ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate that the issue of "globalisation" has since the early 1990s often navigated rather superficially on a sea understood as being full of risks, with two massive assumptions orienting research and assessment: the risk of homogenisation and the risk of cultural relativism. It describes the rise and evolution of the uses of the words "globalisation" and " mondialisation " in the French language. The chapter presents insights into the most common negative interpretations of that phenomenon by French social scientists, with a special reference to the few who have shown an interest in investigating globalisation more thoroughly. Openness to the world and to non-Western thought in social science. The late and quite reluctant have created a situation that is similar to that of the two mythological monsters Charybdis and Scylla that Homer described in his Odyssey and that jointly threatened the ships attempting to navigate through what we now call the Straits of Messina.
