School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

¿Con o sin ancestros? Vigencia de lo ancestral en la Amazonía peruana

Abstract: The existence —or not— of the concept of ancestors in the indigenous Amazon has been the subject of much debate However, regional leaders do not hesitate to call upon ‘ancestral’ knowledge, customs, or territories in the sense that, from an academic point of view, could appear enigmatic «Ancestral, but… with or without ancestors?» is the question a confused anthropologist might ask In this article, I propose to offer elements of a response to this question,based on a case study in Peru First I analyze how Amazonian indigenous leaders, following international law, have adopted the legal notion of ‘ancestral possession’ of their territory to adapt it to the political sphere This approach accounts for the recent generalization and uniformization of the term ‘ancestral’, but poses the problem of how it articulates with the indigenous cosmologies that it supposes to reflect For this reason, I explore in the second section the pertinence of the category of ‘ancestor’ in the indigenous Amazon, briefly drawing upon the academic debate in order to define inwhat way this category takes on meaning Based on testimony from an experienced Awajun leader, we thus return in the third section more explicitly to the different meanings and planes of reference that unfold when one uses the term ‘ancestral’, showing how Amazonian indigenous people not only adopt external conceptual elements and arguments, but also transform them based on their own cosmological singularities and political perspectives

En nombre de los pueblos: primitivismos y poscolonialismos

Abstract: This essay analyzes a certain populist inclination which can be observed in anthropology and post-colonial studies, an inclination which consists in the appropriation of a people's image (the ethnic or the subaltern), idealizing it, portraying it as a pure and separated entity, abstracted from the flows that have influenced it throughout history, including those coming from the hegemonic classes. The spokespersons who speak in the name of these subjects (often anthropologists) intend to protect them and claim to reproduce the truth supposedly emanating from the people, constructing for instance indigenous discourses usually disconnected from the social realities of today's communities. Here we are invited to reflect on those spokespersons, their discourses, and the way they benefit from their use of a people's name.

The “Vertical of Shamanic Power”: The Use of Political Discourse in Post-Soviet Tuvan Shamanism

Abstract: This article addresses the use of political discourse and the shaping of institutionalized organizations in post-Soviet shamanism in the south Siberian Republic of Tuva. It argues that many organizational features of today’s shamanism result from the creative integration of legal, academic, and political concepts that have been mostly elaborated under the Soviet/Russian centralized state governance and were thus historically alien to shamanic practice and discourse. Starting from the early 1990s, the leaders of the Tuvan shamanic revival used these concepts (such as “religious organization of shamans” or “traditional confession”) pragmatically in order to take advantage of their favorable relationship with authorities, to assure a better public place for their religious organizations, and to establish their authority over the shamanic network. Nevertheless, this use of political discourse was not without consequences for the development of Tuvan shamanism. The organizational aspects of post-Soviet Tuvan shamanism in particular have been profoundly shaped by Russian political idioms of hierarchy and centralized power. In English, extended summary in Russian .

On Thick Records and Complex Artworks: A Study of Record-Keeping Practices at the Museum

Abstract: In 1967 Garfinkel and Bittner were investigating good organizational reasons for bad clinic records, demonstrating how the reading of such records as sociological data should be reported to the understanding of their production’s practical contingencies and to the situated circumstances of their use. This seminal paper opened new avenues of research related to the study of records in various professional contexts and of their transformation, to the development of praxiological approaches to practical and professional texts, or to the study of historical documents and archives. To contribute to this ethnomethodological strand of research, I propose a case-study of artworks’ records management at the museum, investigated as a perspicuous site to reflect upon how artworks are experienced, apprehended and defined in the institutional ordinary business. Drawing on observations and materials collected at the French National Museum of Modern Art, I study records’ careers (how they are produced, used and transformed by museum’s members) and describe their material and organizational properties, by giving a close look at some elements (initial artworks’ descriptions, installation instructions and confidential correspondence). More particularly, I focus on one distinctive property of some records: their thickness, investigated as a scheme of interpretation of the situated features of documentation work. By reading artworks’ records as local collective practices of assemblage, disruption and reconfiguration of pieces of documentation, I demonstrate that what is documented in this process is not only the artwork: it is also the collective work of working with artworks, dealt with as ongoing achievements of institutional practices.

How the demographic makeup of our community influences speech perception

Abstract: Speech perception is known to be influenced by listeners' expectations of the speaker. This paper tests whether the demographic makeup of individuals' communities can influence their perception of foreign sounds by influencing their expectations of the language. Using online experiments with participants from all across the U.S. and matched census data on the proportion of Spanish and other foreign language speakers in participants' communities, this paper shows that the demographic makeup of individuals' communities influences their expectations of foreign languages to have an alveolar trill versus a tap (Experiment 1), as well as their consequent perception of these sounds (Experiment 2). Thus, the paper shows that while individuals' expectations of foreign language to have a trill occasionally lead them to misperceive a tap in a foreign language as a trill, a higher proportion of non-trill language speakers in one's community decreases this likelihood. These results show that individuals' environment can influence their perception by shaping their linguistic expectations.