Participant Observation and Comparison
The importance to have an acquaintance with the object of research gives to participant observation a prominence and a role that overstep disciplinary boundaries. However because of its specificity the validity of this method appears often limited and one day or another most anthropologists face similar questions : how to generalize an interpretation based on singular cases ? How to amplify the relevance of data produced by participant observation ? How to make empirical results accessible to other disciplines and facilitate their appropriation ? To avoid the critique of hyperparticularism, « one anthropologist, one village, one culture », this article suggests allying participant observation and comparison and develops some tools to facilitate this conciliation.