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This paper seeks to widen the understanding of Cold War anthropology by considering the history of contacts and dialogue between Soviet and American anthropologists from 1945 to 1964. Focusing mainly on the Soviet side, it argues that the isolation of Soviet ethnography was never complete, although it reached a highpoint during late Stalinism. The paper considers the resuming of contacts between US and USSR scholars in the second half of the 1950s; Soviet participation in international anthropological congresses and its effects on theoretical developments in Soviet anthropology; and the preparation, proceedings and consequences of the 7th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES) and the Expert Meeting on the Biological Aspects of Race, held in Moscow in 1964. The paper argues that these events were instrumental in widening the confines of Soviet Marxism and introducing new research areas (such as psychological anthropology) into Soviet academia. This enabled ethnography in the USSR to present itself as an alternative centre of consolidation for both Western left-leaning anthropologists and scholars from postcolonial countries.

Despite their relatively similar national contexts, geographical proximity, and comparable historical and cultural experiences, Brazil and Argentina show relevant differences in terms of R&D systems, research assessment procedures and the morphology of their academic elites. However, they share similar paths of integration to the international academic arena, along with the prevalence of nationally oriented groups under a primarily public funding system. Diverse combinations of intersectional inequalities can be found when analyzing two concrete populations of researchers from the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), given that we are dealing with highly internationalized academic elites. In this paper, we describe the two national fields and the target populations in terms of age, position, and institutional affiliation. Considering the different composition by sex of these two populations we observe meaningful analogies regarding publication and, especially, publication in English. Finally, we discuss author positions, showing how intersectional inequalities affect women, relating this general picture to citation impact in Google Scholar and describing how gender territories are built among the top cited researchers.

Modern knowledge advances by subdividing specialized knowledge. But the boundaries between disciplines and professions are not inscribed in nature. The relations between economics and sociology are interesting because they have been marked by cycles of proximity and distancing. In Argentina, the enthronement of « development » in the 1950s as a public policy objective and the focus of academic agendas facilitated convergence. Both state and international institutions took Latin America as a singular object that demanded the assistance of both specialists. In contrast, the dictatorial government of 1976 intervened in the university and public administration, forced many researchers into exile, and encouraged antagonism between economists and sociologists. Based on a large corpus, this paper reconstructs the history of this link and shows how local crises and external influences encouraged cooperation, opposition, and indifference between these specialists.

In 1965, a scandal shook the Latin American social sciences and affected for years the positions of academics and intellectuals before offers of foreign funds to carry out their activities. Indeed, the complaints that emerged in Chile about the goals of the so-called Camelot Project, together with the tracking of its financiers to the military apparatus of the US government, alarmed those who, amidst budgetary restrictions at the national level, were looking for money for their research projects. In Uruguay, these deliberations coincided with the debates surrounding the recent Seminar of Latin American Elites, held that same year at the Universidad de la República without too much fuss, but with some alerts about the promoting body, the suspected Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was increasingly evident that these issues were imbricated in public discussions on science and politics, especially those that aimed, in line with similar global debates, to redefine the role of knowledge institutions in the promotion of social development and change. This paper analyzes all these events to understand how and why foundered the first more or less systematic attempt to consolidate sociology as a separate and legitimate academic discipline in the Uruguayan university.

This paper describes the development of political science as an academic discipline in post-war France. In just a few years, Sciences Po, a professional school rather than a research institution, established by Executive Order in 1945 in order to “promote research”, has offered academic programmes and degrees, founded an academic journal, several editorial collections, a professional association, and created several research centres in political science. The post-war French academic context accounts for Sciences Po’s disciplinary investment, backed by the US philanthropic foundations which provided money, scientific recognition, and epistemic models.

