This research area brings together inquiries that resonate with public debate, civil society, and the increased circulation of humans and ideas.

Whether in ordinary or exceptional situations, this research theme explores grey zones, in which indeterminacy and uncertainty prevail, where powers, institutions, norms, values, and beliefs are called into question. The research projects grouped here focus on the modalities that enable low-key political action in areas ranging from religion, kinship, and health to the environment and migration. Unlike the notion of crisis, which refers to a critical but temporary situation, the notion of grey zones covers the situations of unrest that we have begun to explore in recent years—states of agitation, destabilization, and confusion that can be prolonged—but it also differs from it. The grey zone refers to a liminal situation, an in-between, a border zone which, unlike “trouble,” has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a high degree of indeterminacy coupled with uncertainty about what is happening or may happen. This has led to a shift in research towards an anthropology of the infra-political in contexts of social, ecological, and political reconfiguration that individuals inhabit because they find it in their interest to enter, remain, or leave.

The aim will therefore be to consider the interstices in order to envisage the individual and the social, less through institutional frameworks and stable identities, and more by focusing on interactions, margins, and intersections in spaces of adjustment, circumvention, opportunity, and creation.

This theme is a continuation of research conducted at the Lesc on the exploration of forms of expression of sensoriality and emotions, as well as their materialities and bodily manifestations.

Work in this thematic area extends to the emotions and sensations as modes of expression and communication, as well as to perceptual apprenticeship and the incorporation of movement. It also raises the question of the limits of these experiences or their atypical forms, their performance as an object and tool of inquiry, and as a place of experimentation for anthropology.

Research in this area considers the relationship to time and temporality, both linear and circular; mythical as well as materialized, forgotten or reinvented.

It questions the construction of time in all its social dimensions, the processes and modalities of actualizing the past, its socio-political uses, and its local arrangements. Spaces of mediation of the past will be considered here not only as places of reconfiguration of the past, but also as places that allow us to imagine the future and sketch out possibilities.

These reflections are based on ethnographic observations of ritual, artistic, and museographic practices, as well as archives (private, family, and museum). They are also based on experimental research methods and the testing of new forms of writing and knowledge sharing.

The work taking place under this theme is oriented by a twofold observation: first, the awareness of the upheaval or impoverishment of human ecologies known as the “Anthropocene” has been reflected in the humanities by the deployment of inquiries aimed at repopulating the social sciences with new entities (hitherto referred to by default as “non-human”), as well as by increased attention to the correlations and interdependencies between phenomena on a deeply variable scale. The second observation is the growing rise of a political sensibility that attempts to bring habitability back to the forefront and emphasizes its relational and material nature. Paradoxically, however, everything seems to be done to render these two aspects invisible: the materiality of our surroundings, infrastructures, environments, and processes of composition, but also ecological chains of interdependence and the diversity of modes of association and relationship.

Anthropology over the last thirty years has largely contributed to making use of this point of view to critique the project of the “moderns,” a project synonymous with the impoverishment or even purification of the composition of the world. The critique highlights the imposition of a division between the human and the non-human based in part on the attribution of anthropocentric capacities and relationships. The work in this area aims, on an empirical level, to continue the motion of the kind of inquiry that has already been initiated, while radically renewing it on a theoretical level. Three types of problems arise: How can we describe the composition of the things and environments of human beings? Up to which scales is it interesting for anthropology to situate itself? To what (im)perceptibles should we be sensitive?