Contenu du sommaire

The imposition of the sacerdotal vocation This study concerns the rural Vendée, a particularly catholic region in the west of France. The analysis of the process by which the church still manages to insure its social reproduction reveals the selectioning of children who "hear the calling" of the priesthood and the engendering of the sacerdotal vocation amongst these children. This study also reveals some of the more dissembled mechanisms of producing and reinforcing religious beliefs at the individual and the group level. To identify and mark amongst other children those who appear susceptible to becoming priest, the recruitment specialists utilize such criteria as the economic situation of the family, etc. Even if the vocation is objectively the product of certain social pressures, this choice can only be made when the group and the individual affirm that it is a "free choice".To be efficacious, the work of engendering the vocation should produce the very conditions necessary for its dissimulation.

The army, draftees, and social classes The Army, like any other totalitarian institution, submits new recruits to a double indoctrination by the use of techniques designed to cut them off from the everyday world and by the use of rituals intended to form a disciplined behaviour. In spite of the apparently equalitarian character of the Army, these domesticatiing forces are exercised mainly upon the members of the less affluent classes. This can be seen in the disproportionate recruitment amongst social classes, in the differences in duty stations, and in the division by high and low ranking officers of the various tasks of dominating and forming new draftees. By inculcating a sense of order and by preparing, at the same time, the dominated social classes for their role of obedience, the military establishment contributes to the perpetuation of this System of domination and, thus, the existing social order.

The restructuring of the village Does the village nccessarily conslitute a pertinent analytical entity in the study of the peasant environment ? The practical problems encountered in the study of a village in the west of France have led us to question the definition of the "village group", as well as the limits of the latter and the value of the local monograph as a survey method. The geographical mobility of village populations, the increase in the range of daily movements, and the transformation of the peasant's social space, are they not in fact processes which prohibit the strictly geographical delimitation of the entity under study ? Being neither a closed microcosm, nor a simple collection of unrelated inhabitants, the intermediate position of the village allows us to examine the relationship that develops between social groups and the social space.

The categories of professorial evaluation The analysis of a set of individualized note cards kept by a philosophy teacher concerning his college prep class shows that the evaluation and the operation of scholastic classification carried out by faculty members implicitly take into account social criteria. The System of adjectives by which the professorial judgement is expressed ("vulgar", "mediocre", "serious", "sincere", "subtil", "cultivated", etc.) operates like an instrument of social classification. The results of this analysis are confirmed by the analysis of the necrologies of alumnus of an important college, the "Ecole normale superieure". This represents the final professorial judgement. The categories of university thought and judgement which transpose social classification into the unexpected form of scholastic evaluation function throughout a professional career.

University psychology and the ideology of social mobility The analysis of two works in psychology (one, thoughts on academic counselling and, the other, a study of social mobility) reveals the specific contribution that university psychology makes to the ideology of social success. The two principal facets of this contribution are the acceptance of certain social phenomenon and the reduction, by the use of a language of "motivations", amongst other means, of social inequalities to individual psychological and biological inequalities. Together they tend to form a new justification of the existing social order in which each individual is what he merits to be.