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Call to contribution symposium : Location and circulation of know-how in Africa
Deadline : November 10th, 2008
« Local knowledges » emergent as a transverse topic with many researches on knowledges and know-how of contemporary Africa. This symposium aims at conferring a central position on this topic and on this notion, liable to question them in several domains : agricultural and food productions, trades and small enterprises, health practices... The circulation was speeded up by property, knowledges and men just as the multiplication of the devices of promotion of resources and of local activities reactivate necessarily the question of the sense of the place and especially that of origin " in touch with a place or a territory. They also encourage us to be interested in choices and decisions of the local actors, as well as in contents expected from their technical and symbolic effectiveness, or even political.
Symposium organised by Easter MOITY-MAIZI and BRUNO MARTINELLI
Institutions : Supagro Montpellier (UMR INNOVATION), Donatecarcenter.com-AIX (UMR NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 8171), Sysav (ANR) programme and University of Provence
Place : Mediterranean Home of the Sciences of the Man – 5, street of the Castle of the Clock, on 1390 – Aix-en-Provence
Dates : 19 and 20 march 2009
Programme and call to communications
« Local knowledges » emergent as a transverse topic with many researches on knowledges and know-how of contemporary Africa. This symposium aims at conferring a central position on this topic and on this notion, liable to question them in several domains : agricultural and food productions, trades and small enterprises, health practices... Africain local knowledges are recovering from process and from tendencies which differ so deeply from European processes as it returns pertinent confrontation and opens new theoretical perspectives.
The anthropology as other disciplinary fields tied to empirical steps which throw into relief practices, points of view and local knowledges, cannot content itself with an analysis of these processes which would compare the total to the place, the global economy in specific cultures. The circulation was speeded up by property, knowledges and men just as the multiplication of the devices of promotion of resources and of local activities reactivate necessarily the question of the sense of the place and especially that of origin " in touch with a place or a territory (Moity-Maïzi, Muchnik, 2006). They also encourage us to be interested in choices and decisions of the local actors, as well as in contents expected from their technical and symbolic effectiveness, or even political. In perspective, it is then "support" and networks of their recognition (professional, self-defining, economic) that shows itself as essential stakes, notably for groups led to construct, with the help of NGO for example, a process of promotion of their resources and know-how.
In the world on borders dissolved by the mobility of capitals and of means of production, the globalisation would be source of erosion of localities (Dufy, Weber, 2007). Relocations of industry, fluidity of the relations of job and of exchanges indeed cause a general process of déterritorialisation (Appadurai, on 1996). The fire of the worldwide courses of foodstuffs since 2007, riots of hunger in 2008, call into question moreover the agricultural, international and national political leanings. The agroindustrial development envisaged from (re) promotion of local resources is so on the agenda of all programmes. And yet the location of resources, competences, knowledges and of activities does not decree. It is a complex process in length, dependent on macroeconomic conditions certainly but also on technical and professional choices, on forms and normative devices of recognition, technical and food cultures, so much specific, local conditions, registered at the same time in individual and collective logic..
Investigation renewed by the phenomena of location / relocation, stocks and choices linked to the "place" , of their commercial, territorial, self-defining and political translations, appears all the more necessary in social sciences as develop today numerous policies and institutional tools to protect on one hand biological resources, on the other hand knowledges linked to their working, to their transformation and to their manners (further to the Convention of Biodiversity, 1992) which promote and mediatize the notion of " local know-how " , in touch with cultural identity and ecological specificity. The presence of institutions of intellectual property (as OAPI on the scale of central and Western Africa for example), gives a political frame of strengthening of the legal frames of protection of local resources. The building of quality signs constitutes in this frame a possible option to promote at the same time as to protect some products manufactured from these specific resources. Facing the historical reality of the uninterrupted movements of loans, of hybridizations and of réinvention of techniques, know-how and products, notably in most sectors of trade and of the urban small enterprise, especially in the food sector, steps of protection and of certification collide on one hand in prickly question of their anteriority or of their cultural origin, on the other hand in the difficulty in circumscribing reference places for this category, "local" , tied to material and cognitive resources. These allocations introduce obvious risks of exclusion, of organisation into a hierarchy or of stigmatization, which appear as soon as they undertake to identify actors to represent " knowledge this places », at the risk of seeing appearing from new self-defining, political shapes, that exceed the definite frame of a step of protection or of skills of resources.
Historically, the ethnography of techniques and know-how, in Africa as elsewhere, dedicated a lot of its jobs to the phenomena of circulation, of interbreeding or of hybridization which touch as well not commercial and commercial material resources as groups artisans, techniques or more widely cultures tradition is always reinvented for new stakes of future, as much economic as professional or political. For his/her part since a dozen years, economic anthropology underlines the importance of knowledges, stocks, implicated in any economic act at the same time as she offers a rereading of exchanges and of institutions or economic networks among which the local dimensions, the territorialisées, seem decisive. Various questions appear then from collaboration between these fields of anthropology : does the location of resources by steps (official or not) of promotion, differentiation or skills, allow to "admit « them in their plural dimensions ? What does be admitted indeed at the bottom and which senses the local actors give to these steps or process ?
From empirical jobs in Western and central Africa, favouring the analysis of devices and of correlations which are built thanks to a step (state or not) of promotion (protection, skills) resources, knowledges, jobs and local productions, this symposium will try to inform following questions :
1/What are strategies that it is possible to update, both on the side of some groups of artisans and practitioners today and on the side of the organisms of support, to promote, to qualify as resources (know-how, products) ? All in all, how are built these "heritages" of future and what new trainings do they provoke ?
2/According to which processes, and especially with which mediators and devices of translation, some know-how linked to specific resources, they are appropriate (Ré), mobilised (Re) ; what are choices carried by the local actors in these processes, which are the dimensions that they favour to it (economic, political, ethical), which are especially norms and new shapes which they work out there (in term of organisation of places, jobs, devices of transmission and of training) ?
3/What are effects but also current risks linked to steps which try to locate resources, products and linked know-how ? Beyond a moral ambition of protection of nature (across its resources) or of an ideal of recognition of techniques and of specific craft products, linked to cultures, ideal become perhaps emblematic of our « society of lands », they will wonder here about contents and necessarily political stakes of these processes of location, in an epoch which favours relocations, standardization of techniques, products, and homogenization of knowledge and competences …
This symposium will give a priority to studies of case treating with craft know-how in Africa, in the sectors of agriculture, as food processing industry but also as metallurgy, as health. He calls empirical jobs, in anthropology and more widely in social sciences, allowing a comparative analysis of the processes of location of resources and know-how. Stake is to be able to construct a collective reflexion on the theoretical tools subject to mobilisation by anthropology and disciplines related to analyse and/or to accompany processes of location / broadcasting / circulation, of protection / skills, resources and know-how ; to clear perspectives of renewal of our approaches of the phenomena of location / globalisation taking into consideration their strategical pronunciations in processes of training and in forms or devices of recognition and of patrimonialisation.
The proposals of communication of 2500 signs are to send before November 10th, 2008 in : contact-lcsfa@mmsh.univ-aix.fr
The selection of discreet communications made by a scientific committee and will be announced on November 30th, 2008
The entire texts of chosen communications will have to reach the organizers of symposium in : contact-lcsfa@mmsh.univ-aix.fr at the latest on January 31st, 2009
Articles drawn of communications will make the object of a publication of synthesis in editions of the university Presses of Provence
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