Analysis of George Marcus' (1995) Ethnography in/of the World System

Beyond moving towards inclusion of plurality of research locations multi-sited ethnography effects a methodological shift in the direction of multidisciplinary research that brings existing and emerging areas of inquiry into dialogue. Single sites have provided historical context of ethnographic methodology application that through its theoretical positioning within larger system of capitalist relations has given voice to subaltern subjects as they found their reflection in categories of class, gender, or ethnicity. As the cultural forms to which ethnographic research gave expression have evolved beyond primary categories of macrotheoretical description the distinctions among them gave way to attention to fluid temporal and spatial scales on which research attention can turn to sets of subjects that theoretically transcend limits of a single research site. Relations among sites have entered into theoretical construction by means of ethnography of their structural aspects. In response to "transformed locations of cultural production" (p. 97) multi-sited ethnography provides suitable methodological framework for integrating latest cultural, social, and economic developments into explanatory endeavours commensurate with the present moment.

As a consequence of moving from more traditional connections between anthropology on one hand and philosophy, political economy, and history on the other hand towards interdisciplinary arenas of inquiry defined more by subject than by discipline the very process of clarification of links among multiple sites where ethnography can pursue its subject matter has become the methodology of multi-sited ethnography. In the 1970s Wallerstein has given the initial impulse to the eventual development of multi-sited ethnography as he provided systematic background on which numerous single-site anthropological projects were carried out. In view of the post-WWII "international regimes of political economy" (p. 98) - among the descriptions of which are post-Fordism, time-space compression, flexible specialization, the end of organized capitalism, and globalization - a comprehensive theoretical framework of reference for capitalism remains to be introduced into scholarly discourse. As historically inherited metanarratives fragmented into localized perspectives the ethnographic concerns with agency, culture, and practice have become starting points for forging theoretical connections among multiple sites over which emergent research subjects react to global changes. In contrast to recent stress on ethics, commitment, and activism in ethnographic research, the formulation of most valuable contribution that multi-sited ethnography can make to scholarly discourse takes place via its methodology.

Multi-sited ethnography transcends such concerns of traditional ethnography as its methodological limits, its explanatory power, and its association with the subaltern. As multi-sited ethnography embeds in its research design emergent relations across multiple sites it appropriates abstract models and aggregate statistics into its methodology (p. 99). The possibilities for institutional recognition of multi-sited ethnography increase as disciplinary perceptions evolve to recognize interactions among related sites of work. The contemporary mobility of researchers draws increased attention to how recognized historical research has always relied on fragmented, reconstructive, and relational methods. Tracing relations across sites where composite processes unfold takes theoretical precedence over traditional concerns of ethnography with intensity and quality of engagement with research site. Multi-sited ethnography takes upon itself the "function of translation from one cultural idiom or language to another" (p. 100). As the process of fieldwork becomes qualified, displaced, and decentered, the ethnography explores across several sites "unexpected and even dissonant fractures of social location" (p. 100).

Making connections among distinctive discourses becomes the contribution of multi-sited ethnography as it maps the broader field of its inquiry. In line with traditional fieldwork where command of foreign languages has constituted a professional requirement ethnography intending to translate the conditions from multiple sites into single explanatory framework maintains to even greater degree the importance of language translation for its integrity. The long privileged focus of ethnography on the subaltern becomes problematized as gender, economic, and social mobilities come to fuller theoretical account within the discipline (Haraway 1991). The movement beyond the concentration on the subaltern leads to ethnography of the shape of systemic processes in the "reconfigured space of multiple sites of cultural production" (p. 101). Multi-sited ethnography constructs a new object of study as it maps an expanded field of theoretical attention. This expanded scholarly mandate of ethnography opens possibilities for comparisons that encompass units of research with more conceptual complexity than controlled comparisons of traditional ethnography have allowed in the past. The multi-sited ethnography produces conditions for new objects of study to emerge out of complexity of the sites of investigation for which it ventures to develop descriptive models out of "logics of relations, translation, and association among these sites" (p. 102).

