because of this opposition high fashion presents functional similarity to the structure of fractions (and secondarily age groups) of the dominating class which predisposes it to keep ahead of the expectations of its clientele the "young", "inexpensive", "modern", "franck", "intellectual" style is in contrast with the "luxurious", "traditional", "conservative", "bourgeois" style The succession of couturier poses problems permitting analysis of the sort of social alchemy realized by the couturier when he imposes his "signature" which can radically modify the social quality of product without changing its physical nature. The field of fashion betrays with particular transparency certain of the mechanisms characteristic of what can be called an economy of symbolic exchanges. What is described as the crisis of haute couture could be only one sign among others of restructuring of this mechanism linked to the apparition of new tokens of distinction (and of new fractions) less naively ostentatious and less insolently luxurious than those couturiers traditionally offered.

The establishing of the cartoon field Until recent times (1960-1970), the cartoon possessed the properties common to most of the symbolic goods produced for a wide-range audience : subjugation of producers to the laws of the market, anonimity, uniformity of products, etc. An ensemble of changes, without a doubt linked, for the most part, to the increase in school attendance, have been at the origin of the constituting of a "field" of the cartoon, possessing some of the properties of the fields of scholarly culture. The analysis of the process of the canonization of the cartoon is the opportunity to observe the modifications which the establishing of a specifie culture -of a relatively autonomous field, of a mechanism (reviews meetings, prizes, editors, institutions of learning, etc.) introduces in the producers'characteristics, in the formal properties of the works and in the type of relationship which the producers maintain toward the works.

Compulsory schooling and the invention of abnormal childhood In order to understand the recent development of the institutional ensemble dealing with "unadapted" childhood, one must go back to the origins of this movement : institutions and institutional practices, social characteristics of the producers of this new "science" and of the clientele of this new "market", ideological environment of this scientific discourse. By extricating the ties between medico-pedagogical theories and practices and the society of an epoch, one can escape from the illusion of the medico-pedagogical field's absolute autonomy and the circle which furnishes its scientific caution to agents when they justify their actions by using inadaptation statistics ; these statistics are themselves constructed according to classifications which reflect social pigeonholes.

The teaching of agriculture and the symbolic domination of the peasantry An instrument of action over the peasants, the teaching of agriculture could constitute for different fractions of the dominant class a means of maintaining their own definitions of the peasantry. Thus the rural primary school, which took the place of formal agricultural learning for most of the peasants, contributed at the end of the 19th century to trans-forming the peasantry by opposing the "enlightened farmer" to the "backward peasant". The teaching of agriculture could equally be taken as an attempt to resolve indirectly, through the interposed peasantry, the urban "social question". The idealized image of bucolic and peasant virtues, which the intellectuals and artists produced and which the school fed back to the peasants, was formed in the 19th century from the denunciation of the city's miseries : it was a euphemized expression of the fear engendered by the "worker peril". By producing a corps of professionals from the framework of the peasantry, the teaching of agriculture could have the effect of installing a new type of relationship of domination between the peasantry and the dominating class.