Québec et la géographie sociale en questions

Questioning Québec through social geography In the early 1960s, two revolutions were underway: the quiet revolution in Québec and the quantitative revolution in geography. Apparently unrelated, these episodes of change probably shared common underlying values associated with modernity. Since then, the transformations experienced in Québec have been interpreted in a multitude of ways, including geographical considerations. Research careers, mine included, have been shaped by this undertaking. All along, I have found that social geography, with the capacity it has to reinvent itself, has helped making sense of this turbulent environment. In the 1970s, exploring the structural dynamics of Canada's social space helped in figuring out the place occupied by Québec in this ensemble. Then, analyzing the historical relationships between cosmopolitan Montréal and provincial Québec City suggested that the oxymoron ‘quiet revolution’ stood for a central process in the cultural dynamics of Québec's social space, where new ideas arriving through Montréal are sifted and institutionalized by the state in Québec City. Nevertheless, Québec City is also capable of initiating progressive urban movements, as illustrated by the odyssey of the Rassemblement populaire de Québec, documented through participant observation. Such urban movements may affect the urban fabric but, as intense and creative social networks, they may affect even more their interacting members, as it seems to have been the case with regard to rapidly evolving gender relations during the last decades. All in all, after more than four decades, I keep the conviction that a practice of social geography that is open to various theories and methods is capable of producing liberating knowledge.     

Entre souveraineté indigène et sécurité nationale : Négocier la sécurité frontalière et la culture Mohawk à Akwesasne

Based on the case of the Mohawk territory of Akwesasne, wedged between Ontario, Quebec, and New York state, this paper provides an analysis of the links between the affirmation of indigenous culture and the implementation of security policies on borderlands. The focus extends beyond political conflicts over border issues to encompass the ways in which Aboriginal sovereignty is affirmed within processes of negotiation and cooperation in the matters of identification requirements, border agents’ cultural sensitivity, and law enforcement. We find that the enhancement of border security can paradoxically be a political opportunity for local leaders to reaffirm indigenous sovereignty, and that this reaffirmation through cooperation is, at the same time, emerging as a key factor in the implementation of border security policies.     

La théorie des éléments de Christophorus Clavius et l'idée du globe terraqué

Christophorus Clavius' Theory of the Elements and the Idea of the Terraqueous Globe. The need to reconcile Aristotle's theory of elementary spheres with the evidence of earth above sea level – the so‐called ‘terra firma’ – induced an important conceptual shift. As a consequence anti‐Aristotelian arguments were brought to the fore in order to be incorporated into the very same Aristotelian tradition. The German Jesuit Christophorus Clavius played a momentous role in this process. He introduced the idea of the terraqueous globe into the Scholastic cosmology, modifying the logical frame of Aristotelian physics. The present work analyses Clavius' theory as well as the procedures he considers to reach his purpose. He used a combinatorial approach to study the relations occurring between the four elements – earth, water, air and fire – and analysed their relations from a physical perspective, proposing a possible structure of the sublunary world.     

Dieu et les dieux chez F. Creuzer et F.G. Welcker

In the first half of the 19th century some German classical scholars tried to understand the pagan religions of antiquity as genuine religions, containing an intuition of the truth. F. Creuzer regarded popular beliefs and cults of all ancient peoples as a “religion of the imagination”;, a “pantheism of the imagination”;, but thought that, besides that popular religion, there existed a much deeper, esoteric pantheism, which was passed on from one generation to another and from one country to another by priests‐sages. In Greece, according to him, popular religion became more superficial than anywhere else; its religious content was to a large extent substituted by poetic and artistic beauty.     

Essai de typologie des centres de santé et de services sociaux au Québec

Given the importance of contextual factors—physical, social and institutional environments—for understanding health landscapes, this article examines the situation in the province of Québec and suggests a spatial typology at the scale of the health and social services centres (CSSS). These CSSS provide services for 95 areas which are the finest territorial delineation in terms of health policies since a reform instituted in 2003. While delivery of primary health and social services is defined at this local scale, overall health policy is decided at the provincial scale. The challenge for stakeholders is to supplement their local knowledge with that of the broader context. In this article, we use principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis to identify eight profiles of CSSS. The final results of the cluster analysis demonstrate that two‐thirds of the health and social services centres correspond with two marginally differentiated profiles and the remaining third shows specificities that are highly spatially anchored.     

Les horizons géographiques,entre continu et discontinu1

This article analyses the metaphor of education and politics, commonly referred to as the allegory of Plato's cave. It develops the geographic concept of the horizon of novelty and otherness as a ‘dialectic’ of continuity and discontinuity, as well as an articulation between human mobility and immobility. In return, it poses the question of horizontality, always shown but never stated, as a critique of a metaphor crushed by the verticality that institutes the political connection, not in relation to the other but as a transcendence, and bases human education on the crushing of emotion. Beyond these readings, Plato's text allows the articulation of philosophy and geography in a common ‘logos’ and thus constitutes not only one of the foundations of an anthropological approach to geography but also one of the bases of the Western world and Western thought.     

L'identification des zones calmes et un diagnostic d’équité environnementale à Montréal

Quiet urban areas are places with low noise levels that can help people to support physical and mental wellness. This paper has two objectives: to identify quiet urban areas in Montreal and to check for the presence of environmental inequities in access to such areas for vulnerable groups (children, older people, low‐income individuals, and visible minorities). Using a GIS‐based methodology, 2,282 quiet urban areas were identified in Montreal. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model analysis showed that there are no major inequities in access to quiet urban areas for the population groups studied. The analysis did, however, revealed substantial spatial disparities in terms of the distribution of quiet urban areas across the boroughs and municipalities examined.     

Occupation humaine et environnement au 5e et au 4e millénaire sur la côte Sharjah-Umm al-Qaiwain (U.A.E.)

Three contributions in this issue are concerned with sites along the west coast of the United Arab Emirates which pre-date the Bronze Age. In this paper we shall attempt to view these sites in the broader geographical context of the southern Gulf coast; and thereafter to consider (1) the lithic material attested in the Arabian peninsula and dated to between the late 6th and early 4th millennium B.C.; (2) the painted pottery comparable to Mesopotamian Ubaid wares; and (3) a dozen CI4 dates (1) run on shell which all range around 6000-4500 BR The material utilized here comes from a series of expeditions conducted by the French Missions to Sharjah and Umm al-Qaiwain between 1985 and 1990 (2). The objectives of our geomorphological and archaeological inquiries were to observe, within a restricted area, the remains and evolution of human occupation in a changing environment.