In this article I analyze the symbolic role of the hospital in its social context, from its creation in Rome in the 2nd century BCE to contemporary Montreal hospitals. I trace the change from its original role as a site to isolate the sick to limit the symbolic pollution of the allegedly perfect social body of the Roman state, a trope that became an important vector of unity as Rome expanded and incorporated greater numbers of foreigners and slaves. Today, however, western hospitals have become a semiotic engine where patients construct a new biography to counter the depersonalisation of contemporary medical practices. I propose that today patients use the hospital as raw material to construct a temporal framework that substitutes the rhythms of everyday life that illness and the institutional culture of the hospital have interrupted. These narratives adhere to the same basic structure: the entrance scenario is always admission to the hospital; the plot structure is built with the non-medical details of the daily hospital routine. Surrounded by a neoliberal ethos that insists on the autonomy of the self but silenced by the mechanisation of illness, contemporary patients transform hospitals into semiotic engines where patients use their immediate environment to re-engineer new voices of the self.

Inspired by a traditional ritual, the potlatch, Indigenous Dene communities in central-northern Alaska have developed new forms of reciprocity as a response to exogenous political threats to their autonomy. The potlatch involved the ritualized gifting of food and other items to selected guests as a means of creating political equilibrium by inculcating a sense of obligatory reciprocity. Today, people are reluctant to leave their communities and have begun shipping bush food from one community to the next instead of receiving gifts of food as invited guests. This new development is in response to a perceived threat to community survival. Since the 1990s, the Alaskan state government has been threatening to close schools with fewer than 20 students. This would affect most Native communities in the region, which generally have under 200 residents and correspondingly small schools. Closures would force people to move to larger villages with functioning schools or abandon their communities and move to a larger city (Fairbanks, in this case). While the government proposal to close smaller schools has yet to be implemented, it remains a constant threat (it was last revived in 2018). The new form of food redistribution allows people to stay and reaffirm their ties to their communities while reinforcing social ties to people of other communities.

Les Sekanis de la Colombie-Britannique septentrionale ont une longue histoire de contacts avec les groupes européens et eurocanadiens. Leur passé est marqué de plusieurs évènements importants, donc deux sont ciblés ici : le fait que les divers groupes sekanis ont émergé, dû aux dynamiques de la traite de fourrure dans la région, et comment ils l’ont expérimentée avec un système phratrique-totémique dans la deuxième moitié du xixe siècle. Cependant, ces deux volets importants du passé sont aujourd’hui totalement oubliés (tandis que d’autres évènements, même antérieurs, sont toujours d’actualité). L’auteur explore ici les raisons de cet « oubli » sélectif.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Italy experienced a series of crises when its precarious postwar political compromise was challenged by the effects of decades of structural corruption. The author was offered unsolicited narratives of the prewar and especially wartime Fascist period. Surprisingly, many of these stories cast Fascists and their Nazi political allies in a positive light. Here, the author argues that these favourable views of a bleak period are linked to the disenchantment and diffidence many felt (and continue to feel) toward the state and its institutions, and that these stories are not nostalgic expressions of fascist sympathies. Instead, they stress how people managed the micro-details of everyday life to gain small, individual victories against wartime degradations that would otherwise transform them into powerless victims. Even today, these expressions of individual agency reinforce shared notions that there is alternative to the institutional culture of an inefficient and oppressive state.

The "Gilgamesh" epic presents a thought experiment about succession and political stability. Although knowledge of the traditional system of the transfer of political power in Mesopotamia is far from unequivocal, historical. and archaeological evidence points to challenges from competing lineages and from powerful usurpers from the periphery. To extinguish rival claims, Gilgamesh adopts a radical solution: he exercises the droit du seigneur. In effect, he is the 5th king of Uruk but only the 2nd born in the city and the first to found a dynasty. By placing his sons in other lineages, he delegitimises competing claims from rival lineages and establishes a patrilineal dynasty. Gilgamesh's adventures in space (the raid to the West) and time (the quest for immortality) are merely framing devices for putting in place the events by which his biological strategy of ius primae noctis is revealed to be the only real means of strengthening the urban centre's relatively weak hold over its dominant periphery.

The authors argue that the various middle classes of Europe, especially Western Europe, are being fragilised as a result of globalization, certain political tendencies and especially by the standardization of space and place following the implementation of a policy of Europeanisation. In particular, we concentrate on the ECoC (European Capitals of Culture) programme (launched in 1983, over 40 Cities have held the title since), as this embodies these changes and pressures. We argue that the middle classes are caught in a crisis of confidence in traditional institutional arrangements as local definitions of time and space traditionally grounded in individuals and neighborhoods are reworked and reoriented to favour national and especially European identities. The new difficulty of attaching a sense of self to public places and to local time has weakened the social Self and created resentment towards larger political institutions responsible for denaturing local time and place.

Les Sekani de la Colombie septentrionale (Canada) étaient des chasseurs nomades qui vivaient, jusqu’aux années 1970, en petits groupes dispersés et autonomes sur le plan économique. Dans cet article, j’examine comment l’hyperindividualité qui accompagne ce style de vie est utilisée pour définir un champ de silence qui devient la base de la communauté politique. Pour ce faire, les Sekani déplacent l’agir individuel vers un domaine apparemment « surnaturel », encourageant les chasseurs à prendre contact avec les esprits tutélaires. Le silence qui entoure de tels contacts déclenche des commérages « secrets » qui aboutissent à l’identification d’un homme fort capable ainsi d’assumer le statut de chef gestionnaire du territoire national.