Multisited Field Studies

Mark-Anthony Falzon, Clare Hall, Cambridge, UK; and University of Malta, Msida, Malta
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

In the last couple of decades, multisited field studies (usually in their ‘multisited ethnography’ incarnation) have emerged as
a methodological choice that favors a spatially dispersed field – through the use of actual multiple sites and/or the juxta-
position of data – through which social scientists ‘follow’ people, goods, information, and such. The knowledge that is
produced is said to better reflect contemporary thought on space, place, scale, and boundaries, and therefore social
formations that are caught up in contexts of transnationalism and globalization. The idea has spawned a considerable
methodological–theoretical literature as well as a number of empirical case studies. It has also come under significant crit-
icism, mainly from arguments of holism, lack of depth, and abdication of ethnographic responsibility. These critiques have
led to a self-examining ‘second-generation’ thought and method and multisited studies show no signs of being forgotten.

‘Multisited field studies’ can mean many things. In the social
sciences, the term usually refers to a type of grounded research
based on ethnographic principles and techniques. In this
standard incarnation, it is known as ‘multisited ethnography,’
which means that while the two terms are broadly inter-
changeable, most of the productive theoretical and empirical
contributions hinge on multisitedness as applied to ethnog-
raphy specifically.
Ethnography is an eclectic methodological choice that
privileges an engaged, contextually rich, and nuanced type of
qualitative social research, in which fine-grained daily interac-
tions constitute the lifeblood of the data produced. With
respect to method, it entails the situational combination of
field techniques (note taking, audio/visual recording, inter-
views, examination of indigenous literature, observation, and
such) rooted in the ideal of participant observation (to live, to
some extent, as the ‘natives’ themselves do), itself based on
relations of trust and a belief that data are produced in and of
‘thick’ interaction between researcher/s and researched.
Conventionally, ethnography has involved the idea – if not
necessarily the practice – of a relatively long-term (typically
several months upward) stay in a field site of choice. The site
was understood to be the container of a particular set of social
relations, which could be studied and possibly compared with
the contents of other containers elsewhere. To some extent, the
contents might also be generalized into area, regional, or, most
optimistically, universal knowledge.
Multisited ethnography purports to break with this conven-
tion. The standard reformative thesis was nailed by George
E. Marcus to the door of the Annual Review of Anthropology (1995).
Telegraphically, Marcus argued that multisited ethnography
defines as its objective the study of social phenomena that
cannot be accounted for by focusing on a single site.
Previously, the ‘world system’ was seen as a framework within
which the local was contextualized or compared; it now
becomes integral to and embedded in multisited objects of
study. The essence of multisited research is to follow (a crucial
and consequential word in this case) people, connections,
associations, and relationships across space, because they are
substantially continuous but spatially noncontiguous. Research
proceeds by a series of juxtapositions in which the global is
collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel, related
local situations, rather than something monolithic or external
to them. In terms of method, multisited ethnography involves
a spatially dispersed field through which the ethnographer
moves – actually, via sojourns in two or more places, or
conceptually, by means of techniques of juxtaposition of data.
Since 1995, Marcus – sometimes in collaboration with
other scholars – has pursued an ongoing project of ‘refunc-
tioning ethnography’ (Holmes and Marcus, 2004, 2005).
The significant number of sophisticated articulations of what
multisited ethnography might actually mean, in theory and
practice (see, for instance, Hannerz, 2003; Gustavson and
Cytrynbaum, 2003), can also be read as developments on the
theme. The consensus is that much new ground has been
covered since the ‘first-generation’ multisited ethnography.
This openness to self-renewal and self-criticism, spearheaded
in many ways by Marcus himself, is what has kept the idea so
full of life and potential.
Predictably, reactions to Marcus’s program have been mixed.
On the one hand, there are those for whom the idea is so
much old wine in new bottles. On the other, it has fired the
spatial imagination – and enlarged the carbon footprint – of
a generation of social scientists, as the converts used it to study
things as diverse as global environmentalism (Gatt, 2011),
climate change (Krauss, 2009), human immunodeficiency
virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (Whyte et al.,
2011), and even a type of gourmet mushroom (Choy et al.,
2009). Methodologically too, multisited ethnography has
been the subject of a great many scholarly contributions; these
include at least two edited collections (Falzon, 2009; Coleman
and von Hellermann, 2011).
