The aim of this project is to describe and compare the construction of mechanical knowledge in indigenous societies of the Atacama Plateau and the Gran Chaco. We will approach the subject making four preliminary assumptions: (1) in these strongly asymmetrical social contexts, the mechanics knowledge is a place of power, of marking differences (of gender, ethnical, of nation, of dressing, etc.), and of creating social subjects. In this sense, one must retrace the evolution and local tensions of formal devices of mechanical instruction (military service, religious missions, technical education), that are also devices of control and social discipline of heterogenous and underling populations. In this context, mechanics is an asymmetrical field under tension, with legitimate and illegitimate forms, counterculture and competing circuits of mechanics. (2) In the peripheries of large technological systems (mines, sugar plantations), the process of indigenous appropriation of machines produces a singular field of heterogenous technical practices, discourses about machines, ways of naming and classifying them, identification of dangers and recalling accidents, etc. All this, allows for an anthropology or ethnography of mechanics. (3) Mechanical knowledge and its tensions lead to a production of specific series of tools, technical procedures and gesture, for which it possible to develop an archaeology, and that can be studied through models and formalization. This knowledge is inserted more largely into a local phenomenology of mechanics – the different ways to think and rationalize the machines, to classify and name them, to identify the danger and have a memory of the accidents, to assign to the machines some symbolism, estheticism or animality – this knowledge takes also part of a local sociology of mechanics – actors, divisions, associated paths that emerge – which we have to take into account; It is possible to model those material environment – tools, garbage and wrecks, makeshift workshop, working clothes, etc. ; this material constitutes the archive of those tensions. This research project calls up resources in ethnology, history and history of technology and is based on a explorative, qualitative and comparative method. We study two marginal and weakly populated areas which were lately colonized (1880-1930) by the mechanized extraction front (mines in the Andes, sugar and wood in the Chaco). The comparison between the two moreover totally different areas will permit us to understand how, with different social, technical and historical circumstances, a same technological and mechanical “stratum” is disseminated, absorbed and locally appropriated. The research is organized in three axis : (1) Ethnography of the mechanical fact in the Atacama and the Chaco will investigate the different elements of the local mechanics as well as the individual paths and learning forms; (2) mechanical knowledge, power and colonial spaces will study the formal vectors of mechanics learning (missions, technological schools, etc.) and the archives by interpreting them in the general context of colonization of these territories; (3) edge of mechanics, materialities, technology will analyze and model technological pattern by studying tools, workshops, wrecks in order to understand the tensions, the limitations and contradictions of these local mechanics. Three results are expected : (i) to collect and describe this knowledge through different corpora – ethnographic, documentary, tools and technological procedures – in digitized, indexed forms that permit a collective exploitation ; (ii) to enhance our knowledge of that problem by publishing three articles, a collective book and by preparing a monographic manuscript and (iii) to dynamize the academic and scientific collaboration between the different partners in order to develop a work in progress about history and anthropology of technology in colonial/asymmetric contexts..

ECOBOOM project proposes an analysis of the contemporary transformations of the mining sector in the energy transition, and its effects on the modes of exploitation and the territories. It takes a North/South perspective, extending from extractive territories to national and global scales. It compares two parallel but connected extractive processes in the global mining arena, and investigates their connections: the energy transition metals (ETMs) boom, which concerns metals such as lithium and rare earths, and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) supply chain, which particularly affects the gold sector. This collective research is based on the central hypothesis of the ecologization of the resources, understood both as a new rhetoric aimed at making the exploitation of certain minerals 'indispensable', and as the set of institutional and technical mechanisms linked to it. This comparison between supply chains and resources aims to take into account the complex articulation between spatial scales, temporalities and levels of socio-political organization, for which a common analytical framework is mobilized. The notion of 'moral economy' allows to take into account the production, circulation and use of moral sentiments, values, norms and obligations in the global social space, which are superimposed on the traditional political economy. The notion of 'governable spaces' focuses on the impacts of these changes, both in the global mining arena and on territories. This comparative perspective places the study of the energy transition within the more systemic process of the 'great transition' in terms of North/South environmental, social and global justice. This approach responds to the issues of the "Societies and territories in transition" axis by questioning spatial transitions, identities and territorial sovereignties, the relationships between societies and territories around resource management, and the recomposition of relations between centers and peripheries introduced by the new extractive booms. The project focuses on three research axes: 1) the discourses and devices of the rhetoric of ecologization of the resources, perceived as a new global moral economy that we confront with the moral economies of the extractive sites of ETMs and ASM (gold); 2) the implementation of this ecologization in mining territories through a more localized bottom-up approach to governable spaces, which indicates both the reorganization of material flows specific to each resource and their infrastructures, and the recomposition of forms of politicization, in terms of social and environmental justice; 3) a comparative approach between supply chains aimed at determining the driving forces that orient their respective trajectories. This analysis of discursive and material circulations aims to consider the effects of decoupling between 'green' and 'dirty' supply chains, in a context of competition between extractive territories. The comparative case studies have been selected in the North and South for their complementarity, the expertise of the project members and the new orientations of national policies towards the extraction of ETMs. The main fields are France, where a collective fieldwork will be conducted to strengthen the comparison, New Caledonia, Bolivia and Ivory Coast. They will be complemented by secondary fields (Arizona, Venezuela, Senegal, Sudan) which have been selected to serve as counterpoints to the main fields or to shed light on decoupling effects. In each field, workshops will be held with the resident populations in order to exchange views on the energy transition and to carry out joint reflections towards a fair and equitable 'great transition'.

