Critical notes on the participating observation in the context of the Portuguese ethnography

Abstract

When the popular wisdom objects that «fine feathers don't make fine birds», it shows that there is a tendency to talk about the feathers and to forget the birds. In the same way one has talked much about the participating observation as a method of field work and very little about the ethnographer that makes it as an individual. It happens that the participating observation is, among all the methods of collecting scientific data, one of those implying the researcher, as a person, more deeply. The present text does not want to be an exhaustive discussion of the concepts of field work and participating observation. On the contrary, what the author is looking for is to present a set of questions arisen whenever one finds out that there are no feathers without a bird, no participating observation without a participating individual.