Suchergebnisse

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.