The paper questions how theoretical production has been conceived as a way to scientize French literary studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of structural methods engaged reflections on scientificity in the Humanities, which were extended in the semiology developed around Roland Barthes. The question of science then appeared through the debates on the role of literary criticism. The end of the 1960s is marked by an evolution towards an aesthetic and theoretical radicalness which identified theory and science. Eventually, the collective construction of poetics around Genette and Todorov shows at the same time how theory is prioritized over the question of science, and the complex relationship with literature in the definition of a science of literature. The paper relies on a study of some theoretical texts and of several theorists’ trajectories, in a perspective of historical sociology of Social Sciences and Humanities.

This paper proposes to explore the formation of a discipline named Chinese medical history in the early half of 20th century through a case study of a medical historian, Chen Bangxian, and his writings. Chen gained knowledge about recent trends in world medical history in his local world indirectly, when the thinking of historians in the German-speaking countries spread to other Western countries, to Japan, and finally to China. The article explores ways to understand the interaction between knowledge and historiography in the early half of 20th century in a global context, and reveals how a historiography which both embraced world trends and historians with limited transnational background at the same time created a new “modern” way to write medical history in Republican China.

In the course of recent debates, Ibn Khaldun has been (re-)claimed not as a precursor, but as one of the “founding fathers” of sociology. This entails the suspicion that Ibn Khaldun’s legacy, especially his Muqaddima as an important reference in the foundational phase of modern European sociology, has been sidelined in the construction of the sociological canon and thus remains an unacknowledged source today. This paper presents a historical case of South-North reception of sociological theory. A systematic assessment of the reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology reveals that while his acknowledgment was quantitatively rather low, it was indeed qualitatively interesting. In particular, two important early sociologists, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer, mobilized references to his Muqadimma in the context of their “sociological theory of the state.” They discovered the fundamental theoretical convergence between their approach and the early Arab scholar. Against the ahistorical philosophical idea of the state and the non-historical juridical idea of the state, both authors defended the sociological idea of the state. It is the conquest of one tribe over another with the aim of economic exploitation through political subjugation that gives rise to the state. Here, Ibn Khaldun appeared as a particularly reliable reference. His reception in the works of Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer also sheds a different light on the much-voiced refusal of imported social theory as being irrelevant.

The key object of our critical analyses is the Italian higher education system, a set of 97 universities (69% state and 31% accredited non-state universities) and a few post-secondary vocational programmes. This system has historically been considered centralised and corporative. In this paper, we aim to both outline the main components of the system and critically debate major transformations that have led to a mix of autonomy and internal competition in the last thirty years. Given the elitist nature of its organisation in the past, Italian higher education is still based on a rigid separation between fields of study, making it less effective at promoting educational success (a shortcoming evidenced by high rates of university dropout) and deeply embedded corporative characteristics that are unable offset its structural underfunding. Recent reforms have profoundly redesigned the landscape according to New Public Management principles, promoted greater university autonomy, and fostered a quasi-market regulation approach based on quality assessment, performance-driven careers, and the quantitative evaluation of research. We present and discuss these topics, considering their impact on governance and management as well as on students, research activities, and the academic profession.

This paper explores the contributions of authors who worked in the first Brazilian universities—the Universidade de São Paulo, founded in 1934, and the Universidade do Distrito Federal, founded in 1935—and became internationally influential, by focusing on their acquaintance with European (and especially French) colleagues who contributed to the “University Missions” in Brazil. These scholars built anti-racist approaches to understanding Brazilian racialised and marginalised communities and developed ideas on tropicality that challenged classical European views of an alleged “inferiority” of tropical people and their lands, based on environmental determinism or scientific racism. These anti-racist views of the tropics, which I call “social tropicalism”, acquired international renown thanks to the publications of Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro (1908-1973). Based on new archives and drawing upon recent literature on tropicality and post/decoloniality, I analyse Castro’s early networking with other transnational scholars such as French sociologist Roger Bastide (1898-1974) and Brazilian anthropologist Artur Ramos (1903-1949). Discussing these intellectual exchanges allows for an appreciation of the Brazilian social science “hub” organized around these early universities, and the way they contributed to shape critical scholarly thinking and challenged traditional views on the South as a “tributary” of Northern theories.

