ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

190Gabriela BoangiuLaplantine’s Ethographical Description: „Times in which the methodologicaltextbooks of socio-humane researches were semi-compulsory and presented asrules to be strictly obeyed– under the threaten of “excommunicating” waybeyond the frontiers of lawful science the one that, out of ignorance or out ofany other reason break them” 1 - has passed.Thus, there are some people that consider “the scientific culture” (thatnot only means the good learning of textbooks and of the so-called “perfect”resumes, but also lecturing the published reports of research, the so-called“author books”, very useful because of their implacable perfection, if this is tobe quantified) and the “practice personal exercise” as an adequate solution,both of them necessarily doubled by the regular use of “(self) reflection,epistemological (self)interrogation” 2 .It is necessary to briefly resume the main stages of Ethnology as science inorder to deeply understand it and its accumulations in the discourse of contemporaryEthnology. In this way, the main, common spring of Ethnology, Ethnography,Anthropology, Sociology is identified. Further on, we observe their relative step-bystepautonomy and the further methodological intersections between the abovementionedscientific fields in the perspective of “frontier” disciplines.On one hand, Ethnology is in such an obvious relation with Anthropologythat there have been times when the two were considered identical. Still, itsnegative side – reductionistic and unproductive- was obvious. Although beingconsidered as “clearly dissociated methodological stages”, Ethnography beingresponsible with “observation and description”, Ethnology with “datainterpretation” and Anthropology with “generalization and comparing”, thisdelimitation proved to be simplistic, and artificial 3 . Some researchers mentionrelatively flexible borders within these three terms that “continue to be used inorder to design the particular shape the ethnological work takes at a particularmoment: we still speak about Ethnography in order to characterize field work andabout Ethnology or Anthropology in order to emphasize the effort made forclarifying the theoretical part brought by research” 4 .On the other hand, in his attempt of featuring some major directions ofthe history of Ethnology and Anthropology, Dumitru Stan emphasizes thatEthnology and Anthropology “are nowadays in a similar situation with that ofSociology and any of the socio-humane sciences: they hardly fulfill thetraditional epistemological conditions of validating any science (object, methods1Elisabeta Stănciulescu, Foreword of François Laplantine’s „EthographicalDescription”, Iaşi, Polirom, 2000, p.32.2 Ibidem, p. 33.3 Marie-Odile Geraud, Olivier Leservoisier, Richard Pottier, Key terms of Ethnology(translated by Dana Ligia Ilin), Iaşi, Polirom, 2001, p. 14-15; Pierre Bonte, Michel Izard(coordinators), Dictionary of Ethnology and Anthropology (translation coordinated by SmarandaVultur and Radu Răutu), Iaşi, Polirom, 1999, p.431-435.4 Marie-Odile Geraud, Olivier Leservoisier, Richard Pottier, op. cit., p. 14-15.