Multi-Sited 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.
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Sources
- Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000523 ↗
- Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Multi-Sited Ethnography of Dispersed and Globalized Phenomena. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/anthropology/multi-sited-ethnography
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