Multi-sited Ethnography Research Articles

Greening honey: Producing the underground origins of a forest wonder

Green honey is a substance reputedly made under the ground by a powerful bee endemic to Palawan Island. Stories of its mysterious origins have circulated for years across the Philippines. ‘Underground’ is a place on Palawan – a nationally significant subterranean river sometimes rumoured to be a source of green honey. But beyond this specific site, and in quite another sense, the underground can also refer to a space where production occurs through shared imaginings but remains unseen. This article explores how the circulation of green honey produced in this underground space has shaped the lived place of Underground. Multi-sited ethnography is used to investigate how the social lives of green honey across the Philippines, including their embedded politics, reorganize the value of ‘local’ honey on Palawan. Greening honey, the author argues, involves materializing the purported origins of substances through their forms as bottled objects.

Ethically scaling up interventions in educational development: a case for collaborative multi-sited ethnographic research

ABSTRACTEducational interventions are often administered at scale in diverse settings as part of international development programmes. Their implementation is subject to a linear process that begins with finding out ‘what works’ at a local level, frequently through the use of randomised controlled trials, and continues with rolling out the intervention to the whole population at a national or even transnational level. This process often fails to consider the role cultural, political, and historical factors play in the perceived success of the local intervention, which can compromise both the impact and the ethics of at-scale implementation. To help address this issue, this paper argues for a definition of scalability that incorporates the ethics of the practice of scaling. It points to the potential of collaborative multi-sited ethnographic research to identify nuanced understandings of the different ethics systems endogenous to individual sites of implementation, in lieu of the universalising notions of ethics that are embedded in mainstream, linear notions of scalability. In so doing, it makes the case for multi-sited critical ethnography as a methodology of choice in researching the scalability of interventions in the context of development projects in the ‘Global South’.

Voluntary work, transnational mobility and language learning in a social movement

ABSTRACTIn the current neoliberal era, work is increasingly connected to transnational relations that involve people crossing linguistic and national borders. Based on a multi-sited ethnography, this article explores a transnational social movement called Emmaus where voluntary work, geographical mobility, and language learning intersect. I analyse the role of language in narratives of mobile volunteers, or those with this intention, in the Emmaus network. Volunteers need to learn and use linguae francae (English and Spanish) for voluntary work, which they justify with inter-cultural and solidarity tropes. In addition, they must also navigate nation-state immigration laws and linguistic differences that contrast with their construction of Emmaus as a ‘safe zone’ for transnational mobility and communication.

The Bakru Speaks

Abstract Throughout the Guianas, people of all ethnicities fear one particular kind of demonic spirit. Called baccoo in Guyana, bakru in coastal Suriname, and bakulu or bakuu among Saamaka and Ndyuka Maroons in the interior, these demons offer personal wealth in exchange for human life. Based on multisited ethnography in Guyana and Suriname, this paper analyzes converging and diverging conceptions of the “same” spirit among several Afro- and Indo-Guianese populations. We argue that transformations in how people conceptualize bakulu reveal how supposedly radical moral differences are constructed within and between populations in the multi-ethnic Caribbean. More than figurative projections of monetized inequality or racial and ethnic prejudices, baccoo actively mediate how people throughout the Guianas think about and experience the everyday conduct of economic and racial relations.

Getting Behind the Walls and Fences: Methodological Considerations of Gaining Access to Middle-class Women in Urban India

This article presents and analyses two cases of ethnographic, topic-driven, fieldwork among upper caste, middle-class women in urban India, which is a field dominated by hierarchical social relations of class, caste and gender. The aim is to discuss the methodological challenges we encountered in delineating, ‘constructing’ (Amit, Vered, 2000, Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London and New York: Routledge) and getting access to potential field-sites. Prospective informants lived their everyday lives criss-crossing between different types of social arenas within the city, inducing us to take a multi-sited approach (Marcus, George E., 1995, ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24, pp. 95–117). Moreover, these everyday social arenas were clearly demarcated and initially closed to outsiders by physical walls and social distinction, rendering the process of gaining access rather challenging. Here, we discuss these challenges and how we attempted to solve them. A central point is that ‘gaining access’ for most ethnographic researchers is a long process of meticulous planning, serendipitous encounters and ‘dead-ends’, that in itself is part of the ethnographic material. Furthermore, we discuss the relational aspect of qualitative research, wherein the researcher ‘puts his or her own body on the line’ (Okely, Judit, 2012, Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method, London: Bloomsbury, p.1). We argue that the manner by which the researcher is being positioned by the people studied – processes characterized by resistance, avoidance or even exclusion – often contain rich ethnographic information which must be taken into consideration. By highlighting this, we aim to demystify challenges often overlooked or under-communicated in ethnographic research.

