Thirty years after...

This text looks back at the conditions under which the investigation that gave rise to the anthropological report on the Commission took place in the early 1990s. Abelès retraces the path that led him from his doctoral thesis to the European Parliament and then to the Commission. It highlights the methodological reflexivity that was at work in the course of the fieldwork, particularly concerning the relationship to the commission, the point of entry into the observation, the singularity of the position of intersection occupied by the researchers, or the effects of intrusion in the short term or in the longer term, such as during reception of the study. The text advocates a non-essentialist and non-monolithic conceptualisation of the institution as a system of structuring tensions between individual and shared identities.