Pense-bêtes, astuces et recettes de jardiniers-observateurs de papillons

Abstract

The Garden Butterfly observatory (OPJ) has been running since 2006. It is the result of a collaboration between a Laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History and Noé Conservation, a NGO dedicated to the promotion of Nature’s protection. The OPJ is an epitome for citizen sciences, in which knowledge is jointly produced by professionals and lay people. This paper exemplifies a special managerial stance which amounts to keeping open the possibility to take part in the project without previous requirement in terms of competence. This requires a pragmatic method that leads to an end-of-pipe complexification in the statistic treatment of butterflies populations and their evolution. This pragmatism which tries to break up the learning into simple operations, is addressed in this paper, by comparing it with ethnomethods of several amateurs effectively involved in OPJ, through which lay people conduct their actions in a complex manner to fit, at the end, with a standardized protocol. It leads to stress the symmetry between the way the protocol operates in the scientific world on the one hand, and in the world of amateurs on the other, thanks to an interpretive flexibility and material connectivity, which are also called “user friendliness”. We conclude on the importance for human creativity of exosomatic technologies that develop accuracy and precision and enable a better ability to tell apart species and fuel biographic trajectories with an ever more vivid recollection of memories and creation of “souvenirs” for the future.

Keywords

• pragmatism
• citizen science
• entomology
• natural science
• butterfly
• learned societie