De l’autorité ethnographique à l’autorité du corps et des émotions

réflexions à partir d’un terrain « chez soi » auprès d’une minorité, les « roms » en Italie

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic research on Rom childhood and parenthood in Italy, conducted « at home » but with a social minority, this paper questions the ethnographer’s emotional and bodily engagement to discuss the importance of reflexivity and reflectivity (Csordas, 1999) from theoretical, methodological and epistemological points of view. In the first part I examine postmodernism critics and alternatives. Arguing that ethnographic knowledge results from embodied experience within the ethnographic encounters and relations, I propose reflectivity as an analytical tool complementary to reflexivity. In the second part, I analyse the emotions emerging from such an encounter and I describe its objective and subjective dimensions (my social characteristics and those of my interlocutors as well as my emotions and the interactional experience of my interlocutors). I finally show that while objective data allows to examine the ethnographic relationship as social sex, age and status bonds, the focus on (inter)subjectivity contributes to objectivizing these bonds within interactions.