pp. 37-66

This article considers the crisis of totalisation in ethnography and the perspectives that are currently available to overstep it. It summarizes the major lines of « integrative ethnography » which bas developed as a prolongation of social and cultural anthropology, around the idea of monographical totalisation. The article goes on to discuss the criticism it received and the new types of relation between survey and writing that have been explored in the narrative approach. It then imagines ethnographical practice which, by distinguishing between generalisation and totalisation, is put into place in the light of interactionism, then recent developments of action sociology.