Compare methods

	Multi-Sited Ethnography	Sensory Ethnography
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	2009
Originator	George E. Marcus	Sarah Pink (building on the anthropology of the senses)
Type	Fieldwork design tracing connections across multiple field sites	Fieldwork and representation attending to the full sensorium
Seminal source	Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117.	Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. ISBN: 9781446287316
Aliases	Multisited Ethnography, Multi-Locale Ethnography, Mobile Ethnography, Follow-the-Thing Ethnography	Sensorial Ethnography, Ethnography of the Senses, Multisensory Ethnography, Sensory Fieldwork
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Sensory ethnography, developed by Sarah Pink, is an approach to fieldwork and representation that treats human experience as fundamentally multisensory and embodied, attending deliberately to smell, touch, sound, taste, and movement alongside the sight and text that conventional ethnography privileges. Rather than reducing fieldwork to what can be observed and written down, it asks the researcher to participate in and reflect on the felt, sensed texture of everyday life. It then seeks forms of representation — evocative writing, audio, video, walking with people — that can convey that sensory knowing to others.