Materials and cultures. The wide world of wild silks For centuries, amongst the many silk-producing insects, Bombyx mori or ‘mulberry silkworm’, native to China, has been extensively reared. It is praised for the fine and shiny long filaments drawn from its cocoons. Yet, other species belonging primarily to the Saturniidae family, qualified as ‘wild’ by silk specialists, have been bred worldwide in local textile industries, while a few species like the Chinese Antheraea pernyi and the Japanese Antheraea yamamai reached the international silk market during the 19th century. However, archeological findings show their long-lasting existence. At least two wild silks species have been used since the 3rd millennium BCE in the Indus valley (contemporary Pakistan), and another species was present during the following millennium in the Aegean. These discoveries and others made in the area comprised between Central Asia and Europe show that wild silks have an enduring past which deserves attention in order to understand the history of silk/silkS as well as the importance/significance of these materials in today’s globalized world. Indeed, these species and the substances they produce are the focus of emerging interests in the domains of economic development, natural resources management, and cultural heritage, and they feature in claims over biological and genetic resources under international property laws (Nagoya protocol). Grounded on both social sciences and sciences of life and materials, WILDSILKS is a cutting-edge project studying the history, the present making, and the role the so-called ‘wild’ silks can play to explore societal and environmental questions. It gathers an interdisciplinary team relying on history, social anthropology, biology, physical and biochemical sciences, as well as sciences of preservation. By working on three scales -substances, local knowledge and practices, and environmental and life shaping- WILDSILKS questions the techniques of production, uses and circulations of wild silks from museum pieces and contemporary material cultures. Through a comparative approach with Bombyx mori substances and cultures, such reflections will permit to integrate wild silks into a global history and anthropology of materials and materialities. By localising wild silks textiles in museum collections, and by determining their species thanks to biological and materials sciences, our project will contribute to the construction of a historic mapping of the uses of each wild silks species. Such a framework could confirm the validity of Aristotle’s and Pliny the Elder’s comments on silk production in the Aegean and trace some inter-regional wild silk circulations, for instance between the Indian sub-continent and Africa through the Indian Ocean. WILDSILKS will also investigate the present sociocultural dimensions of wild silks through ethnographic fieldworks in four areas –India, Southeast Asia, Japan, West Africa– chosen for the vivacity of their wild silks production and use, for their involvement in exchanges of species, substances, and knowledge, for the diversity of their sociotechnical contexts, and for their renewal and/or emerging interests in wild silks. It will question wild silks’ roles as indicators at the interface between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and in relation to environmental, social and economic imbalances. Thus, WILDSILKS’ young team members integrate local and global dimensions to the long history of silkS.

Cham Documentation Keywords : Vietnam, Cham, ancient cham, middle cham, automatic indexing of the cham characters, artificial intelligence. Parterss : CASE, Paris ; L3i, La Rochelle ; MICA, Hanoi ; Lab. des Structures Sonores, Ottawa. Fundings requested : 418219 € Duration : 48 months The CHAMDOC project focuses on one observation: in Vietnam, due to a lack of transmission, the written Cham heritage is on the verge of disappearing, whether it concerns inscriptions or the oldest manuscripts. Because of the cultural rupture of the second half of the 20th century in Vietnam, the country did not train young scientists in epigraphy and Cham palaeography and thus, the new generation of researchers who take up historical studies is cut off from this type of sources. Since 1832, the Chams have been being assimilated by the Vietnamese state, whose writing has been exclusively Romanized since 1920, and alpha-syllabic languages such as Cham are disappearing and, with them, a whole panoply of the country's history and culture. However, the Cham people have had a rich and eventful history between their blossoming in kingdoms on the coasts of Vietnam from the beginning of the 1st millennium to 1471, then their contraction in a small kingdom in Southern Vietnam until 1832, and finally their dispersion in the diaspora. Each stage of its history has been accompanied by texts reflecting its socio-political-religious functioning: inscriptions in Sanskrit and Ancient Cham from the 6th to the 15th century; manuscripts in Middle Cham on latanier leaves or on paper from the 18th century; manuscripts in Modern Cham during the French colonial period. The project aims to provide Vietnam's history with the opportunity to access these documents in the languages that have now disappeared: the Ancient and the Middle Cham. Thanks to the close collaboration between researchers in SHS and IT, it is now possible to reverse this fatality and propose a project on the automatic recognition and analysis of Cham characters and Cham words in two types of documents: inscriptions and manuscripts. In order to avoid the disappearance of these alpha syllabic writings, the CHAMDOC project aims to develop methods of image processing, analysis and recognition, based on artificial intelligence techniques, to allow automatic reading of sources (inscriptions in Ancient Cham and Sanskrit until the 17th century, Middle Cham manuscripts from the Royal Archives of Panduranga between 1702 and 1850), then their indexation for wider use. The CHAMDOC project is a multidisciplinary, unique and innovative project. Its overall objective is the design and development of innovative digital methods and tools for extracting and analysing characters from old written documents. More specifically, four objectives will be pursued: - the collection, analysis and indexing of documents written in Ancient and Middle Cham; - the development of image processing and pattern recognition methods based on artificial intelligence techniques to analyse the structure and content of Cham inscription and manuscript images; - indexing of content to allow the creation and use of semantic links between documentary sources; - the permanent safeguarding and enhancement of a unique cultural heritage. The project partners are computer research groups specialized in automatic content extraction (L3i and MICA) and SHS research on Cham (CASE and LSS). Together, they want to bring the written Cham heritage into the digital age and give a new impetus to this documentation. The project is positioned in the field of digital humanities, combining SHS and Computer Sciences. It is part of the scientific axis "Culture, creations, heritage". It aims to preserve the history and cultural heritage of the Cham people in Vietnam.

