An intense debate broke out between China and France over the sovereignty of the Xisha Islands in the early 1930s, in which meteorology played a key role. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the relationship between science and politics; this article demonstrates the multifaceted role of meteorology in asserting sovereignty in the context of East Asian international politics. The establishment of a meteorological observatory on the Xisha Islands was designed to demonstrate China’s administrative control over the territory, and to reinforce its sovereignty. In addition, international meteorological conferences also provided an arena through which Chinese diplomats could establish China’s position in this region. With rising nationalism, it is arguable that, because meteorological factors are strongly connected to transportation, the military, the economy, and technology, meteorology was highlighted in the Xisha Islands case and became the core issue in the diplomatic dispute between China and France. Drawing on official documents of the Chinese National Government, along with reports from the English and Chinese press, this article shows how China strategically employed meteorology as a tool for asserting territorial sovereignty over the Xisha Islands, arguing that science provided an effective means of solving its territorial disputes with foreign powers.
William Sharp Macleay (1792–1865) is best known for his invention of the strange and elaborate “quinarian” system of biological classification, which gained enormous popularity in Britain almost immediately after its initial explication in 1819. While the curious story of “quinarianism” is already a somewhat obscure episode in nineteenth-century natural history, even less is known about Macleay’s decade-long participation, beginning in 1825, in the de facto abolition of the Atlantic slave trade around Cuba. While an 1817 treaty had formally outlawed the purchase and sale of enslaved peoples in the region, the trade continued in practice well beyond that point. From his colonial post in Havana, Macleay occupied leading positions in the mixed admiralty court tasked with adjudicating the cases of ships captured on suspicion of engaging in it. This article first recovers Macleay’s views on human difference, what we might call a “quinarian anthropology.” It then details his work on the mixed commission at Havana between 1825 and 1836, where he continually struggled to stamp out the smuggling of enslaved peoples against a Spanish conspiracy to surreptitiously support it. Finally, it reads Macleay’s work in law and natural history collectively, lashed together by the unifying concept of redefinition. Macleay, it argues, pursued his efforts to reform the order of nature in tandem with his efforts to reform the language and interpretation of the laws that bound his rulings. In both cases, that work of reform relied on altering definitions, creating new terms, and recruiting allies to adopt and advance them.
This study aims to trace the methodological and epistemological shifts in the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, highlighting the transition from the archaeological excavation of discourse structures to the genealogical analysis derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s theses. The research seeks to deconstruct the mechanisms through which knowledge was transformed into an instrument of power to generate discourses of exclusion, confinement, and control within modern institutions (such as the asylum, the clinic, and the prison). Through this meta-critical lens, the paper examines how the categories of "reason" and "unreason" were constructed, and how the complicity between knowledge and power led to the marginalization and silencing of peripheral discourses (such as madness and sexuality). The study concludes by demonstrating how "the genealogy of knowledge" and "the archaeology of the margin" contributed to unmasking the authoritarian practices hidden behind the neutrality of the human and medical sciences, thereby reclaiming the forgotten and excluded history.
Searching for the origins of mathematics within logicism has led us to present a historical-conceptual approach to the relationship between mathematics and logic. It has become clear to us that the concept of mathematics is not defined solely by its subject matter, but also by its method, which relies on two mechanisms: intuition and deduction. In the latter, the logical dimension of mathematics stands out, derived from the principles defined by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics. Furthermore, the principles of Euclidean geometry can only be understood through the teachings of Aristotelian logic. Although the manifestations of the logical dimension of mathematical foundations appeared with Leibniz, who paved the way for the emergence of mathematical logic, the crisis experienced by mathematics in contemporary thought reinforced this, at least from the perspective of the logicist school, which worked to find a solution to this crisis by reducing mathematics to logical foundations. This is precisely what we aimed to highlight through this study of ours.
This socio-ethnographic study seeks to uncover the mechanisms through which spatial exclusion and class stigmatization contribute to transforming the symbolic expression of the youth subculture locally known as the "Kahwiyyin" into delinquent practices and organized criminal violence embodied in the phenomenon of the "Araya." This dynamics is examined within resettlement estates in the city of Touggourt, southeastern Algeria. Utilizing a synthetic theoretical framework combining anomie theory, delinquent subculture theory, social labeling theory, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and symbolic violence, the research relies on an ethnographic methodology based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of individuals from both studied groups. The findings indicate that the "Kahwiyyin" group represents an initial stage of symbolic deviance rooted in aesthetic, linguistic, and stylistic rebellion. In contrast, the transition to the "Araya" represents a threshold of organized material delinquency governed by sequential pathways, most notably school dropout, police detention, and family breakdown. The study also reveals that spatial exclusion and institutional labeling act as intertwined mechanisms converting the symbolic capital accumulated during the "Kahwiyyin" phase into violence/crime capital that can be financially exploited by the "Araya," amidst a cumulative failure of the system of institutional actors (school, family, religious figures, media) to provide pathways of reintegration for stigmatized individuals.
