À partir d’une enquête articulant des observations en contexte scolaire, des entretiens avec des parents et des questionnaires adressés aux enfants à partir d’un jeu de carte, l’article met en évidence le rôle que jouent les figures symboliques représentant des animaux dans la prime-socialisation enfantine (3-6 ans). Dans un premier temps, je reviens sur la manière dont la notion de totémisme a permis d’analyser les usages symboliques des espèces animales pour penser des catégories sociales, chez des auteurs tels qu’Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss et Philippe Descola. L’article revient ensuite sur la manière donc ces questionnements peuvent se voir adaptés à l’étude des représentations enfantines, afin de comprendre les usages symboliques élémentaires des animaux. J’explicite alors les méthodes employées pour enquêter sur la genèse des modalités enfantines d’appréhension des animaux. Enfin, l’article reprend les résultats de cette recherche, qui mettent en lumière la façon dont les différences entre animaux peuvent servir aux enfants à penser des différences sociales et à intérioriser des dispositions associées à leur position dans différents rapports sociaux, de genre et de classe. Ce faisant, leurs pratiques ludiques impliquant la mise en scène ou l’imitation de comportements animaux, ou l’expression d’un vif intérêt pour différents types d’animaux, peuvent ainsi constituer des vecteurs indirects d’apprentissage de leur place dans le monde social.

A number of recent monographs testify to the dynamism of transimperial analyses of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the late modern period. In particular, the study of prisoners of war, refugees, and pilgrims has enabled three young scholars, Will Smiley, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, and Lâle Can, to offer fresh perspectives on the history of institutions central to political modernity. By exploiting new sources, focusing on interactions between state and non-state actors, exploring ordinary practices of government, and decentering perspectives, these volumes contribute to shaping a powerful historiographical renewal. Reading them together, this article considers the dynamics of the co-construction of imperial orders based on shared conceptions of sovereignty, subjecthood, and protection. It underlines the systemic entanglement of the two empires’ colonization projects, the centrality of borderland actors, and the complex redefinition of affiliations and belonging that took place in the course of these often violent processes of modernization.

When the adjective “vegetarian” first appeared in a published text, in 1842, it was hardly intended as a daring neologism: derived from the Latin vegetus, it was meant to indicate a healthy state of body and mind, and was employed as an alternative to various other terms such as “abstinent,” “Pythagorean,” or “frugivorous.” The nineteenth-century “vegetarians” sought to emphasize the conceptual continuity between their choice to abstain from meat, or from animal products altogether, and the long tradition of ancient philosophers like Porphyry and Plutarch, as well as biblical imagery regarding human diet before the Fall. This article examines the intellectual milieu in which the word “vegetarianism” was coined in order to establish the connections both with current understandings of this diet and with discussions on abstaining from meat before the term itself started to be employed. The result is a case study of the intersections between the history of a concept and the entangled histories of the various words accompanying it. The methodology of controlled anachronism is presented as a productive tool that allows historians (of philosophy) to identify conceptual trajectories while safeguarding contextualization, and thus to trace the history of an idea amidst terminological change. The article is a plaidoyer for the application of anachronisms to historical research, moving beyond the view that they are incompatible with history’s alleged need for neutrality.