On the rural monograph

Abstract

The research form called monograph circumscribes a method one can lead back to the designation of «case study» or «intensive analysis» in the classification suggested by Ernest Greenwood. Looking for the first uses of the monograph, one would find a triple main origin: the human geography (specially Vidal de la Blache's school), the ethnology (principally the structural-functionalist classic school) and the social science (sociology) of Le Play and the «rural societies». But all those uses of the monograph reveal limits of theoretical visibility imposed by the articulation of the method with the theories that command it. In the first part of this article one examines some of those limits precisely, first in human geography (problems of space and the relation between «natural» and «social» variables), then in anthropology (problems of the closing of the analytic field and the anti-historicism) and, in the end, in the so-called rural sociology (marked, up to a certain point, by the dichotomy between evolutionism and anti-historicism). In the second part one tries to enunciate the conditions of theoretical legitimity for using rural monograph. There one says, on one side, that, against the temptations of the theoretical deductivism, it is necessary to reaffirm that the production of knowledge implies the field work, the empirical research, and frequently the use of the monographic method. On the other side, against the empiricist hyperfactualism (leading to the sum of close totalities, the ignorance of the assemblage contradictory social processi? the elaborate reproduction of the «common sense» notions), one must look for the alternative and explicit theoretical ways that may get out of the monographic method certain habitual presuppositions in its use that may effectively contribute to the intelligibility of the concrete situations.