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Since the 1980s, and the Writing Culture critique of ethnographic representation, the writing of ethnographic texts in anthropology has been distinguished by the perennial appearance of new works composed of tropes and stylistic strategies that reflect the diverse influences of the period of critique. These "messy" texts were, and are, valorized as experiments. This essay argues that as critique such ethnographies are not so much experimental as baroque, indicating perhaps a limit of the historic ethnographic form, and the need to push the spirit of experiment back toward the conditions of producing ethnography in fieldwork. This "refunctioning" of ethnography in its experimental spirit would recognize and address the present limit of the baroque to which the 1980s period of critique and after has led.

For me, since the 1980s, the distinctive event in the recent history of social and cultural anthropology in the United States has been a profound cutting of the discipline (or rather of this influential component of the four-field disciplinary organisation of general anthropology) from moorings that defined it through much of the twentieth century. Certainly the discipline is still wedded functionally to certain aspects of the institutional model which has shaped the identity of social and cultural anthropologists, as pioneered through the works of such figures as Bronislaw Malinowski in England and Franz Boas in the United States. Most anthropologists still begin their careers with a geographical area specialisation outside the U.S. However, few receive the intensive areas studies education that was available and encouraged in the U.S. during the 1950s through to the 1970s when, in the atmosphere of the Cold War and development studies, there was a huge investment in such interdisciplinary programmes that has since waned.

Many of the regions of the globe where anthropologists have traditionally worked are now places overtaken by extreme forms of social and political disorder – epidemics, ethnic violence, the dissolution of state apparatuses – necessitating the intervention of supranational forms of aid and authority. This paper surveys the predicament of the producer of anthropological knowledge "as usual" in such regimes of intervention. What identity does the anthropologist create? What is the self-claimed rhetoric of authority for research undertaken in such situations? Three alternatives are surveyed – the expert, the reporter and the witness – with the third focused upon since it has increasingly become an expressed self-identity or ideology of anthropological research within scenes of intervention. Witnessing offers a return to a position of a kind of disinterestedness following on the binds of postcolonial critiques, which makes the presence of independent anthropologists possible but problematic amid projects of interventionist aid, rescue and military action.

This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the "local" and the "global," the "lifeworld" and the "system." Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several "tracking" strategies that shape multi-sited ethnographic research are considered. The review concludes with observations about the reflexive persona of the ethnographer as "circumstantial activist" in which methodological discussions about multi-sited research in anthropology are now being developed.