As a result of a research on the consequences of the factional politics in the production of the actions on and the representations of the municipal politics, I discuss the reliability of the participant observation of reunions. Fieldwork experience of long and frequent "reunions" between rulers and subordinates refutes the assumption that they should represent the global universe of agents they invoked, and that they should be part of a larger totality: the urban political community -the barrio or the city. To transcend this assumption, and to demonstrate the constituent character of the "reunions", I remark the importance of giving priority to: the indexical meaning of actions, denaturalising the concept of society, and specifying the anthropological holism in the study of contemporary worlds. This argument will allow us a to discuss some studies of urban anthropology that have avoided the reflection on the consequences of the ethnographic study of researcher's "native worlds".
participant observation; political process; urban ethnographic study