The real and symbolic impoverishment of the contemporary working class has as its corollary the growing difficulty of its members to come up with a representation of themselves, that is, to produce a collective image providing a sense of identity for themselves and for others. This difficulty is handled differently in different contexts and the place ascribed to the ethnographer (called on to give an image of the group) is itself significant of this differentiated handling. Based on an ethnographic survey in a French working class village hit by the industrial crisis of the 1980s, an attempt is made to understand the meaning of the nickname given to the investigator at the beginning of the survey. ‘Big Brother’ (‘l’oeil de Moscou’ in French) stigmatised the impetuous curiosity of the involved observer, or what was perceived as double dealing by him but which was not perpetuated. The important thing here is that the nickname did not ‘stick’ : beyond the classic difficulty of the respondent group to let itself be divested of the means of representing itself, there transpires, through the status provisionally given to the ethnographer, the state of a local community struggling to rebuild an image of itself. When the group is silent as to its identity, the investigator must seek out some expression of identity that has lost its former means of legitimisation.