Multi-Sited Ethnography
Also known as: Multisited Ethnography, Multi-Locale Ethnography, Mobile Ethnography, Follow-the-Thing Ethnography
Multi-sited ethnography is a fieldwork design, articulated by George Marcus in 1995, in which the ethnographer studies a single cultural phenomenon by moving across the multiple, geographically dispersed sites through which it circulates rather than dwelling in one bounded village or community. Instead of asking 'what is the culture of this place?', the researcher asks 'how is this object, person, or idea connected across places?' and follows it wherever it goes. The result is an account of globalized, networked, or transnational phenomena that no single locality could reveal on its own.
Key highlights
- Captures globalized, networked, and transnational phenomena that single-site fieldwork structurally cannot see.
- Makes the connections, flows, and translations between sites the explicit object of analysis rather than background.
- Allows comparison across linked contexts while preserving a common phenomenon as the thread.
- Reframes 'the field' as a system of relations, fitting commodity chains, migration, and media circulation.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use multi-sited ethnography when the phenomenon you care about is dispersed across locations — commodity chains, migration and diaspora, transnational organizations, social movements, media circulation, or globalized policy — so that a single field site would capture only a fragment. It is appropriate when the connections between places are themselves the analytic prize. It is less suitable when deep, long-term immersion in one community is the goal, when resources cannot support travel and access across several sites, or when spreading attention thin across many nodes would sacrifice the depth that gives ethnography its authority.
Strengths & limitations
- Captures globalized, networked, and transnational phenomena that single-site fieldwork structurally cannot see.
- Makes the connections, flows, and translations between sites the explicit object of analysis rather than background.
- Allows comparison across linked contexts while preserving a common phenomenon as the thread.
- Reframes 'the field' as a system of relations, fitting commodity chains, migration, and media circulation.
- Trades the depth of long-term single-site immersion for breadth, risking thinner local understanding at each node.
- Demands far more time, funding, language competence, and access negotiation across multiple locations.
- Defining and bounding the object to follow is interpretive and can drift, threatening coherence of the study.
- Maintaining methodological and ethical consistency across sites with different conditions is difficult.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
How is multi-sited ethnography different from comparative case studies?
Comparative case studies select separate, often parallel cases to contrast against a common framework. Multi-sited ethnography instead follows a single phenomenon — an object, person, or story — through the sites it actually connects, so the sites are linked by the thing being traced rather than chosen as independent comparison units. The connections between sites are the analytic focus, not just the differences.
How many sites make a study 'multi-sited'?
There is no fixed number; what matters is that two or more sites are genuinely connected through the followed object and that the connections themselves are analyzed. Even two well-linked sites count if the study reconstructs the relationship between them. Adding sites only helps if depth at each remains sufficient to make the local accounts credible.
Does going multi-sited mean abandoning ethnographic depth?
It risks it, which is the main critique of the approach. The discipline expects enough participant observation at each node to make every local account trustworthy; multi-sited design manages this by tightly bounding the object of pursuit and accepting some loss of single-site immersion in exchange for seeing the whole system. Researchers must be explicit about this trade-off.
Sources
- 1.Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117.
- 2.Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.ISBN 9780759112421
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Multi-Sited Ethnography. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/anthropology/multi-sited-ethnography