An impersonality regime
Working notebooks, held by a French mason between 1928 and 1952 have haunted the sociological imagination of his son, during more than forty years, forcing him to frequently revise the frame of their analysis. The paper is an account of the three main steps whereby this perseverance was performed : the first one took the notebooks as materials to build an anthropology of piece-workers masons, the second gave great value to the capacity of the field data sampling to embed both the work and his environment, the third deemed the erasure of the writer as a characteristics of his stylistic ontology. The tenacious sociologist with his admiring gaze moved thus from the enunciators to the statements, and from the statements to the enunciation. But, if he succeeded to ensure justice to his inherited notebooks, he remains far from finding satisfactory answers to the questions their existence as a collection still generates.