The article examines a 30-year experience of collective ethnography in the sugarcane plantations of Brazil's Northeast. Over this period, the research group has worked in different temporal and spatial contexts, continually exchanging its findings. The author draws on her experience as part of the research group in order to focus on the conditions of entering the field, the seasonal variations and geographic displacements, the research group's morphology and the overall implications for anthropological knowledge. Debates over ethnography have neglected the relationship between the social conditions in which anthropologists carry out their work and what they are able to write about the social world. This article sets out to fill this gap.
L'article analyse une expérience de trente années d'ethnographie collective dans les plantations sucrières du Nordeste brésilien. Pendant cette période, un groupe de chercheurs a travaillé dans différents contextes temporels et spatiaux, échangeant continuellement entre eux leurs découvertes. L'auteur expose son expérience, en tant que membre du groupe de chercheurs, dans le but d'examiner la façon d'aborder le terrain, les variations saisonnières et les déplacements géographiques, la morphologie du groupe de chercheurs et l'ensemble des implications que cela peut avoir sur le savoir anthropologique. Les débats sur l'ethnographie ont négligé la relation existante entre les conditions sociales dans lesquelles les anthropologues accomplissent leur travail et ce qu'ils écrivent à propos du monde social. Cet article tente de combler ce vide.
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