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There is an impressive literature on ‘interdisciplinarity’. Nevertheless, few papers provide a descriptive taxonomy of the different forms of scientific work at the intersection of different kinds of knowledge. Those who tackle this issue adopt either a normative and internalist viewpoint in relation to a given discipline or the sociology of identity perspective.Moreover, the concept of ‘trading zones’ is so commonly used in the social sciences and beyond that it seems to be able to cover most of ‘interdisciplinary’ exchanges, but proves in fact to be insufficient. On the basis of fieldwork on complexity sciences, this article proposes to provide a descriptive taxonomy of ‘interdisciplinary’ scientific work, identifying five types described from interviews and archival citations: the frontier workers (a category that corresponds to what Galison has described with the ‘trading zones’ notion), the ambassadors (who work in multidisciplinary teams and help people from different disciplines to understand each other), the polyglots (who can ‘speak’ several languages and who often end up leading multidisciplinary teams), the dual nationals (who can ‘speak’ two languages and can conduct ‘interdisciplinary’ research alone or with others) and the translators (who apply one universal tool to several disciplines). We offer a critique of the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ and propose an alternative term: epistemic inter-culturalism.