Multi-sited Ethnography Research Articles

Law Lost, Compliance Found: A Frontline Understanding of the Non-linear Nature of Business and Employee Responses to Law

This paper seeks to understand the transmission and reception of legal rules as a component of the regulatory compliance process. It adopts a frontline approach (Almond and Gray 2017) to regulatory compliance that traces the grassroot functioning of compliance processes from regulator, to compliance managers to individual employees. Through a multilevel and multi-sited ethnography of worker safety protection in Chinese construction industry, this paper shows that in the cases studied there is a fundamental disconnect in the transmission and reception of law from regulator to organization and within the regulated organization. Yet at the same time, the paper finds that employees did comply with the law, and that thus compliance can exist without a full transmission and reception of legal rules into and within the regulated organization. By expanding the frontline approach to study regulation and compliance to look at the grassroots operation across three different frontlines, this study has been able to assess the legal assumptions inherent in existing regulatory compliance research. Not only does it find that compliance in these cases was not a top-down process and that we need to look at the grassroots operation inside organizations, it also shows that law does not always play a central role in regulatory compliance and that we need to reassess the implicit focus on law in regulatory compliance scholarship.

Nostalgia as double-edged sword: Australian-Hungarians reclaim lost belonging in post-socialist Hungary

ABSTRACT Based on multi-sited ethnography, this article examines the return visits of Australian-Hungarian diaspora subjects after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In particular, it explores how nostalgia becomes an instrument for navigating the ambiguities, paradoxes, and disappointments of return and forging new and creative relationships with the home country. I argue that as much as nostalgia has contributed to the shattering of returnees’ illusions in the face of ‘reality’ upon returning, it has also helped them to facilitate deeper feelings of immersion with their home country. In this way, this article elucidates the restorative properties of nostalgia for identity and belonging.

Italian-Bangladeshi in London. A community within a community?

Based on a multi-sited ethnography in Italy and the United Kingdom, this contribution focuses on the onward migration of Italian-Bangladeshis to London, that is, Bangladeshi migrants who acquired EU citizenship in Italy and then moved to the British Capital. After the presentation of the reasons for this onward migration, the article will analyse the representation, constructed by the Italian-Bangladeshis interviewed in London, of the relationships between them (coming from different districts of Bangladesh) and the members of the “historical” British Bangladeshi community, in London since generations (originating primarily from the Bangladeshi district of Sylhet). Specifically, it will focus on the on mistrust – sometimes a fully-fledged hostility – between the two communities as it was narrated by the Italian-Bangladeshi respondents, framing it as a dichotomy between British citizens and (Southern) European citizens; as a wider dichotomy between residents of Bangladeshi origin in London, but originating from different regional contexts in Bangladesh; as an effect of the social stratification of the “Bangladeshi Diaspora” in the world.

A Phenomenological Exploration into Lived Experiences of Violence in Northeast India

The Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in the state of Assam in Northeast India can be described as a landscape of terror since the area has been a stage for recurrent, mostly violent contestations along ethno-religious lines for more than four decades. Over the years, the violence has claimed more than a thousand lives and displaced millions. Using a multi-sited ethnography carried out over more than eleven months of fieldwork in the region, this paper looks at the everyday lives of those affected by the conflict and critiques the notion of spectacular resistance and exceptionalism in the context of Northeast India. This is done by using a phenomenology of lived experience framework to pay closer attention to the distinctly ordinary ways in which populations survive and endure states of dispossession, displacement and abandonment.

Negotiations of Science and Religion in Nordic Institutions: An Ethnographic Approach

This article explores how two seemingly contradictory global trends—scientific rationality and religious expressiveness—intersect and are negotiated in people’s lives in Nordic countries. We focus on Finland and Sweden, both countries with reputations of being highly secular and modernized welfare states. The article draws on our multi-sited ethnography in Finland and Sweden, including interviews with health practitioners, academics, and students identifying as Lutheran, Orthodox, Muslim, or anthroposophic. Building on new institutionalist World Society Theory, the article asks whether individuals perceive any conflict at the intersection of “science” and “religion”, and how they negotiate such a relationship while working or studying in universities and health clinics, prime sites of global secularism and scientific rationality. Our findings attest to people’s creative artistry while managing their religious identifications in a secular, Nordic, organizational culture in which religion is often constructed as old-fashioned or irrelevant. We identify and discuss three widespread modes of negotiation by which people discursively manage and account for the relationship between science and religion in their working space: segregation, estrangement, and incorporation. Such surprising similarities point to the effects of global institutionalized secularism and scientific rationality that shape the negotiation of people’s religious and spiritual identities, while also illustrating how local context must be factored into future, empirical research on discourses of science and religion.

