To suggest that wildlife corridors are a necessary component of restoring lost habitat connectivity requires an understanding of some of the concepts that shaped the conceptualization and implementation of wildlife corridors in the first place. To begin, as defined by the research group Conservation Corridor, a corridor is “a habitat whose main function is to connect isolated patches of habitat that would otherwise be inaccessible.” Next, understanding the value of wildlife corridors also requires knowledge of the concept of connectivity or the ease with which species are able to move between different appropriate habitats.

Understanding Connectivity

As mentioned in the Introduction, ecological connectivity refers to “the unimpeded movement of species and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth.” As habitats become increasingly fragmented, and as biodiversity continues to be threatened by the processes of infrastructure development, climate change, and other forces driving the Anthropocene, it becomes even more critical to protect connectivity (Figure 2.1). As Hilty et al. note in their 2020 IUCN report, Guidelines for Conserving Connectivity through Ecological Networks and Corridors: “Science overwhelmingly shows that inter-connected protected areas and other areas for biological diversity conservation are much more effective than disconnected areas in human-dominated systems, especially in the face of climate change.” Moreover, to achieve this, the 2020 IUCN report recommends establishing an ecological network for conservation to help establish ecological corridors and achieve connectivity. The IUCN defines an ecological network for conservation as “a system of core habitats […] connected by ecological corridors, which is established, restored as needed and maintained to conserve biological diversity in systems that have been fragmented.” This network, or system of core habitats, would ideally be comprised of protected areas, other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), and other intact natural areas. Together, these areas would constitute an ecological corridor; in other words, functioning in the positive, an ecological network would be connected with ecological corridors. An ecological corridor “is a clearly defined geographical space that is governed and managed over the long term to maintain or restore effective ecological connectivity.” While it is possible to achieve connectivity conservation goals without the presence of a network per se, ecological networks for conservation “are more effective in achieving biodiversity conservation objectives than a disconnected collection of individual protected areas and OECMs because they connect populations, maintain ecosystem functioning and are more resilient to climate change.”

This chapter examines the way that British women reworked their memories of their travels through their souvenirs at the turn of the nineteenth century. According to Susan Stewart, souvenirs operate metonymically – that is, they are fragments that stand for larger events and experiences. As an example, she notes that a ribbon saved from a corsage ‘is metonymic to the corsage, [and] the corsage is in turn metonymic to an increasingly abstract, and hence increasingly “lost” set of referents: the gown, the dance, the particular occasion, the particular spring, all springs, romance, etc’. Over time, these lost and abstracted referents are substituted by the narrative of the souvenir's possessor – that is, a narrative of their own ‘interiority and authenticity’. I argue that through a souvenir practice of observation and reflection, British women tourists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries undertook microtravel long after their original physical journeys were over.

British women tourists brought objects home from the travel environment as souvenirs. They also wrote of objects from the travel environment following their return home, informed by sketches and notes they had taken in situ (themselves objects and a form of souvenir). The women could use these fragments as literal or figurative touchstones to ‘travel down’, as Michael Cronin has described it, ‘into the particulars of place either in space (botany, studies of microclimate, exhaustive explorations of local landscape) or in time (local history, archaeology, folklore)’. They could also build on their observations of the objects to reflect on larger questions of history, culture, politics and identity, and themselves. This chapter starts with an exploration of British women tourists’ souvenir practice of observing (closely perceiving the particulars of a place by taking an object from it and/or drawing or writing an object-oriented impression) and reflecting (developing narratives over time). Their microtravel depended on an ‘interplay of spontaneous notation in the field and retrospective narration on return’. In the latter part of the chapter, I explore the traveller Hester Piozzi's souvenir practice in greater depth, as she reworked her memories of her 1784–6 Grand Tour over time to develop an identity as a demi-naturalized Welsh-Italian woman.

