The Tension in the Heart of the Anthropological Research
The study I have led during several years on closed institutions (army and freemasonry, in particular) made me wonder about the place and the role which I had to play in these organizations in order to analyse them. Between a desire of objectivity on one hand, and a desire to penetrate from inside an environment closed in order to understand its representations and its practices on the other hand, I had to find the happy medium between too big a distance, and too small a proximity. Concluding my study, I noticed that some closed institutions do pay attention to these questions : the freemasonry, for instance, tries to set up cognitive and behavioural processes so that the follower can create a dialectic between the inside and the outside, the self and the other, the theory and the practice.