TOTALISATION AND ALTERITY IN ETHNOGRAPHIC SURVEYS

This article considers the crisis of totalisation in ethnography and t he perspectives that are currently available to overstep it. It summar izes the major lines of ''integrative ethnography'' which has develope d as a prolongation of social and cultural anthropology, around the id ea of monographical totalisation. The article goes on to discuss the c riticism it received and the new types of relation between survey and wiriting that have been explored in the narrative approach. It then im agines ethnographical practice which, by distinguishing between genera lisation and totalisation, is put into place in the light of interacti onism, then recent developments of action sociology.