Empirically, the most productive venue has probably been
that of mobility studies (‘follow the people,’ as Marcus would
put it). Given the extent to which scholars in the field
have largely eschewed ‘methodological nationalism’ in favor
of transnational understandings, this is hardly surprising. As
Amelina and Faist put it, the transnational approach “rejects the
nation-state as the sole starting point of empirical analysis .
[and] . calls for a denaturalization of categories such as
‘nation’ and ‘space’” (2012: p. 2). What that means in practice
is that migration scholars increasingly find it uncomfortable
to root their research – physically and/or conceptually – in
a single site. Amelina and Faist go on to describe how

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 16 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12211-1 103
104 Multisited Field Studies
multisited ethnography has also inspired the ‘mobile methods’
ethnographic approach, an itinerant strategy that recommends
collecting data by ‘observing people’s mobility,’ ‘walking
with,’ ‘stalking,’ or ‘lurking’ around others. This supposedly
produces an intimate knowledge of, and enters into
a dialectical relationship with, geographical and/or virtual
mobility. According to this position, transnational scholars
would need to go beyond sui generis models of state responses
to mobility and look at the practices of (potential) migrants,
which may result in mobility, immobility, or a combination
of both.
Somewhat cheerfully, the idea also seems to have spilled
over into disciplines other than anthropology and sociology.
‘Multisited archaeology,’ for example, is “adapted from multi-
sited ethnography to serve archaeologists’ interests in
comparing locales, multi-scalar connections, and local-global
relations” (Ryzewski, 2012: p. 241).
It must be said that déjà vu is not the only finger that has
been pointed at multisited ethnography. In the last few years,
especially, one has also seen a number of sustained and serious
critiques of Marcus’s original formulation and its elaborations.
Hage (2005), for instance, who mischievously suggests that
multisited imaginings may well be a symptom of delusions
of innovativeness if not grandeur, argues that with respect
to studying, say, migration, the concept of a single geo-
graphically discontinuous site is much more useful than that
of multisitedness. He also suggests that multisited research
may imply a tacit holism, and proposes that a “certain
reflexivity concerning the social relations that one is opting
not to cover in depth” (Hage, 2005: p. 466) makes for
a better definition of one’s partiality. His conclusion is
startling: “I simply do not think that there can be such
a thing as a multi-sited ethnography” (Hage, 2005: p. 465).
For Hage, multisited ethnography is a buzzword, since “its
signification and ramifications are [not] explored by many of
its users . [who] use it mechanically” (Hage, 2005: p. 464).
A second significant recent critique of the multisited imag-
inary is that by Matei Candea (2007). Like Hage,
Candea targets in particular what he sees as a born-again
holism implicit (and sometimes explicit) in Marcus’s and
subsequent formulations. He argues that ethnography is
really about setting up ‘arbitrary locations’ – which in any
case it invariably does, in the sense that a landmark work like
Garsten’s Apple World (1994) is actually Apple ‘places,’ since
her ethnography of the multinational company was based on
fieldwork in a limited number of locations chosen by herself.
Candea grants that the multisited program has probably
served to broaden the range of topics considered suitable for
ethnographic study; however, he posits that Marcus’s device
of ‘following,’ for instance, could be applied equally well in
a local, arbitrary setting – which is what ethnographers have
pretty much always done. What the more naïve advocates of
multisitedness see as ‘incompleteness,’ Candea sees as a self-
critical methodological decision (‘making the cut’), which
one ‘reflects upon and takes responsibility for’ (Candea,
2007: p. 174). Ethnographers need to be more cautious of
the seductions of ‘limitless narrative possibilities’ – which
are deceptive in any case – opting instead for ‘sensibilities
based on self-imposed restrictions’ (Candea, 2007: p. 168).
Perhaps most importantly, Candea reminds us that siting
is, as Coleman and von Hellermann put it, “an
epistemological, methodological, and presumably political
practice” (2011: p. 7).
