Ethnographers of the World United? Current Debates on the Ethnographic Study of Globalization
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: How does ethnography come to terms with our current global condition? Being a method characterized by its in-depth knowledge of a bounded space, how does ethnography cope with a world scale? How does the global condition affect the definitions of key ethnographic concepts? In this article, I first reconstruct ethnographic debates regarding the status of the global, showing how ethnography can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the binary global/local. Then I review two projects that study global processes from an ethnographic point of view: multi-site ethnography (Marcus 1995) and global ethnography (Burawoy et al. 2000). I compare these two approaches along four dimensions: site, context, research design and reflexivity. I argue that while multi-site ethnography and global ethnography are often used interchangeably, each ultimately presents distinctive answers to key questions for the ethnographic study of global processes.
Author: Pablo Lapegna
Institution: Stony Brook University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2183406740