The use of very long term inquiry in ‘ethnographic reasoning.’ Compared analyses of immersion inquiries with dancers and firefighters
The ethnographic investigation implies an intimate, embodied, even carnal knowledge of the environment surveyed and the social actors. It also requires the researcher to work on himself, making it possible to approach as closely as possible the social, psychological, economic, and other realities of the other, who has become, sometimes a friend. But little attention has been paid to the specific contributions of long time in ethnography : If the immersive aspect of the investigation has been the subject of numerous debates (identification objectivation, reflexivity ...), the effect of the long or even very long time has been less analyzed. From two very long-term surveys of the dance world and firefighters, we propose to show how this atypical temporality of social science work allows us, first to desingularize the individual who is being investigated, gradually relocated to a group, a history, a tradition, a family ... The relationship established over the long time then contributes to build trust such that some subjects end up being addressed while they have been carefully euphemised or set aside for months or even years. Finally, we have to go beyond the kind of snapshot to which our quicker, more distant inquiries sometimes accustom us.