A third line of critical thought takes to task Marcus’s
prescription for field-workers to ‘follow.’ The problem is that
‘following’ implies cartographies and trajectories that precede,
and would exist quite happily independently of, the fieldwork
project (see, for instance, Fairhead, 2011). In this sense,
‘following’ comes dangerously close to being a passive act
and the field to being essentialized and detached from the
field-worker – a far cry from say Dilley’s (1999) convincing
discussion on ethnographic context as a performative act.
Recent contributions have tended to get around this by
replacing ‘following’ with terms that are active and agentive.
Coleman and von Hellermann (2011), for example,
emphasize that there has been a conceptual shift from
‘following’ to ‘collaborating’: “We might be tempted to use
the term ‘fieldmaker’ here, but we need to bear in mind that
fields are always made, are never ‘natural [.]’” (p. 3). In
fairness, the shift is evident in Marcus’s own methodological
thought and practice: A work like Ocasião: The Marquis and the
Anthropologist, a Collaboration (Marcus and Mascarenhas, 2005)
is true to its subtitle and indeed breaks new ground in that
direction. Besides, once the substitution is made in favor of
collaboration, multisited ethnography can quite easily deal
with critiques from arbitrary decision making.
In view of these and other critiques, it may be worth
remembering that there is a sense in which every fieldwork
project is an experiment in siting the object. Rather like the
Weberian ideal type (see, for instance, Freund, 1968), an
analytical device by means of which the social scientist sets
up the boundaries of a definition and proceeds to work
within it (thus opening up infinite possibilities of ideal-typic
definition and therefore analytical trajectories), any exercise
in siting is always one of an infinity of possibilities. Clearly,
the process should be based on more than whim; rather,
siting proceeds within a triangular space set up by one’s
preunderstanding (itself a product of the current scholarly
literature among other things), the developing researcher-
researched collaborative exchange, and – last but not least –
scholarly creative choices that are invariably circumscribed by
the availability of resources. There are many reasons why this
model of siting is useful. First, and pace Hage, it takes
multisitedness to be one of a number of possibilities, rather
than a messianic calling or a first among equals; this is both
realistic and prudent. Second, it allows the notions of
arbitrariness, choice, and creative scholarly enterprise happily
to coexist with multisitedness in ways that transcend wooden
models of ‘following.’ Third, it accommodates the recent
thought on ethnography (including its siting) as a form of
active and ongoing collaboration in the field.
The Methodological and Intellectual Background
In order to try to take stock of multisited ethnography, it makes
sense to outline some of the reasons why the idea emerged
when it did, and why it is thought to be so apt (according to
some, necessary) an approach to contemporary research. The
question may be phrased as, Why did the localizing strategies

of ethnography come into question, and why in the late
twentieth century? Briefly, the author thinks that there are two
main reasons.
The first has to do with the notion, and its ethnographic
consequences, that space is socially produced. Lefebvre (1991
[1974]) was the first to flesh it out in a sustained way, the
story goes, although Foucault was foresighted enough to
sense, years earlier, that the ‘spatial turn’ was round the
corner (see Soja, 1989). Definitely by the 1990s, space was
all over the social sciences. As summed up by Massey (2005:
p. 9), contemporary sensitivity to issues of space rests on
three propositions:
First, that we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as
constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global
to the intimately tiny . Second, that we understand space as the
sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense
of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct
trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heteroge-
neity . Third, that we recognise space as always under construction.
There is of course, in ethnography as well as in other social
scientific circles, a long tradition of looking at the relation
between people and spaces – at the making of places, in other
words. What is more recent is the reflection on the
methodological corollary of this relation. By 1986, Salzman
(1986: p. 528) was asking “Is traditional fieldwork
outmoded?”, and suggesting among other things research-team
models of ethnographic practice. (The suggestion has been
taken up by scholars who have explored, often through their
own empirical work, some of the ways in which multisited
collaborative ethnography involving teams of people might
work – see, for instance, Choy et al., 2009; FitzGerald, 2012.)
