Professor Anne-Marie Picard has written two entries ("Acte manqué" and "Ennui") in the Dictionnaire de la fatigue, just published by Droz (Travaux de Sciences sociales) and edited by Philippe Zawieja (from Mine-Paris Tech).
"As one of our most intimate and daily experience, fatigue is a kind of in-between that questions and disturbs our mental and physical borders. Is it a warning signal, a form of stress, or an emotion?
As the Western biomedical approach has difficulty defining this non specific, too subjective symptom, this dictionary rather uses the humanities and social sciences to approach the very heart of the phenomenon. Coming from a wide range of scientific fields, 91 contributors illustrate through 131 entries how, throughout peoples and centuries, each society probably has its favorite or specific form of fatigue, depending on its relationship to the body, to the Divine, to death or to work. From acedia to melancholy, from neurasthenia to burn out or bore out, this Dictionary of Fatigue prepares the foundation for a future anthropology of fatigue."