Nos - Revue des sciences sociales

abstracts
SANDRA GEELHOED AIDARA
A message from the dawn of time.
Jean-Loup Welcomme on the trail of
the Baluchitherium
In 1994, the palaeontologist Jean-Loup
Welcomme discovered several fossil deposits
in the desert of Pakistani Baluchistan.
Among the bones unearthed over the following
years, were the remains of a giant
mammoth, the Baluchitherium, a colossus
measuring nine metres long and five metres
high and a distant relative of the rhinoceros.
It walked the Earth over twenty million
years ago and, among those large animals
that have now died out, has the original
feature of being a mammal. The mission at
hand is not just of scientific interest, but is
also the opportunity for an on-site encounter
between European scientists and the
local inhabitants. The region is considered
as being among the most inhospitable in the
world and a hub of fanatic Islamic terrorism.
Welcomme understands that without
the support of the Baluchi warlords, he will
not be able to conduct his excavations. His
mission has therefore also been a story of
how the scientist has adopted the customs
of a people, and how the inhabitants themselves
have appropriated the work of excavating
and fossils on a cultural plane.
LUC GWIAZDZINSKI
Defining the urban night
As compared to the human organism,
a city's existence is organised according
to the day-night alternation. Yet, although
there is a growing interest for the city, we
tend to forget its night dimension. This
amnesia concerns just as much the municipal
officials, urban and town planners, technicians
and scientists. In our regions where
during the winter, two thirds of the day light
is lost, there is however a life after day time.
Urban night time is no longer the period of
total obscurity symbolised by curfew and
social rest which inspired artists in quest of
liberty, served as a refuge for criminals and
was a source of distress for the government
scene of new conflicts between individuals
or neighbourhoods which are sleeping, working
or feasting. As a forgotten dimension
of the city and a zone of central tensions,
the night has to open itself to scientific
research. The geographer, proposes according
to two contradictory poles, liberty
and insecurity, the exploration of the city
at night. He tries to define the urban night,
its limits and rhythms, brings to light the
stakes and tensions which accompany this
conquest and wonders about the emergence
of a society which functions 24h/24h.
STÉPHANE JONAS
Jean-Baptiste Boussingault and Alsace
In the rich and varied life and works of
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Dieudonné Boussingault
(1802-1887), a chemist, agronomist,
public figure and internationally renowned
explorer, the time he spent and worked in
Alsace, and more particularly in northern
Alsace (Lobsann, Merkwiller-Pechelbronn
and Goersdorf-Liebfrauenberg), holds a
prime place. In the wake of local and regional
events commemorating the bicentenary
of his birth, this article focuses on that place
by situating it in the life and works of this
great scientist and citizen, considered as the
founder of agricultural chemistry in France.
SAIDA KASMI
Young wanderers of the night in
Strasbourg – paths and crossroads
This article observes the transhumance
of a few young night wanderers in Strasbourg.
While this time of darkness between
the setting and rising of the sun is often
presented as the prime time for merging
with others, the differences in individual
paths demonstrate that everyone has their
own idea of the event and that there are in
fact as many nights as there are subjectivities.
Encounters with other individuals and
groups occur in conventional places which
are stages along routes specific to each
person, but where the solitude experienced
is often an unknown factor since these
nocturnal places are also crossroads used as
staging posts by several such paths, which
therefore interweave. Bars and night clubs
exist not so much through their concrete
walls and the services they offer, but as
spatial nodes in the network of individual
temporality. They only take substance when
the night sets them up as gateways to the
night itself and explain why night as a
period of time, can also be understood as a
space – even more so than the day – because
people live in the night and night acts as a
container.
MICHEL NACHEZ
Night at the crossroads of cyberspace
For a person firmly rooted in the material
world woven out of material things, the
frontiers between day and night seem to
be marked with astronomic regularity. But
does the same hold true for the cyberplayer?
He becomes involved in a re-forged, artificial
time-space where the concept of night
develops through a multitude of definitions,
where nights crossover and run into each
other, where we could speak of a concept of
a world of non-nights and non-days, or even
a world beyond night and day. Do these
new definitions of night inspire spatial and
temporal confusion, or do they spark off a
reorganisation of representations with users
of cyberspace? When, through cyberspace,
we test out not only the World but also other
worlds, the experience and semantics of
the night are modified. At the crossroads
of cyberspace, is there an enrichment or a
loss of night?
ERIK PESENTI
Passing through the night: Henri
Bosco, Federico Fellini and Fortunato
Seminara
The author of this article has chosen to
speak of the night in the work of two writers
(H. Bosco and the Italian F. Seminara)
and a film maker (F. Fellini). The aim is to
show for each of them, the significance of
"passing through the night". With Bosco,
whose last, unfinished novel we analyse
(Une ombre, in which he coined the phrase
"passing through the night"), we experience
the night as another life, a life of dreams and
mysterious worlds. In the romantic novel by
F. Seminara, on the other hand, night is
a terrifying (and sometimes fatal) ordeal
through which we have to pass and is often
associated with madness and the symbolism
of the moon. The night in the cinema world
of Fellini alone helps people to blossom
out and to become reconciled with the city.
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