Ten years later, Fog Olwig and Hastrup suggested that “the
methodological implications of this insight [that space is
socially produced] are still being worked out” (1996a,b: p. 1,
the author’s parenthesis). The upshot is that social science has
had to come to terms with the idea that, logically, if space is
produced, there is no reason why the spaces of field studies
should be exempt. Marcus’s plea may be seen as an attempt to
prescribe a methodological antidote to these anxieties.
Aside, the ‘spatial turn’ has affected fields beyond the social
sciences. In literary criticism, for example, recent years have seen
a spate of works dealing with the spatialization of the text.
Davidson (2007), for example, links free verse, and the way that
the shape on the page is produced by the poem, to the
Lefebvrian concept that space is not prior to but produced by
human activity; Huang (2006) looks at ‘spatial negotiation’ in
Asian-American fiction; and Michelucci (2002) draws on the
works of D.H. Lawrence to discuss place as a culturally
constructed category that exists in relation to space as
a physical and philosophical one.
The second set of forces that inspired Marcus, and that lend
allure to multisited ethnography, may analytically be separated
into two types: first, the debatable (and debated) idea that
contemporary societies are invariably, inevitably, and self-
evidently located within larger wholes (see Cook et al., 2009);
second, the seemingly obvious corollary that within these
wholes, people, information, goods, and ideas are in a
constant state of displacement.
Multisited Field Studies 105
There is a sense in which a cautious analytical holism seems
to be at the heart of the ethnographic approach. At the same time
as ethnography is about the particular, it is also thought to give,
as Gay y Blasco and Wardle (2007: p. 43) put it, “further
contextual meaning to particular lives by demonstrating their
integration within more inclusive social forms.” Applying this
to space/place, the question of what to do with the local
has a long pedigree in ethnographic methodology. For
example, during the latter half of the twentieth century,
anthropologists – in particular those studying seemingly
bounded peasant villages, or ‘immigrant communities’ –
became increasingly uncomfortable with the conventional idea
that the local was an adequate form of ethnographic space
(Falzon, 2005). Even so, as recently as 2007, Russell (who
went on to do multisited fieldwork with the Yakkha people in
Tamaphok, Nepal, and various migrant destinations in India
and elsewhere) could complain that migrants are people one
says ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ to in their destinations and places of
origin, respectively, “but rarely with knowledge . of the
travels and travails in between” (2007: p. 362).
The grandest themes of late-twentieth century and contem-
porary social science seem to revolve around a problematic
relation to the local and the search for some larger scale of anal-
ysis, and the study of connections between places. As Mintz
(1998: p. 117) puts it, “(t)he new anthropology is many things,
among them the study of human groups in motion. That motion
is thought to be more than international; it is transnational.”
World systems theory, transnationalism, migration studies that
go beyond classical push–pull and/or integration concerns,
diasporas, cosmopolitanism, and so forth – all posit frame-
works and scales that invite supralocal understanding and
therefore methodology. The most prominent interpretive
framework is of course that of globalization, which as a
paradigm patterns much of the contemporary thought about
people and places. A host of social formations are nowadays
seen as being formed and reformed in and of ‘global
assemblages,’ in Ong and Collier’s words (2005).
One should add that recent formulations of globalization
have moved well away from both the ‘global village’ model and
its less banal if more insidious cousin, namely, the idea that
global interconnectedness coexists with local variability. As
Massey (2005: p. 88) puts it, “‘spatialising globalisation’ means
recognising crucial characteristics of the spatial: its multi-
plicity, its openness, the fact that it is not reducible to a
‘surface’, its integral relation with temporality.” The shift is
relevant because it raises the cardinal point that while
multisited ethnography may be many things, what it certainly
is not (or should not be) is an approach that devalues locality
and place. On the contrary, multisitedness properly done has
the potential to produce a knowledge that highlights the
specifics of place and local experience and the hierarchies that
these exist within, and that in turn provides the basis for an
informed critique of place and location. In other words,
multisitedness assumes that place still matters. The alternative
would be an aspatial multisitedness, a notion that mocks itself
so effectively that hardly any explanation is required.
