TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS IN CIVIL WARSMaking the social explicit or implicitInternational conference at EHESS 9th-10th June 2016Org. Quentin Deluermoz - Jérémie FoaArgumentsWhat happens when, during a civil war, familiarity vanishes from the very heart of the familiar, when it disappears in a house full of enemies, at the starting point of politics itself when distinguishing friends from enemies is no longer obvious? This conference will focus on what happens when your neighbour may cut your throat, the butcher poison you, your accent betray you, your son denounce you, your brother lie and the street you used to know so well be transformed into an ambush. "For, in internal wars," Montaigne wrote, "your manservant may support the party you dread." In such a chaotic world, space, language, friends, objects – the common meaning of words – are no longer reliable nor is it possible to appropriate them immediately. They are always open to doubt, they are not a given anymore. They must therefore be conquered, and "marked".Conversely, in a "normal period of time", the way society works may be characterised by a very high degree of implicit and a low level of questioning of "routines". An essential part of rules, of behaviours, of the precedences that must be respected, of the roads that must be taken, of the meaning of words, of their pronunciation, of the identities that must be recognised are self-evident or even produce nothing more than indifference. What must be done, what must be said in a certain situation, has, in ordinary life, no need of being made explicit but is performed in silence, in the tacit adjustments that the habitus or the "common sense" allow to be made. The aim of this interdisciplinary conference (which encompasses anthropology, geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and political sciences) is to provide a vista on the "civil war" based on all the civil wars. To that end, analyses should take the following problematic assumption as a starting point and confirm, invalidate or refine it: In opposition to the ordinary world, societies in civil wars may be defined by a dramatic eclipse of the implicit, which consequently entails the need for multiple tests that make the social explicit: posters, notices, rules and regulations, certificates, uniforms, passports, insignia, grammars, codes, etc.. At the same time, in such situations, and following a first period of uprooting and tearing away, there seem to be emerging other rules, other codes of relations, which are more local, more shifting and unstable. More specifically, civil wars may be a time, which is always uncertain, when the implicit and the explicit are being re-articulated: in a tragic situation, in which the survival of people is often at stake, the frontier between what can be shown and what must be hidden, what must be displayed or, on the contrary, concealed, changes. While it is essential that "good evidence" be shown in some places, it is urgent that marks be hidden in others. Civil wars, Luc Boltanski writes, are also well-known times of a "considerable increase in reflexivity". The object of this conference is the re-articulation of the visible and the invisible, the new division of the phenomena that occurs in civil wars. More precisely, what will be studied is what, in a civil war, resists, changes statuses or collapses into radical uncertainty: words, spaces, identities, objects are all objects of doubts and, therefore, of investigations.Among those threads, there is: - Lifting the veil: In a civil war situation, what is at stake in "recognising the other" and "presenting oneself" (E.Goffman) is not only preserving one's honour anymore. It is also a direct question of life or death. One line of questioning could be how people learn to detect the identity of "friends" as well as that of "suspects" (signs, insignia, clothes, behaviours, accents, religious knowledge, secret codes, etc.). Another line of inquiry may focus on how they counterfeit the signs that the "investigator" expects to find (counterfeiting documents, disguising oneself, stealing uniforms, discovering passwords, etc.).- Marking space: It may be relevant to analyse the places where such "controls of identities" are made: are those tests made in special places (check-points, entry points, town entrances, borders) in civil wars or are the latter characterised by an expansion of the spaces of surveillance (home search, controls based on features and appearance, night-time visits, etc.). In line with those questions, the analyses will focus on everything that is part of the political or denominational "marking" of space: flags, pennants, severed heads of enemies, triumphal statues, victory dances, currencies, etc. The competences people use to encode and decode the spaces and their qualities (hostile, familiar, hidden, partisan, dangerous, etc.) may also be studied. - Objects in action: Contributions will closely look at the "objects in action" as they not only make up the realistic setting of the civil war scenes but are also actors in their own right and as such objects of doubts and investigations: pressure cookers hiding bombs, wine barrels hiding traitors are all common objects whose main quality, in a context where there exists no distinction between the front and the rear line, is that they blend into everyday life without drawing attention onto themselves. The capacity of the actors to have the objects that will be necessary to their action as well as their skill in not trusting objects that are unremarkable a priori could be one part of the enquiries. - "Having doubts about any greatness": Where is the great, the high, the fair, the State? It could be of interest to investigate situations in which positions are usurped, the authorities are replaced and the power has been split into two, but also in which the humble is empowered: housekeepers, caretakers, gatekeepers, men and women who are in a liminal situation and who have the power of making you move from one space to another (from the street to the cellar, from a dangerous to a safe place) or on the contrary of pushing you into harm's way, of letting you enter a town or of refusing you the access to it, of providing you with documents or of challenging their authenticity – the power of the bureaucrat and of the pen-pusher – the power of lending you the disguise of a humble person (which cannot be bought) so as to help you be unremarkable, etc.- The rebellion of words: Finally, following Thucydides, who said that "civil war changed even the common meaning of words", it could be interesting to analyse connotations, denotations, schibboleths, words with double meaning, passwords, and accents (which betray or capacitate), dialects, idiolects, etc. It may also be useful, as Victor Klemperer (LTI) did, to look into what is done with and to language in such terrible situations: names of parties, acronyms, abbreviations, euphemisms, exaggerations.While the field of study, like civil wars, is an international one, contributions will have to focus more specifically on an extended period of "modern times" going from the 16th to the 21st century, as this will provide some unity to the situations the institutions have had to face. Organisation: Quentin Deluermoz (Université Paris 13, Pléiade ; Institut universitaire de France)
[email protected]érémie Foa (Aix-Marseille Université, TELEMME) ;
[email protected] and institutional partners:ANR (Ni)2, IUF
