Le poteau, le traite et la balance. La vie morale des cités
The Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme is organising an evening event to present the book *Le poteau, le traître et la balance. La vie morale des cités*, due to be published by Créaphis in September 2026.
This 'Livres en dialogue' session will feature Kamel Boukir, the book’s author, in conversation with journalist Sylvain Bourmeau.
Following the event, you will have the opportunity to ask our guests any questions you may have.
Viewed as a way of life, the suburb is less a marginal area than a moral region, with its epicentre and its peripheries. The polarity of this landscape revolves around a triptych: the 'snitch', the 'traitor' and the 'informer', with family, the neighbourhood, and educational and republican institutions on its fringes. These hyperbolic figures of loyalty and betrayal shape a milieu governed by an ethic of defiance and a sense of excess. Kamel Boukir’s sociological study examines the concept of a fulfilled moral life: what are the bonds that compel each individual to hold themselves and others to high standards? What becomes of friendship when a life of delinquency pushes childhood friends to the brink of paranoia, fuelling the struggle for possessions and prestige at the crossroads of three hierarchical orders: generational order, charismatic greatness and economic success? Daniel Cefaï's afterword situates this long-term ethnography within the context of contemporary urban sociological discourse.
About the speakers
Kamel Boukir is a sociologist and senior lecturer at EHESS. His work focuses on youth and deviance from the perspective of moral sociology, exploring the conflicts of loyalty that arise when childhood friendships turn into criminal complicity.
His publications include: “‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Complicity between greed, hatred and betrayal” (Terrain, no. 72, 2022) and “‘We’re lads from the estates!’ The ecological genesis of moral experience: the sense of community among youth gangs in the Parisian suburbs” (Daniel Cefaï et al. (eds.), Human Ecology: A Social Science of Living Environments, Créaphis, 2024).
At the same time, his passion for the mountains has brought him into contact with tales of exploration. He introduced and translated Matthew A. Henson’s Diary of a Black Explorer at the North Pole (Zones sensibles, 2020).
Sylvain Bourmeau has, since the late 1980s, been involved in launching three enduring media successes: the political science journal Politix, the weekly magazine Les Inrockuptibles (where he served as deputy editor-in-chief between 1994 and 2008) and the online daily Mediapart (where he was part of the small group of founding journalists between 2008 and 2011). He was also deputy editor-in-chief of Libération and an associate professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
He is the author of Bâtonnage, a collection of poetry published in 2017 by Stock, and the author and director of a series of around thirty documentary films, ‘Les Intellectuels du XXIe siècle’, produced by Les Films d’Ici for France Télévisions, and *Ils ne sont pas l’extrême droite, ils font l’extrême droite*, due to be published by Éditions de la Découverte in September.
As editor-in-chief of the opinion daily AOC, Sylvain Bourmeau has also been a producer of the programme La Suite dans les idées on France Culture and an associate professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
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