By all standards, water is today and tomorrow's most coveted resource. Although it has often been a vector of cooperation among multiple actors, observers generally agree that environmental conflicts around water management are likely to harden and entail severe risks of social and political unrest in overpopulated cities, both in the South and in the North. Worrying trends include recurring droughts and flooding, increasing volatility of resource availability, the melting of glaciers, and resource contamination due to industrial pollution, modern agricultural practices and lack of adequate sanitation. However, the specific way whereby mounting environmental challenges reinforces and/or modify the traditional dynamics of water conflicts has received remarkably scant attention. It is partly due to a technical bias that has devoted studies at identifying best practices and efforts at joint regulation by stakeholders rather than recognizing the pervasiveness of tensions, however evolving these tensions may be. By contrast, the BLUEGRASS project sets out to understand the evolving logics of water conflicts in front of new environmental challenges, rising from the encounter of two processes: climate change and urban dynamics, that contribute to produce freshwater insecurity. The will do so, in particular, by analyzing the vagaries of the exportation of the two-dimensional “French model” (i.e. a focus on management at the level of the water catchment area, and the promotion of the private sector to address environmental challenges) in the Americas. The research will focus on the way environmental problems are socially perceived and constructed, but also strategically appropriated and used by a wide range of actors. Case studies will include cities and their surrounding rural region in the West of the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil. Brazil will especially be devoted a lot of attention, as the project fits within the framework of a bilateral ANR-FAPESP agreement. Theoretically and methodologically speaking, this comparative with a small number of cases project seeks to highlight the interplay between multi-level coalitions, by analyzing both the fabrication of a global model, different national appropriations of and reactions to this model, and the way local conflicts play out. It also sets out to pinpoint the interactions between rural and urban issues, and to document the evolving tensions between the city centers and their peripheries in various contexts.

Transcultur@ is a joint research project led by a Franco-Brazilian team of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Its purpose is to develop an online Dictionary of Transatlantic Cultural History to be published in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. This encyclopaedia is conceived as an innovative scientific and technological tool for analyzing the cultural dynamics of the Atlantic Area and its central role in the contemporary process of globalization. The project aims at presenting an interconnected history of the Atlantic Area since the 18th century via a collection of analytical essays exploring the cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Americas. The project necessarily implies a multidisciplinary approach involving historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, musicologists, or specialists of literature, the visual arts, drama and cinema. Reflecting the most recent research and debates, the dictionary engages the question of transatlantic circulations and cultural globalization as well as the process of identification and the role of borders in the creation and the reshaping of major cultural areas since the 18th century. Supported by the TGIR Huma-Num, Transcultur@ aims at promoting digital humanities in order to measure, map out and analyze transnational cultural circulations in the Atlantic Area. The project will be led by three main partners: the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 University, and the University of São Paulo.

This project on the urbanisation of the Spanish Empire in the 18th century aims to map the continuities and discontinuities of the inhabited spaces of the empire, listing at the same time the areas that were under the control of independent indigenous political units or rival powers of Spain. Based on the cross-referencing of Antonio de Alcedo's famous Diccionario (1789) with manuscript sources, it will lead to the creation of a toponymic database and a geolocalized Atlas of villages, mission pueblos, mining centres, towns and cities of the Americas - which does not exist to this day - constituting a patrimonial collection for the use of historians, anthropologists and linguists. The parallel work on about twenty 18th century maps will make it possible to locate all the places thus obtained (some of which have disappeared nowadays). Two hypotheses structure this project. The first is that the cartography of this urban network allows another history of the empire to be made, one that is more pragmatic and attentive to real topography than to the question of new colonial knowledge, because it reveals a multiplication of borders (local, regional, continental) that has been neglected until now. In so doing, it reveals the contingency of empire. The second hypothesis of this project is that the cross-referencing of systematic and comprehensive sources (Alcedo's dictionary) with practical sources (reports and censuses made on a very local scale), as well as with cartographic sources from the period, is capable of constructing a new documentary heritage of toponyms, maps and a record of territorial occupations. This heritage is highly sensitive material at a time when various indigenous peoples are making claims, particularly territorial claims, to their respective governments. In its own way, therefore, the heritage revealed by this research corresponds to the equivalent of a declassified archive. The project will first carry out a computer processing of the Alcedo Dictionary (OCR processing, validation, tagging and data extraction) in order to compose a gazetteer which will then be geolocated by a geomatics engineer. The gazetteer will mobilise anthropological and historical know-how through linguistic, cartographic, demographic and political research (usually handwritten documents) which will have to enrich it. Data and cartography will constitute the material of an interactive portal on the topography of imperial urbanisation, in open access, where researchers will be able to draw on new sources for their work. The main scientific events of the project will be a mid-term colloquium on Alcedo's work, a closing colloquium on the methodological contributions of the project and its dialogue with other contexts and periods, provisionally entitled Colonising Territories, and a travelling exhibition. These will be complemented by training seminars in automatic text analysis and geomatics, as well as by more permanent research tools (edition of Alcedo's Dictionary in XML TEI format, toponymic directory of villages, towns and cities in the Americas, interactive open access portal, edition of an atlas of geolocated ancient maps). The project is also conceived as a place of training through research for master, doctoral and post-doctoral students. In addition to its interest as a tool for creating archives, the most salient feature of this project is the great complementarity of the transdisciplinary and international team that is leading it, in terms of field, profession or scientific skills: associating archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, specialists in automatic language processing and geomaticians, this team is in fact able to answer all the questions raised by the project.