The conflict of values of civilisations and the paradoxes of the history of Chinese modernisation appeared on a small parcel of land 18 years ago. This extensive study of Shekou has brought to light the social, economic, political and cultural stakes which underlie the recent metamorphoses of the country, notably of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the ambiguities and time-space lags of these metamorphoses. This article looks to reconstruct this historical process in the perspective of Chinese thought.

This study was conducted through interviews with a sample of researchers from French laboratories. It has brought to light two main themes which are interlinked: (i) all laboratories which reach a certain level of development are laboured by a diversification of their teams which tends to compartmentalise them; (2) this compartmentalisation is offset. The laboratory is thus the level at which one finds and manages the problem of unity posed by the compartmentalisation of teams which are open to the whole scientific field.

The nature of networks depends mainly on two variables: the weight of instrumentation and the degree of unification of problematics or thematics. Weakly integrated networks are found in those disciplines which use technologies which are easily disseminated because of their low cost, as well as those disciplines which have low degrees of theoretical unification. Nuclear physics and astrophysics are examples of the most integrated networks. A division of labour has recently developed in molecular genetics which has become de localised between different laboratory teams. We can describe these networks as paradoxical.

A logic of exclusion-inclusion nowadays dominates the debate on poverty and social policies, namely through categories such as underclass and social exclusion. Thus, poverty becomes an essentially moral problem, rather than political, and the poor are treated as a group apart. Though different, both concepts work to reinforce the fracture separating the poor, and increasing a process of erosion of citizenship ties—what Madeleine Rébérioux denounces as being today a crisis not only of work, but of political and civic ties as well.

Many familiar political projects—among them, demands for participation, for citizenship and for free movement and open borders—have been recently subsumed within a larger crusade against ‘social exclusion’. But each of these political projects seems better understood, and better pursued, in its own original terms. Furthermore, inclusionist appeals logically backfire: explicitly they are expansionist, urging the stretching of boundaries of membership so as to include those who were previously excluded; but every inclusion implies an exclusion (there can be no ‘inside’ without an ‘outside’); so indusionist appeals are implicitly consenting to a closed community, albeit one with a rather broader catchment. We ought to be striving instead for different kinds of communities, ones less internally inclusive and less externally exclusive. This amounts to a call for multiple overlapping jurisdictions, with many places where one can seek social support and many places where one might lodge a demand or file an appeal.

Edward Tylor's animist theory, and his theory of the survival of the soul were the basis for a large anthropological movement which grouped together a number of disciplines involved in the reconstruction of human prehistoric religion, as well as the identification of the savage components of civilised religions. From 1884 onwards, this British movement spread to France through a number of authors who are not very well known today. Their writings are nevertheless useful for their characterisation of religious studies of Tylorian inspiration.