Conference by Alain Cottereau, director of studies at the EHESS entitled "Make visible an invisible economy : a survey in Hispano-Moroccan area" on Tuesday December 18th 2012 à 6:00 pm in amphitheater simone Weil (Ground floor).

The conference is organised in association with Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Ange Guépin.

On the occasion of the release of Alain Cottereau and Mokhtar Mohatar Marzok’s book, Une famille andalouse — Ethnocomptabilité d’une économie souterraine, Bouchene, 2012, Alain Cottereau will present an approach both simple and radical, on the basis of a detailed ethnography: faced with de-realization of the world, faced with official invisibility of real economic life - erased by the dogma of the prevailing political economy - an anthropology of evaluation is still possible with scientific requirements, provided one goes back to phenomena. This will be the gaining back of simplicity against false evidence, starting with re-learning how to count. At the beginning, ask the question: what matters in life. Then, strive to know what matters for given social environments and formalize an accounting context, without altering what is "incomparable". This is how the investigation in the Hispano-Moroccan milieu is conducted, on which the conference is based. When Alfred Schutz, a phenomenologist friend of Husserl, in 1938, heard his younger schoolmate Friedrich Hayek, in a seminar with leading neo-classics Austrian, talk of (economic) "data": he asked, "To whom are such data given?”

Alain Cottereau is a sociologist and historian, director of studies at the EHESS in Paris, author of books and articles in the history of politics, history of labor law, history of techniques, in anthropology in today’s world, and runs for three decades at the EHESS a seminar entitled "Sense of justice and sense of social reality"

Alain Cottereau