Building on a creative synthesis of sociology and anthropology, community studies represented an early attempt in the indigenization of social science under non-Western settings. In this paper, I review the historical development of community studies in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Yenching School of Sociology had actively promoted the field study of local communities as a viable way of understanding Chinese society and culture. With the suspension of sociology in mainland China, the tradition of community studies was kept alive but significantly transformed in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Local, expatriate and émigré sociologists and anthropologists utilized the two cities as substitutes for traditional Chinese society and as social laboratories for charting modernization and social change. While community studies in Chinese contexts were devoted to the broader aim of indigenization or sinicization, institutional building and theoretical breakthroughs were often dependent on Western connections rather than the anti-hegemonic initiatives of non-Western sociologists.

This paper analyses the scientific knowledge production of Indian anthropologist/sociologist Irawati Karve (1905-1970) against the backdrop of India’s decolonisation. I shed light on her efforts to engage with internationally validated social scientific knowledge and to adapt it to local and national questions and traditions of inquiry. Through an analysis of her work’s reception, which includes sharp criticism by Louis Dumont, I discuss how Karve’s efforts were restricted not only by an international system of validation majorly influenced by scholars in centres in the global North, but also by the pervading colonial legacy of anthropology. Thinking with Karve’s case as an example of a double bind between nationalising/indigenising impulses in the creation of scientific knowledge and global inequalities in the geopolitics of international science, I reflect on the difficult position occupied by sociologists and anthropologists in the global South in response to the quest of decolonising knowledge.

This paper analyses the role of plaster casts in the discipline of physical anthropology. It traces the trajectories of a collection of casts made in the early twentieth century by Dutch physical anthropologist J. P. Kleiweg de Zwaan in present day Indonesia. The central question is how this collection of plaster casts was used to convey knowledge about race. The paper uses the work of historians of science L. Daston and P. Galison to distinguish three different ways in which plaster casts could be used to communicate race, each associated with their own claim to truth. It sets out to explain how this collection was intended to show the features of races that were impossible to communicate in text and numbers and to train the observers to recognise these, thus creating a surrogate for the anthropologists’ fieldwork experience. Secondly, as this paper follows the biographies of the casts, it also points to the unequal colonial encounter at the moment the moulds were made.

In the course of recent debates, Ibn Khaldun has been (re-)claimed not as a precursor, but as one of the “founding fathers” of sociology. This entails the suspicion that Ibn Khaldun’s legacy, especially his Muqaddima as an important reference in the foundational phase of modern European sociology, has been sidelined in the construction of the sociological canon and thus remains an unacknowledged source today. This paper presents a historical case of South-North reception of sociological theory. A systematic assessment of the reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology reveals that while his acknowledgment was quantitatively rather low, it was indeed qualitatively interesting. In particular, two important early sociologists, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer, mobilized references to his Muqadimma in the context of their “sociological theory of the state.” They discovered the fundamental theoretical convergence between their approach and the early Arab scholar. Against the ahistorical philosophical idea of the state and the non-historical juridical idea of the state, both authors defended the sociological idea of the state. It is the conquest of one tribe over another with the aim of economic exploitation through political subjugation that gives rise to the state. Here, Ibn Khaldun appeared as a particularly reliable reference. His reception in the works of Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer also sheds a different light on the much-voiced refusal of imported social theory as being irrelevant.