The shaping of anticipation: The networked development of inferential capacity in governing Southeast Asian deltas

Motivated by foreseeable changes in the Earth's systems, governments across the world learn to anticipate the consequences. Understanding how such anticipation comes about should ease its further development. We therefore explore the central capacity within anticipatory governance: the capacity to infer future consequences. Such inferential capacity consists of tools, techniques, and practices increasing an agent's options to infer consequences. We examine the development of this capacity for two Southeast Asian deltas, using data from a multi-sited ethnography and a social network analysis. These methods combine the small-scale ‘lived’ perspective of agents and the multiscale network in which these agents deploy strategies to entrench tools, techniques, and practices for inferential capacity. Strategic choices in positioning for network effects and fostering reciprocity matter, while values and historical contingencies cannot be brushed aside.

Between industry labs and audience formation: Film festivals and the transformation of the field of film production in Chile

In the last ten years, the field of film production in Chile has been considerably transformed, showing an exceptional increase in local production, a growing professionalization and wider international recognition. Chilean film festivals have played a pivotal role in this change, both as sociocultural hubs that promote regular encounters and exchanges among filmmakers, and also by fostering a local cinematographic culture among film audiences. This article is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Chilean field between 2010 and 2018, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with festival organizers and participants. It analyzes the major transformations seen in Chilean film festivals, from relatively informal showcases for local cinephiles and hangouts for filmmakers to professionalized “industrial” hubs and nodes for project development, education and “audience formation”. These developments are linked to diverse changes in a Chilean cultural policy that considers national cinema as a creative industry, while they also reflect the global trend of film festivals toward a “business model”. The Chilean case shows how festivals can articulate new, at times contradictory, modes of film practice, serving to reconfigure a local field of cultural production.

Modern Intimacies and Modernist Landscapes: Chinese Photographs in Late-Colonial Mozambique

Abstract This paper addresses a specific aspect of the social and cultural life of the Luso-Chinese in Mozambique, whose first contingents came from the Chinese province of Guangdong in the second half of the 19th century. Most settled in the city of Beira. By the 1950s, the Chinese community was already well integrated into modern life in colonial Beira. The city was going through an unprecedented urban and architectural boom. At that time, the Luso-Chinese, who were essentially merchants, also began to stand out in the field of photography. Based on a multi-sited ethnography among the Portuguese-Chinese diaspora – and their family photo albums – this paper reflects on two inseparable aspects of late-colonial modernity: architecture and photography.

“Me fui quedando”: the temporary-prolonged stay of Colombian students in Paris

This article addresses the migration of Colombian students in Paris. The objective is to reflect about the processes through which a temporarystay city becomes a place of prolonged esidence. The research is based in a multi-sited ethnography and in-depth interviews conducted in France and Colombia. The text is divided into three sections: The first section explains the dual nature of transience of migrant students; the second section explores the context of departure; and the third section analyses the living conditions of Colombian students without scholarships in France. It is concluded that in order to understand the reorientation of the students’ project and the lengthening of their stay in Paris, it is necessary to address the context of origin and arrival in parallel, both at an individual and at a social and transnational level.

Conferred cosmopolitanism: class-making strategies of elite schools across the world

Drawing on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools, this article explores how these institutions work to produce subjects that will thrive in a globalized world. We examine how despite a similar commitment to global citizenship education and a cosmopolitan orientation across all schools, the intersections between the transnational and national sphere continue to shape the specific futures students are being prepared for. Thus, while all schools understand cosmopolitanism as being acquired by working across difference and having international mobility experiences, the specificities of the national socio-economic contexts and the founding principles of each institution, shapes the kinds of ‘leaders’ being formed, which in turn differentiates the specific cosmopolitan practices being promoted. Ultimately, these elite institutions are seeking to create an elite class by conferring a cosmopolitan status on their students which will have direct convertibility for the specific futures being envisioned for them.

