| Summary: | International book fairs (IBF) are the most dynamic events for observing the agents, practices, ideas and powers that define the books available in the publishing markets in certain coordinates of space, time and language. The article presents a reflexive return to research experiences on IBF, which began thirty years ago. It aims to contribute to a topic that has only very recently gained interest from colleagues of multiple national and disciplinary backgrounds; in other words, an object of knowledge in the process of being legitimised. The impetus for this exercise was the experience of arranging the archives generated over a dozen ethnographies in various fairs in Latin America and Europe for public consultation. The transformation of the archive, its passage from a private reservoir to a public one, was the product of two demands: one institutional and the other from colleagues from six different national origins who asked to review the documentation generated in my fieldwork. The theme is open with an analogy between the visible face of publishing production in general and in the social and human sciences in particular (what we can communicate in articles and other productions) as opposed to the face in shadows: the actions of intermediaries in that market of symbolic goods (publishers, booksellers, translators, etc.), on the one hand, and the work of knowledge production which precedes the publication of results (fieldwork, classification of materials, composition of archives, institutional conditioning, etc.), on the other. To enliven this set of experiences, the text then transcribes fragments of a field notebook (written in Liber-Madrid '97) and moves on to an analysis of the evidence, where I select some of the most productive conceptual axes in my work, such as the relations between professionalisation and internationalisation, between nation and globalisation. The documentary and analytical ensemble provides a substrate for problematising field archives and ethnography of archives, with a view to an epistemological proposal that enhances the dialectic between both poles or means of knowledge production. At the crossroads between personal forms of making ethnography with a certain archaeological imprint and the response to hypotheses by authors such as Foucault and Bourdieu on the powers and structures, spaces and times of the production of science, this article is ultimately oriented towards an analysis of the conditions under which subjects, areas of research and disciplines are legitimised in the contemporary social and human sciences.
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