The "Osmosis of the Gazes". Anthropologists and Historians with the Prism of the Field Research

The aim of the article is to show that academic field research, once it situates its subject within the concrete realities of the field, will transcend, if not challenge, theoretical findings of scholarly books. The article tackles an ongoing debate that gives rise to a certain discomfort among anthropologists and historians. These specialists, even the local ones/those who have studied in their own country, have different scholarly backgrounds. In most cases, they have come to live in the West, or they became foreigners in their own country when they began to live in an urban environment or were born there battling with the western "orders of discourse" (Foucault), cut off from life in the village or neighbourhood. The academic order of knowledge which the researcher has internalized will then in the field be confronted with the local norms. Applying a diachronic perspective, the text analyzes the problem of proximity on the ground by comparing this confrontation observed by the author in Africa with similar experiences in South East Asia and the Americas. It attempts to decode two perspectives in which the supporters close themselves off into apparently two contradictory syndroms: "historicism" and "presentism". It also examines closely other current themes in the field: the dogma of distance, reflexivity, and the specific perspective of the anthropologist. Both, the anthropologist and local historian appear to apply a multicentered perspective, and a range of views points and competences. The specific gaze of each of these observers alone is by definition insufficient to describe this complexity, because several competing viewpoints are needed in the process. The article suggests that the "osmosis of the gazes" permits a better understanding of the subject in question.