The observers of babies and their scientific culture: What is the link between disciplines?

Résumé 0

Starting from the text by Benoit Quirot on babies and anthropology, which picks up on the question of transdisciplinarity, this text goes one step further by exploring the disciplinary culture and the professionals who work with babies, while also examining the way this culture influences the practice. The article first explores the conditions and the interest of coordinating disciplines, by distinguishing between interdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Then, we consider the notion that participant observation creates a “clean slate,” not from the theoretical presuppositions that partly structure what is observed, but rather from the meaning inferred from the latter. The article reflects on the distinction between an idiographic approach, which looks at the “real” baby, and a nomothetic approach, which apprehends the “average” baby. It investigates whether the baby observed in a transdisciplinary manner gains skills from being thus observed. Finally, we raise the question of whether the baby under observation can really be said to exist, in the sense that our conception of the baby is inevitably reductive, as he/she is constantly changing, according to his/her development and the context of the observation itself. We conclude the article by proposing a “complementarist” approach, inevitably methodological, with reference to Devereux, and we consider how this successive decentering can be used in clinics.