In the Journals – a French selection

For this installment of In the Journals, Koichi Kameda de Figueiredo Carvalho suggests two French journals which may be of interest to Somatosphere readers:

Revue Anthropologie des Connaissances (RAC):

There is not yet a dedicated society for the social studies of science and technology in France. However, Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances (RAC) is a key reference in the field. Founded in 2006, the journal is currently directed by Élise Demeulenaere, an anthropologist at the CNRS, and Céline Granjou, a sociologist at INRAE (France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment). It publishes a wide range of social science articles devoted to the study of connaissances—that is, the discourses, practices, and systems involved in their production, use, transmission, and collective mobilization. As the journal notes, “anthropology” is used broadly, referring to multidisciplinary inquiry into practices, behaviors, representations, ideologies, professions, organizations, technical institutions, and forms of production, while taking historical specificity into account.

The journal is committed to publishing articles in multiple languages. In addition to French, some papers are also available in English, Spanish, and German. This reflects the journal’s openness to linguistic diversity and its interest in expanding its readership.

Somatosphere readers may be interested in several thematic issues. The dossier “Small Numbers in Health,” issue 18-4, 2024, follows a workshop on the topic and questions the modernity attributed to statistics in health and policy. It also discusses the production of poor-quality statistics and their role in health policy. Another issue explores the notion of the “microbial turn,” which emerged in 2014 within the social sciences and is rooted in earlier work on human–microbe relations. It is characterized by a shift from negative to positive framings of microbes and by the promises associated with this shift (“A Microbial Turn?”, issue 15-3, 2021). Readers may also be interested in the special issue on the notion of the “work of nature,” which examines knowledge-production systems in animal and environmental studies (“Nature(s) at Work,” 17-1, 2023), or the issue devoted to “preparations for action,” which seeks to enrich conceptual and theoretical discussions about action (“How to Take Action? Preparing, Setting Up, Rehearsing for Things to Happen,” 18-2, 2024).

Anthropologie & Santé (A&S):

Created in 2010, Anthropologie & Santé publishes theoretical and empirical work in French that reflects major trends in the anthropology of health and illness. Topics range from critical studies of care practices, health systems, and institutions to clinical anthropology, the political anthropology of health, and applied medical anthropology. The editors-in-chief are Carine Baxerres (IRD [Institut de recherche pour le développement] and LPED [Laboratoire population environnement développement]), Lucia Candelise (University of Lausanne), Pierre-Marie David (University of Montreal), Vincent Duclos (University of Quebec in Montreal), and Cinzia Greco (University of Manchester).

Many articles will be of interest to Somatosphere readers, but a few recommendations are worth highlighting.

For instance, Digital Health. Social-technical transformations of care and health practices in a connected world, dossier 28/2024 on digital health brings together contributions that explore how digital technologies participate in processes of biomedicalization, as well as in phenomena of globalization and the technologization of biomedicine. Another example is The hospital. For a new anthropology of clinical spaces, dossier 16/2018, which focuses on the hospital as both an ethnographic field site and an anthropological object in its own right. Contributions range from an article discussing the growing capitalization of hospitals—which transforms things and services into assets (Turning patients into assets. Ethnographic study of capitalization processes within public hospitals, Juven 2018)—to an article based on an ethnography of a Chinese military hospital ship in Vanuatu. This article sheds light on new configurations of global health and addresses sanitary, humanitarian, and political issues (Stuber-Vandame 2018).

Finally, both journals follow the “diamond” open access model, in which the publication, distribution, and preservation of academic texts are free of charge for both readers and authors.