Holiday

I’m off to the south of France for a few days tomorrow so there’ll be no posts for a while. I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to catching up on a bit of reading; I don’t feel like I’ve really been able to concentrate much recently. I thought about posting a list of books [...]

Fieldwork map of Paris: visualising my research

Inspired partly by Cicilie’s recent post about the geography of her fieldwork I have had fun constructing a Google Earth map of my own fieldwork. I’ve included most places directly linked to my fieldwork: cultural and academic institutions (some of which have also doubled as interview venues), offices of associations I have had contact with [...]

Festive round-up

A few recent news stories on a range of topics that merit a mention before the holidays…
- ‘Les musées ne sont pas à vendre, par Françoise Cachin, Jean Clair et Roland Recht‘ Le Monde 12.12.06. The ex-director of the Musées de France and the art historian lash out at the commercialisation and politicisation of art [...]

“Artification”: or what’s the difference between an ‘object’ and an ‘oeuvre’?

This morning I rounded off my fieldwork for the (calendar) year with an interview with an anthropologist working at the Cite nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. It’s both an enormous luxury and sometimes a bit daunting to talk to informants who themselves have a very sophisticated grasp of the complex of processes in which they [...]

International migrants day – 18 December

Today is ‘international migrants day’, set up by the UN in 2000 [link]. I know of a couple of events in Paris to mark the occasion, although I wasn’t able to attend either as an interview I was doing took longer than I expected.
The most exciting was this event on the theme of migration and [...]

More on discrimination and ‘communautarisme’

As more evidence for a reflection about the nature of anti-discrimination discourse in France see this poster for an event that took place this weekend (by Metro Buzenval, Paris 20e):

This link shows the programme. On the agenda: ‘tackling discrimination’ and ‘implementing cultural diversity’. Everyone it seems is singing from the same sheet, even those groups [...]

The 24-hour ethnographer

Saturday night 2am. I am at a party in the 9eme arrondissement. The host is a friend of a friend, an architect and the guests a small group of well turned-out Parisians for the most part in their mid-thirties. As so often ’so what do you do?’ is the conversation opener and whilst talking about [...]

Sarkozy invites ‘les jeunes des quartiers populaires’

Not really news this anymore but last Wednesday (13th) Nicolas Sarkozy invited a number of ’success stories’ from the deprived suburbs to a conference/meeting at the Interior Ministry [official link here]. A blatant piece of electioneering, or, in the words of the Bondy Blog:
On avait bien pris soin de mettre en avant l’association Bleu Blanc [...]

Theories of nationalism: totalising identity in France

Over the last three days H-nationalism has been publishing an interview with John Hutchinson, Senior Lecturer in Nationalism in Europe in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics by Eric Kaufmann, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. I like the installment format – I’m more likely to find [...]

The use of history… in China… in German (!)

Every so often I meet up with a German friend of Oli’s to practice my German. Often we just chat but I also try to find an article to talk about. It’s very good for me and I think occasionally a bit baffling for Christoph: I rarely manage to string a grammatically correct sentence together [...]