There Are No Minorities Here: Cultures of Scholarship and Public Debate on Immigrants and Integration in France

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2006

Abstract

Migration studies have long been characterized as an illegitimate field of research in the French social sciences. This results from the strong influence of the so-called ‘republican’ ideology on social sciences, the constant politicization of the subject in the public arena, the maintenance of a number of taboos revolving around the colonial experience, and a history of the concepts (race, ethnicity, minority) that makes their potential use in scientific analysis controversial. This difficulty of reflecting upon the ethnic fact or racial relations contributed to the implementation of a normative framework, which until recently gave priority to the analysis of integration, leaving the content of ‘racial and ethnic studies' little explored in France. This article offers a historical perspective on the way knowledge has been produced in this field. It highlights the ‘doxa’ of the French integration model in social sciences, elaborating on the controversy over the production and use of ethnic categories in statistics, the various taboos revolving around the role of ethnicity in politics, the discussions launched by the emergence of a post-colonial question and the transition from an analysis of racism to the understanding of a system of discriminations.

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Copyright 2006 Sage

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Publication Title

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

Published Citation

Simon, Patrick and Amiraux, Valerie. “There Are No Minorities Here: Cultures of Scholarship and Public Debate on Immigrants and Integration in France” translated by Eric Mielants in International Journal of Comparative Sociology, August 2006, Vol. 47, (3-4), pp. 191-215. doi:10.1177/0020715206066164.

DOI

10.1177/0020715206066164

Peer Reviewed

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