Literary theorists have been analysing the importance of identity in recent decades, both in regard to the characters in books and to the people who write those works. For example, what is the nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology, sexuality, gender or ability of a character or an author and how does it impact the way they write or are written about and how does it affect our understanding of the person and/or the text (e.g. see Bennett and Royle 2009, pp. 179, 199, 216, 234)? In translation studies, more recently, questions that have been raised include the following: Which authors get translated and why? Which authors are left only in their own language or in a select few other tongues? Who gets to become a translator and through what means? Who is invited to translate a given work and why are they considered the right or most appropriate translator for that particular text? Are there ways of challenging the choice of texts to translate and people to translate them? How does translation complicate ideas of nationality or other forms of identity? As Wilson notes, citing Peter Newmark, the ‘views and prejudices of the translator, which may be personal and subjective, or may be social and cultural, involving the translator's “group loyalty factor,” which may reflect the national, political, ethnic, religious, social class, sex, etc. assumptions of the translator’ (2009, p. 54).

In this section, I will focus on some aspects of identity on a larger scale. I am not fully inclusive here due in part to word count restraints and in part because of a lack of research. An example of a missing topic is how someone's sexuality might affect how and what they translate, and how translation in turn might impact on understandings of sexuality; but perhaps what is explored here can inspire ideas about additional aspects of identity and their intersection with translation.

4.1 Translation as a form of Building National, Cultural and/or Linguistic Identity

Rita Kothari and Krupa Shah state that ‘[t]ranslation in the twentieth century has acquired this new role – of fostering group pride and history and also of enacting linguistic and cultural identities’ (2019, p. 140).

Compressed Modernity, the Compressed Individual, Migration and Digital Work

Over the past 40 years in China, the effects of the accelerated economic transition, increased economic competition and an upsurge in geographic mobility between rural and urban labour markets have transformed employment opportunities for migrants as well as their social relations in the workspace. This means that an economy of enrichment (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017) is built on the rapid growth of the Chinese labour market, which has rapidly spread to various sectors of the national and global economy, particularly with the development of digital economies.

The recent emergence of a platform economy in China needs to be understood in the frame of China's ‘compressed modernity’, characterized by a juxtaposition of ‘pre-modern, modern, and post-modern regimes’ (Roulleau-Berger 2016), which implies novel social, economic and emotional contradictions in migrant workers’ daily experience in the workplace. As such, the contemporary Chinese platform economy appears to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has generated new working opportunities for the contemporary generation of migrants from the periphery, in many cases from inner Chinese provinces, who arrive in industrial cities and who are able to make use of digital tools to be employed in the digital economies, performing digital work on digitized economic platforms. On the other hand, such a novel performance of digital work brings about new forms of exploitation, subalternity and violence.

Crucially, the digital economy has taken on an important status in the production of ‘non-Western’ global markets, notably Asian ones (Wen and Liu 2021). The platform economy emerged in China as a new industry, or a new myth, against the backdrop of the global technological revolution. Originally launched by Amazon, microtask crowdsourcing is now practised by Chinese giant Alibaba Group. In platform capitalism (Chen 2018; Chen and Qiu 2019), the organization of labour and tasks is increasingly fragmented. Young migrant workers from rural origins have increasingly been employed by the Chinese digital economy, yet their freedom and autonomy at work are often challenged by the capitalist culture which characterizes these digital workspaces (Jia and Dwayne 2018). To reframe Ilana Gershon's (2017) understanding of neoliberalism, in contemporary China, migrant workers are ‘reviewed’ and rated by consumers; they are encouraged by their employer to ‘always work more’ in order to participate in this platform capitalism (Wu et al. 2020).

In December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 18, set out to travel on foot from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’, the antique toponym of contemporary Istanbul, carrying The Oxford Book of English Verse and a translation of Horace's poetry in his rucksack. Following in the footsteps of young aristocrats embarking on the Grand Tour on the cusp of adulthood, he craved a dramatic change of scenery, in contrast with ‘the dissipated nocturnal ramblings’ shared among London Bohemian circles. The transformative power of a trip towards the East, beyond the confines of the known and the familiar, was intimately bound to the choice of pedestrianism that involved a multisensory initiation into the untranslatable:

Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey across Central Europe conjures up, as Charles Forsdick has argued, ‘nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying’, exemplified by the frugal travails of medieval monks and wandering scholars. Eager to ‘travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps’, the young traveller nonetheless spent several months in baroque castles and country houses in the company of barons and counts, ‘talking of art, culture and history […], discovering the treasures of ancient libraries’. But he did not relinquish his initial commitment to walking as a prime means of locomotion that facilitated direct engagement with places and people.

