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Despite the interest anthropologists have shown for their peers’ writings since the 1980s, they have apparently been very reticent at the idea of studying their notes. Linked to Geertz’ interpretative theory, such caution is diversely justified depending on the types of annotations involved. Even when it manages to avoid the pitfall of interpretation, analyzing them may nevertheless feed into the controversies that crop up when 'revisiting' the classics of the discipline, which reveals the processes of conversion all writing imposes on data. As an indication of that change, field notes can also cast light on the first transformation that takes place in an on-going survey. At the heart of that double metamorphosis, the notes Marcel Griaule took during his famous conversations with Ogotemmêli (1946) bear witness to the reconstruction and ideological elaboration undertaken by the ethnologist, as well as to how his reasoning in the field progressed, discernable not only in the content but in the very form of his notes.