The remarkable figures showing the growth in China’s investments in Africa, its wide range of interests and the political and strategic advantages of its new global role are well known. Encapsulated by the effective slogan “win-win” and an anti-imperialist mantra, the Chinese presence in the region has resulted in a “soft power”, both an institutional strategy for spreading cultural values and private initiatives for adapting to the host country. With the opening of these cultural arenas of interaction, which differ depending on the context, the interests and the paths followed by migrants were abandoned in favour of macro-economic analysis. Since, the attention they attract is as much a due to the need for a better understanding of the local context as of practices for building a “subordinate globalisation” (Marchal, 2008) on a world-wide scale. The EsCA project is an expression of the desire to combine the knowledge of specialists on China and Africa, by working in pairs using a comparative approach, to analyse new cultural interactions and their various elements, constructions and effects. Three themes will be closely examined in both their material and virtual dimensions (web exploration): traditional Chinese medicine, cultural institutional and semi-private arenas of interactions (Confucius institutes, Chinese and mixed associations) and the geopolitical uses of the immaterial cultural heritage. These themes will be studied in three African countries – Mali, Cameroon and South Africa – due to their significant cooperation with the People’s Republic of China. Analysis of the virtual field will be facilitated by tools adapted for internet investigation, developed by the FMSH’s TIC Migrations programme (ANR Contint, E-diasporas Atlas).

Much research has been devoted to the issue of globalisation. However stimulating they may be, these different points of view fail to address an essential question: how, in concrete terms, the institutions and organisations that manage globalisation actually function. In the field of economics, for example, the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose purpose it is to liberalize global trade by putting into effect a system of rules designed to ensure free trade in goods, is hardly a well-known organisation. We propose to carry out an anthropological research that will focus on the negociation process and the internal functioning of the WTO and that will take into account the transnational and intercultural features of this organization. The WTO was created in 1995 with the purpose of liberalizing trade. It provides a framework for the negotiation of trade agreements and a forum for settling trade disputes. In addition, the WTO administers a system of trading rules. We will study the WTO's most characteristic characters: its multiculturalism, its use of negotiation, the different representations of exchange within the organisation, the search for consensus and the endeavour for making a global community, the WTO as an emerging public space, the procedure of dispute settlement and the overlapping of legal and political spheres. This research will be based on an ethnographic fieldwork within the various organs of the WTO. The principle of our research is not to impose a pre-existing grid of interpretation on the problems, but to listen to what is being said and thought within the organisation and to elaborate working hypotheses based on this listening process. We will observe the daily routine of civil servants and will follow the progress of meetings taking place in the building where the secretariat works; interviews will be held with the protagonists. Collection of empirical data in this way will comprise the research base. The team includes anthropologists from several regions of the world - Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe in order to better approach the diversity of the problems and to provide a cross-fertilization of views on the organisation.

The concepts of exchange, of circulation and of networks of interaction play a key role in our understanding of the Neolithic in Europe. A previous ANR-funded project, ‘JADE’ (2006–2009) focused on the axeheads of Alpine jades that circulated around western Europe during the 5th and 4th millennia BC. Movements of Alpine axeheads over distances of up to 1700 kilometres as the crow flies were identified, reaching to the Atlantic coast to the west, and the shore of the Black Sea to the east. The impression that is produced by the distribution maps and the contexts of deposition is one of strongly inegalitarian societies, where exchanges were controlled by an elite, who manipulated these objects by consecrating and/or sacrificing them. Such activities certainly were concerned with competitive displays of power, but they were also bound up with religious rituals, with mythology, and with the conceptual reproduction of society. We can oppose this western Europe of jade with an eastern Europe of copper. This division of Neolithic Europe into two, with its two systems of social value, profoundly changes our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of the Neolithic. The new project, JADE 2, involves a social approach to the contexts of discovery of Neolithic jade objects in Europe. Using this approach, and by comparing the centres of production in the western Alps and Piedmont with the peripheries of ‘jade Europe’, it seeks to explore the varying conceptual significance of these remarkable object-signs – the variability being linked with their social function, which differed from region to region. It appears that the social function of jade objects became reconfigured as they passed through different cultural groups between the Atlantic and the Black Sea. In seeking to complete the inventory of jade objects and their contexts of deposition, especially in central Europe and the Balkans, the objective of JADE 2 is to reconstruct one part of the social and historical dynamic of Neolithic Europe between the end of the 6th millennium and the beginning of the 4th millennium, by exploring the concepts which underpinned the long-distance movement of large axeheads and ring-discs of Alpine rock over a network that extended some 3000 kilometres from east to west.

It is obvious nowadays that social sciences and humanities are using more and more massively the digital audiovisual technology for the constitution of their scientific and cultural heritage in form of more or less important (online) video-librairies, videotheques, etc. These tentatives have to be understood with respect to the constitution of digital scientific and cultural resources which could be reused (readapted, re-authored,) in specific contexts of uses and by specific user communities. Nevertheless, this vision is in contradiction with the fact that, actually, digital audiovisual resources are considered de facto in a very limited, even simplistic sense as a sort of a linear film which is diffused as such – like in the traditional model of communication dominating in the TV branch – without any consideration as far as its specific cognitive, semiotic or again rhetoric profile or content. With respect to this matter of fact, the ASA-SHS aims to introduce a semiotic approach in the processing of audiovisual resources either by the researchers themselves or by any other user community interested in the adaptation « versioning » of audiovisual corpora. Based on a seven years long experience in the constitution, indexing and publishing of more than 5000 hours of online videos in social and human sciences (viz. The Audiovisual Research Archive program of the French Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme – FMSH - in Paris) and in relying heavily on one of the French main traditions in language and communication sciences (i.e. discourse and narrative semiotics), the ASA-SHS project evolves in three main steps : 1/ based on initial user requirement analysis, three specific online audiovisual corpora in history, literature and archeology will be analyzed from a thematic, rhetoric and narrative point of view in following a general methodological framework of document description ; 2/ the results of this « field work » will be used for the development of specific tools necessary for the content processing of audiovisual resources (tools such as ontologies or thesaurus, stereotypic description models, publishing models, etc.) 3/ once these tools developed and validated, they will be integrated in a already existing digital environment (used by the FMSH for processing the audiovisual corpora) and experimentations will be undertaken a) on the three above quoted working corpora and b) on other, sometimes very different test corpora in order to show the interest of a semiotic (and cognitive) approach in processing audiovisual corpora either for research itself or for education (formal or informal one) or again for professional objectives. The basic objective of the ASA-SHS project is to sensibilise the SHS research community to adopt a more sophisticated vision of the very structural nature of audiovisual documents and to show them the concrete benefit of a semiotic approach in the processing (i.e. description, indexing, adapting and publishing) of chosen audiovisual corpora.