Multi-sited Ethnography: Reactions to, and Potentials of, an Ethos of Anthropological Method During the Early Decades of the 2000s
Keywords:
multi-sited ethnography, metamethod, research designAbstract
I develop here a discussion of the idea of multi-sited ethnography by engaging with the reactions to it that I have perceived, primarily among anthropologists. These reactions express an interesting mix of doubt and hope—an anxiety structure-- for innovation in the practices of research in the classic tradition of fieldwork/ethnography that continues, perhaps more than ever, to give shape and identity to social/cultural anthropology. However, in answering for multi-sited ethnography, I do not want to merely offer a justification for it or argue for its feasibility, but rather I view the problems of its implementation, and the kinds of imagination that this requires,as an opening to a thoroughgoing argument for the need to reform, reinvent, or redesign the deeply engrained aesthetic and culture of method for certain kinds of research horizons in which anthropology is now deeply involved. These are referenced by such terms as the anthropology of globalization, the anthropology of the contemporary, and calls for public anthropology, among others. My concerns here operate at the level of metamethod or the ways in which within a particular professional culture of research, certain norms, forms, and indeed aesthetics of practice, usually communicated more by lore, storytelling, example, and tacit means.
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