Relire un Essai Wébérien Méconnu Motifs et obstacles

Sans résumé Philippe Despoix enseigne la littérature comparée à l’université de Montréal où il dirige le Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes. Ses recherches portent sur la fonction des médias techniques dans les processus mémoriels et de transferts interculturels. Il a notamment publié éthiques du désenchantement (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1995) et Le Monde mesuré (Genève, Droz, 2005). Nicolas Donin est chercheur en musicologie à l’Ircam, où il dirige l’équipe ? Analyse des pratiques musicales ?. Ses travaux portent sur les œuvres, les pratiques et esthétiques musicales savantes. Il a notamment codirigé, avec Bernard Stiegler, Révolutions industrielles de la musique, numéro spécial des Cahiers de médiologie (n^o 18, 2004). L’Analyse musicale, une pratique et son histoire, ouvrage réalisé en collaboration avec Rémy Campos, est à para?tre (Genève, Conservatoire de Genève/Droz).     

Harmony and Melody in Discourse on European Cohesion

From a corpus constituted by the five Cohesion Reports written by the European Commission, the article, using the methods of textual analysis, highlights the production of a European discourse on the territories participating to a process of institutionalization. Thus, starting from various authors analyses who validate the idea of institutionalization, the authors propose here to further explore this idea, using a method based on a lexical analysis software. The aim is then, on the one hand, to assess the extent to which the discourse of the Commission has elements of stability to justify the idea of institutionalization or, in the other hand, the elements of change over time that could compromise the very idea of institutionalization. The authors present the following results: the Commission discourse has important features of stability. Nevertheless, beyond this finding, there are changes at work. Their expression is rendered possible by the polysemy of the notions mobilized, and they are driven partly by a “rational” representation, but above all by the interplay of the succession of tensions and mind-shaping contexts in the construction of Europe.     

SPATIAL MOBILITY AND RETURNS TO EDUCATION: SOME EVIDENCE FROM A SAMPLE OF FRENCH YOUTH*

ABSTRACT This study re‐evaluates the returns to geographic mobility and to the level of education taking into account the interaction between these two variables, and using the distance covered as a proxy for migration costs. We have at our disposal an original French database that permits precise calculation of the distance between the place of education and the location of first employment. For men, we find decreasing returns to spatial mobility as the distance covered rises and increasing returns to mobility with higher levels of education. The marginal returns to spatial mobility for women are lower across the board.     

Sailing virtual canoes across Oceania: revisiting island accessibility

Understanding sailing conditions is a basic requirement for understanding the two periods of settlement of the distant islands of Oceania, initially from the Bismarck Islands off New Guinea as far as Samoa and later from Samoa throughout East Polynesia. The question of a “navigational threshold” between these two worlds is the focus of this paper. A computer simulation is presented that quantifies the difficulty of sailing virtual canoes in the differing wind conditions in both areas. The model demonstrates substantial differences in ease of voyaging up to and beyond Samoa. That this measure is so markedly different between these two worlds gives support for the hypothesised pause between the discovery and settlement of islands West and East of Samoa.     

Paleodemographic analysis of a fossil porcupine (Hystrix refossa Gervais, 1852) population from the Upper Pleistocene site of Geula Cave (Mount Carmel,Israel)

For decades zooarchaeological studies mainly focused on teeth age profiles to derive central hypotheses concerning human subsistence during the Pleistocene. Behavior was often related to hunting and/or scavenging strategies according to two models: attritional versus catastrophic. However, few studies have estimated basic demographic parameters using standard methods of population ecology, which are necessary for a more confident interpretation of animal paleopopulation structures. Thanks to a remarkably rich fossil bone assemblage from the Upper Pleistocene cave of Geula (Mount Carmel, Israel), in this paper we perform a paleodemographic analysis of Hystrix refossa, Gervais 1852 (Mammalia, Rodentia). We first consider phylogenetic and morphometric dental criteria for the comparison of Pleistocene porcupine species, followed by an examination of taphonomic conditions of the bone assemblage. We focus strongly on the age structure of the fossil population, presenting a new methodological approach that combines life tables and Leslie matrix models – one of the best-known methods in population ecology for assessing population growth and age distribution. We detail demographic parameters derived from cross-sectional life tables and past trends in the porcupine population at Geula Cave using simple matrix projection model. Finally, we were able to perform an elasticity analysis to identify which demographic component was potentially the most critical for influencing growth. We show that the population of H. refossa did not decline or shrink but was stable. Our results permit us to characterize Geula Cave as a natural shelter for porcupines, with limited evidence to scavenging and hunting by either hyenas or humans.