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The author resituates the overcoming of Bourdieu’s scientistic inhibition, a transgression as he himself called it, in what has been the place of ethnography in his works, and, within it, of dialogical exchange and face-to-face interaction in the fieldwork. Keeping in the background a theoretical-practical framework, dialectical, even contradictory, the author focuses on three texts –the preface to the second part of Travail et travailleurs d'Algérie, Le métier du sociologue, and the methodological chapter “Comprendre” published at the end of La misère du monde– which manifest the status of dialogue and face-to-face interaction, and, at the same time, the tensions that, over the space of thirty years, appear in Bourdieu’s appropriation of these ethnographic gestures. A subsequent comparison of his practice with that of Gérard Althabe, his contemporary and almost compatriot, allows us to measure this transgression. the interview is no longer just an illusion of immediacy, it also becomes a “spiritual exercise”, an oblative openness, an active listening of the necessary singularity.