The interventions called “rural land plans” aim at both identifying and recognizing land rights as “they are perceived and validated by the populations themselves”. They are implemented through a complex device of inquiry and intervention that mobilizes social theories and concepts in a more or less implicit manner. The different layers of presence of anthropology and anthropologists in the Beninese rural land plans design, understanding and implementation are analyzed on the basis of a plural ethnography combining basic and applied research phases. The analysis of the intervention as a complex chain of translation will be preceded by a discussion of the regimes of enunciation and mediator-concepts organizing the rural land plan.