From participant observation to participant action(-to-be): Multi-sited ethnography of displacement in Cyprus

Abstract

The field–fieldworker encounter in the contemporary ethnographic circumstances creates moving fields where the archetypal Malinowskian conventions have been experienced as insufficient practices. Calls were made for theoretical reconfiguration of a fieldsite from bounded single site to a multi-sited one. This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in an abandoned village, demonstrating how a fieldsite circumstantially oscillates from online to offline, factual to imaginary when attachment is still resilient and the desire to return is still alive. Its contribution to literature is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates how to adjust the academic qualitative inquiry to ensure a move towards the desired social changes by cultivating the role of the ethnographer from participant observer to a participant in action in the era of ‘public-or-perish’. Secondly, it adds an important dimension to multi-sited ethnography: a new ‘future’ site, a new stroke to George E. Marcus’s ‘spatial canvas’ in the process of place-making.