De l’« ensauvagement » à l’observation participante : archéologie d’une catégorie anthropologique

This article shows how the notion of “participant observation”, theorized in the twentieth century, has its roots in Renaissance travel stories, where immersion into foreign societies is experimented. While the legitimacy of these testimonies is inherited from the judicial paradigm, legal writings borrow many references to “pre-ethnographic” stories to justify their purposes. These early forms of “participant observation” are both legitimized and weakened by the experience of immersion, which sometimes approaches “ensauvagement”.