Editorial line

Translated from:
Ligne éditoriale
Other translation(s):
Línea editorial
Linea editoriale
Editorial

The journal Condition humaine / Conditions politiques aims to develop and disseminate French and international scholarship devoted to the anthropological readings of politics in the contemporary world.

Large-scale planetary transformations (ecological, social, digital, economic, etc.) are reconfiguring our presence in the world and consequently, the very concept of human being as an individual and collective political subject. In today’s world new forms of politics are emerging that go hand in hand with these transformations and invites to rethink the “political” object beyond its conventional boundaries. The journal aims at providing the analyses that anthropology, associated with neighbouring disciplines, can perform of these radical transformations or reformulations of politics, including new forms of protests and alternative imaginations of futures, the reconfiguration of modes of the state in the age of globalization, but also of norms and flows, turmoil, fractures.

However, in the French scientific editorial landscape, this “other” knowledge on politics has been scattered and quite invisible so far.

Therefore, Condition humaine / Conditions politiques proposes to mobilize the methods, approaches, and concepts of political anthropology. It is grounded in the ethnographic method, in ethnological and historical knowledge, both about remote and near spaces, and in anthropological comparison. Its disciplinary boundaries overlap with those of other social and human sciences, historical and political sciences.

It is by bringing anthropology into dialogue with all the cultural and scholarly fields that are inspired by anthropology and rely on it to have insights, suggestions, and tools for grasping the political transformations of our societies that we will respond to the intellectual and scientific demands of the present. All the discipline of the social sciences are welcome: political science, which seeks an ethnographic anchoring and a reading of politics “embedded” in the social and the cultural ; history, which draws on anthropology to ponder over the alternation of sedimentations and fractures, over the complex forms of time ; philosophy, which with the help of anthropology reformulates the concepts of politics in a shaken world ; geography, which associates with anthropology to analyse the scales game and the symbolic and material articulations and disarticulations of spaces. Let us not forget the environmental sciences, in this time of Anthropocene ; the religious sciences, in these times of new millenniarisms ; economics, in these days of great inequalities and demands for the social re-signification of economic ties. We shall not neglect local, indigenous, or people’s knowledge. We shall pay attention to public opinion and to all that contributes to the social production of collective knowledge or understanding about community making and the designing of common destinies, both in the present and in the future.

In its production of articles and essays, the following both resonate or dissonate: the disciplinary instituted knowledge and the indiscipline of the world and of the present ; the middle- and long-term time of research and the times of social demands, as well as of the fields studied ; the de-compartmentalization of the French-speaking disciplinary tradition and the dialogue with international thought and with “other” traditions (minor, subordinate, post-colonial, or simply immersed in other languages or cultural universes).

To this end, the journal publishes in French and in several Latin alphabet languages of European and intercontinental diffusion (English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese), supplementing the articles published with long abstracts translated into French and English.