From the depths of the Borneo jungle to private ménageries through the dark web, this article investigates the expansion of contemporary wildlife trafficking and maps an early twenty-first-century booming trade in living organisms, dead animal parts and metempsychic imaginaries. Fuelled by a multiplicity of emergent relational entanglements, such traffic involves life and death matters, big money interests, coveted commercial routes (and their extensive influence over land, people and spirits) as well as deep affective states infused with apocalyptic narratives, blood and bullets, tourism and terrorism. Here I concentrate on the curious case of pangolin poaching and identify problems pertaining to the characterization of life forms when such forms are massively poached, extensively traded and, overall, continuously transfigured along various registers of activities. Concomitantly, I detect in today’s so-called ‘multispecies-turn’ a problematic conceptualization of what an animal (individual or species) is – be this animal alive or dead, whether it should be hunted, protected, consumed, reproduced, mourned, or even held responsible for a new geological epoch. Rather than assuming the given of an already individuated form (from which to consider either pre-conceived or post-confirmed developmental stages), I draw on individuating processes that actually enable individuals to emerge (and emergence to individuate). While distinguishing between dynamics of concrescence and indetermination, I offer positive, operative and alternative concepts to re-engage with mo(ve)ment of shared becomings. Here, the animal is approached as an event.

This article briefly reviews the long-lasting commitment of Social Science Information to the critical analysis of orders of knowledge and the conditions for their creation to, subsequently, reflect on the current co-existence of a plurality of orders of justification across society, including the institutions of knowledge production. Furthermore, it suggests that recent social transformations have accentuated an asymmetry within this plurality, namely towards those forms of judgement that operate with quantitative measures and that are geared towards enhancing performance.

North America shelters a growing population of so-called 'exotic animals'. If the phenomenon is not recent, it now fuels a considerable black market. Jungle backyards compose a non-negligible (yet often neglected) part of some modern ecological landscapes. This article explores problematical situations emerging from these shared humanimal lives. It presents the first results of a multi-species ethnography and examines the prevalence of what I call beastness -an antique commerce amid humans and animals that reveals not only utilitarian purposes, but also relational entanglements. Such a commerce feeds a sizeable economy and exerts major selective pressures (both biological and cultural) on organisms and their environment. For instance, there are more captive tigers living in the state of Texas alone than wild specimens running free anywhere else on the planet. From a strictly statistical point of view, the average tiger is no longer the tiger we imagine. Not wild anymore but neither quite domesticated, some animals -pioneers, in a sense -shuffle traditional taxonomical and ontological conceptions. Through biographical material, I reflect on adaptive responses as well as on zoological potentialities developed by this always-evolving bestiary. Providing serious case studies to further debates dealing with bio-eco-conservation, I discuss the influence of informational and communicational processes crystallized by some of our contemporary crossed becomings. RésuméL'Amérique du Nord abrite une population grandissante d'animaux dits 'exotiques'. Si le phénomène n'est pas nouveau, il alimente désormais un marché noir considérable. Nous livrons ici les premiers résultats d'une ethnographie multi-spécifique menée au coeur de ces jungles de garage qui composent dorénavant une part non négligeable (et pourtant négligée) du paysage écologique contemporain. Dans cet article, nous développons l'idée qu'un tel commerce de la bête (ou beastness) entretient non seulement une économie de taille mais exerce des pressions sélectives majeures (à la fois biologiques et culturelles) sur les organismes concernés et leurs environnements respectifs. Plus tout à fait sauvages, ni pour autant complètement apprivoisées, ces existences pionnières menées par des animaux à la filiation parfois douteuse ne vont pas sans brouiller certaines de nos conceptions taxonomiques et ontologiques traditionnelles. Par exemple, l'état du Texas compte désormais plus de tigres en captivité qu'il n'en reste, à l'échelle planétaire, encore en liberté. D'un point de vue strictement statistique donc, le tigre moyen contemporain n'est plus (seulement) l'animal mythique qu'on l'imagine pourtant (encore) être. En offrant à l'analyse une série de données animales et biographiques, nous fournissons aux débats contemporains sur la conservation du vivant des précédents sérieux en matière de réponses adaptatives et de potentiel d'expression zoologique. Ce faisant, nous discutons la puissance des processus d'information et de communication cristallisés par certains de nos ...

