Introduction : La division sociale du travail d’écriture

Drafting the law. Civil servants at work at the French Ministry of Ecology

“…Building political differentiation is a necessity for the drafters, who anticipate the need to send signals to the majority as well as to their allied pressure groups, making sure the project will be accepted. That restriction causes the stakes proper to the administration (such as preserving the autonomy of civil servants working in the field) to correlate with technical-legal constraints: the rights to pre-emption, abandonment and expropriation, which exist in already normalized forms impossible to shake off (Coton and Proteau, 2012), must now be written into the law.…”

O papel da escrita na construção de causas públicas: uma análise do acervo de documentos produzidos por grupos de atingidos pela Usina Hidrelétrica de Tucuruí, Pará

“…Nevertheless, what we could call a 'graphic reason' present in the printed materials does not relate only to a technique of communication, but to an entire cognitive and sociopolitical system. Writing, furthermore, integrates a social relation founded on the unequal distribution of what Coton and Proteau (2012) call a 'scriptural capital,' that is, of types of knowledge and writing skills that tend to authorize the exercise of a specific kind of power. For this reason, the multiplication of the printed material originating from the movements of dam-affected peoples can be considered to have broken the kind of pre-existing monopoly over this type of skill held, in the affected area, by the regional media, itself controlled by local elites.…”