This contribution will investigate the effects of walking on the sensory apprehension of boundary-crossing – whether symbolic or territorial – and on intercultural encounters in Leigh Fermor's travel narrative. Indeed, as we are reminded by Manfred Beller, ‘there is no such thing as a pristine encounter’, and in A Time of Gifts, the confrontation with the unfamiliar is frequently mediated through the lens of cultural analogies, conjuring up Brueghelian landscapes and Shakespearean Bohemia.

Raymond Boudon posits that methodological individualism (hereafter, MI) is an explanatory framework characterized by two integral components: a micro-level analysis centered around rationality (where rationality does not mean necessarily that action must be explained in utilitarian terms) and a macro-level analysis focused on unintended aggregation effects. According to Boudon, this explanatory model aligns with the research practices employed by major social scientists who made substantial scientific contributions. This study unfolds in two parts. The initial segment (the first four sections) delves into a more comprehensive understanding of Boudon's MI by examining its relationship with key themes in social methodology. These themes include the demarcation between scientific and ideologically oriented explanations, the ontology of collective concepts, various forms of rationality, essential aspects of a comprehensive sociological approach, and the discourse surrounding explanations, deductive-nomological models, and mechanisms.

The analysis in the first part of this study serves as a foundation for comprehending its second part. The latter, encompassing the last two sections, delves into Boudon's quest to validate the explanatory prowess of MI. Boudon scrutinizes the history of sociology, seeking evidence of implicit applications of MI with paradigmatic significance due to their prominence.

According to Boudon, the historical trajectory of sociology attests to MI's capacity to elucidate a diverse range of crucial social phenomena, including social change, ideology, false beliefs, and moral sentiments—issues often traditionally explained through holism or methodological collectivism. Boudon contends that MI found application as an explanatory tool even among classical authors who either failed to articulate the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of their empirical accounts of the social realm or overtly embraced holism without practical implementation.

This study zeroes in on Boudon's analysis of the implicit methodology employed by Tocqueville, whom he regards as one of the pioneering individualist sociologists. Additionally, the study examines Durkheim, highlighting the paradox between his methodological claims and the actual provision of an individualist account of magic and other social phenomena.

Boudon and the Cognitive Function of the Social Sciences

To grasp Boundon's conception of MI, it is essential to delve into his perspective on the nature and objectives of scientific social research. According to Boudon (1993, 4), social sciences have historically served three primary functions.

While it may seem obvious what translation is and what translators do, the concept of translation varies depending on when and where the term is being used and is affected by culture, history and politics.

2.1 Translation

Any type of communication can require different forms of translation; speaking or writing could be called translation, as we have to express our internal thoughts in an external format, in a type of language that is different from the language in our heads, because the latter is our own idiolect. Salah Basalamah refers to all the different types of translation and writes about ‘the broad distinction between translation in its traditional textual/verbal “narrow sense” including subtitling and interpretation, and translation in its broader sense which involves the mediation of diffuse symbols, experiences, narratives and linguistic signs of varying lengths across modalities (words into image, lived experience into words), levels and varieties of language (Standard Written Arabic and spoken Egyptian, for example), and cultural spaces, the latter without necessarily crossing a language boundary.’ (2019, p. 184) That is, we are all translating all the time, from thoughts into words, and between dialects and registers and modes and media. However, for the sake of space, I want to focus on this ‘narrow’ view of translation, that is the textual one.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers several definitions of the term ‘translation’. One is ‘[t]he action or process of translating a word, a work, etc., from one language into another’ while another is ‘[a] version of a word, a work, etc., in a different language’ (OED, ‘translation’, n.p.). In other words, there is the actual process of translating or the outcome of that process; Basil Hatim and Jeremy Munday ask whether translation is a process or a product (2004, pp. 3 and 6), while the OED differentiates between the two ideas, rightfully perhaps, because the word can, in English, cover both, even if we see a clear difference between process and product.

The OED definition does not specify whether the word or work to be translated can only be written, or whether oral texts count too; today, oral translation is often technically referred to as interpretation, whereas in casual conversation, I have found that most people outside of the field do not differentiate between translation and interpretation and either use them interchangeably or use one term to cover both written and oral works.

