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Dans cet article, on évalue la pertinence de diverses représentations du ruralisme et de l'urbanisme chez Marx, Tonnies et Weber, dans la mesure où elles se rapportent à la documentation actuelle sur la question de la réflexivité en sciences sociales. Étant donné l'influence linguistique dans la recherche en sciences humaines, le nouvel examen de ce discours n'est pas fait dans le but de définir la ruralité de façon «essentialiste». L'analyse porte plutôt sur la signification des tentatives que font Marx, Tonnies et Weber pour élaborer un concept de ruralité qui permet de démêler la façon dont fonctionnent les négations et les oppositions dans leurs textes. On prétend que le discours rural/urbain est structuré autour d'une modernité qui cherche àétablir un dialogue avec l'altérité et à questionner les limites. On montre aussi la difficulté qu'éprouve l'esprit de la modernité devant la nécessité de préserver un sens à l'altérité tout en l'engageant dans un processus relationnel sans pour autant se l'approprier. Plusieurs études canadiennes, qui font appel à la distinction rural/urbain, sont citées pour illustrer la difficulté conceptuelle du domaine. L'auteur affirme qu'un aspect de cette difficulté face à l'altérité, dans ce cas‐ci l'altérité du rural, tient de l'objectivité scientifique, laquelle exclut la réflexivité du processus de recherche. La réflexivité, inhérente et nécessaire au processus de recherche en sciences humaines, est donc ici à la fois sujet et ressource. This paper assesses the relevance of various representations of ruralism/urbanism in Marx, Tonnies, and Weber as these pertain to the current literature on the issue of reflexivity in social science. Acknowledging the linguistic turn in human science inquiry, the re‐examination of this discourse does not attempt to develop an “essentialist” definition of rurality. Rather the analysis is concerned with the meaning of the attempts by Marx, Tonnies, and Weber to develop a concept of rurality which involves teasing out the way negations and oppositions operate in their texts. The paper argues that the rural/urban discourse is structured by a modernist interest in engaging otherness and questioning limits. It also shows the difficulty a modernist consciousness has with preserving a sense of the very otherness it needs to engage. Several Canadian studies, which draw on the rural/urban distinction are cited to illustrate the field's conceptual predicament. The paper argues that part of the problem which modernity has with otherness (in this case the otherness of the rural) lies in the scientific requirement that, by virtue of a commitment to objectivity, reflexivity be excluded from the process of inquiry. Reflexivity, as intrinsic and necessary to the process of human science inquiry, is therefore both a topic and a resource for the paper. a … disquieting quality of modernism: its taste for appropriating or redeeming otherness, for constituting non‐Western arts in its own image, for discovering universal, ahistorical “human” capacities. (Clifford, 1...

This paper takes a phenomenological hermeneutic orientation to explicate and explore the notion of the grey zone of health and illness and seeks to develop the concept through an examination of the case of alcohol consumption. The grey zone is an interpretive area referring to the irremediable zone of ambiguity that haunts even the most apparently resolute discourse. This idea points to an ontological indeterminacy, in the face of which decisions have to be made with regard to the health of a person (e.g., an alcoholic), a system (e.g., the health system), or a society. The fundamental character of this notion will be developed in relation to the discourse on health and the limitations of different disciplinary practices. The case of alcohol consumption will be used to tease out the grey zone embedded in the different kinds of knowledge made available through the disciplinary traditions of medical science, with its emphasis on somatic well-being, and anthropology, with its focus on communal well-being. This tension or grey zone embedded in different knowledge outcomes will be shown to have a discursive parallel with the dialogue between the Athenian, the Spartan, and the Cretan in Plato's Laws. Making use of the dialogical approach as described by Gadamer, the Athenian's particular resolution of the tension will be explored as a case study to demonstrate the necessarily particular analysis involved in a grey zone resolution.

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