This book is a collective work born from a common desire: to rethink the way in which social science research is written and transmitted. Produced by a group of anthropologist-artists, it offers a unique gesture, mixing text, image and sound, to examine in depth the narrative forms of contemporary anthropology.

Based on six ethnographic surveys carried out in France, Portugal, Romania and the Congo, this work explores sensitive experience in varied social and political contexts. Inspired by phenomenology, this research questions living things, relationships between humans and non-humans, sensory perceptions, soil, time, climate and colonial memory. In doing so, the book opens a breach in traditional modes of scientific narration by proposing decentered writing where the figure of the author gives way to a common arrangement of sensitive materials. Thus, narrative design, graphics and layout are no longer secondary stages in the work, but acts integrated from the start of the process of designing and telling the story of the scientific object. The form thus also becomes epistemological, and the form-c relation had intentional force.

This book is not just to be read: it is looked at, listened to, felt. It invites a sensory immersion in lived worlds, often silent, by reinventing the forms of sharing the investigation. To do this, he offers a multimodal reading both in the book and on a website which highlights films, interviews and other ethnographic traces. More than an editorial object, STRATA constitutes an experience of thought, perspective and sensitivity.

This project is supported by the A*MIDEX ANFAA (Alternative Narrative Forms in Audiovisual Anthropology) Chair of Excellence at Aix-Marseille University / IDEAS.