In a series of works published during the early 1970s, and especially in L’inégalité des chances (1973a), Boudon introduced a new method for studying intergenerational social mobility. He developed a simulation model that explains the attainment of social status through the interplay of one's social background and academic accomplishments. In this model, each individual within a given generation goes through two selection agencies, first the school system to attain a certain level of education, and second the labor market to secure a social status linked to the type of employment acquired. The comparison between the attained status in the workforce and the status of one's parents measures social mobility. Within a set of specific, well-defined assumptions, this model computes the trajectory of a particular generation from its point of origin (parents’ status) to its eventual position (offspring's status), thereby determining the resultant intergenerational mobility. During the period around 1970, when Boudon was engaged in writing on these topics, all computations required by the model had to be executed manually. However, in this paper, we capitalize on the computational capabilities of spreadsheets to yield instantaneous results. Consequently, we are able to conduct a more comprehensive analysis of the influence on social mobility of various sets of parameters, particularly focusing on the two crucial parameter sets: the demand for education and the class structure.

The first section provides a concise overview of Boudon's model, while second section delves into his index of intergenerational mobility. Subsequent sections explore the effect on school attainment and social mobility of different values of the parameters of the model. The third section investigates the consequences of changes in demand for education, the fourth section, of changes in class structure (from a less to a more egalitarian society), and the fifth section, of changes in the degree of “meritocracy” (a more “meritocratic” system is understood here as a system in which an advanced educational level increases the likelihood to reach a higher social class). The sixth section addresses the classic Boudon–Bourdieu debate on the impact and significance of “cultural inheritance” on intergenerational mobility. Last, in the final section, we analyze the relevance of what Boudon calls the “language of systems,” and the limits of the “language of correlations,” in the study of social mobility.

Raymond Boudon's career as a social scientist started with an inquiry into the mathematical approach to the study of social facts and the problems of the structuralist perspective in mid-twentieth-century sociology (Boudon 1967; 1971 [1968]). He then turned his scientific attention to the study of inequalities in education, publishing a book (Boudon 1974 [1973]), which has put his work at the center of academic discussions as he reached conclusions which were significantly at odds with that of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990 [1970]). Afterward, from the 1980s on, Boudon studied topics such as social values (Boudon 1995; 2001), ideology (Boudon 1989 [1986]; 1994 [1990]), and democracy (Boudon 2003; 2006). But, from that moment on, something had changed. Although he always was interested in epistemological issues, his focus became increasingly theoretical rather than topical. He aimed at discovering the proper general foundations of social scientific analyses through the study of the specific topics he was addressing. As a consequence, these empirical/topical concerns were increasingly brought together in order to illustrate the fruitfulness of what he termed the “general theory of rationality” (Boudon 2007; 2011).

Indeed, a large portion of his academic work from the 1980s up to his death in 2013 aimed at carefully building this theory based either on a rethinking of classical and contemporary social theories (Bulle and Morin 2015) or on empirical/topical insights. If a special concern with the problems of ideology, values, democracy, and political sociology indeed permeates his work, his analyses nevertheless all aim at clarifying the general research program he is trying to delineate for the social sciences.

It is no coincidence, however, that the analysis of the topics of ideology, values, and politics were put at the front as convincing illustrations of his own theory. Values, politics, and ideas are indeed complex things which can neither be fully explained using the instrumental approach of rational choice theory (RCT) nor using any of the various fashionable irrationalist approaches of the day. It is very easy to dismiss opposing ideas, values, or thoughts as being merely the result of brainwashing, false consciousness, crowd mentality, panopticism, habitus, the patriarchy, systemic racism, the heterosexual matrix, and so on.

Travelling is often perceived as an enriching but temporary experience as it implies a return to the point of origin, to one's home. But what happens when the passing travellers are forced to settle permanently in their destination? How do these interrupted journeys affect travellers and their relationships with the locals and themselves? Two short stories by French writer Marie NDiaye – overlooked by critics – explore the consequences of such a situation. In ‘En Chine I’, a nameless narrator travels to China to visit her estranged cousin and the country. Once there, she is compelled to accept a strange pact: to help her cousin, she agrees to let a local woman absorb her identity, a supposedly harmless experience. In ‘En Chine 2’, Patin, a business traveller, also finds himself unable to leave the place that he was supposed to visit only briefly. Seemingly locked inside the pension where he is staying, he is advised to change, to become ‘perfectly Chinese’, if he ever wants to go back home.