Ethnography and the digital fields of social media

Qualitative researchers struggle to study the transient fields of social network sites like Twitter through conventional ethnographic approaches. This paper suggests that, in order to step further, we should distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online communities and the fluid, ‘meta-fields’ resulting from the aggregation of scattered communicative contents based on their metadata. Both these two intertwined layers of the digital environment interplay with users’ online social practices – which are embedded within offline everyday life and vice versa. While Internet ethnography largely dealt with contextual digital fields, recent developments in the realm of online research allow the ethnographic exploration of digital meta-fields and their publics. This shift recalls Marcus’ appeal for a multi-sited ethnography but, in fact, goes further beyond, towards a truly ‘un-sited’ ethnography. I highlight and discuss the main methodological implications of meta- and contextual fieldworks by presenting an exploratory study of European exchange students’ Facebook identities.

“Doing” diabetes: the unobtrusive presence of plants

This article investigates the “knowing” and “doing” (through a material semiotic approach) of diabetes. Practices of treatment and healing give insight into how this chronic medical condition is “done” in clinics and in homes, by clinic staff and patients in a multi-sited ethnography. Diabetes is scrutinised in all instantiations it takes: patients and clinical staff, medical technologies, knowledges, pills and other forms of medication all become connected in more and less apparent ways. These forms of medication include the use of medicinal plants as intersecting and as a parallel system of healing for diabetes. Medicinal plants are both a current and historical influence to managing diabetes, whilst incorporating various participants in a network of knowledge production and treatment-centred practices. The paper focuses in particular on medicinal plants and how they interact with humans in the treatment and care of people with diabetes as one art of knowing and doing this chronic medical condition. This paper demonstrates the complexity of networks and connections between disease, illness, humans and plants.

Finding the way into a global industry

PurposeGatekeepers in social research are regularly taken for granted in the associated methods literature, yet they constitute an interesting social phenomenon in themselves as powerful and normally unpaid agents of research access. Questions relating to the recruitment of potential gatekeepers and to the nature of the rewards that they might seek are under-considered and locating key gatekeepers is often characterised (perhaps inadvertently) as a matter of luck or happenstance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a multi-sited ethnography based on maritime industry conferences held annually in Europe and Asia. The two authors attended 18 of these conferences either as regular delegate or as a speaker. In these conferences, they maintained fieldnotes and formally and informally interviewed participants both face to face and e-mail.FindingsEvery year executives come together at commercially organised conferences focussed upon human resource management in the shipping industry. At these events, major global players discuss a programme of issues related to the business of recruiting and training seafarers. However, these international conferences are both much more and much less than they seem. They are crucial in establishing reputational capital and provide researchers with key venues for negotiating research access.Originality/valueThis paper argues that unlike most conferences, these can only be seen as “field configuring events” to a very limited extent but that they nonetheless serve an important purpose in securing symbolic, and more significantly reputational, capital for both individual delegates and interested academics. The paper further argues that resourceful researchers can mobilise such capital in their favour in negotiating research access contributing new ideas to the literature on gatekeepers and on research access.

Circulation and localization of a transnational founding story in a social movement

AbstractThis article investigates the circulation and appropriation of the “origins” story in a social movement called Emmaus. In particular, it analyzes storytelling in two localities, Barcelona and London, at critical moments when collective identity is foregrounded for different socio-political purposes. Emmaus is a transnational social movement that (re)inserts marginalized people who live and work with more privileged members in local groups called “communities” dedicated to recycling and social projects. Ethnography is essential to situate and understand narratives in broader interactional and socio-political contexts. My multi-sited ethnography (2011–2012) affords an outlook on the storytelling practices that produce and negotiate acultural chronoscope, “depictions of place-time-and-personhood” to which participants orient when they interact with each other (including telling their life stories) within Emmaus. Situated storytelling constructs a collective identity across linguistic and national borders at a particular sociohistorical juncture. The Emmaus story constructs a certain worldview and person types within animagined communitymade up of (narrated) others all over the globe. The Emmaus chronoscope is based on the encounter between two individuals from different backgrounds, which will transform their reasons to live thanks to the shared value of solidarity with others.

