Enquêter en temps de crise à Cuba

Abstract

This article proposes to reflect on the way in which the time of the urban fabric and the socio-spatial changes in Havana can be understood through the daily and ordinary fieldwork experience. Long and repeated ethnography allows us to observe changes from below and from the perspective of the inhabitants’ experiences, while at the same time confronting these changes with the major structural evolution that the country is undergoing. The prolonged time spent in Cuba also allows the researcher to obtain a certain legitimacy, but also raises important issues of reflexivity. The life-story approach and housing biography are therefore particularly interesting methods to mobilize within the framework of a geographical analysis, to understand how representations and discourses on time contribute to the production of urban forms and residential trajectories. Object biography makes it possible to give material substance to life stories and to embody the different registers of times mobilized by the actors.

Keywords

• Time
• Life-story
• Biography
• Housing
• Research field