‘Old’ tools in a new era: unpacking the roles of promotional and informational resources in scaled-up preventive interventions

ABSTRACT As health promotion as a field progresses further into the 21st century, it may seem backward-looking to devote research energy to the study of health information leaflets and program resources. However, the longevity of these tools in health promotion invites more critical understanding of their roles and meanings, particularly now in the era of scaled-up evidence-based programs. As program implementation becomes more complex, it is vital that we understand the roles these tools play, as ‘what’ it is about them that needs to be scaled-up might be misconstrued or contestable. We undertook a multi-sited ethnography of the electronic information management system used to assist the scale-up of a $45 m population wide childhood obesity prevention program in New South Wales, Australia. This provided a window to observe the roles of informational materials and program resources in program implementation in schools and early-childhood services. We found that resources acted both as a form of standardisation (controlling the form of the program across the state) and as a means by which practitioners developed flexibility in local-level adaptation. We found practitioners strategically harnessed program resources as tools to assist in relationship building, and to achieve key performance targets. Resources also played a crucial role in developing collaborative engagements between practitioners working in a range of local contexts across the state. We conclude that during program scale-up, there is a set of actions and interactions around program resources that illustrate and mirror wider implementation tensions and dynamics, revealing important small moments of practitioner agency.

Organizational Practices in the Constitution of the Right to Culture and to the City: Understanding the Struggle for the Rights of a Cultural Organization in Goiás City, Brazil

The objective of this paper is to discuss how the organizational practices in the field of culture constitute the development, promotion and access to rights to culture and to the city in Goiás city, Goiás, Brazil. We bring the theories of the field of Studies Based on Practices (SBP) closer to the Law in order to understand the non-institutionalized legal phenomena of the organizational processes. From a multi-sited ethnography carried out in the Historic Center of the city of Goiás, Goiás, a place classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO between August 2014 and December 2015, we highlight the processes by which organizational practices, as producers of spaces in cities, constitute Rights when recognizing or neglecting the occupation of the urban space by certain social groups. We emphasize how the analysis of organizational processes can contribute to a debate on Rights from a perspective of legal pluralism from the daily life of cities and highlighting the relevance of understanding the occupations of urban spaces as a way of reconfiguring relations between the State and civil society.

Transmigration program can be failed, but transmigrant stay life: Portraits of Transmigrant Families in Sorong Regency, West Papua

Transmigration has been applied in Indonesia as a development and population distribution strategy. Historically, the Indonesian transmigration program has a long story since the Ethical Policy until now. Furthermore, transmigration had been claimed and became the primary strategy of development in the New Order. Despite all the hope about transmigration, people considered this program failed nationally because its top-down system has caused a new problem in the destination area. However, some transmigrants have been succeeded and struggled in the new area. This paper described the bright side of what-so-called failed transmigration in Segun, Sorong, West Papua. Data are collected by multi-sited ethnography with observation and in-depth interviews of two successful Javanese families in Segun. In conclusion, this paper argues that although the program has failed nationally, each transmigrant had its strategy to survive and succeed in the new area.

The Field as a Black Box: Ethnographic Research in the Age of Platforms

This article aims to provide a detailed rendering of the struggles we experienced while undertaking ethnographic research for the study of music curators working at online music streaming platforms. Based on the field notes generated during a multi-sited ethnography, the article will critically discuss the “black boxing” strategies employed by these platforms in order to protect themselves from public scrutiny, and how media scholars can counteract in order to (partially) circumvent the restrictions posed by them. In light of this discussion, we propose five tactics that we argue can be employed in order to perform ethnographic research in the age of platforms. We conclude with a reflection on what we can learn from “failures in the field” and why it is important to advance ethnographic studies of the new places of cultural production.

Lived Experiences of Women Entrepreneurs Regarding Socio-Cultural Constraints in Entrepreneurship in Southern Punjab, Pakistan

The research paper investigates the socio-cultural constraints faced by women entrepreneurs during startup and expansion of their entrepreneurial ventures in Ahmedpur East of District Bahawalpur through documenting their lived experiences. The research is primarily a multi-sited ethnography and utilizes qualitative research methods such as in-depth semi-structured interviews and focused group discussions on collecting primary data from a selective sample of 25 entrepreneurs ascertained through sampling technique. The study highlights gender-specific socio-cultural challenges such as social perceptions and biases, work-life balance, patronage of male family members, restricted mobility owing to Purdah and low recognition and payment of women's work etc. as prime reasons that hinder not only women participation as entrepreneurs but also inhibits their engagements and choices in entrepreneurship. Socio-cultural factors not only systematically impact women's social interactions and decision-making but transform into multiple other challenges that women fight and struggle with while making their space as entrepreneurs.