Assembling Viability: The Art of Mundane Embryo Selection in IVF

One of the mundane everyday practices of IVF is observing and classifying embryos. After the fertilisation, embryos are graded according to their quality which is an estimation of whether the embryogenesis—the embryo’s development—seems normal or deviant. This practice is called embryo selection and it is based on assessing the ‘good quality’ embryos as viable and ‘poor quality’ ones as inviable. Viability refers to the capacity of embryos to develop into foetuses and eventually become babies. However, the question of what kinds of embryos ultimately are viable is a complex issue, which also hinges upon several other factors than the quality estimation. This paper shows that the idea of embryo viability is an assemblage of multiple kinds of things. The paper is based on multi-sited ethnography and expert and patient interviews conducted in the private fertility service sector of Finland. I argue that embryo viability is a practical achievement that requires the successful combination of several factors: the scientific facts on embryo quality, the expert knowledge and laboratory practices and the patients’ engagements in the process. None of these factors alone is enough to explain the precarious embryo viability which nevertheless is the central issue in IVF.

Gang glocalization: How the global mediascape creates and shapes local gang realities

This article introduces the concept of ‘gang glocalization’ to capture the processes by which global media myths and conventions create and shape local gang realities. The different stages of gang glocalization, and the motives to engage in this process, are examined by comparison of two empirical cases – Congolese gangs in Brussels and Afro-Caribbean gangs in London. This multi-sited ethnography finds that youth use fiction and imagination in order to create individual and collective gang identities. Police and political action against gangs is then informed by the same fiction and imagination, resulting in new gang realities based not on what is real. We find that mythmaking is an essential aspect of gangs – without the myth there is no gang – and that imagination is at the core of some of its most harmful activities, namely spectacular symbolic violence. This is an update on Thrasher’s (1927) old themes. The driving forces behind gang glocalization are emotions and desires tied to lived experiences of social and cultural exclusion. Implications for research and practice follow.

Exploring the interplay of narrative and ethnography: A critical sociolinguistic approach to migrant stories of dis/emplacement

AbstractIn this article I explore the benefits of interplaying narrative and ethnography for conducting a context-grounded, sociolinguistic analysis of the representational and interactional functions of migrant storytelling events concerning dis/relocation. I focus on a series of narratives of socioeconomic and geographic im/mobility told by three Ghanaians who, unsheltered, lived on a bench of a Catalan urban town. These were gathered via “go-along” narrative interviews and multi-site ethnography during six months of fieldwork. I show that the imbrications of a social-practice and social-action approach to narrative with network ethnography allow to: (1) investigate how representation and interaction in place-centered stories and storytelling acts reveal the narrators’ positionings with respect to host-society dis/emplacement, in their alternative spaces of socialization; (2) capture what gets silenced in dis/orientation narratives, like discrepancies between stories told and lived concerning identity management across migrant groups; and (3) expose the researchers’ impact on shaping the form and content of these stories by ingraining self-reflexivity activities into all analytical accounts. This offers an informant-integrative, critical view of how migrants enact transnational survival in contexts of precariousness and exclusion, which contributes to understanding how they place themselves with regard to their non-citizenship statuses, from a socially-sensitive, non-essentializing perspective.

The Janus face of precarity - Securitisation of Roma mobility in the UK.

Technological developments and the free movement of people within the EU have enabled Member States to implement new geopolitical control measures to increase migration control and social sorting of undesired migrant groups. As part of a securitisation process, these measures are often expanded upon and justified in terms of economic threat that aims to restrain ‘opportunist Central East European migrants’, who are associated with welfare dependence and cheap labour. Although unemployed Roma migrants are exposed to social exclusion due to the stigma of ‘benefit shoppers’, this paper explores how current neoliberal labour market structures facilitate new securitisation processes and fuel the precarity of Roma, even if they are employed in the host country. Based on a multi-sited ethnography completed in The United Kingdom, it will be illustrated how communitarianism of Member States stratifies the moral values of migrants’ labour in a manner that defines the preconditions of social inclusion of newcomers in host societies. In short, this paper argues that even for migrants who are not welfare dependent and who are self-sustaining, their social inclusion is defined by engagement in the sort of labour that is culturally acknowledged by the host society.

