Grappling with the issue of ethnography caught between identity and alterity, the author sets the limits and refutes the assertions of the dominant scientific model of rationality. He argues in favour of the language in keeping with the nature of the phenomena under study and socio-political diversity, citing as an example the ‘writing’ of Latin America. Translation is therefore considered as a model for internalizing that which originates on the outside, without removing the traces of distance and difference, for complete equivalence does not exist. Like an ethnographer, the translator is confronted with a primary referent, whereas literature, translation and ethnography are used as an experiment of limits, as ways of approaching the Other and as the methodical abandonment of identity as sameness.