Multisited Ethnography

Multisited ethnography is a methodological approach first described by anthropologist George Marcus that has become widely used and invoked in studies of geographically dispersed phenomena such as capital and labor market flows, commodity chains, international institutions, migration, and communications media. Although the term multisited ethnography usually refers to the practice of an ethnographer undertaking research in, and between, several physical locations as part of a single study, it is also sometimes used to describe investigation of a single location that is explicitly conceived of as part of a larger context that exceeds the boundaries of the field site.

In his original writings on the subject, Marcus portrayed multisited ethnography as an emergent strand of anthropological research that challenged the conventional ethnographic focus on a single field site—and thus the theoretical and methodological assumptions that underpinned such a focus—and was well suited to understanding an increasingly interconnected world. Rather than intensively investigating a single location, the multisited ethnographer is free to track the movement of, or connections between, people, stories, objects, conflicts, and cultural meanings across multiple sites and potentially across historical periods. As such, multisited ethnography challenges the often-implicit assumption that “communities” or “cultures” are geographically bounded, internally homogeneous, and can be studied in isolation.

Although Marcus described an anthropological project, multisited ethnography has become popular within broader studies of consumption, and elsewhere, because of its pertinence to the global flow of goods, ideas, people, and relations. For example, researchers might deploy a multisited methodology in tracing a particular commodity from production through consumption to disposal, the local development of global brands, the virtual and physical experiences of participants in online communities, the expansion of global social movements, or the spread of managerial techniques through transnational business networks. Proponents of multisited ethnography have argued that because such phenomena are frequently uncoupled from a specific physical place, they cannot be properly apprehended by investigation of a single site. Instead, such phenomena require a method that can extend the ethnographers purview into nonphysical places or that can follow the relationships, institutions, discourses, techniques, and people that connect different places.

Despite its growing interdisciplinary popularity, there are several criticisms of multisited ethnography as a method and as a description of a method. In a prominent critique of multisited ethnography, anthropologist Ghassan Hage has argued that research across several geographical locations has always been part of ethnographic practice. Often cited in this regard is the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, the early-twentieth-century pioneer of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, whose tracking of goods and traders in the Kula exchange system spanned the Trobriand Island archipelago off the east coast of Papua New Guinea. Similarly, some ethnographers of migration and of world religions claim to have long been engaged in research that encompasses multiple localities and that tackles the relationship between local forms of practice and global systems. Hage further argues that investigation of several geographical places does not necessarily make an ethnography multisited; rather, intensive study of, for example, a transnational family, may better be understood as undertaking fieldwork in a single geographically noncontiguous site.

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