“Who’s Pitiful Now?”: Othering and Identity Shifts of Japanese Youth From California to Tokyo

ABSTRACTThis study examines how intraethnic relationships and identities are understood, negotiated, and repositioned among Japanese students at Pearl High School (pseudonym) in California, within a transnational context. I utilize a 2-year multisite ethnography and discourse analysis of follow-up interviews collected over the past 10 years. By focusing on their practices of intraethnic Othering using labels in association to social places, I show the multivocality and multilocality of their identity negotiation as follows: (a) Groups of seemingly homogeneous Japanese students differentiate each other by using labels (e.g. “Jap,” “FOB” (fresh off the boat), “wannabe”) and making territories within their school. (b) The Japanese university admission policy for returnees (kikoku) situates these students on their return to Japan to renegotiate their identity in between culturally kikoku and institutionally kikoku. (c) The transnational transition into kikoku, while reproducing the underlying ideologies, twists the participants’ relationship and identity positioning, and influences their social, academic, and career paths in Japan.

‘I speak small’: unequal Englishes and transnational identities among Ghanaian migrants

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates language ideologies involving various non-standard English-language practices among homeless Ghanaian migrants, and explores how these interplay with transnational identity management in Catalonia, a non-English-speaking bilingual society. Through a 6-month multi-site ethnography of three case-study informants which included recorded interviews and spontaneous interactions, I explore how migrants engage with various pluralisations of local and global English in reported encounters with other migrants and local residents, and I show that they share ambivalent positionings towards them. They generally present themselves as speaking ‘small’ or ‘no’ English, in acts of linguistic delegitimisation whereby they inhabit marginalised, de-skilled pan-African identities. However, on other occasions, they position themselves as ‘better’ English speakers than local populations who sanction ‘outer-circle’ English forms, in acts of self-legitimisation whereby they vindicate their ‘native speakerhood’ condition, constitutive of educated, cosmopolitan identities revolving around ‘Ghanaianness’. I conclude that these sociolinguistic comportments speak of migrants’ linguistic marginalisation. They uncover ways in which situated forms of identity categorisation linked to the censorship of socioeconomically-stratified English varieties shape, and are shaped by, hegemonic monolingual ideologies and societal normativities concerning ‘English standardness’ which dictate who count as legitimate transnational citizens in the Southern European societies of the twenty-first century.

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley: Reframing HSIs through a Multi-Sited Ethnography

This article contributes to the study of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) through a narrative grounded on two points of innovation. It offers frameworks to decenter the conversation on HSIs from normative practices in higher education to focus on pedagogical, cultural, and political relational processes that find greater congruence between nominal HSIs and the Latina/o students, families, and the communities that populate those universities. It looks at points of innovation that emerged in two different parts of the country at different places, spaces, and time. One was initiated at the University of North Florida (UNF) in the early-to-mid-1970s, and the second is taking place at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in South Texas (UTRGV). The UNF experience placed race relations front and center of its innovation, and offers an appropriate historical lens through which to understand the social and institutional change taking place in South Texas. The UTRGV work provides an example of how an HSI can align its curricular and core identity to reflect the population and region it serves. This study employs a methodology and theoretical framework that aligns the inquiry, pedagogy, and meaning-making process in a generative and relational discourse.

Sacred remittances: money, migration and the moral economy of development in a transnational African church

ABSTRACTWhile remittances have come to play an important part in debates about migration and development, the link between religion, migration and transnational financial flows has yet to be understood in its full complexity. Drawing upon a multi-sited ethnography of a transnational African church, this article addresses this overlooked dimension of migrant transnationalism by analysing how religious donations converted into ‘sacred remittances’ produce a moral economy of religious life shaped by a politics of belongings at various scales. The article discusses the social meaning that diasporic actors attach to religious donations sent to the homeland (the Congo) and how this compares to the practice of sending remittances to family members. The article also argues that transnational circulation of sacralised money operates within a field of meanings and practices associated with moral expectations, entitlements and differentiated regimes of value. Sacred remittances, as ‘global money’, may generate a diversity of transnational linkages between donors and recipients but they remain embedded in landscapes of status and power.