The point is that the paradigms of globalization and its
cousin, transnationalism, no doubt posed the major twentieth-
century challenge to ethnographic methods of inquiry and
units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social
106 Multisited Field Studies
relations in particular communities and places (Gille and
Ó Riain, 2002). As such, they were also behind the multisited
model; indeed, for Hannerz (1998), for example, ‘trans-
national research’ is broadly interchangeable with Marcus’s own
terminology. It is commonly thought that a refusal by
ethnography to engage with a type of spatialization associated
in the popular (and sometime the scholarly) imagination with
modernity would (unacceptably) limit practitioners to an ever-
tighter circle of apparently bounded locales.
Clearly, the earlier point about space and the present one on
the space of modernity are directly linked. If, as summed up by
Marshall Berman’s (1983) application of a famous sentence,
modernity is about ‘All that is Solid Melts into Air,’ that
includes ethnographic space and field siting. Again, Marcus’s
and subsequent contributions have provided a useful point of
departure. Cook et al. (2009), for example, have suggested that
one way of reformulating multisited ethnography is by
conceptualizing the field in such a way as to detach it from the
concepts of space and place, thus opening up the possibilities
of an ‘unsited’ field within which comparison across
theoretically relevant spatial boundaries can take place. They
emphasize that unsited fieldwork is a development on, rather
than a negation of, multisited ethnography.
Anxieties and Comforts
Much of the discussion on multisited ethnography revolves
around the idea that it may well be an oxymoron. That is, there
exists a preoccupation that while there is much to be said for
researching spatially dispersed objects, a program that proposes
to be more routes than roots (see Clifford, 1997) could well end
up robbing ethnography of its central tenets as presented earlier,
and therefore of its value as the jewel in the crown of qualitative
research. This preoccupation is not necessarily born of a purist
conservatism (although that element is at times present), but
rather of the belief that the ethnographic paradigm – traced to
Malinowski by anthropology and to early-twentieth century
urban studies by sociologists – has produced some of the
richest social scientific insights, and is as such worth preserving.
Hage epitomizes this belief: “[A]fter spending so many years
examining all kinds of work in the areas of migration and
diasporic studies, I have consistently found it to be the case that
of all the disciplines deployed in studying globalization,
migration and mobility, none are better equipped . than an
ethnographic analysis” (2005: p. 474). The two main sources
of anxiety (both of which have been referred to earlier) concern
depth and ethnographic responsibility.
‘Depth’ – or, as Geertz (1973) famously put it, ‘thick
description’ – is unquestionably one of ethnography’s richest
offerings. Its lack is also thought to be a key flaw of the
multisited project, which seems to lead field-workers into
spreading themselves too thinly. Briefly put, given that this
type of research implies moving around and ‘following’
horizontally, there is little time for staying put and achieving
depth by ‘following’ vertically. As Burawoy put it, “[b]ouncing
from site to site, anthropologists easily substitute anecdotes
and vignettes for serious fieldwork [.]” (2003: p. 673).
In order to address this issue, one must question the
process of production of depth/thickness in conventional
ethnography; only then can one decide whether or not mul-
tisited ethnography measures up. Participant observation is the
obvious answer, but what about it? The methodological stance
of ‘getting off the verandah’ or ‘hanging out’ at street corners is
only part, albeit a necessary one, of the story. Crucially, the
factor that enables ethnographers to achieve depth and to make
informed decisions about the partiality of their work is time.
Participant observation has its own time order, which typically
runs to several months. Initiates believe that the growth of
ethnographic consciousness reveals itself to the field-worker as
water boils, that is not only gradually but also through
a defining moment, at which one suddenly realizes that one
‘understands.’ The moment of inspiration itself may be abrupt
but it is actually the product of that gradual process. Prospective
field-workers are told that, provided they stick it out long
enough, their moment will come. In ethnography, therefore,
time transforms and makes. We might here take a leaf out of
Bourdieu’s writing on the implicit (and therefore unquestioned,
by researchers and researched alike) periodicity of gift
exchange, to the effect that it is not just the nature of the gift
that gives it meaning but also its timing – “to abolish the
interval is to abolish strategy” (1977: p. 6). The contention is
that by abolishing the interval, multisited ethnography
abolishes depth.
There are at least four counterarguments and/or -proposals.
