How is participation a garantee in ethnographic inquiry?
What makes the time of the survey on the ethnographics datas’s quality ? What is the guarantee of long-term observation in the ethnographical survey ? The long-term participating observation, is frequently justified with epistemological arguments. Since the steps of type rather “mechanics”, postulating the neutralization of the situations of investigation until those more reflexive making analysis of the situations ways of knowledge on the object, the long term observation, by supposed effects of dilution of the social distance, is frequently justified by epistemological virtues which I wish to discuss in this article. From some typical contemporary examples, we shall discuss of the epistemological presuppositions of long-term observation to show in fine how it is based on a latent bottom of persistent positivist epistemology.