L’aca-fan : aspects méthodologiques, éthiques et pratiques

Since Henry Jenkins’s seminal works, the study of fan communities has been developing in the English-speaking world, and more recently in France. However, it confronts scholars with a basic problem, reminiscent of dilemmas encountered by ethnologists: how can one reconcile critical distance with being sufficiently immersed within a given community to gather reliable information? This problem has led to the emergence of a particular category of scholars, referred to as “aca-fans”, a scholarly positioning which raises a number of theoretical, ethical and practical questions. It is not enough for an academic to identify as a member of a fan community to penetrate it; conversely, even the most erudite fans do not implicitly have an academic legitimacy regarding the analysis of their community. Consequently, reconciling both points of view is complex but necessary work. Although fans and academics are often part of the same broader culture, their discourses are not equivalent, given that academics need to retain an anthropological neutrality on the community they study, whether they are part of it or not. Furthermore, the study of fan communities cannot be synonymous with outright appropriation, regardless of the expectations of the fans themselves, who might legitimately wish to have their say on the way their practices are described and used. Finally, aca-fans need to consider the practical modalities of their research, the fields studied and the existing representations of the community they study. This paper aims to synthesise those questions, and to propose a theoretical and methodological conception of the aca-fan’s role