Contenu du sommaire

The Two Marriages of Jean Celisse The study provides an ethnographie description of a marriage that was celebrated in two different ceremonies, one of working-class character, the other solemn and marked by a concern with respectability. This doubling had the effect of reconciling the norms of sociability and the expectations concerning behavior of the young couple's respective families. The observation of the preparations, rituals, games, various types of behavior, and the ensemble of symbolic actions in each of the ceremonies revealed a series of systematic oppositions which led the author to raise a number of more general problems. In particular, he examines the notion of class homogamy as it is statistically defined. Here, both members of the couple corne from the same social category, but the parents of one of them are considerably older than those of the other. As a resuit, the two families differ profoundly in their aspirations and models of behavior. The author also considers the problem of how to identify a group. To this end, he contrasts the small group attending the first ceremony, all of whom knew each other, with the quasi-anonymous group attending the second, and then attempts to explain the workings of the censoring mechanism governing the behavior of the guests at the respective ceremonies.

Art and Trade : Parallel Education and the Lower Middle Class The Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) is an institution of social mobility, offering workers the possibility of undertaking or of returning to advanced technical studies while continuing to work at their trade. Functioning parallel to the regular teaching institutions, of which it is in certain respects the counterpart, it differs from the latter because of a number of paradoxical features. It is open to all (except students), without competitive entrance examination or even a specific degree requirement, and it is empowered, like the "Grandes Ecoles" (e.g; the Ecole des Mines and the Ecole Centrale), to grant engineering degrees. In practice, however, the studies are long and difficult and frequently abandoned, and the degree rarely obtained. As can be seen from the survey conducted among 1,900 students and from the history of the institution, it achieves its stated aims only in the ideal realm. Only there -in the officiailrhetoric and, to some extent, in the minds of the students- is it capable of uniting what, in reality, necessarily remains separate and opposed : art and trade, or, looked at along an other dimension of the social hierarchy, theory and practice. engineer and worker, intellectual work and manual work. Operating in the same way as the institutions and organizations practiced in the manipulation of symbolic hierachies and the reconciliation of opposites, the Conservatoire is one of the places where the dominant class seeks to overcome contradictions by which it is obsessed but that it cannot possibly resolve in practice. It is the product of the junction of the symbolic functions with the increasing social demand for training and upward mobility on the part of the lower middle class among whom it draws virtually all of its students. The crisis that the Conservatoire is cur rently experiencing and the attempts to redefine its role illustrates how a utopia is "put aright" to the degree that it becomes realized and finds its niche in the social order

Continuing Education and Moralization : The Social Function of the Social Psychology of Business. The aim of the present study is to grasp the relationship between the introduction of techniques inspired by social psychology and the change -or at least the beginning of a change- in the ways of exercizing power in business. The author's observations derive from Personal participation in a program of continuing education or so-called "permanent training". The various stages of this type of training have multiplied since the adoption of the law of 1971, which, it seems, has benefited chiefly managerial and lower-level staff. The study is based on the hypothesis that these stages would be utilized, in a number of cases, as instruments of moralization, designed not so much to provide technical knowledge as to impose a new System of values, itself tied to a new style of command ("non-directiveness", "openess", "creativity", "participation", etc.). The study focuses, in particular, on a group of lower-level staff who have in common the characteristic of being ill-suited to the posts they hold. The group includes the daughter of a military officer, judged to be too "authoritarian" in her position as head of the typing service, and a programmer of working-class origins who is uncomfortable in his dealings with both his superiors and his subordinates. The author's analysis shows that the social psychology of business probably does not have the power to transform the habitus of the people involved, and thereby to "reform" their behavior in a permanent fashion. All the same, it does possess, at the least, the power of altering their scale of values. As a result, it leads them to recognize the excellence of the new values that "modern" managers of "modern" business concerns have arrogated to themselves. This, perhaps, is the subject's main function.

Splendor and Misery of a Petit Séminaire This study examines life in a petit séminaire (i.e. a secondary school run by priests) in the department of the Vendée. A religious school, it exerts a constant pressure on its students to develop an inclination to stand apart and to perceive themselves as destined for a sacerdotal career. A special disposition of space and time acts to immerse the seminarists in a closed religious universe in which all activities, including even the most banal, concur in inculcating the basic elements of the priestly habitus. This is accomplished, in particular, in the hidden form of training the bodily movements involved in a wide range of everyday actions. The studies themselves are set up in such a way that the symbolic consecration which always clings to them is converted into a religious consecration of the students. The crisis that began in the school around 1965 is a result of the manifold transformations which have occurred since that date, in part, among the traditional church-going public, and in part, among the diocesan clergy. With the steady increase in the importance of academic standards and their universal imposition, the students have been led to utilize and profit from the school as they would from an ordinary secondary school leading either to further studies or to a secular occupation. Looking at the situation from another perspective, the priests belonging to the lowest echelons of the clergy are seen to have discovered a particularly effective means of strengthening their position in the religious field. This consists in their refusal to accord any value to the school's traditional way of functioning or to the type of priest it produced. By this means the priests have altered the social image of the religious competence of the older priests occupying the position of power.

A Chine se Game : Notes for a Social Critique of Judgment. The author reports on the results of a survey of the image that the French have of their political leaders. It was conducted in the form of a game known as the "Chinese portrait". He shows that those questioned employed classificatory schemes (high/low, right/left, white/black, strong/weak, rich/poor, etc.) which express in their own logic the objective structure of France's social classes. A "majority" assigned to the representatives of the left or of the working class the most pejorative characteristics the (Renault as opposed to the Rolls Royce, the pine-tree, black, the cap, and Mireille Mathieu, as opposed to the oak-tree, white, the top hat, and the Queen of England). But this was probably because the prevailing system of classification has been accepted by even those who wish to reject its bases and its symbolic products.