Continuing our focus on analysing the current socio-political transformations with suitably revised scholarly tools, this issue of Social Science Information/Information sur les sciences sociales is devoted, on the one side, to observing recent changes in scientific practices, and, on the other, to critically reviewing some key themes and concepts in sociological debates. In between the two, so to speak, one article addresses the critical question of form-giving processes in social life, linking social formations to territorial productions. Recent changes in scientific practices Among the productive tensions animating social sciences since their inception is the 'transfer' of concepts from one discipline to another, sometimes from sciences to social sciences (though rarely the other way around). In his article, Julien Larrègue examines the emergence of a new sub-discipline-genopolitics-and the afferent problems that can trickle down through social analysis activities when the mobilization of a particular concept, in this case the concept of a gene, is taken for granted. Showing how flaws can infuse arguments as well as render actual tensions visible within an established discipline, his piece provides more than a case study of regular scientific epistemology. In fact, Larrègue's work invites us to carefully rethink the enmeshment, within apparently stabilized fields of inquiry, of conceptual production and its archaeological dimensions with political agendas, individual and collective trajectories, and institutional constraints. All of this renders social sciences not only sciences of social phenomena, but actually phenomena of sciences in the (un)making. Also addressing the transformations of research topics (and frictions of connection between natural and socio-political realms), the article by Anthony Larsson and his co-authors, Carl Savage, Mats Brommels and Pauline Mattsson, raises issues revolving around the actual configuration of social sciences activities-this time not only at the level of a discipline, but at the level of an institution. Unfolding the intricacies surrounding the creation of a distributed biobank facility in Sweden, the authors show how deeply intertwined political, economical and societal dimensions actually are, and how their respective affinities, interests and prospectives can converge and work together or, as was the case with this research infrastructure, diverge and complexify even more any attempt at stabilizing processes.

What is normally reconstructed as the early history of the social sciences is better seen as two quite separate lines of practices: one dealing with observations of matters of state and policy, called political arithmetic or statistics and increasingly resorting to enumerating and counting occurrences; the other one trying to develop concepts to understand what was seen as a radically new social configuration after the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century, there was rather little connection between the two. 1 Except that there was a problem: those who emphasised conceptualisation could never be quite sure in how far their concepts referred to the changing society; and those who observed, in turn, could not be sure what social phenomenon exactly it was that they were enumerating and counting. The bridge between the two lines, one might say, is measurement in the broad sense of the term, namely the elaboration of features of a social phenomenon such that those features could be made subject to systematic observation and comparison over time as well as with co-temporaneous social phenomena. Some connection between the two lines was established during the period that came to be referred to as the era of classical sociology, but in Émile Durkheim's approach much more than in those of Max Weber or Georg Simmel, for instance. During the period between the two world wars, the tenuous connection got almost entirely lost again in Europe where social philosophy and empirical social research flourished in separation. In the USA, in contrast, the development of quantitative research techniques was widely debated among academic sociologists, with a view to their impact on the discipline. Already in 1932, Floyd N. House addressed a section meeting of the American Sociological Society reflecting upon 'measurement in sociology' and, among others, referring to John Dewey's view that the scientific method tends to 'substitute data for objects' (House, 1934). In 1953, Samuel A. Stouffer returned to the theme under the same title, now in the form of a Presidential Address to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society. Thus, the issue is certainly not new and has long been recognised. However, the conditions under which it needs to be addressed undergo changes. Tentatively, we propose the following periodization of the more recent approaches. 2 After the Second World War, quantitative research methods became dominant in the US social sciences, and the latter, in turn, became the guiding model throughout the West and even beyond. But such hegemony also generated resistance, one particular expression of which was the 'dispute over positivism' in the West German social sciences (documented in Adorno et al., 1969). More than a debate, this and related occurrences in other settings were indeed disputes, led by antagonists from rather well-defined standpoints and with little intellectual movement in the process. As a result, rather 859468S SI0010.