Laïcité is what Laïcité does: Rethinking the French cult controversy

France’s distinctive reaction towards “cults” is generally described as a result of laïcité’s consubstantial problems with religious diversity. The aim of this article is to present an alternative way of thinking about the French cult controversy and, ultimately, about the concept of “laïcité” as an explanatory framework for France’s response to religious diversity. It draws on empirical data to look at how notions such as “laïcité” and “cults” are used in official discourses and translated into administrative practice. This approach will underline that laïcité is not a driving force that predetermines a unilateral response to “cults”, but that laïcité is as laïcité does, in other words a highly claimed and contested value, reflecting divergent political and administrative approaches of the cult phenomenon. The framework “laïcité versus religious diversity” is also undermined by another crucial observation. While it sees the cult controversy as primarily a religious issue, it seems that the recent revitalisation of the combat against “cults” was made possible by its partial dissociation from the religious sphere and its extension to a wide range of practices and new areas.

Stability and dynamical behavior in a lake-model and implications for regime shifts in real lakes

A modified abstract version of the Comprehensive Aquatic Simulation Model (CASM) is found to exhibit three types of folded bifurcations due to nutrient loading. The resulting bifurcation diagrams account for nonlinear dynamics such as regime shifts and cyclic changes between clear-water state and turbid state that have actually been observed in real lakes. In particular, pulse-perturbation simulations based on the model presented suggest that temporal behaviors of real lakes after biomanipulations can be explained by pulse-dynamics in complex ecosystems, and that not only the amplitude (manipulated abundance of organisms) but also the phase (timing) is important for restoring lakes by biomanipulation. Ecosystem management in terms of possible irreversible changes in ecosystems induced by regime shifts is also discussed. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.

Pattern formation of chevrons in the conduction regime in homeotropically aligned liquid crystals

We report on chevrons (herringbonelike patterns) observed in homeotropically aligned liquid crystals with high electric conductivity. We focus our attention on two types of chevrons observed in the conduction regime. The threshold voltage and the characteristic double periodicity of chevrons (i.e., the short wavelength lambda(1) of the striated rolls and the long wavelength lambda(2) Of the chevron bands) have been measured as functions of the applied electric frequency f. With the aid of a crossed polarizer set, we have, in addition, determined the director field which shows a periodic in-plane rotation for our chevrons (with a wavelength lambda(2)) We arrived at the types of chevrons after qualitatively different bifurcation sequences with increasing voltage. The frequency dependence of lambda(2) also shows a qualitatively different behavior with respect to the two types of chevrons. The experimental results are discussed in terms of recent theoretical investigations.