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 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).

Das Projekt TRIVIUM wurde 2008 initiiert mit Unterstützung der DFG, ANR, der DGLFLF, der DVA-Stiftung und der Robert Bosch GmbH. Es betrifft die Konzeption und die Realisierung eines Instruments zur Weiterentwicklung der Forschung in den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften und der wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich. Es handelt sich dabei um eine elektronische Zeitschrift, in der ausgewählte Artikel aus deutschen und französischen wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften in der jeweiligen Partnersprache veröffentlicht werden. Es geht also um eine Art »Zeitschrift der Zeitschriften«, eine Zeitschriftenschau, die in beiden Sprachen im Internet publiziert wird. Bisher erschienen sind drei Themen-Nummern pro Jahr. Die Themen der deutschen wie der französischen Ausgabe werden je nach Rezeptionslage der Forschungsarbeiten in den entsprechenden Arbeitsrichtungen des jeweiligen Partnerlandes ausgewählt; sie müssen folglich nicht jedes Mal identisch sein. Die Konzeption der Themen-Nummern hat die Sichtbarkeit der Zeitschrift und ihre Verbreitung über die fachspezifischen deutschen und französischen „scientific communities“ hinaus zu gewährleisten (vgl. die Zugriffsstatistiken im Anhang). Hauptziel ist es, den wissenschaftlichen Austausch mittels eines neuen Übersetzungsträgers zu intensivieren und zur Bewahrung und Valori-sierung der beiden Partnersprachen in der wissenschaftlichen Forschung und Kommunikation beizutragen. Die verschiedenen Themen-Nummern werden sich in Aufbau und Zusammenstellung auf die Forschung stützen, Forschungen begleiten und neue Forschungsarbeiten initiieren. Dieses Instrument wird selbstverständlich auch solchen Forschungskonsortien zur Verfügung stehen, die im Rahmen der Projektausschreibung von DFG/ANR als auch im Rahmen anderer Projektauschreibungen finanziert werden.