This paper explores the contributions of authors who worked in the first Brazilian universities—the Universidade de São Paulo, founded in 1934, and the Universidade do Distrito Federal, founded in 1935—and became internationally influential, by focusing on their acquaintance with European (and especially French) colleagues who contributed to the “University Missions” in Brazil. These scholars built anti-racist approaches to understanding Brazilian racialised and marginalised communities and developed ideas on tropicality that challenged classical European views of an alleged “inferiority” of tropical people and their lands, based on environmental determinism or scientific racism. These anti-racist views of the tropics, which I call “social tropicalism”, acquired international renown thanks to the publications of Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro (1908-1973). Based on new archives and drawing upon recent literature on tropicality and post/decoloniality, I analyse Castro’s early networking with other transnational scholars such as French sociologist Roger Bastide (1898-1974) and Brazilian anthropologist Artur Ramos (1903-1949). Discussing these intellectual exchanges allows for an appreciation of the Brazilian social science “hub” organized around these early universities, and the way they contributed to shape critical scholarly thinking and challenged traditional views on the South as a “tributary” of Northern theories.

Building on a creative synthesis of sociology and anthropology, community studies represented an early attempt in the indigenization of social science under non-Western settings. In this paper, I review the historical development of community studies in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Yenching School of Sociology had actively promoted the field study of local communities as a viable way of understanding Chinese society and culture. With the suspension of sociology in mainland China, the tradition of community studies was kept alive but significantly transformed in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Local, expatriate and émigré sociologists and anthropologists utilized the two cities as substitutes for traditional Chinese society and as social laboratories for charting modernization and social change. With the expansion of higher education, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a proliferation of field research on rural and urban communities in Taiwan and Hong Kong. While community studies in Chinese contexts were devoted to the broader aim of indigenization or sinicization, institutional building and theoretical breakthroughs were often dependent on Western connections rather than the anti-hegemonic initiatives of non-Western sociologists.

The article presents a paper that discusses the generational difference in terms of scholars' relationship towards folklore studies. Various activities on folklore were traced from late nineteenth century to Second World War in Burgundy, France. It cites that Dijon Academy has little participation in folklore activities while Mâcon Academy has developed folklore specialists. It also notes that it was in the late 1930s that new generation of social sciences scholars have studied folklore.

This article aims at explaining the way economists identified as industrial economists tried to build an intellectual collective in order to impose their own definition of industrial organization in the field of economics. The paper deals with the history of this group, which as also been called “French industrial organization school”, from its frist years (at the middle of the 70’) until the beginning of the 90’. At this time, this group appeared as unable to reproduce and imposing its own jurisdiction of industrial organization. This work aims at describing social mechanisms which produced this impossible reproduction, exploring the way French economists tried to build a community but also the way social positions of its actors in the field of economics have been a drag for its success and expansion.

What are the reasons leading some researchers to advocate the application of certain methods on the ground that they are more precise and more systematic, even though they are also more abstract and more constraining than those currently in use? This question is examined here through a review of the evolution of the academic career of two French archaeologists, Georges Laplace and Jean-Claude Gardin. Their earliest works, dating from the 1950s, were characterized by the application of more abstract methodologies, based on formalization or on the use of computation. In the following decades, Laplace and Gardin’s approach remained marginal in France, even though at the same time, similar perspectives were becoming popular not only among English-speaking archaeologists but also in other academic fields in France. The biographical perspective adopted in this paper allows us to highlight the parallel trajectories and the tensions existing between the epistemical, ethical, biographical, and political dimensions that shaped the careers of Laplace and Gardin. As such, their academic experiences appear as the most radical forms of the contemporary aspiration to modernize and professionalize archaeology.

Political economy, social economy, economical science: during the Interwar, these different names reveal a boundary-process, which aims at defining the best way of “doing science”. This best way of doing science is characterized by Edgard Milhaud in its Enquiry on Production, which he realized at the International Labour Organisation between 1920 and 1925. This paper intends to determine the place of this enquiry within the field of political economy, and thus examine the conditions of possibility of a scientific practice within an administrative and political setting.

