Alexandra Giroux

Mmm… Let’s take your diary. Vacations begin on 16 April. And what a pity, you have a real lack of imagination. What will you do for two weeks? Thanks to L’Anglomane, you just have to “copy and paste” some of the following brilliant ideas! First week, you can study. Then, just relax! Now, that’s original, isn’t it?

Monday 25 April: You have finished reading your favourite magazine in English? Don’t worry! There are a lot of publications in Nancy 2. You can find them in the library, in the Ofup displays or on Internet. Let’s have a look at VHSzine, Face à fac or Fistafac. (I’m sure you know how to use Google.)

Tuesday 26 April: Let’s buy some vegetables in the Faubourg des trois maisons. Then, just walk up to rue de Fontenoy. You will discover the Fanzinothèque. It is a place where you can find the independent press. People who are interested in cinema, nature, politics or what ever can read magazines in this place or even borrow them.

Wednesday 27 April: Are you a little hungry for culture? Today, let’s go to the Mediathèque, which is open from 10:00 a.m. to 18:00 p.m. On the first floor, improve you English by reading some English-language newspapers. On the second floor, tell your little sister that she can stay here and discover the “Rouergue” collection. On the third floor, let’s make new friends in the “Work place”. On the fourth floor, borrow the book Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie (in English of course) and the CD “Hommage à Jeanne Moreau” with Holden, Lilicub and others singing famous themes from the actress’s films.

Thursday 28 April: The Océanautes swimming-pool is open from 16:00 p.m. to 17:00 p.m. for free. You just have to cross the road if you are on the campus. You can loose about 500 calories. Get them back again by visiting Place Stanislas and buying an ice-cream (some tastes such as tomato-basilica are very fashionable!) Is that not enough? “Le bouche à oreille” on rue des Carmes is a restaurant specialised in cheese. Bonus: there are spoons pasted on the ceiling.

Friday 29 April: You probably know that it is very obsolete to go out on Saturday night. Friday is the greatest day to have fun in Le Caveau. What is it? A place under Brasserie St Epvre where you can join me and dance salsa. If you are a girl, it is very easy even if you are not a great dancer. Just choose a good partner. But if you are a boy, it is a bit harder to impress people if you are as graceful as an elephant.

Saturday 30 April: You are tired and stiff. Stay in bed and turn on the radio. France Inter proposes “La prochaine fois je vous le chanterai” from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and “Vous écoutez la télé” with Marc-Olivier Fogiel from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m.

Sunday 1 May: Try to avoid people selling lily of the valley and go to Haut du Lièvre. In the morning, there is a great market where you can buy clothes for 1€, exotic fruits and Arabic specialities. It is a great opportunity to find some vitamins for Monday. Why? You need energy for confronting a new day in Nancy 2.

February 9th sees the publication of Le Dictionnaire du Corps, a work steered by Bernard Andrieu, professor in Nancy 2. Thanks for his help in the realization of this article, essentially made with translated parts of his texts.

The body is our every day life. From birth to death, our body is the companion of our existence. Our children, our deaths, our sexualities, our kitchens, our movements, our communications so many physical cultures realizing symbolic and imaginary meanings in the shares and the representations. All the objects used every day are physical so much by their ergonomics and their design. Our environment and the state of the planet, express our physical customs. Our practices and our techniques engage gestures, postures and movements in interactions with the other bodies, the objects and the persons. Never being able to get out of our body otherwise than by the word, sexuality and action, each belongs to a material culture which educates him since the childhood by habit, by control and by ritualization.

The body is today in France the focus of diverse publications in biology, ethology, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literature, but no work, even Le Dictionnaire du Corps, can inventory and synthetize the researches and the definitions.

Le Dictionnaire du Corps (450 articles) solicited those, belonging to human and social sciences, who put forward in the jobs a definition of an ownership, a state, a practice, a technology or a model of such an individual body, social or collective. These physical cultures, observed and described by the sociologists and the psychologists, must be situated in their conditions of emergence both to the plan of history and the plan of the evolution of the concepts. The liberation of the body, the youth, the ageing, the expansion of sports and physical practices, the emergence of the complementary medicines and the physical therapies, the aesthetic forms, the arts of the body, the techniques of the body, the practices of maintenance, the varied sexualities… so many subjects studied in Le Dictionnaire du corps as the visible part of the physical iceberg are.

What does this dictionary talk about? Androgynous, bisexual, crucifixion, dance, empathy, feminisms, godes, haptonomia, impotence, youth, lesbian, menopause, narcissism, organicism, psychiatry, robot, soldier, tattoos, utopia, speed, yoga, X, … for example.

Le dictionnaire du corps prefigures an encyclopedia of the body in the social and human sciences. It creates the network of the researches on the body in France by grouping together for the first time the specialists in the service of the general public. It opens a new community of researchers and researchers belonging so much to the University, to the bodies of researches (NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, INSERM, INED) and in laboratories and research seminaries (School of France, International School of philosophy, EHESS)