Contemporary forms of mobilisation are multiple, modular and variable. Scholars of social protests have long debated the making and extent of collective action. EVIMOB leverages a case study on an understudied Southeast Asian country, Myanmar, and investigates how memories, experiences and a history of violence can inform and generate new types of contentious action. The coup d'état of February 1, 2021, abruptly put an end to Myanmar’s democratic experiment and was followed by a massive rejection of military rule that took many forms. We propose an interdisciplinary approach to the relationships between violence and mobilisation, in urban, rural and diasporic settings and across the political and the religious fields through different periods. Building on historical, political sciences and anthropological methods, we argue that, in a society where the public mediation of the past is contested, mobilisations reveal alternative ways of mediating shared memories grounded in experiences of violence that serve as a basis for social change. Through archival, online and field research, the project seeks to answer a) how past mobilisations inform contemporary collective action by investigating continuities and innovations in repertoires and forms of contention; b) how mobilisations inform experiences of violence by analysing the (re)creation of memories, narratives and places. EVIMOB aims to refresh discussions on the relations between violence, memory, and politics which, in Myanmar, have long focused on communal and ethnic conflicts and on the systematic use of state coercion. Based on an ongoing collaboration between three generations of French and Myanmar scholars that intensified since the democratic opening of the country in the 2010s, EVIMOB offers a unique opportunity to foster research exchanges in the recently labelled “rare field” of Burma Studies.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s 2015 creation of an Economic Community is the next stage in the region’s integration, a process sharing many of the EU’s aims but using different means, based on consensus rather than rules. Their integration models differ, yet both have much to learn from the other. Europe’s knowledge of Southeast Asia (SEA), however, does not reflect SEA’s geopolitical importance and is dispersed through the EU. This is the context of the European call for research on Regional integration in South-East Asia and its consequences for Europe. SEA is developing institutions but also a regional identity for its people. Regionality here is not only a political framework but a set of grassroots processes, aspirations shaped by tangible/intangible heritage inherited from history, valorised/devalorised in present-day politics, possessing economic value. This may be studied by multi-disciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities. As part of its aim of placing French research at the heart of Europe-Asia scientific networking, the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) wishes to respond to the call. Its proposal for H2020 is provisionally entitled Regional Integration in SEA (RISEA); the project for which it seeks ANR funding (30,000 euros) is named Preparing ‘Regional Integration in SEA’ (P-RISEA). The funding will help the EFEO continue building a research network linking the EU and SEA. This network already exists, in the EFEO’s Asian expertise, partnerships and infrastructure (10 centres in SEA), and its coordination of EC-FP7 project SEATIDE (Integration in Southeast Asia: Trajectories of Inclusion, Dynamics of Exclusion), with a consortium of 5 EU and 4 SEA universities (2012-2016). ANR funding will improve the network’s reach and durability, increasing its chance of success in the call. P-RISEA plans to achieve two aims by the call’s deadline (Feb 2017): 1. Consortium enhancement (Phase 1 May-Oct 2016). The EFEO will convene plenary and consultative meetings to build on the existing network, inviting 8 SEATIDE partners to form the RISEA consortium and create mechanisms for its enhancement with associated or advisory partnerships: -Emerging central/southern European partners, to bring isolated experts into the academic mainstream. -SEA partners, including in Timor-Leste, of interest to EU policy as SEA’s only non-ASEAN nation. -Partners in China, India and Japan, for SEA integration’s “external dimension”. -Public (finance, development) and private sector (media, NGO) non-academic experts, to form a Public Impact Advisory Board. -A European Academic Response Network, to provide targeted policy expertise. 2. Project design (Phase 2 Nov 2016 - Feb 2017) The funding will enable the final consortium to discuss RISEA’s project architecture and research content in areas of scholarly innovation and political concern (anthropology, economics, environment, geography, history, international relations, politics). Proposed research clusters include: Framework Institutions, Emerging Identities, Transnational Mobilities, Water and Human Security. Proposed multidisciplinary topics include: refugees (Myanmar/Thailand); sea (South China Sea, Indian Ocean); impact of demographic and soc/pol change on economic growth; anthropology of ASEAN elites; Lower Mekong water, energy and food security. The project will be designed through discussion with the full consortium, including non-academic advisors. This bottom-up methodology was used for SEATIDE and allowed all partners to identify with project aims during implementation. These meetings and travel of experts to Paris to help write the proposal will be impossible without funding under P-RISEA. In conjunction with help we are seeking from National Contact Points, Paris Sciences et Lettres and other sources, ANR funding will position France at the heart of international research on Asia, Europe-Asia networking and academic counselling for EU policy makers.