ABSTRACT
Multisited ethnography adapts the classical tools of qualitative fieldwork in anthropology and sociology – a researcher’s long-term engagement with one location that includes cultivating familiarity with local language and sociocultural life through participant observation – to the exploration of processes that unfold across multiple sites (Marcus 1995; Burawoy 2000; Burawoy et al. 2000; Hannerz 2003). This type of ethnography, then, involves research in two or more locations interconnected by a particular practice or set of practices. Multisited ethnography has been used to document a range of multiply-sited practices, from “mail-order marriages” (Constable 2003) to the global circulation of agricultural development policy (Gupta 1998). But perhaps more than any other activity, it is migration that has inspired and informed the development of multisited ethnography. Indeed, migrant communities – who influence both their home and receiving societies – mandate that researchers consider how sociocultural life is never formed in one bounded place but rather takes shape through interaction between and across different places. As work on migration shows us, to fully understand any sociocultural practice, we must account for such interaction – and multisited ethnography is uniquely well-suited for creating such accounts.
