Qu’est-ce qu’un laboratoire d’ethnographie? Une introduction…

The anthropologist returning from long periods of fieldwork often wonders how to break the solitude instituted by his newly acquired knowledge or presumed knowledge: “To whom to confide what happened on the field, even what can never be made public? With whom to continue the complex dialogue begun on the field and before? From whom to expect a critique as radical as it is creative?”. The Ethnography lab is configured as the place and time in which if one does not find answers to many questions, one will find questions that will lead to many answers. In an era of reflexive deficiency, an era dominated by the tekhne and main stream thinking, the author argues, the Ethnography lab represents a kind of free zone in which to exercise reflexive criticism in all freedom of thought, with the certainty of receiving continuous food for thought, not keywords imposed by the dominant relations, i.e. by the administrative apparatus and bureaucratic diktats, often so harmful to the academy and the dialogical construction of knowledge. The case discussed by the author is the Laboratoire d’ethnographie de Rennes, France.