International audienceDrawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researcher's moral character, especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines

Knowledge about how reviewers serving on interdisciplinary panels produce evaluations that are perceived as fair is especially lacking. This paper draws on 81 interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions. We identify how peer reviewers define "good" interdisciplinary research proposals, and how they understand the procedures for selecting such proposals. To produce an evaluation they perceive as fair, panelists must respect the primacy of disciplinary sovereignty, deference to expertise and methodological pluralism. These rules ensure the preponderance of the voices of experts over non-experts in interdisciplinary panels. In addition, panelists adopt a range of tactics and strategies designed to make other reviewers who lack such expertise trust that their judgments are disinterested and unbiased.

This article offers a new interpretation of Marcel Mauss's The Gift. It situatesMauss's argument within his broader thinking on the politics of sovereign debt cancellation and the question of German reparations paid to the Allies after World War I. Mauss applauded the policies of reparation and debt cancellation proposed by the French "solidarist" activists who were responsible for inclusion of reparations provisions in the Versailles Treaty. But Mauss was also aware that their legal mobilization could not by itself restore a sense of solidarity among European peoples. Broader systems of political alliance and anthropological norms of gift-making were also necessary. In Mauss's writings on war reparations, as in The Gift, he described the legal, political, and macrostructural dynamics at work in the settlement of reparations and sovereign debts, which he differentiated from the dynamics at work in the speculative logics of financial capitalism. In doing so, Mauss provided insights into the settlement of sovereign debt crises, which still agitate the international community today.

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, consensus, and the norm of universalism, but neglected the content of evaluation and how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision-making. The normative literature suggests that evaluators should overcome their epistemological differences by "translating" their preferred standards into general criteria of evaluation. However, little is known about how procedural fairness actually operates in panels, and more specifically about how agreements are reached in the face of epistemological diversity. Drawing on 81 interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, we show that: 1) Evaluators generally draw on four epistemological styles to make arguments in favor of and against proposals. These are the constructivist, comprehensive, positivist, and utilitarian styles. 2) Although the comprehensive style is favored, there is considerable diversity in the epistemological styles used in the panels we studied; 3) Peer reviewers define a fair-decision making process as one in which panelists engage in "cognitive contextualization," that is, use epistemological styles most appropriate to the field or discipline of the proposal under review.These findings challenge the normative literature that associates procedural fairness with the use of generalizable criteria of evaluation. 3 Fairness as Appropriateness: Negotiating Epistemological Differences in Peer ReviewTheoretical and methodological approaches are objects of continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1968;Merton 1972;Somers 1996;Steinmetz 2005). When textbooks and specialized publications refer to differences in theoretical and methodological approaches, they often frame them as irreconcilable epistemological styles, stressing incompatible elements. By "epistemological styles" we refer to scholars' preferences for particular theoretical styles (ways of understanding how to build theories and how to accumulate knowledge) and methodological styles (methods of proving, and belief in the very possibility of proving, theories (Knorr-Cetina 1999)). The diversity of theoretical styles ranges from the view that authors should acknowledge how the formulation of their theoretical orientation is shaped by their own social location, identity, and political orientation (DeVault 1999;Smith 1990), to the view that theories emerge from the observation of new evidence in light of existing explanations, without being affected by who the researcher is or how she apprehends her object (Nagel 1961). Regarding methodological styles, authors such as Nagel (1961), Ragin (1987), Singleton and Straits (1999), Stinchcombe (2005) and Tilly (1994) hav...

International audienceDrawing insights from the ethnographies in the natural sciences, which have focused on the role of technical instruments in laboratory practices, this article asks, "What role do technical instruments play in the humanities?" Editions of La Comédie humaine, written by Honoré de Balzac, are taken as a case study. Primarily based on ethnographic research with Balzac scholars, this article traces the evolution of Balzac's text from a unified and unadorned text in the 1930s, to a single annotated text in the critical edition of the 1970s, and to a searchable electronic format of different versions. The author shows that the different schools of interpretation in Balzac criticism (traditional, semioticians, socio-critics) constructed these diverse editing technologies to influence the evolution of literary theories. For instance, traditional scholars' theory of authorship entertains en elective affinity with the critical edition of La Comédie humaine. Sociocritics challenged its assumptions and constructed electronic editions to develop their own theories, particularly on the genesis and reception of Balzac's texts. By focusing on the epistemic cultures in which research practices are embedded, this case study complements purely institutionalist perspectives on knowledge-production in the academic field and highlights the presence of diverse epistemic cultures in literary criticism