Return to Saussure

Introduction: Return as a Problem 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 Laca...