Constrained choices, enhanced aspirations: Transnational mobility, poverty and development. A case study from North Hungary

This paper aims to contribute to the exploration of the nexus of poverty, migration and development by providing what has been lacking thus far; namely, a close ethnographic portrait, combined with a survey, that interprets the most typical and diverging migration trajectories and their impacts in an economically backward and ethnically differentiated region in Hungary. Building on the inspirational work of anthropologists and mobility scholars who propose to recover a global and multidimensional perspective on transnational movement when exploring the nexus between migration and its consequences for development, we carried out multi-sited ethnography, both in the sending and in the destination localities. We also conducted a survey among migrants who had returned, sometimes temporarily, to their community of origin. Using this multi-spatial approach, we demonstrate the different layers of the migration-development nexus. We argue that, on the global level, receiving countries all benefit from the cheap and flexible labor of poor migrants, be they Roma or non-Roma, skilled or low-skilled mobile laborers. However, on the level of migrant-sending localities, due to the differential migration patterns of local Roma and non-Roma, the developmental effects of the two groups’ geographical movement cannot be taken as homogeneous or leveled. For non-Roma families, when men leave behind their wives and children for the sake of financial betterment of their family, there is little developmental effect on community level, but only in a narrow financial sense. However, we argue, drawing on Appadurai’s (2004) “capacity to aspire” concept, that for a fraction of some kinship groups of low-skilled Roma who mainly migrate with their whole family, transnational mobility may not be as successful financially as for the non-Roma, although it has future-oriented developmental elements by potentially enhancing capacity to aspire for both migrants and non-migrants.

"You can't write in Kaapse Afrikaans in your question paper. . . .The terms must be right": Race- and class-infused language ideologies in educational places on the Cape Flats

Language is integral to educational processes because it forms the basis for classroom communication and the medium for knowledge transfer. However, language is imbued with race- and class-related ideologies: ideas about "proper" and "educated" uses of language. Language ideologies are shaped by the linguistic norms of powerful groups and are based on political rather than linguistic factors. In this paper, I explore how language ideologies operated in three educational sites on the Cape Flats. Multisite ethnography was used to research language ideologies in classrooms, amongst a hip-hop group, and at a youth radio show. Participants in the study spoke a variety of Afrikaans known as Kaapse Afrikaans, which differs from the standard Afrikaans inscribed in the school curriculum. The research showed that language ideologies were perpetuated through semiotic processes known as iconicity, recursiveness, and erasure. Through iconicity, Rosemary Gardens youths' language was inextricably linked to colouredness-a mixed race and language with low status attributed to both. Whereas standard Afrikaans was described as "pure, high, proper, and real," Kaapse Afrikaans was recursively depicted as "low, deficient and slang." These semiotic processes functioned to erase young people's use of language at schools, particularly repressing Kaapse Afrikaans in its written form. On certain occasions, the hip-hop group used language freely as they commented on their local environments. Powerful linguistic ideologies will continue to denigrate marginalised youth, even if radical teachers and hip-hop culture dismiss them. Educators should, therefore, both endorse the linguistic resources youth bring to classrooms and arm them with powerful forms of language and knowledge that hold power elsewhere.

Technology Enabled Information Services Use in Tourism: An Ethnographic Study of Chinese Backpackers

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the previously unexplored theoretical relationship between technology enabled information services (TEIS) and the value created by the use of such services. This paper presents a mixed virtual and multi-sited ethnography to provide a thick description of Chinese backpackers (CBs) use of TEIS. Participant observations and interviews of CBs in three different journeys within Europe were undertaken. Our findings illustrate that additional usage values occur when TEIS are used in a tourism context. Social influences and technical infrastructure play a stronger role than previous research presented. The study contributes to the literature by 1) providing a theoretical understanding of tourists’ TEIS use; 2) documenting a study of a complete package of technologies used by CBs, and 3) proposing a research model which can be used for studying different TEIS use behaviour/patterns, and also in the design of TEIS for specific contexts.