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AbstractTowards the end of the French regime in New France, authors of travel literature barely seemed interested in the American landscape, instead focusing their attention upon indigenous peoples. An analysis that concentrates on the space dedicated to the body and the landscape in the texts and engravings used by these authors reveals, however, that both were manipulated in order to reinforce the colonial ideology. The French symbolically appropriated the landscape, redefining the relationship between Amerindians and the environment in an effort to assert their presence. This paper explores the representation of the body and the landscape in travel literature from the point of view of appropriation and power.

This article explores the foundation of a French Canadian immigrant community in Palm Beach, Florida in the Post-war years. The arrival of an ever-growing contingent of tourists and snowbirds during the 1960s and 1970s transformed this community. Formerly focused on integration into American society, it now set out to create a francophone context well connected to French Canada. If economic imperatives often motivated this migration, the « fear » of winter also appears to be an element of continuity in French Canadian Florida.

Natural resource management transfer contracts and community biocultural protocols (PBC) are two community-based tools currently being tested in Madagascar. They are part of the ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol. The latter are more recent and come under the legal framework on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). As types of written charters by which the communities codify or specify the conditions of access to their resources and associated knowledge, the PBCs are also directories of traditions and customary rules for the management of their tangible and intangible heritage. According to their promoters, PBCs would make it possible to strengthen the mechanism of decentralization of resource management, in particular by consolidating the right to self-determination of communities. However, questions arise as to the impact of the mechanisms on the institutional organization and the internal functioning of the communities. Focused on the study of the case of the communities of Mariarano and Betsako, in the northwestern part of the island, the article shows that, despite their bottom-up and participatory dimension, these devices have profoundly modified the structures local and customary management of space and resources as evidenced by the “personification” exerted on community institutions and which is explained by the desire of the State and funders to make “legible”.

AbstractDistancing itself from logocentric methodologies that privilege narrative and text in memory research, this paper insists on the importance of the senses in practices of social recall. Through ethnographic analysis of an open-air museum commemorating Soviet history in today's Lithuania, it examines differential ways in which sight and taste are mobilized as memory media for linking the nation's socialist past with its “capitalist” present. The paper also argues that this museum constitutes an apt ethnographic locus in which to critique unproblematic unilinear approaches to the ongoing systemic change in the European East after Communist rule.

Keywords: Lankauskas, mémoire sociale, les sens, transformations postsocialistes, Europe orientale, Lituanie, Lankauskas, social memory, the senses, postsocialist transformation, Eastern Europe, Lithuania, Lankauskas, memoria social, sentidos, transformación postsocialista, Europa oriental, Lituania

Some French humanist poets betray a keen awareness of the intrinsic fragility that affects the cultural dynamics of the Renaissance. Marot and Du Bellay express its inchoate nature, even when addressing the King. While celebrating the times they live in, they rarely greet the renewal as an ongoing event. Qualifiers and other linguistic structures make it a virtual reality in their verse. To explain this paradox, this article will first examine the temporal and moral ambivalence affecting humanist poets’ relation to Antiquity. The analysis will then turn to conditional and negative turns of phrase that can be interpreted as oblique warnings to the Prince (“If you do not… then be careful”). Despite the obvious expectation of a budding renaissance, hopes that a French Virgil will emerge are fraught with doubt and virtual wording. Finally, the reluctance toward the epic reveals issues that displace the end of the Renaissance, and perhaps pave the way, if not for a true political renaissance, for a poetics of renaissance as a process.

AbstractThis paper provides an analytical grid of the Lebanese monetary policy over the recent period, through the three main constraints with which the Bank of Lebanon is confronted: public debt, the dollarization of the economy and the fixed exchange rate. The analysis shows that the Bank of Lebanon is to some extent caught between the devil of the fixed exchange rate and the deep blue sea of public indebtedness. This critical situation is typical of a “first generation” financial crisis.

Keywords: New Babel, translation, critical translation, French critical translation, French critical geographies

During the period of Louis XIV’s reign as sole ruler of France and prior to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1661–1685)—years characterized by legal repression of the Reformist minority and uncertainty around the Edict’s régime of tolerance—provincial synods were the de facto representatives of the reformed Churches. Here, it was pastors, and more particularly moderators, who acted as the voice of their communities. Royal oversight was chiefly maintained by commissioners (including Catholics after 1679) who were present in the synods. The exchanges that took place between the moderators and the representatives of the king reveal how a discourse of submission to the monarchy was established and cultivated by the commissioners, while sometimes being conditioned or contested by the pastors, particularly in cases where freedom of conscience was threatened and divine law appeared to be impeded by royal decree.

Keywords: Pasteurs, Louis XIV, Synodes, Commissaires

Urban self-management is an activity that can be exhausting and may not always be sustainable over the long term. This is partly because it involves not only typical activist activities but also the management and maintenance of a physical space. Drawing on a study conducted with activists from five self-managed spaces in Rome, I analysed the mechanisms that explain why some individuals continue to engage in activism for years, despite various challenges, while others choose to leave. It became clear that the decision to stay or leave results from a delicate and complex balance between centripetal forces (which hold the activists back) and centrifugal forces (which compel them to leave). To prevent the balance from tipping towards leaving, self-managed spaces must be more than just arenas of struggle and interaction; they must also be spaces of care, which can make these experiences not only valuable but also sustainably humane.

Keywords: urban self-management, human sustainability, care, commons, urban movements