The place held in common by the ethnologist and
those he talks about is simply a place: the one occupied
by the indigenous inhabitants who live in it,
cultivate it, defend it, mark its strong points and keep
its frontiers under surveillance, but who also detect in
it the traces of chthonian or celestial powers, ancestors
or spirits which populate and animate its private geography;
as if the small fragment of humanity making
them offerings and sacrifices in this place were also the
quintessence of humanity, as if there were no humanity
worthy of the name except in the very place of the
cult devoted to them.
The ethnologist, on the contrary, sets out to decipher,
from the way the place is organized (the frontier
always postulated and marked out between wild nature
and cultivated nature, the permanent or temporary
allonnent of cultivable land or fishing grounds, the
layout of villages, the arrangement of housing and
rules of residence - in short, the group's economic,
social, political and religious geography), an order
which is all the more restrictive - in any case, the
more obvious - because its transcription in space gives
it the appearance of a second nature. The ethnOlO thus sees himself as the most subtle and knowledgea