Compare methods
Review your selected methods side by side; rows that differ are highlighted.
| Material Culture Analysis× | Multi-Sited Ethnography× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Anthropology | Anthropology |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 2012 | 1995 |
| Originator≠ | Material culture studies tradition (Ian Hodder; Appadurai/Kopytoff object-biography lineage) | George E. Marcus |
| Type≠ | Systematic study of objects as evidence about culture and social relations | Fieldwork design tracing connections across multiple field sites |
| Seminal source≠ | Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN: 9780470672129 | Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. DOI ↗ |
| Aliases | Material Culture Studies, Object Analysis, Artefact Analysis, Anthropology of Things | Multisited Ethnography, Multi-Locale Ethnography, Mobile Ethnography, Follow-the-Thing Ethnography |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | Material culture analysis is the systematic study of physical objects and artefacts — tools, clothing, buildings, gifts, commodities, everyday possessions — as evidence about the people and societies that make, use, exchange, and discard them. It treats things not as inert backdrop but as active participants in social life, carrying meanings, structuring practices, and binding people into relationships. Drawing on object-biography thinking and on Ian Hodder's account of human–thing entanglement, it asks what an object's form, history, and circulation can reveal about culture that words alone cannot. | 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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