Anarchism,utopianism and hospitality: the work of René Schérer

Abstract

René Schérer (born 1922) is lamentably almost unknown to the Anglo-American world as his work has, as yet, not been translated. He is one of the main specialists of the French ‘utopian socialist’, Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and a major thinker in his own right. He is the author of more than twenty books and co-editor of the journal Chimères. Colleague and friend at Vincennes University (Paris 8) of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châletet, Alain Brossat, Georges Navet, Miguel Abensour, Pierre Macherey..., he continues to host seminars at Paris 8 (now located at Saint-Denis). He is a living testimony to a radical past, and a continuing inspiration to a new generation of young thinkers. This article aims to convey the original specificity of his understanding of anarchism. By so doing, it will stress the importance of his work for any thinking concerned with a politicised resistance to social conformity and the supposed ‘state of things’ today.     

Le plan de sauvetage des scientifiques français

From 1940 to 1942, a number of French scientists take refuge in America with their families. They are part — often not being aware of it — of a rescue program organized from New York by two of their colleagues. Henri Laugier and Louis Rapkine, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation (financial and logistic). Reconstitution of the different stages that paved way to an applicant for exile proves that the Vichy government did not prevent, as a rule, the temporary departure of French intellectuals, even if Jews. As for the United States, they made easier the reception of the only scientists who could enrich durably the American intellectual life.     

The Ethnoarchaeology of Reptile Remains at a Lake Turkana Occupation Site, Kenya

The role of reptiles in hominid hunter–gatherer subsistence in Pleistocene Africa has been largely overlooked. This study examines the reptile component of a modern lake shore camp (site 20) assemblage of low archaeological visibility. Site 20, located on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana, has been observed from its creation to burial. The site is an ideal modern analogue for the interpretation of African prehistoric archaeological sites. Patterns of element loss, and patterns of bone modifications, namely burn, cut and slice marks, are examined. From this baseline data, three conclusions are drawn regarding the interpretability of reptile remains found at archaeological lakeside sites: (1) the MNI of crocodile remains at a site is likely to be similar to the original number of individuals which contributed to the deposited assemblage; (2) the MNI estimates of the turtle component will be much less than the original number of individuals in the deposited assemblage; and (3) patterns of bone modifications can be related to hominid food procurement and processing activities.     

Platforms,Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal

UK online food delivery company Deliveroo has a platform that automates the coordination of meal delivery, creating a market for the delivered meal. This market indicates the necessity to examine the social arrangements produced through the platform beyond the labour of the delivery worker. Markets comprise heterogeneous actors that require their coordination to be calculated. Deliveroo, though, offers two competing views of markets. First, as interfaces in which supply and demand are represented as autonomous blocs that are articulated through the goods of the delivered meal whose constitution, including the labour of delivery, is black-boxed. Second, as agencement—formatting collective arrangements—in which the goods of the delivered meal are contingently calculated as a flexible arrangement of riders, restaurants and customers whereby these actors have differing degrees of choice concerning their participation, and through which new service performances are emerging in the necessity for their contingent interaction.     

Book reviews

Australian Books

A. T. Yarwood: Attitudes to Non‐European Immigration (Problems in Australian History), Cassell, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 146, $2.25.

Frank Hardy: The Unlucky Australians, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 249 + index, $4.95 (cloth), $1.95 (paper).

Stanley Brogden: Australia's Two‐Airline Policy, Melbourne University Press, 1968, pp. 235, $5.75.

C. A. Hughes, ed.: Readings in Australian Government, University of Queensland Press, 1968, pp. 504, $6.50.

Jean Spender: Ambassador's Wife, Angus and Robertson. Sydney, 1968, pp. 207, $4.25.

Arthur Huck: The Chinese in Australia, Longmans, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 117, $4.50.

M. Revelman: Sex and Politics in Australia, Publicity Press Books, Adelaide, 1968, pp. 297, $1.35.

J. A. La Nauze, ed.: Alfred Deakin: Federated Australia: Selections from Letters to the Morning Post: 1900–1910, Melbourne University Press, 1968, pp. 314, $7.20.

Overseas Books

Frank Parkin: Middle‐Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Melbourne University Press, 1968, pp. 207 + vii, $4.75.

L. J. Sharpe, ed.: Voting in Cities, Macmillan, London, 1968, pp. 340, $8.80.

The Times News Team: The Black Man in Search of Power, Nelson, London, 1968, pp. 174, $4.95.

J. A. A. Stockwin: The Japanese Socialist Party and Neutralism: A Study of a Political Party and its Foreign Policy, Melbourne University Press, 1968, pp. 197 + x, $6.50.

D. A. Low, ed.: Soundings in Modern South Asian History, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1968, pp. 399 + viii, $7.50.

Gwendolen M. Carter, Thomas Karis and Newell M. Stulyz: South Africa's Transkei: The Politics of Domestic Colonialism, London, Heinemann, 1967, pp. 184 + viii, $6.70.     

Bonesetting: the algebra of genocide

ABSTRACT

Genocide rulings should not care about numbers. Legally, proving the intent to destroy a people in whole or in part is what counts. Yet numbers are vital actants in the often decades-long lead-up to trials. Aggregate numbers give weight to the specificity of individual testimony, statistical estimates can transform missing people into cold, hard facts, and algorithms can reveal ‘excess death’, even when forensic anthropologists cannot find all the bones. And because of this power, numbers are highly contested in both truth commission findings and trials like that of Generals Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez. In this article I analyse the disentangling work of statisticians and anthropologists in exhuming and counting bodies, and how particular numbers (200,000; 1,771; ninety-three per cent) are made, then re-entangled in efforts to count. The modern ideal of a universal subject of rationality and abstraction that positions women and natives as those who cannot count contributed to their historic exclusion and dehumanization. Counting, as in adding things up, is part of the historic achievement of the trial to make Maya-Ixil women and men count, in the sense of to matter.