Du texte au terrain : temps, durée, assignation dans la relation d’enquête

• Main Author: Anne-Marie Peatrik
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative 2009-03-01
• Series: Ateliers d'Anthropologie
• Subjects: age criterion; generational system; life course and life cycle; reflexive ethnology
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/8203

From the text to the field: time, duration and assignment in fieldwork relations. The question of the influence of the protagonists’ age on fieldwork relations is rarely considered, whereas that of gender has become a required element of reflexivity in anthropology. And yet age assumes particular significance when the populations studied attach so much importance to this criterion as to make it a dominant principle of their social organisation. This article describes the circumstances in which the importance of her age was perceived by the ethnographer long after the completion of her fieldwork with the Meru of Kenya, a particularly age-conscious community, and how the magnifying effect on certain processes has led to the definition of subjects of subsequent research. This paradoxical discrepancy, calling into question the exercise of reflexivity, opens the way to comparatist considerations about the effect of time in the researcher’s career, taken as an illustration of research into the anthropology of the ages of life.