Field practices in a situation of social tension and civil war in Congo-Brazzaville ; La manera de actuar en situaciones de tensión social y de guerra civil en el Congo-Brazzaville ; Les pratiques de terrain en situation de tensions sociales et de guerre civile au Congo-Brazzaville

Abstract

International audience ; Referring to my own field practices in a situation of social tension and civil war in Congo-Brazzaville entails a genuine critical examination of a society which is at the same time a social world made up of a plurality of social microcosms and the field of my experiences of life, action and thinking. I was tempted – as if this could be taken for granted – to adopt the participative observation method through immersion in the social world in which one is both subject and object. I was aware of the double epistemological and social constraint in the reflective and critical approach of a socio-anthropologist according to which the field of participative objectivation is also that of social experimentation. In the first phase, research and fieldwork were carried out from 1990 to 1994 on « religious and non-religious mutual social support in the urban society of Brazzaville (Congo) ». In the second phase, research was done between 1995 and 1998 on the Matsouanist movement in the paradoxical context of both the process of democratization and civil wars in partnership within an ORSTOM and CNRS research group on the theme « City-dwellers and religions in Brazzaville ». This scientific construction with respect to historical time and research under tension in a field full of pitfalls enabled me to understand what working means on the present and the day-to-day in the timeframes of war, and, on the other hand to see how individual and collective identities are constructed through different processes of breakdown and recomposition of urban situations. ; Evocar las prácticas de terreno en contextos de situación social y de guerra civil supone un verdadero esfuerzo crítico con respecto al presente de una sociedad que es el mundo de lo social que contiene múltiples microcosmos sociales y también con respecto al ámbito de mis experiencias, de mis acciones y de mis reflexiones. He intentado, lo cual no es evidente, utilizar el método llamado de « observación participante » que implica una inmersión en ...