Contenu du sommaire : An annual english selection

Protease inhibitors, the first drugs to bring about real remission in Aids, were first developed in 1996. Between the time they were proven effective and the time they became accessible to all Aids patients in France, the available quantity of protease inhibitors was far from sufficient to satisfy the need. In response to this temporary "tragic choice" situation, the Conseil national du sida [National Aids council] proposed that the drugs be distributed by lots ; i.e., through random selection of patients from pre-established lists. The following is a monographic study of the genesis of that situation, the controversy caused by the recommendation to proceed by lot-drawing, and the consequences of that controversy. Its objectives are twofold : 1) to propose a model for analyzing controversies by studying how media coverage interacted with a specific collective action ; 2) to show the ongoing relations within the particular network of actors -pharmaceutical companies, clinicians, Aids patient advocacy groups, and public agencies and authorities- involved in getting anti-Hiv treatments onto the market in France.

What can be said of the sibling tie in adulthood ? Analysis of a survey conducted by Insee of meetings between or among brothers and sisters (survey sample : 6,000 French households) points to three main conclusions. First, there is little that is normative about the sibling tie: number of meetings varies greatly by individual. In contrast to direct filiation, relations between siblings seem determined by choice and interest more than status-conditioned obligations. Second, inclination is nonetheless more likely to regulate sibling ties for men; for women, regulation is more likely to be status-conditioned. Third, the sibling tie is structurally secondary to direct filiation (mother and father-adult children) : how often siblings see each other is a function of father's and/or mother's presence, and declines when individuals settle into couples and have their own children. The fact that the sibling tie functions as a substitute when direct filial ties are impoverished or lost further illustrates that, of the two direct blood ties, the sibling tie is structurally secondary. These properties of siblingship are probably particular to the cognatic or non-unilineal, "kindred" system which is that of modern Western kinship.

This article aims to contribute to social network analysis through a study of telephone sociability. After reviewing the procedures used for apprehending the structure of sociability networks, several types of personal networks are defined through an analysis of relations conducted by telephone. While some of these networks involve a mere sum of interpersonal ties, with networks composed of a full set of different types of ties contrasting sharply with those characterized by virtual absence of all ties, others reveal the existence of networks based on preference, where the relevant opposition is between two types of exclusive ties: family and friendship. Social status does not suffice to understand such relational choices ; these seem to involve instead a variety of distinctions associated with two relatively new modes of life : living alone and living outside the world of work. When these new dimensions are used to read these different types of sociability, we see that increasingly complex factors need to be invoked to understand social behaviors.

Science and technology are characterized by considerable intellectual and institutional fragmentation - a product of unceasing specialization. In this article T. Shinn shows how a little studied transverse science and technology community, the research-technology movement, promotes "pragmatic-universality". The multi purpose and generalist instruments generated by research-technology foster a technical lingua-franca in academia, industry, state technical services, the military and so forth. Research-technology also facilitates cognitive and institutional boarder crossings between disciplines and professional spheres. Shinn argues that divisions of labor in science and engineering are not detrimental to universality but are instead basic to its establishment. Demarcated niche audiences independently test and validate ideas and usage. Those which survive diverse and locally imposed testing are ultimately held in common by all groups, thereby becoming a universally accepted consensual stock of knowledge.

Biology-inspired sociology of the nineteenth century, at least that of major thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim, cannot be understood with reference to an opposition between "mechanical" and "organic" models. It was not based on the Romantic figure of the organism as countervalue to the machine, but rather centered around the notion of organization as it was debated in the discipline of natural history over the first half of the nineteenth century. In the sociological thought of this period, therefore the logic-based theme of classifying organized forms plays a crucial role.

In the 1960s, researchers and scholars with very different approaches to studying the peasantry met up in Paris. For American anthropologists, the peasantry in Europe and South America constituted a new field of study ; French geographers and historians (particularly Medievalists) had amassed a great number of regional studies ; the tradition of the populist Russian agronomists had been rediscovered ; and Marxist economists and sociologists were trying to account for vestiges of the peasantry in light of Marx's prediction that peasants would disappear. These different disciplines and approaches, in part impelled by the French agricultural revolution and the repeated failure of socialist-run agriculture, were able to develop together a theory of the peasantry.

The phenomenon of debt slavery has either been greatly underestimated or, on the contrary, overestimated through confusion with other ways of dealing with the debtor, like pawning, for instance, or the possibility of reimbursing debt through labor. After carefully defining debt slavery, the article shows how widespread it has been, and explains its social-significance as follows: inequalities between rich and poor, already present in most primitive societies, may be redefined in terms of masters and slaves. The transformation, or threatened transformation, of a debtor into a slave considerably strengthens the power of the dominant. The article concludes with a hypothesis about the origins of the state.