29.5
Lessons Learned about Different Experimented Researcher Positions within Military Organization
This paper will focus on ethnographic methods used to analyze military organisations and groups and, more precisely about immersion which has been – and still his – a priviledged tool use during my research within military universe during the last twenty years.
Four positions will be questioned. A first one, as member of the Army when I was drafted and when I realised my very first research in order to complete my master's degree (study about incorporation and instruction of a draftee). A second one, one year later when I was a researcher completely outside the institution. A third one, as PhD student financially supported by the French MOD but also in a technical way to realise my immersions in the Army, in the Navy, in the Air Force and in The French Gendarmerie. At least, my current position as a researcher and a teacher on secondment from the French University within the French Military Academy of Saint-Cyr where I conducted a research on the socialisation processes of the French Army officers through a class of cadets1. Each one of those positions presents its own advantages or disadvantages, inevitably associate to the intelligible dimension of each study produced. The presentation will consequently stick to consider aspects which appear to me as most important: those relating to the posture of the researcher and his statute ; those of the delicate question of distance and the differences between the « participating observation » and the « observing participation » ; those correlated with the challenge of restitution and the significant stage of the writing with a possible self-censorship ; those still of the tricky question of the researcher's identity in a male dominant universe ; etc.