The first argues that multisited fieldwork does indeed present
these logistical and methodological challenges, and that the
solution is to choose one’s sites as carefully as possible in such
a way that the periods spent in each site add up to an acceptable
interval. In addition, careful field strategies are needed to
maximize the dividends in each site, given the limited time. In
FitzGerald’s words, “[t]he danger of stretching time and
resources too thin in multi-sited fieldwork is why it is even more
dependent on a clear theoretical orientation and strategic site
selection than work in a single site. Fumbling through one
field site to ground theory is bad enough; in multiple sites it
is disastrous” (2012: p. 3). One supposes that the criteria for
site selection will be case specific and will vary according to
one’s resources, research questions, and ongoing collaboration
in the field.
The second is to substitute long-term with very long-term
fieldwork, thus enabling one to ‘take in’ more sites. A reasonable
proposition, which, however, makes rather special demands on
the field-worker. Leonard (2009), for instance, has shown how
she adopted a long-term cumulative strategy by making a
particular project her life’s work, so to say.
The third argument, which is popularly – and probably
unfairly – associated with first-generation formulations, is that
the multiplicity of multisitedness makes up for its inadequacies
in any single site. That is, as ethnographers move around, it
becomes a matter of adding short durations to make a long
one. The argument is clearly flawed in that two or more
shallownesses do not make a depth; intervals simply do not
add up, or at least not unproblematically.
The fourth solution is much more compelling. There is
a sense – to some extent implicit in notions of ‘time–space
compression’ and such – in which space and time are
methodologically interchangeable. In other words, it is not just
time that transforms and makes, but also space. This porosity
has always been part of the ethnographic paradigm, not least
 Multisited Field Studies 107

since conventional ethnography posits a long stay in one place The second source of anxiety with respect to multisited field
(hence the relevance of space). And historically within studies derives from considerations of ethnographic responsi-
anthropology, fieldwork ‘away from home’ (therefore, spatial bility. Consider the following piece of postfield recollection:
displacement) was also seen as a prime route to what
textbooks call ‘defocusing,’ an ethnographic state of mind,
which in turn enables the production of data. Now, if I wanted to carry out research on Gibraltarian Sindhis, where
should I do that? Would I have to go to Madrid, where Ramesh Kar-
Clifford’s writings on route-based research and the
nani was on the brink of opening a subsidiary of his father’s shop?
conventionally backgrounded spatial shift of ‘getting there,’ What about cousin Gope, who studied law in London? What about
are well known (1997). In addition, one might argue that Anusha, whom I met in 1996 and considered a typical ‘Gib-girl’ of
just as classical foundation myths have the oikists (founders) Indian origin, and in 1997 married a Sindhi from Manila, where she
mark out a new city’s boundaries or sacred temenos by lives today? And how to meet Aunt Geetu from Bombay, who has
never left India in her 64 years but who is in regular contact with her
circumambulation, ethnographers have classically set up relatives in Gibraltar, who keeps contact with her family guru in
spatial routines that enabled them to know a people by Bombay and who probably knows more about her family in Gibraltar
knowing a place. The ethnographer turns out to be a serial than anyone else living in the colony? (Haller, 2005: p. 155)
circumambulist, daily retracing their steps and in so doing
producing the site and knowledge about it. Spatial routine
One charge that is sometimes leveled at the multisited
becomes a route to ethnographic knowledge.
program is that, in advocating ‘following,’ it appears to assume
The time/space swap is important because it enables one to
a preexisting field – a ‘given’ space or set of trajectories produced
suggest that it is precisely the paradigm of participant observa-
by the people, goods, information, and so on that are being
tion (as the main portal to the native’s point of view) that
followed. Clearly, that would go against the basic principle that
constitutes the strongest case for multisited ethnography.
space is socially produced, in this case by both researcher and
If our object is mobile and/or spatially dispersed, multisited field
researched. In other words, the very logic of contemporary
studies become themselves a form of participant observation by
understandings of space (as discussed earlier) requires that
virtue of having those characteristics. As Clifford (1992) puts it,
ethnographers take responsibility for the production of their
they can be seen as ‘fieldwork as travel practice.’ And,
field sites.