This paper questions the historiography of ethnomathematics as it is generally practiced in this field of research, which currently refers to the study of cultural variations in the uses of mathematical ideas and knowledge, especially those elaborated outside the scope of scholarly and academic activities. If what are generally considered as the founding texts of ethnomathematics were published in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of an anthropology of mathematics can be traced back to ethnological, mathematical, and philosophical studies written since the 19th century. However, the prevalence of the evolutionist and “prelogical thought” theories appears to have durably impeded the recognition of a mathematical rationality expressed through various activities in non-Western societies (and particularly in those with an oral tradition). At the turn of the second half of the 20th century, a significant epistemological change occurred on this issue, which prompted the development of studies that are now generally considered to be seminal works in the establishment of ethnomathematics.

Through the constitution of membership criteria to the discipline, this article studies the question of “making science” in economics. The article reconstructs a sequence during which the constitution of membership criteria and homogenization of the disciplinary corpus were crystallized: the standardization of PhD program. Based on an analysis of the Bowen Report, the paper focuses on the role of the American Economic Association in this process and analyzes the challenges associated with heterogeneity and lack of certification for a discipline going through a professionalization process and claiming the authority of science. Contemporary economists often claim the exceptionality of their discipline within the human and social sciences by highlighting its consensual character. The article shows that constitution of membership criteria and the homogenization of the disciplinary corpus are essential to create the conditions for a consensus to settle.

Max Derruau Geography Precis was considered as one of the main popular university Geography textbooks during 50 years. The paper analyses its main characteristics and questions its exceptional longevity within academic publishing, which changing context reveals the quantitative and qualitative evolutions of higher education. Through its different republications, this textbook takes into account new questions, debates and scientific orientations of the discipline. In spite of the nowadays obsolescence of this presentation of positive knowledge in human geography, tempered by unequally achieved attempts to update the text, Derruau’s book is considered to be a classic textbook in academic human Geography.

Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers was first published in 1953. The book is considered a classic in history of economic thought. Significant of an heterodox vision in economics and cautious toward the growing mathematisation of economics and the present rise of positivism, The Worldly Philosophers praised as crucial the moral, political and social dimensions of great economic reasonning. It is the purpose of this paper to introduce Heilbroner’s work to a french audience. We will do so in analysing the very first edition of the book, that is, the sources, the main developments and the intellectual reception of the 1953 edition.

This paper takes as its point of departure the opposition between psychoanalysis and historiography that has modelled and in large part divided the history of psychoanalysis. Many authors argue that the historical contextualisation of psychoanalysis deploys a critical force by relating its theories and techniques to other (social, economic and cultural) realities. However, such approches risk to reduce or to miss the specificity of their object. As potential alternatives, we discuss the work of C. Ginzburg, J. Forrester and A. Davidson, who have suggested situating Freudian psychoanalysis in an epistemology of the human sciences. We take up some of their interrogations so as to put forward a vision of contextualisation combining a sociology of the psychoanalytical movement and an anthropology of epistemic and therapeutic approaches and practices. In other words, the article aims to articulate what we term a “collective history” and a “concrete history” of psychoanalysis.

This paper addresses the epistemic status of the history of philosophy through case studies of a few works produced in the field of ancient and medieval philosophy. The discipline embodies the tension between, on the one hand, philosophy, a science that seeks a high level of generalization and avoids social contextualization, and, on the other hand, history, whose epistemology is contextualist by definition. History of philosophy is thus an area particularly conducive for investigating the conditions and issues of contextualization in the social sciences and humanities, which, from the 19th century onward, have been defined as historical disciplines to distinguish them from the natural sciences.

Since the 1960s, a still increasing number of publications have reported the psychic and\or physiological health benefits of the contact with certain animals (mostly dogs, cats, horses and dolphins). Carried mainly by the disciplines of the psyche (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy), these practices and\or experiments of care using interactions with animals are even today the object of numerous internal controversies. Are the effects real? By what means are they produced? Are they generalizable? On what conditions? The purpose of this paper is to go back to the origin of research regarding Interactions with Animals with Therapeutic purpose (I.A.T.), in order to understand what is at stakes with these controversies. Thus, we will present literature published between 1960 and 1985 in the United States. We will then connect the analysis of its contents to the constitution of a network of heterogeneous actors, all interested in the production of "strong" knowledges about the positive effects of interactions with animals on human health.

