On the occasion of the launch of the Portuguese edition of the book As Narrativas de Vida (Bertaux, 2016/2020), Daniel Bertaux talked with the sociologists gathered at the XI Portuguese Congress of Sociology. The author spoke about life stories as a research tool in the social sciences and the controversies that this methodology has raised. In response to the criticism of its detractors, the sociologist argues that it is necessary to collect several life stories within the same social world in order to reach saturation. Thus, his main contribution lies in the way he used this particular technique of data collection, from a socio-ethnographic perspective. In this paper, the end result of this conversation, the author also discusses the process of the production of life itself (or “anthroponomy”) which he theorized in the late 1970s.

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