Notebook of Max Sorre. Excursion to the Pyrenees, August 1919
© Sorre family collection (private archives)
Dylan SIMON will speak on Friday, February 18 at the “History of Humanities and Social Sciences” seminar, with a paper entitled “The Ecological Tradition of French Geography”.
This seminar is organized by Emanuel Bertrand, Jacqueline Carroy, Wolf Feuerhahn, Serge Reubi and Nathalie Richard.
Registration and information on https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2021-2022/ue/883
Presentation of the paper
The humanities and social sciences did not wait for the 21st century to question environmental issues. If the constitution of these sciences under the ecological prism has been relatively little questioned, milestones have nevertheless been set, but in an unequal way according to the spaces and disciplines considered.
Thus, the history of geography has been little studied from this perspective – in contrast to the history of anthropological or sociological knowledge – even though geography initially placed the ecological question at the heart of its theoretical program. It is to such a history that we propose to return, by focusing on the relationship between geography and plant ecology, but also on the scholars who developed an ecological program in the discipline (Paul Vidal de La Blache, Max Sorre, Georges Bertrand, etc.).
The challenge is to grasp what this ecological conception of man implies, as well as the diversity of its origins and redeployments at the intersection of different natural and social sciences. But contrary to the construction of a classical genealogy, it is more a question of building a “concrete history of abstraction” that places these geographers in the scholarly practices, discussions and controversies of their time (why, for example, were historians such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel reticent about Max Sorre’s human ecology?
The History of the Humanities and Social Sciences Seminar
This seminar proposes a deliberately general approach to the field. The humanities and social sciences are often approached according to disciplinary historiographies. The objective is to take a step back from this type of perspective, by showing that we can, for example, make a history of the sharing and exchange between human sciences, philosophy, medicine, literature, natural sciences, etc. We will focus on the practices, the knowledge, the names and the actors from which the project of building one or more sciences that take Man and humans as their object was constituted and is constituted. Supported by the French Society for the History of Human Sciences (SFHSH), this seminar is a forum for discussion of current issues, recently published books, the status and uses of archives, and the methods and functions of a historical approach to sciences that take humans as their object. It is intended for researchers, doctoral students and students in the history of science and, more broadly, in the humanities and social sciences.
