Settings, Interactions and Things

Abstract

The recent resurgence and prominence of ethnography in France is placed against the backdrop of key phases in its subterranean development during the past half-century, caught in the rift between sociology and anthropology and invoked in different ways by various theoretical schools. The author seeks a way out of the current impasse between the classical position of `integrative ethnography' (which purports to capture sociocultural totalities on the basis of localized observations) and the post-modern position of `narrative ethnography' (which dilutes its object in the chronicling of fieldwork and its aporias) that avoids the deficiencies of `combinatory ethnography' (which dissolves collective membership in favour of a generic actor facing `possible worlds'). Drawing on Norbert Elias and Gregory Bateson, but also on Max Weber and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she clarifies and illustrates several key concepts - group of affiliation, social setting, person versus individual, object versus thing - needed to develop a `multi-integrative ethnography' that grants primacy to interactions (and the interdependences they materialize) while reactivating sociological tools indispensable for the analysis of interlocking social memberships.

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