Abstract
How does ethnography come to terms with our current global condition? Being a method characterized by its in-depth knowledge of a bounded space, how does ethnography cope with a world scale? How does the global condition affect the definitions of key ethnographic concepts? In this article, I first reconstruct ethnographic debates regarding the status of the global, showing how ethnography can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the binary global/local. Then I review two projects that study global processes from an ethnographic point of view: multi-site ethnography (Marcus 1995) and global ethnography (Burawoy et al. 2000). I compare these two approaches along four dimensions: site, context, research design and reflexivity. I argue that while multi-site ethnography and global ethnography are often used interchangeably, each ultimately presents distinctive answers to key questions for the ethnographic study of global processes.
Highlights
If we think of ethnography as a method practiced in a delimited geographical space by engaging in face-to-face interactions, it is hard to imagine how such a “micro-oriented” perspective may render significant insights on something as wide as “the world.” Imagined in those terms, the encounter between ethnography and “the global” poses nothing but an oxymoron: After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around
How can we recognize “the global” in order to study “it”? Which approaches have been proposed for the ethnographic study of “globalization?” Which are their assumptions and shortcomings? How can we deal with the “lack of fit between the problems raised by a mobile, changing, globalizing world, on the one hand, and the resources provided by a method originally developed for studying supposedly small-scale societies, on the other” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:3)? Two main strategies have been proposed to answer this question: on one hand, George Marcus’s multisite ethnography (MSE), a perspective emerging from the deconstruction of “realist ethnographic authority” (Stacey 1999:689)
In this article I hope to have shown the contributions that ethnography can make to understanding, explaining and researching the contemporary “global situation.”
Summary
If we think of ethnography as a method practiced in a delimited geographical space by engaging in face-to-face interactions, it is hard to imagine how such a “micro-oriented” perspective may render significant insights on something as wide as “the world.” Imagined in those terms, the encounter between ethnography and “the global” poses nothing but an oxymoron: After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around. If we think of ethnography as a method practiced in a delimited geographical space by engaging in face-to-face interactions, it is hard to imagine how such a “micro-oriented” perspective may render significant insights on something as wide as “the world.” Imagined in those terms, the encounter between ethnography and “the global” poses nothing but an oxymoron: After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around. The analysis of these terms does not exhaust the possible lines of inquiry, they are the major methodological arenas in which ethnographers confront the challenges of incorporating an analysis of global processes They all point out to emergent problems of ethnographic research regarding fieldwork and the production of theory and texts They all point out to emergent problems of ethnographic research regarding fieldwork and the production of theory and texts (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Van Maanen 1995; Strathern 1995; Amit 2000)
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