| Summary: | Referring to my own field practices in a situation of social tension and civil war in Congo-Brazzaville entails a genuine critical examination of a society which is at the same time a social world made up of a plurality of social microcosms and the field of my experiences of life, action and thinking. I was tempted – as if this could be taken for granted – to adopt the participative observation method through immersion in the social world in which one is both subject and object. I was aware of the double epistemological and social constraint in the reflective and critical approach of a socio-anthropologist according to which the field of participative objectivation is also that of social experimentation. In the first phase, research and fieldwork were carried out from 1990 to 1994 on « religious and non-religious mutual social support in the urban society of Brazzaville (Congo) ». In the second phase, research was done between 1995 and 1998 on the Matsouanist movement in the paradoxical context of both the process of democratization and civil wars in partnership within an ORSTOM and CNRS research group on the theme « City-dwellers and religions in Brazzaville ». This scientific construction with respect to historical time and research under tension in a field full of pitfalls enabled me to understand what working means on the present and the day-to-day in the timeframes of war, and, on the other hand to see how individual and collective identities are constructed through different processes of breakdown and recomposition of urban situations.
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