Globally elite: four domains of becoming globally-oriented within elite schools

ABSTRACT Drawing on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools across the world, this article explores how elite schools prepare students for an increasingly interconnected world characterised by difference and competition through global citizenship education. In this exploration, I identify the four domains that give meaning to global citizenship education within elite contexts: cultural, relational, emotional, and material. These domains reveal the ways in which these schools are responding to the challenges of globalisation by providing students opportunities to develop awareness and knowledge of differences, to establish and maintain relationships across differences, to gain a sense of obligation towards others, and to accumulate valuable forms of human and cultural capital. Through globally-oriented practices, students are being prepared to be flexibly mobile, to imagine themselves as leaders within a globalised world and to thrive in the hypercompetitive and unpredictable global knowledge economy. These practices play an important part of elite schools’ larger strategy of making and remaking elites.

The Governance of UK Dairy Antibiotic Use: Industry-Led Policy in Action

This article analyses the progress made in the UK with regard to tackling antibiotic “misuse and overuse” in food-producing animals. Moving beyond statistical realities, the paper examines how the UK's industry-led policy approach is shaping practice. Using a multi-sited ethnography situated in Actor Network Theory and Callon's sociology of markets, the UK dairy supply chain policies and practices were studied. Findings reveal that dairy industry policies only partially address the complex network of people, animals, and the environment in which dairy antibiotics circulate. Antibiotic “misuse and overuse” in agriculture is far from a behavioural matter, with solely farmers and veterinarians to blame. Instead, antibiotic use in food animals is embedded in complex economic networks that constrain radical changes in dairy husbandry management and antibiotic use on farms. More attention toward the needs of the dairy supply chain actors and wider environmental considerations is essential to reduce the dairy sector's dependency on antibiotics and support transition toward responsible farming in the UK.

Texts as Places, Texts as Mirrors: Anthropology of Judaisms and Jewish Textuality

This paper takes a three-pronged approach to Jewish society and Jewish texts. The first cites several seminal works that illustrate the importance of examining Jewish textuality as an essential theme in the anthropology of Judaism. The second presents four scenes from a multi-sited ethnography I carried out that examines Jewish study institutions in differing cultural contexts and describes the possible contribution of this methodology to the ethnographic study of Jewish textuality. The third expands on the place of religious texts and their meaning in the context of processes of preservation, creativity, and change in Jewish culture. The discussion highlights the contribution of multi-sited ethnography, which illustrates how text creates “places,” meeting points between Jews and their Judaism, and how this encounter with the text serves as a source of reflection that can then be adapted to changing cultural contexts.

Families at a distance, distances within families: Borders and emotional bonds among migrants from Eritrea

This article investigates how mobility regimes and destination countries contribute to reshaping transnational family ties among refugees from Eritrea. Due to protracted political violence in the country, Eritreans are a geographically dispersed community, bonded together by solidarities, feelings of belonging and kinship relationships. Based on a multi-sited ethnography, this article sheds light on migrant family members living in different countries (Ethiopia, Italy, UK, Sweden), rather than on the relationships between migrants and their family members back home. By focusing on three case-studies and including vertical and horizontal family ties, it explores marriage forms, practices of parenthood and relationships among spouses and siblings, to show the phenomenological experience of family by refugees who find themselves in various family roles, with contrasting moral obligations and in unequal positions with respect to border regimes. The aim is to show how policy and labour constraints play a role in moulding migrants’ family relationships, in addition to the geographical distance, and how people navigate this scenario through confronting dilemmas and taking decisions. While conceptualizing family ties not as “given” but as “made”, this study analyses the forms of subjectivities which emerge in the interconnections between social structures and desires.

Myths of Meritocracy, Friendship, and Fun Work: Class and Gender in North American Academic Communities

ABSTRACTUsing the example of Andean archaeology, this article focuses on subtle forms of inequality that arise when academic communities are conceptualized as friendship‐based and egalitarian, rejecting explicit hierarchy. I describe this asperformative informalityand argue that it stems from a meritocratic ideology that inadvertently reproduces Euro‐American white‐male privilege. In a discipline that prides itself on its friendliness, openness, and alcohol‐fueled drinking culture, those who find themselves unable to enact or perform informality appropriately are at a distinct disadvantage. Drawing from a multisited ethnography of Andeanist archaeologists, I make the case that it is the ephemerality and plausible deniability of performative informality that makes it hard to recognize and thus mitigate against it. In doing so, I draw on and contribute to the theorization of gender/class intersectionality in anthropology and science studies, US conceptualizations of meritocracy in academia and higher education, and feminist Jo Freeman's concept of “the tyranny of structurelessness.” [anthropology of science, ethnography of archaeology, class, gender, anthropology of work and education]