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Figure de proue de l'anthropologie britannique de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, Edward BurnettTylor (1832-1917) renvoie, par la notion de couvade, à un ensemble de représentations, interdits et pratiques liés à la naissance, lesquels imposent au père de renoncer à ses activités et nourritures habituelles et, éventuellement, de s'aliter. Mobilisant une vaste littérature, allant des Argonautiques d'Apollonios de Rhodes à l'ethnographie exotique et européenne du XIXe siècle, Tylor repère ces usages en Amérique, Asie, Europe et Afrique. Il propose de les désigner par le mot français couvade dans la première édition de ses Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865), ouvrage qui s'inscrit dans le vaste renouveau des sciences de l'homme promu par la reconnaissance, en 1859, de la haute antiquité du genre homo et de la préhistoire.

Scorned since antiquity as low and animal, the sense of taste is celebrated today as an ally of joy, a source of adventure, and an arena for pursuing sophistication. The French exalted taste as an entrée to ecstasy, and revolutionized their cuisine and language to express this new way of engaging with the world. Viktoria von Hoffmann explores four kinds of early modern texts--culinary, medical, religious, and philosophical--to follow taste's ascent from the sinful to the beautiful. Combining food studies and sensory history, she takes readers on an odyssey that redefined a fundamental human experience. Scholars and cooks rediscovered a vast array of ways to prepare and present foods. Far-sailing fleets returned to Europe bursting with new vegetables, exotic fruits, and pungent spices. Hosts refined notions of hospitality in the home while philosophers pondered the body and its perceptions. As von Hoffmann shows, these labors produced a sea change in perception and thought, one that moved taste from the base realm of the tongue to the ethereal heights of aesthetics.

Plantation sites, especially those in the southeastern United States, have long dominated the archaeological study of slavery. These antebellum estates, however, are not representative of the range of geographic locations and time periods in which slavery has occurred. As archaeologists have begun to investigate slavery in more diverse settings, the need for a broader interpretive framework is now clear. The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia Wilson Marshall, develops an interregional and cross-temporal framework for the interpretation of slavery. Contributors consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study it as a diachronic process from enslavement to emancipation and beyond. Essays cover the potential material representations of slavery, slave owners'strategies of coercion and enslaved people's methods of resisting this coercion, and the legacies of slavery as confronted by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Among the peoples, sites, and periods examined are a late nineteenth-century Chinese laborer population in Carlin, Nevada; a castle slave habitation at San Domingo and a more elite trading center at nearby Juffure in the Gambia; two eighteenth-century plantations in Dominica; Benin's Hueda Kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; plantations in Zanzibar; and three fugitive slave sites on Mauritius—an underground lava tunnel, a mountain, and a karst cave. This essay collection seeks to analyze slavery as a process organized by larger economic and social forces with effects that can be both durable and wide-ranging. It presents a comparative approach that significantly enriches our understanding of slavery.

Entre Extrême-Orient et Extrême-Occident, des transmissions croisées s'intensifient à partir du 16e siècle dans tous les domaines, scientifiques, philosophiques et autres. Ils concernent des savoir-faire, des sagesses, des savoir-être. De nombreuses facettes du phénomène demandent à être clarifiées. L'ouvrage examine quelques aspects de ces transferts : les canaux utilisés, les acteurs, les motivations de ces migrations ou encore leurs modalités et leurs effets.

Comment se manifeste le questionnement matérialiste? Quels peuvent être les limites et le sens de cet enjeu? De l'héritage grec et chinois aux postures de l'épistémologie contemporaine, cette rencontre interdisciplinaire a croisé traditions clandestines, écritures philosophiques et regards anthropologiques : Lucrèce, Sade et Bataille, mais aussi pensée médiévale, esthétique des Lumières, figures du marxisme, projet de la philosophie réflexive, trajectoire d'un luxum, critique derridienne