Among the important precedents for the multi-sited ethnography as it reconstitutes received vocabulary of theoretical reference within multiple methods, complexities, and mobilities are Foucault's power/knowledge and heterotopia (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983), Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) rhizome, Derrida's (1981 [1972]) dissemination, and Lyotard's juxtaposition (Readings 1991). However, theoretical developments remain subordinated to the exigencies of conducting ethnographic research that brings the potential of interdisciplinary arenas on reconfigured subjects of research. Among the first areas where multi-sited research has taken its initial form were media and audience studies where distinct genres of inquiry have developed around functions of interdisciplinarity, multi-locality, and methodological pluralism. In anthropology this tendency has taken form of transition from ethnographic film towards indigenous media (Ginsburg 1993, 1994, 1996). Latour (1987; 1988) and Haraway (1991) have effected the movement of ethnography from single research sites in the direction of intersections of time and space where juxtaposition plays important role in the theoretical constitution of subjects of research having higher order of complexity.

Multi-sited anthropological research has been more prevalent in subject areas of reproductive technologies (Ginsburg and Rapp 1996), epidemiology (Balshem 1993), electronic communication (Escobar 1993; Marcus 1996), environmentalism and toxic disasters (Laughlin 1995; Stewart 1995; Zonabend 1993), and biotechnology (Teitelman 1989). In the United States, the areas of cultural studies has provided the springboard for theoretical elaboration of international cultural production in connection to macro-social processes via the Public Culture journal under the leadership of Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge the path-breaking essay on global cultural production of the former of which (Appadurai 1990) has championed the complexly multi-sited approach that multi-sited ethnography seeks to build upon. Theoretical rethinking of the concepts of space in geography (Friedland and Boden 1994), sociology (Soja 1989), and anthropology (Harding and Myers 1994) has opened the research on borders, exile, and diasporas (Clifford 1994; Gilroy 1993; Ong 1993) to elaboration of the local-global link in a manner that continues the multi-sited direction of research in the media studies (Abu-Lughod 1993). Major contribution of these developments to ethnography is in the "modes of constructing multi-sited spaces of investigation within individual projects" (p. 105) that should become signal feature of the multi-sited ethnographic methodology.

Haraway's (1991) and Appadurai's (1990) contributions to anthropological discussion of subjectivities and spaces remain in need of methodological translation into how constructions of multi-sited research space may proceed. Explicit methodological discussions are rare in the field of ethnographic research while when they occur (Strathern 1991) they tend to have highly theoretical nature that overlooks the task of building bridges to research practice. Due to its positioning at the intersection of paths, threads, juxtapositions and conjunctions, multi-sited ethnography takes inspiration from artistic, modernist, and especially avant-garde practices that register in their works momentous social changes (Petric 1987). Multi-sited ethnographies posit the objects of their study in terms that allow to start from a given entry point in order to undertake a tracing movement within different settings where complex cultural phenomena gradually become constructed through apposite research techniques. Following the people belongs to the classical techniques of ethnography (Malinowski 1922) that with its elaboration towards multi-sited methodology has led to applications in migration (Grasmuk and Pessar 1991), diaspora (Rouse 1991), and cultural studies (Gupta and Ferguson 1992).

The technique of following the people allows for its foreshortening when on-site data collection is combined with knowledge about subjects of research available off-site to reconstruct a system of relationships that research subjects materialize in their movements, trajectories, and portraits. Following the thing is another, possibly most widely spread, ethographic technique that through tracing of circulation of objects, rights, and relations contstructs a multi-sited research space where large-scale generalizations are possible (Wallerstein 1991). For this technique Appadurai (1986) has provided important methodological blueprint that seeks to discover systemic relationships via ethnographic and speculative research of circulation of things in and through contexts (Coombe 1995; Miller 1994; Mintz 1985). Artistic worlds research has made most explicite use of the multi-sited methodology as it traced curculation of indigenous artworks (Myers 1992), emergent music genres (Feld 1994), and cultural tastes (Savigliano 1995; Silverman 1986).

Among the most influential works that follow the object of their research across multiple disciplines are those by Latour (1987; 1988) that map humans, machines and organisms on the same plane of investigation. Following the metaphor is the technique that traces the "circulation of signs, symbols, and metaphors" (p. 108) that within the ethnographic research design acquires the form of construction of social correlates and groundings of associations on the basis of documentation of language use, print, visual, and electronic media. One of the key advantages of this technique is discovering metaphoric associations that bring the theoretical elaborations of complexity theory to bear on discursive organization that encompasses production of knowledge, governmental institutions, and economic regulation (Martin 1994). Such approach has special potential for theorising sites of cultural production that ethnographic methodology can persuasively argue for empirical connections among them on the emerging landscapes of accumulation, circulation, and exchange.

