Abstract The first part of this article presents an overview of civil resistance theory and practice, including key concepts and the historical record of nonviolent movements ending authoritarian and occupying regimes. It will also present a practical checklist for assessing why people power movements succeed or fail. The second part of this article will demonstrate how civil resistance applies to the global scourge of financial corruption. It will first illustrate two recent successful people power campaigns against financial corruption, then examine their dynamics in terms of new research and analysis of organized, collective nonviolent action targeting graft and abuse. Finally, it will adapt the general civil resistance checklist to the anti-corruption arena, concluding with the specific elements that are most critical to curbing financial corruption.

Abstract Since independence, the Indian State has shown a voluntarist approach in the judicial domain. This has led to the introduction of severe laws against customary relations of exploitation, harassment, and discrimination that rest on caste, gender, or religious differences. While this policy has enhanced a deeper legal culture, and provoked a new legal activism within the Indian population, it has not extirpated the local relations of dominance and exploitation. This paper provides an ethnographic account of how the rape of a young girl from a lower caste in Himachal Pradesh (Northern India) was dealt with in the judicial domain. It will thus provide an analysis of the interplay between traditional power relations and new forces that oppose those power relations through the rule of law. It will show how this interplay is visible in trial, and how it interferes with criminal procedures followed by the court.

Abstract This paper shows how, in the French Assizes Courts, the accusation of foreign defendants (here, mainly Sri Lankans) and the verbal exchanges with them during their trial reveal the implicit codes and presuppositions that govern the French judiciary system. Through an analysis of the part that the language plays in court, and hence the importance of interpreters, this paper will consider the emotions that are revealed during the trial and the role assigned to ‘culture’. It will conclude that the two requirements of equality before the law and of individualization of punishment are often in contradiction.

Abstract It was in February 1935 that Lévi-Strauss went to Brazil to teach sociology at the newly founded University of São Paolo. In the stimulating atmosphere of the city soon he struck up a friendship with the founders of Brazilian modernism, in particular with Mário de Andrade, the central figure of the avant-garde movement, who helped the young researcher to finance his expeditions into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. Twenty years later Lévi-Strauss wrote about this period in Brazil, after having encountered other cultures and having made other experiences. The highly reflexive narrative of Tristes Tropiques contains most of the topics which return in his later works and about which the authors of this volume have pondered from different perspectives. This introductory text reconstructs the principal stages of Lévi-Strauss’ enterprises in Brazil and illustrates how his departure for the New World became the start of a great career.

Abstract For a half a century, Claude Lévi-Strauss multiplied statements about the demographic situation of humanity and its anthropological consequences. Those statements, often seen as shocking, were interpreted as a kind of aberration which defied rational understanding. Current opinion held was that the analysis of such idiosyncratic ideas overstepped the competence of anthropologists and historians. In fact, as shown in my text based on newly discovered archival materials, quite the opposite is true. Firstly, Lévi-Strauss became interested in demography very early in his career. Secondly, his conception of demographic trends and their effects was based on scholarly knowledge. Thirdly, far from being an idiosyncratic extravagance, his demography corresponded to widely shared concerns, central to the cultural policies of UNESCO, in which Lévi-Strauss was involved as Secretary general of the International Social Science Council (from 1952 to 1961). These facts are necessary if one is to grasp the cosmological outlook underlying the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The principles of Lévi-Straussian cosmology, in which demography plays an important role, are not reducible to the axioms of his structural theory. Without taking this cosmological infrastructure into account we are unable to correctly understand the moral message that Lévi-Strauss endeavoured to deliver, which concerned the extreme dangers humanity could face in the near future.

Abstract No anthropologist has been as influential outside the own discipline as Lévi-Strauss. From philosophy to history, from politics to literary criticism, from linguistics to sociology, from psychoanalysis to poetry, from art to contemporary music, the œuvre of the author of Tristes Tropiques has fallen on these fields like a beneficial rain, giving them new life. Such a great influence has several reasons. The design of a wide-ranging anthropological project, its philosophical implications, an immense and precious erudition which allows to build connections between the most different fields of humanistic and scientific knowledge, and lastly a great writing, rich of literary vibrations. All the great questions of the present, from the world's overpopulation to cultural relativism, from the resurgence of the myth to the return of localisms, from the war of the veil to genetic manipulations, all subjects appear in the œuvre of Lévi-Strauss, always in a provocative and anticipatory formulation which represents the precious heritage of the last of the classics.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The author of this paper, a Nobel Laureate in Literature (2008), develops here a plea in favour of the practice of interculturality. He takes the case of its family's historic birthplace, the Island of Mauritius, as an example of intercultural human coexistence, and analyses its achievements, challenges, and possible developments in today's world.

Abstract The practice of family solidarity is a fact in African societies even if the people are facing all kinds of risks from an early age, before they exert their activity to take charge. There is lack of civil protections as “social security” which covers individuals from illness and other risks thus transforming African societies into scenes where violence and social insecurity reigns. Under these conditions, the freedom of the individual is in question as well as the protection of citizens, taking into account the risks to life, work, education, health, other environment. The social role to be played by the rule of law is also in question. But the bond of solidarity is primarily ethical. It binds one human to another, beyond the laws and social institutions.

Abstract In general, discussion about cosmopolitanism is predicated on the assumption of community either already existing or yet to be realised. A common feature of this assumption is that community represents the boundary of “us” inclusion and exclusion of “the other”. Accordingly, the strife to reach out to “the other” constitutes the quest for the cosmos – order – and its realisation is cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is thus based on the ontology of opposition tending towards synthesis. The thesis defended here is that the ontology of boundary as a coupling point and not a moment of the exclusion of “the other” is a necessary reaffirmation as well as complement of “us”. This ontology, supported by polylogue among the peoples and cultures of our planet, is the means to transcend cosmopolitanism and constitute a planetary human community.