if conventional depth is hard to come by in unsettled
Marcus’s line of thought since the original 1995 paper, as
circumstances, that is probably as things should be, in the
well as a number of recent scholarly contributions (see, for
sense that it represents the way people themselves experience
example, the discussion in Coleman and von Hellerman, 2011),
the world. Russell, who cites Clifford’s work extensively, is
address this problem by suggesting that the process of siting is
himself worth quoting more fully: “[I have] done this
essentially a collaborative one (as discussed earlier). It is thus
[fieldwork as a form of travel practice] through the example of
that ethnography retains its ethnographic responsibility, and
a thirty-six hour sojourn with a historically migrant Yakkha
that practitioners are reminded that they have an important
family met fortuitously while I was ‘on the road’ . Such
part to play in the dynamics of carving out a site – theirs is
experiences help to expand, and challenge, the conventional
a shared responsibility, so to speak. Viewed this way,
geographical and socio-cultural boundaries of groups such as
multisited ethnography is a form of, to use a term from
the Yakkha” (2007: p. 378, the author’s parentheses).
Marcus (1998), ‘complicity.’ As law teaches us, complicity is
This raises an empirical question: If it is indeed the case
still a very real, if partial, responsibility.
that multisitedness may itself be seen as a form of participant
Perhaps more importantly, the notion of partial ethno-
observation, what sort of tangible on-the-ground things might
graphic responsibility opens up the whole field of looking at
it help us observe, participate in? The examples that come
ways in which it is produced; surely, this must be one of
to mind include the re-/localization dynamics and strategies
the more useful corollaries of Marcus’s program. As Gille and
of mobile groups, the production of located presence in
Ó Riain (2002: p. 289) put it, “[t]he extension of the
cyberspace (see, for instance, Gatt, 2011), local experiences
ethnographic site in space and time sharpens one’s sensibilities
of geographically broad religious transformations, and the
to the political consequences of defining a site or sites.” The
ways in which individuals and groups commute between
methodology of multisited field studies has come a long way
the various scales (see Herod, 2011; the discussion in
from straightforward notions of ‘following.’
Coleman and von Hellermann, 2011) that frame social
In conclusion, one might ask whether or not Marcus’s call has
experience.
produced anything of lasting value. It would appear that mul-
In addition, the point has been raised by FitzGerald (2012)
tisitedness is not by nature a buzzword, although it may be and
that being multisited and having multisited knowledge are
indeed has on occasion been bandied about as such. Especially
excellent ways of gaining access to one’s people and eventually
when one takes into account the ongoing critiques (including
building rapport. It is surely relevant that FitzGerald worked
Marcus’s own) and increasing theoretical sophistication, it has
with Mexican migrants (again, ‘follow the people’) – with
made at least three contributions to the field:
a group, that is, for whom mobility and knowledge of places
are particularly desirable attributes. Likewise, in his fieldwork l first, a heightened methodological and theoretical sensitivity
with Sindhis, Falzon (2005) holds that being mobile and to space, place, scale, and boundaries, and to the ways in
flaunting it turned out to be very effective as a means of which they are manufactured and experienced both by
earning his informants’ respect and trust. Again, however, ethnographers and by the people they work with;
Sindhis are a group that particularly prizes a kind of multisited l second, a shift toward collaborative field-making and
spatial fluency. research and therefore toward an ethnographic knowledge
108 Multisited Field Studies
that is better aware of, and intellectually equipped to exper-
iment with, the processes of its coproduction;
l third, an ongoing discussion – and actual empirical results –
of some of the practical ways in which ethnographers might
go about producing this spatialized and collaborative
knowledge.
The place may look familiar but multisited ethnography
has thus far turned out to be anything but a methodological
cul-de-sac.
Acknowledgment
Sections of this article borrow on the author’s Introduction to
Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary
Research. Ashgate, Farnham.
See also: Ethnography; Fieldwork in Social and Cultural
Anthropology; Globalization and World Culture; Globalization:
Geographical Aspects; Migration: Anthropological Perspectives;
Spatial Analysis in Geography; Spatial Thinking in the Social
Sciences; Thick Description: Methodology; World Systems
Theory.
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