Following the plot, story, or allegory is a technique that embeds single-site fieldwork in the multi-sited process of reconstruction of situated social landscapes (Brooks 1984). This technique for conducting multi-sited ethnography has found renewed impulse in studies of social memory that map social struggles over definition of collective reality (Boyarin 1994). As a special case of following the plot, the life stories and biographies have served as sources of ethnographic data for multi-sited research oriented to materialize historical cultural formations (Fischer 1991; Fischer and Abedi 1990). Life history accounts through unexpected or emergent associations between sites and social contexts can provide means for ethnographic delineations of systemic relations that existing categorical distinctions may obscure. Following the conflict has mostly guided the research in the anthropology of law, as extended case method, while ethnography has gradually taken over this technique (Sarat and Kearns 1993) to define multi-sited construction of work that straddles "spheres of everyday life, legal institutions, and mass media" (p. 110).

The strategically situated single-site ethnography may represent technique that without actually engaging the researcher in travel lends itself to embedding into multi-sited context (Willis 1981). Other contexts that impinge on the research site do so in a contingent rather than assumed manner when what happens in other locales directs the frame of ethnographic research towards trans-local connections that obtain through localized reconstruction via research design. The methodological aim of strategically situated ethnography is to reveal systemic relations that go beyond the location where it is conducted, for which reason it should be regarded as one of the techniques of multi-sited ethnography since conventional ethnography situates its fieldwork in larger theoretical context differently. Multi-sited ethnography allows to distinctively probe local knowledges that local subjects articulate in relation to other sites where research field is constructed in the process of fieldwork. The comparative translation among research sites is distinctive methodological characteristic of multi-sited ethnography (DeLillo 1984; Marcus and Hall 1992). Ethnographic subjects supply in the forms of their thoughts and actions indications for interpenetration among different levels of theoretical analysis that range from micro-level of individual experience to macro-processes of political economy, which different multi-sited investigations have grasped as Benjamin's "mimetic faculty" (Taussig 1990; 1992), as Marx's notion of fetishism (Pietz 1993), and varieties of fin-de-siecle consciousness and sensibilities (Marcus 1993; 1996).

Researcher's standpoint does not escape from the process of mapping that multi-sited ethnography sets into motion as it traverses its research contexts that in reciprocal fashion position the researcher within the relations of knowledge, power, and authority the necessity for reflexive going about with which has been originally formulated by Haraway (1991: 183-202). As contexts of fieldwork undergo change researcher's practice makes necessary that his or her identity be accordingly renegotiated in relation to research subjects and contexts brought together in the multi-sited juxtaposition of ethnographic landscapes where anthropological privilege and authority are suspended until presentation in the form of written publication. Haraway's discussion of positioning is relevant to the tensions between objective status of researcher in the system of relations and subjective reflexivity of ethnographic methodology that he or she explores in the process of research practice, which reveals multi-sited ethnography as inherently mobile, self-critical, and recalibrating interaction with contexts and subjects of research.

In the practice of ethnographer the political circumstances of the multiple research contexts create in collision with the ethnographic persona of researcher specific and circumscribed forms of political agency that are different from usual activist positions. Personal commitments inevitably cross-cut and contradict their intersections within multi-sited research framework, which forces ethnographer to renegotiate identities in different sites. Gradually developing circumstantial activism that multi-sited ethnography embeds into its program contributes to transition from anthropological detachment to actively informed grasp of large scale systemic relations. As sets of subjects change with contexts of investigation the overlapping working of the process of ethnographic positioning has immediate effect on researcher's one's own sense of relation to the subject of research that explores rather than dissolves contradictions inherent in the unstable positioning of the fieldworker. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork does reserve possibilities for identification, affiliation, and activism, which, however, always retains the nomadic elements of the movable feast for anthropological senses that has been the signal feature of the traditional practice of ethnography.