However close to its fundamental principle ethnocriticism may remain – that is, close to the multivoice culture of literary works – there is no doubt its definition has been altered. Indeed, it no longer tends to focus exclusively on what is traditional and popular, but to be characterized more widely as a study of the cultural modulations which define the structure of the text itself. That cultural pluralism emerges from various schemes (oral culture/written culture, popular/official, profane/religious, scientific/empirical, endogenous/exogenous, etc). It is precisely this evolution, which brings to light the theoretical, as well as the methodological (and ideological) challenges of that approach – which also stakes out the links between literature and ethnographic knowledge – that our article aims at analysing, thanks to the worked example of V. Hugo’s Les Misérables.