ABSTRACT
How would we think of the practices of ethnographic fieldwork if we were to accept the Tardean premise of ‘mutual possession’, ‘the transmission of something internal and mental, which passes from one to other of the two subjects’ (Tarde 2008 [1899]: 20)? Might we need to elide one of the foundations of Durkheimian sociology in our practice of ethnography? That is, does the assumption of a super-organic entity, an over-arching, determining structure of social and conceptual relations (which Tarde argued against) shape our position as ethnographers in a manner whereby we not only construct culture in order to explain what we see to ourselves (Wagner 1975), but misperceive the actions and requests of our informants as representative of this abstraction, rather than their perception of our relationship?