In many ways, those two protagonists can be seen as opposite figures. The nameless narrator of ‘En Chine I’ is visiting China as a tourist, while Patin is on a business trip; the former is asked to give away her identity to a Chinese woman, while the latter is being forced to profoundly alter his own by becoming Chinese. Yet, both short stories present a certain number of similarities: the country described in these texts is not the real China, but a place where locals and travellers have to abide by strange and unreasonable rules. In both, the narrator and Patin are perceived as exotic and fall victim to the locals’ obsessive gaze and compulsive desires. Finally, their transformation, which is presented as an unharmful condition to resume their journey, leads to a drastic alteration in the protagonists’ identity and to the impossibility for them to return home.

French travel literature abounds in examples of travellers whose exoticizing gaze prevents them from seeing the country that they visit and its inhabitants. In those tales, locals often fall victim to the Western gaze, which denies their identity, transforms them into objects of desire and can ultimately cause their death.

Writing in 1753 to his friend Horace Mann, an incredulous-sounding Horace Walpole, the soon-to-be-father of the Gothic, shared the surprising ways he was spending his time:

Walpole was entrusted with safeguarding the taxidermy specimens belonging to the collection of the late Sir Hans Sloane. Yet taxidermy is absent from Walpole's own fantasy Gothic house-cum-museum, Strawberry Hill, particularly surprising given his professional proximity to stuffed hippopotamuses, one-eared sharks, and freakishly large spiders and his view of museums as “hospitals” for unique singularities including “Monstrous births, hermaphrodites, petrifactions” (Walpole, Fugitive Pieces 49). Walpole also had a penchant for collecting items we might consider the sister arts and objects of taxidermy, including wax models, books on embalming, objects made from animal hides (e.g., shields made from rhinoceros skin), and prints that depict taxidermy. While taxidermy is a strange absence at Strawberry Hill, in the Gothic tradition that Walpole would go on to inspire, taxidermy's uncanny presence—from its origins to our present day—looms large.

One need only grab the remote to find evidence of taxidermy's ubiquitous presence in Gothic horror: in hallmark horror films like Psycho, Evil Dead (I and II), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1 and 2), and Silence of the Lambs to the more recent Friday the 13th, The Cabin in the Woods, Taxidermia, Get Out, and A Classic Horror Story; in television and streaming series like Penny Dreadful, Bates Motel, Tell Me Your Secrets, and Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities; and even in horror video games like Heavy Rain Chronicles: Episode 1—The Taxidermist and Taxidermy. Let's look a little closer at a few of these examples.

Raymond Boudon's (1934–2013) contributions to the social sciences demonstrate both depth and breadth. From the beginning of his career to the very end of his life, he tackled topics such as the use of mathematics in sociology, educational outcomes and social mobility, the social origins of values, the reasons for adhering to an ideology, the antiliberal attitudes of most intellectuals (in the classical meaning of the term “liberal”), as well as many other social phenomena. This apparent curiosity for a wide range of topics does not only reflect a desire to provide explanations for social phenomena he found intriguing but is also indicative of a more profound and ambitious quest. In fact, Raymond Boudon wanted to discover and systematize the foundations of a properly scientific sociology. In his mind, these foundations would allow for sociology to become a general science that would be able to shed light on a large range of social phenomena, thus explaining why he himself studied such a wide variety of topics. If he could find the commonalities between the successful analyses of a large range of topics, he thought he would get closer to discovering a general and scientific way to conduct sociological studies.

To achieve this, he developed an interest in the critical study of successful social thinkers of the past and of his time. His analysis of classical sociologists such as Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Tocqueville, and even elements from Marx or of some of his most famous contemporaries such as James Coleman and Mancur Olson allowed him to put forward a sociological theory that was sufficiently general to become the grounds on which, in his mind, social scientific inquiries on a broad variety of topics could rest.

In this introduction, I wish to present an outline of the main threads of Boudon's resolutely complex course of thought, which has greatly contributed to the development of a general and scientific sociology. As Boudon remains a relatively unknown figure in anglophone intellectual circles, I will take an approach that is somewhat biographical to contextualize this course of thought.