This paper seeks to examine the history of the social sciences, and especially of anthropology, in the city of Toulouse during the period of the Vichy government. Indeed, this case study is interesting analyzing the complexity of scientific and political commitments during this time. By drawing attention to the notion of ambivalence, the analysis suggests more than a simplistic antagonistic dichotomy between résistants and pétainistes, and allows to posit a more nuanced approach of the ‘reconstruction’ of social sciences and anthropology in post-war France.

This paper analyses publications by the German traveller-naturalist Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911) on his collection of 135 skulls from north-west New Guinea. I interrogate the processes by which Meyer endeavoured to produce racial knowledge from what he called ‘raw material’, the significance of field experience for his scientific truth claims, the impacts of differences in methodology, research priorities, instrumentation, and national paradigms of knowledge on the interpretation of craniometrical data, and the extent to which culturally-bound constructions of normality, pathology, gender, class and criminality became enmeshed in studies of race. I also track changes in Meyer’s attitudes towards craniology, and the ways in which skulls were valued during his term as Director of Dresden’s Royal Zoological and Anthropological-Ethnographic Museum.

Fierce debates about racial crossing recurred in mid-19th-century French anthropology. This paper addresses the nexus of theory, field experience, and human materialities in scientific disputes about “hybrids”. Diverse global theoretical positions on interracial unions are calibrated with two empirical/material registers: the reports, anatomical collections and anthropological syntheses made by French naval naturalists following encounters with Indigenous people during scientific voyages in Oceania to 1840; and the more focussed ethnographies, collections and anthropological comparisons made by naval medical officers after tours of duty in new French colonies in eastern Polynesia and New Caledonia from 1842. I assess the relative significance attributed to two different orders of materiality—the subjective materiality of field encounters with Indigenous people; and the seemingly objective materiality of objects—human skulls, other bodily remains, and moulages (plaster busts).

In this paper I examine the significance of histories and documentation in association with collections as technologies of credibility in nineteenth century racial anthropology. Drawing on the analysis of catalogues and archives of anthropological collections, I argue that connecting histories and documentation was important to perform the authenticity of skulls as scientific objects and thereby guarantee the credibility of material testimony in racial anthropology. This economy of authenticity of biological materials implied an economy of credibility of the testimony of documents. The reliability of skulls as racial evidence had to be attested by trustworthy histories. The credibility of the latter also had to be guaranteed by three main forms of authentication: anatomical certification; sociological assurance; and rhetorical authentication.

This article, based upon discourse analysis, shows how May 68 translated in the field of science and technology studies. The study of journals dedicated to science/society relationship in the 1970s and in the early 1980s sheds light upon two discursive poles: the radical science movement and the emerging sociology of science. There is an institutional and individual continuum between these two poles. But the paper pays more attention to the discursive continuum between them. It analyzes the political issues raised by this continuum and the tensions it provoked. A special attention is given to the articulation between political radicalism during the 1968s and the epistemological radicalism promoted by the “new” sociology of science.

This paper aims at examining the impact of war sciences on language sciences during the World War II. I will assume that the interaction between war sciences (engineering and sciences) and language sciences should be distinguished from the war effort undertook by linguists to teach foreign languages. Two cases will be analyzed. Roman Jakobson’s distinctive features theory, associating acoustical physics and information theory to linguistics, led to a new phonology in continuity with phonetics. Machine translation, as a cold war technology conceived outside of linguistics, initiated the second mathematics turn of language, that is the mathematics and computer turn of language sciences. In both cases, one will examine which type of connection between war sciences and linguistics is concerned : transfer, convergence or integration.