The Second Fieldwork: Return and Signification in Marc Augé
In his lecture The Ethnologist and the Tourist, Marc Augé offers an observation that may easily go unnoticed alongside more visible distinctions, such as the one he draws between the traveler and the field researcher: “I have often observed that the second fieldwork is always richer than the first.” Read superficially, the remark seems to refer to methodological refinement or the gradual accumulation of experience. Considered more carefully, however, it points toward something more decisive: a particular conception of the temporality of knowledge and the production of meaning.
This article proposes to read that statement not as an empirical observation, but as a theoretical figure. The “second fieldwork” does not designate merely a return to the field, but a logic of return that traverses anthropological practice, writing, and signification. From this perspective, Augé’s remark can be reread through a double lens: Saussurean linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, insofar as both conceive meaning as a temporal and retroactive effect.
The Second Fieldwork and the Temporality of Meaning
As Augé describes it, fieldwork does not coincide with the moment of understanding. The initial encounter with the field is marked by immersion, surprise, and, in many cases, disorientation. Experience imposes itself before it can be conceptually organized. Only over time—and most decisively through return—do certain connections become visible and certain questions open themselves to reformulation.
This temporality of knowledge resonates strongly with the second principle of Saussurean linguistics: the linear character of the signifier. For Saussure, the signifier unfolds in time and acquires value only within a chain; it cannot be grasped simultaneously, nor can it yield its meaning all at once (Saussure, 1916/2005). Meaning does not precede the trajectory, but emerges from the successive and differential articulation of signs.
From this standpoint, the “field” may be understood as a lived chain whose intelligibility is constructed retrospectively. The first fieldwork is not devoid of meaning, yet that meaning remains indeterminate so long as experience cannot be reread from another temporal and reflexive position. Return does not simply add information; it introduces a reorganization. At this point, anthropological practice converges with writing, understood not as a mere transcription of lived experience, but as an operation that renders legible what, at the time, could only be undergone.
Return as a Point de Capitón
The retroactive logic structuring the second fieldwork finds an illuminating parallel in Lacan’s notion of the point de capitón. In his teaching, Lacan describes the point de capitón as that which momentarily fixes meaning, locally suspending the indefinite slippage of the signifier (Lacan, 1957–1958/1999). Meaning does not arise from a stable origin, but from a punctuation that reorganizes the chain from behind, producing a coherence that was not previously given.
Applied to the anthropological field, this notion helps clarify why the second fieldwork does not uncover a latent truth already contained in the first. The issue is not access to a hidden meaning that would have been present from the outset, but the production of a provisional stabilization of sense. Return functions as a point of knotting that confers intelligibility on lived experience without closing it off definitively.
This distinction is crucial. The meaning produced through return is neither transcendental nor final. It operates, generates theoretical and narrative effects, yet remains open to revision. Each renewed return—to the field, to the text, to the concept—introduces the possibility of a different configuration. In this respect, Augé’s anthropology stands apart from any accumulative logic: knowledge advances not through the mere addition of data, but through displacements that retrospectively reorder experience.
Conclusion: Writing as a Second Fieldwork
Returning to the field, returning to the text, returning to the concept—these operations do not follow a logic of repetition, but an economy of meaning that unfolds over time. The second fieldwork is not the last, just as no point de capitón definitively closes the signifying chain. Each return fixes something of meaning, yet always in a situated and provisional manner.
Read in this light, Augé’s remark ceases to be a methodological aside and becomes an epistemological key. Writing about his lecture after having read—and reread—it is not a redundant gesture, but a further displacement. The text itself thus presents itself as a second fieldwork: a rereading that does not seek to close meaning, but to set it back into play.
References
Augé, M. (1997). Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains. Paris: Aubier.
Augé, M. The Ethnologist and the Tourist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2quj5zf6wk&t=523s
Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious (1957–1958). New York: Norton.
Saussure, F. de (2005). Course in General Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916)
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