Mesopolhis Day
"Questions d'Histoire, histoire en question. The state of the multidisciplinary debate".

For the MESOPOLHIS 2023 day, under the patronage of the President of Aix-Marseille University, we have chosen to examine the uses of history by the social sciences. This is an opportunity for the MESOPOLHIS community, and beyond, to stop for a moment and consider the methodological, and sometimes epistemological or even ethical, issues raised by our practices, and to open up the debate with a discipline traversed by a number of currents (micro-history, connected history, etc.), which raise pertinent questions about our ways of doing and thinking. The link between historians' and sociologists' knowledge is explored through research in action.

Cesare Mattina and Elisabetta Bini will approach it through a comparative socio-history of energy sites in France and Italy.

Nouran Gad and Théo Borel will be reporting on its work on youth migration in the Mediterranean, while Dilek Yankaya and Lucas Faure will deal with faith-based actors in development.

Our Guest Star for the day is Professor Giovanni LeviThe main news is the Italian reissue, 35 years on, of his masterpiece, L'Eredità Immateriale(Le pouvoir au village, histoire d'un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle, Gallimard, 1989), which in our opinion is a major event for social science researchers, particularly those among them who take a historical sociological approach.

Giovanni Levi claims a conception of history as a science of general questions, and not as a science of generalisations. In the first edition, Levi questioned the use of archives as traces rather than evidence, and considered it crucial to deal with the margins of society and representations of trivial events. Thirty-five years on, he takes the liberty of outlining a pertinent critique of the methodological weaknesses of more recent historiographical trends, in particular those of global history and connected history, and of the tendency to abandon a history that starts from the States.

For him, as Béatrice Hibou reminds us in her preface to this reprint, translated and published in French by the journal Sociétés politiques comparées: "The limitation of history to a mechanical factual causality, and even more so its simplification to the only solutions that have historically prevailed, contribute to depreciating the very meaning of history.

Microstoria, on the other hand, argues for a total (and not global) history, that is to say, a history of the complexity of actions and facts in which women and men have been and will be the protagonists".

These principles, which we consider to be a serious invitation to the practice of both multidisciplinarity and the historical and comparative sociology of politics, would benefit from being debated on the occasion of the MESOPOLHIS.

16 June 2023 - Programme

8 h. 45

Welcome coffee

Opening remarks by the MESOPOLHIS Directors Marc Bernardot and Mohamed Tozy

9 h. 15

Doing history as sociologists, doing sociology as historians. Comparative and multiscalar sociohistory of energy sites in Italy and France

Cesare Mattina (Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aix-Marseille University, Mesopolhis), and Elisabetta Bini (Professor of Contemporary History at the University of

Naples Federico 2)

10 h. 15

Presentation of the Critique Internationale : Faith-based actors in development
Dilek Yankaya (Lecturer in political science at Sciences Po Aix, Mesopolhis) and Lucas Faure (Doctoral student in political science, Mesopolhis)

11 h. 15

Coffee break

11 h. 30

Youth migration in the Mediterranean during the contemporary period. A cross-disciplinary approach History-Sociology-Anthropology
Nouran Gad (Doctoral student in political science, Mesopolhis) and Théo Borel (Doctoral student in history, Mesopolhis)

13 h. 30

Speech byEric Berton (President of Aix-Marseille University), of Rostane Mehdi (Director of Sciences Po Aix), of Aurélie Philippe (CNRS Provence and Corsica Regional Delegate), and Sophie Bouffier (Director of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme)

14 h. 00

Closing general seminar
Guest : Giovanni Levi (Historian, University Professor), on the occasion of the translation of his masterpiece L'Eredità Immateriale

Discussion: Dionigi Albera (Anthropologist, Director of Research at the CNRS) and Mohamed Tozy (University Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Aix)