Encapsulates the debate on the topics of confusion in consumption and the return of community. Starting with an ethnosociological analysis structuring the passage from modernity to postmodernity around the metamorphosis of the social link, aims at clarifying and explaining the different levels of the postmodern confusion in consumption. Modernity entered history as a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from everyday obligations and traditional bonds. As a consequence, modern consumption emphasized essentially the utilitarian value (“use value”) of products and services. Postmodernity, on the contrary, can be said to crown not the triumph of individualism, but the beginning of its end with the emergence of a reverse movement of a desperate search for community. With the neo‐tribalism distinguishing postmodernity, everyday life seems to mark out the importance of a forgotten element: the social link. Consequently, postmodern consumption appears to emphasize the “linking value” of products and services. Concludes with an exploration of the implications of postmodernity for rethinking marketing with the integration of the linking value concept.

Community and consumption

The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste - but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided. Objects of taste are not present, inert, available and at our service.They give themselves up, they shy away, they impose themselves. ‘Amateurs’ do not believe things have taste. On the contrary, they make themselves detect them, through a continuous elaboration of procedures that put taste to the test. Understood as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered (as with so-called ‘critical’ sociology) an arbitrary election which has to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.

Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology:

This study discusses the meaning of Amerindian "perspectivism": the ideas in Amazonian cosmologies concerning the way in which humans, animals, and spirits see both themselves and other world beings. Such ideas suggest the possibility of a redefinition of the classical categories of "nature", "culture", and "supernature" based on the concept of perspective or point of view. The study argues in particular that the antinomy between two characterizations of indigenous thought - on the one hand "ethnocentrism", which would deny the attributes of humanity to humans from other groups, and on the other hand "animism", which would extend such qualities to beings from other species - can be resolved if one considers the difference between the spiritual and corporal aspects of beings.

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Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio

The paper examines the intellectual history of economic geography over the last 50 years. Three major episodes of research activity are considered: (a) the spatial analysis and regional science movement of the 1960s; (b) the turn to political economic (especially Marxian) approaches in the 1970s; and (c) the intensification of interest in regional‐global interactions since about the mid-1980s. Two minor interludes are also briefly examined; these are represented by behavioural geography and the so-called localities debate. It is suggested that the course of economic geography over the last half-century can best be understood by reference to the sociology of knowledge, i.e., a contextualised but reasoned description of those contextualised but reasoned descriptions that constitute scholarly practice.

Economic geography: the great half-century

“We must explain why science — our surest example of sound knowledge — progresses as it does, and we must first find out how in fact it does progress” (Kuhn, 1970, p. 20). Many answers have been proposed to these two questions. In choosing to organize this chapter in terms of different models of scientific development, I have deliberately sought to emphasize the collective character of work in science studies. My aim is to avoid the repetitive and controversial step of taking a few selected books by a number of great authors — the science studies canon — as the point of departure. To be sure, my way of presenting the arguments has its drawbacks. For instance, the debates that have driven the field as it has grown do not come into focus. However, the theoretical structure of arguments and choices is made clearer, as is the fact that analysts are always struggling with a series of different dimensions. It is thus impossible to give a definition of, for example, the nature of scientific activity, without at the same time suggesting a certain interpretation of the overall dynamics of development and establishing the identity of the actors involved. Even the most philosophical works imply a conception of the social organization of science, and reciprocally the purest sociological analyses assume views of the nature of scientific knowledge.

Four Models for the Dynamics of Science

Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991

Cet article aborde deux dimensions du capitalisme contemporain. Celui-ci se moralise d'une part. Il se verdit d'autre part. Ce sont deux n&#233;cessit&#233;s pour masquer la violence de l'exploitation et la toxicit&#233; environnementale de l'&#233;conomie de march&#233; capitaliste d&#233;r&#233;gul&#233;e. D&#232;s lors que le march&#233; se pr&#233;sente comme un &#233;cosyst&#232;me il se l&#233;gitime comme naturel suivant un processus de naturalisation qui montre l'&#233;mergence d'un sujet du march&#233; simple partie prenante, favoris&#233; par le d&#233;veloppement d'une citoyennet&#233; num&#233;rique &#224; base d'indignations morales, de violences verbales, de cancel culture. 

Bernard Hours

Papers

Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991

La naturalisation morale du capitalisme

Albrecht Burkardt et Alexandra Roger (dir.), L’exception et la règle. Les pratiques d’entrée et de sortie des couvents de la fin du Moyen Âge au

Rose-Marie LAGRAVE, Se ressaisir. Enquête anthropologique d’une transfuge de classe féministe, Paris, La Découverte, 2021, 438 p.

Gilles Montègre (dir.), Le cardinal de Bernis. Le pouvoir de l’amitié